- Misdirection - A few years ago, Lewis Black told a joke about how he hated Dubya’s administration because they produced gaffes faster than he could write jokes. By the time a person had worked out a decent bit about the leader of the free world getting assassinated by a pretzel, Darth Cheney had already shot an elderly supporter in the face…with a shotgun.
The current administration appears to have learned the practical lesson buried in that joke, which is that news cycles, much like zones on a football field, can be flooded beyond the point of exhaustive coverage. Reality is, of course, lending a hand in the matter by providing Somali pirates, disappearing French passenger jets, and irregular manifestations of the ongoing economic catastrophe — or recovery therefrom, depending on your point of view.
Nonetheless, a person is troubled to learn that, between GM’s bankruptcy filing and Obama’s speech in Cairo, he missed the news that the FDIC has “indefinitely postponed” its prospective Legacy Loans Program (LLP). For those who don’t recall, LLP was one of the big bread crumbs in the meatloaf of the Public-Private Investment Program (PPIP), extending the remaining TARP monies far enough to serve their original purpose. Unfortunately(?), it seems that relatively few banks are ready to sell their legacy/toxic assets. This development comes as little surprise to some economists, who have long doubted banks’ willingness to write assets down to their viable sale price, even if the government is actively inflating the market.
- Semantic - Having seen a few references to her second book, Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea, I made a foray into the beleaguered realm of E! and saw a bit of Chelsea Handler’s eponymous talk show, Chelsea Lately. Left nonplussed, I sought Wikipedia’s advice, only to find that the show has allegedly “averaged more than half a million viewers…(much more than the average for a late-night cable program).” Meanwhile, The Daily Show’s entry describes it as having “1.45 to 1.6 viewers nightly, a high figure for cable television.” All I’m asking is the development of a standardized, fact-based set of adjectives describing cable talk show ratings; a person can’t always undertake specific comparisons.
- Fundamentals - Hot off the servers, May’s preliminary unemployment report appears to have been written with the intention of meting a psychic kick to the groin upon its audience. Fearing Americans may have become inured to such news as an increase in seasonally-adjusted unemployment from 8.9% to 9.4%, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) makes sure to weaken the perception of flattening indicators by punctuating nearly every paragraph with a comparison to last year — rather than last month. Take this paragraph, for instance:
“The number of persons working part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) was little changed in May at 9.1 million. The number of such workers has risen by 4.4 million during the recession.”
Buried deep in the weeds, however, was a backdated glimmer of hope known as revision. March’s preliminary unemployment assessment has been revised up from 699,000 to 652,000 job losses; April’s job loss numbers were revised from 539,000 to 504,000. That leaves as many as 82,000 jobs we could collectively lose this month. [Yay!]
Former New York Governor and Client Number 9 Eliot Spitzer would seem to agree with any bitterness BLS has intentionally added to its prose. Refusing to be fooled by macroeconomic indicators currently propped up by selective single-sector inflation, Spitzer advises everyone to grab their socks and hide their gold, because things won’t be getting much better any time soon.
- Bling - When the first black president was photographed wearing a phat gold rope around his neck, many outlets used the word “bling,” but very few offered any humorous subjunctive commentary about his very weak prospects in the world of hip-hop. Thin, indeed, are the lines of political correctness.
apparently Dubya didn’t receive the King Abdul Aziz Order of Merit rope/pendant set until the end of his terms, and there’s no news on whether or not he’s successfully replaced the pendant with a massive, diamond-encrusted “W”. Is there any chance those Cash4Gold envelopes are all bound for Riyadh? All I’m saying is that’s a lot of gold.
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