ADJUSTMENTS

Several months ago, my regular golf partners and I played at Woodley Lakes in the Valley where we were joined by a young banker, a man in his early 30s I would imagine. I asked him what he thought would be the result of the real estate crisis (or what seemed like a crisis at that time). I didn’t really care about the real estate crisis and certainly didn’t understand it. I was just making conversation, the way one does while walking from the tee to the green.

He said the market would make an “adjustment”, then used his #9 iron for a 150 yard shot. He was way short.

At the time I was shocked by his cavalier attitude, how he failed to see any connection between the movement of the market and the actual human suffering it would surely cause. In the end, I was fairly naïve and he was fairly prescient.

The adjustment, as it turns out, was the pork-laden bailout bill that just waddled through Congress is. The connection that shouldn’t be missed here is that Congress opened the door to this disaster with deregulation of the market in 2000; the financial community strode through with a wink and a grin, used the deregulation to satisfy its bottomless greed, and fell flat on its face; now Congress is using our money - $820 billion of it – to “adjust” the market and save us all from financial collapse.

Mort Zuckerman of The McLaughlin Group opined that the bailout may serve to help the Wall St. crowd, but it certainly wouldn’t help the people who are losing their homes. Monica Crowley of the same show – a nasty woman, though well educated – suggested that this is, in essence, a huge tax increase to the public.

The icing on the cake is that politicians have taken advantage of this crisis – a crisis which they created - to establish their positions in what they portray as an epic battle between good and evil, between Wall St. and Main St. Predictably, everyone who helped to deregulate Wall St. is now on the side of Main St. And this is the biggest lie of all, because as Tim Rutten pointed out in the Times, there is no Main St. That place where Andy and Opie live - where everyone is honest and thoughtful, and the worst crime is eating too much apple pie at lunch – is more a part of American myth than American history. But that doesn’t stop politicians from using it to define themselves as blameless.

The banker was right about the adjustment, but the rest of us are going to need a little more club to get to the green.