On The Turning Away

Much have been made of the ABC News-Facebook joining forces to bring young people “closer to political coverage”. Even though there’s no money involved in the deal, Facebook gets a marketing boost from one of the leading news organizations. ABC benefits from the interactions between Facebook users, who can add “US Politics” application to their pages, and its news crew, many of which have set up personal pages.

Facebook appears to have install a new feature on the pages of ABC reporters to encourage people to friend them as, eh, “followers”. Come to think of it, the “follower” feature risks rendering friends acquisition - a skill prized by so many veteran Facebook users - obsolete. Imagine if you don’t have to pull out all the stops to friend people anymore, what’s your virtual life like without trawling the sea of attractive pages?
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He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living hand to mouth.
- Goethe (1749 - 1832)

Samuel Johnson famously defined the pleasures of urban living in the 18th century, “When a man is tired of London he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.” Three centuries after his birth, the same can be said of New York, London - if not more - of the New World. At a time when the financial world is mired in what will surely be known as sub-prime crisis 2007, what better distraction than a showcase of Asian contemporary artists at Pier 92?

The Asian Contemporary Art Fair, launched last Thursday with a gala opening and closed yesterday, is billed as the first of its kind. Although it featured over 70 exhibitors from 10 countries, the elephant in the room is (greater) Chinese art. Korean artists dominated the rest of the display.

If there is a celebrated leitmotif in contemporary Chinese art scene of recent years, it’s cynical realism, a style brought by the collision of post-Mao communism and capitalism. “Cynical realism” was “the intelligent man’s best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation” to British novelist Aldous Huxley who coined the phrase; in today’s China, it perhaps best encapsulates the Zeitgeist of a country undergoing an unprecedented modernization.
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Dismal skies on a Friday afternoon before a long holiday weekend bring out the best in cubicle dwellers. Or so it seems. The thrill of surfing on company time and the agony of life in uncertain “sub-prime” times make thoughts invariable turn to rational decision-making. In other words, chances are, “An Economist Goes to a Bar” is being read at a desk near you.

It’s not entirely surprising, perhaps, that we were sent twice (from different IP addresses) the link to the piece about whether Gary Becker’s “positive assortative matching” concerning marriage still holds today.

In a nutshell, researchers at Columbia concluded, after two years of experiments at a local bar on “rational-minded daters searching for the most desirable partners”, that the stereotypes of men, aka “fragile egos”, looking for pretty faces appear to be true. Who knew? But their efforts to debunk the myth of “a white male preference for East Asian women”, while applaudable, leave much to be desired.
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In a day of “stock plunge with dollar” encore, thoughts invariably turn to the seeming dichotomy of the woes of Wall Street and the buoyancy of US economy. Whether the economic glass is half full is better left for Fed Chairman Bernanke when he testifies before Congress tomorrow.

On Wall Street the carnage inflicted by subprime-inflicted credit turmoil may yet claim more victims. Hot on the heels of $12 billion loss for Citigroup and $8.4 billion for Merrill Lynch came reports about Morgan Stanley’s $2 billion to $4 billion write-down next month. Meanwhile, the golden boys at Goldman Sachs are purportedly to have set aside $16.9 billion to pay salaries, benefits and bonuses, enough to buy the beleaguered Bear Stearns, whose stock market cap is now down to $14.7 billion.
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A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.
- Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)

In the space of a week, two head honchos on Wall Street succumbed to the second wave of credit tsunami. Both Chuck “accidental chief executive” Prince of Citigroup and Stan O’Neal of Merrill Lynch met their fate when they had to write down tens of billions of dollars of exposures to the subprime market that triggered a broad sell-off in banking sector.

The unfolding impact of the credit market mess has sparked speculation about whether financial firms are withholding bad news or if they “know the extent of the damages” at all. Perhaps more importantly, last week’s sell-off helped crystalize the spillover impacts into other credit and funding markets that have prompted central bankers to question the “basic banking model of origination and distribution”.
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