¶ Matins: So often, reading stories in the business section is like watching fish dart in a rolling stream. Glints of brilliant suggestion disappear almost immediately. What does the following passage, taken from Michael de la Merced’s lengthy story about the bailout to date, actually mean?

“What hasn’t improved is the psychology,” said Max Bublitz, chief strategist at SCM Advisors, an investment firm based in San Francisco. “This thing has morphed from a credit market issue into a banking crisis into an economic crisis.”

¶ Sext: Michael Kinsley writes about a new state of mind: not wanting to buy something cool.

But ultimately even the bargain didn’t seduce me. My mind followed an unfamiliar path. I thought of all the coffee makers we already have, and how each of them had let us down. I thought about another clock to reset twice a year or face its accusatory blinking in the kitchen dark. I asked myself whether attempting to master another set of instructions written in English as a Second Language was really the best use of a month of my time.

For possibly the first time ever, I considered the question of getting the thing home (the issue: juggle coffee maker and fare card on the Metro, or eat up my bargain with a $20 cab ride) before I owned it rather than after. I even remembered — as I had vowed to do the last time my consumer confidence boiled over like this — the trauma of disposing the corrugated cardboard box and all those infuriating blocks of Styrofoam. I went home empty-handed, and my consumer confidence was shot.

Oremus…

§ Matins. First of all, we’ve had an economic crisis ever since — you name it. Enron. The home equity party. Pre-approved credit cards in everybody’s mailbox. Nothing psychological about that.

And yet every economic crisis is fundamentally one of confidence. When people worry about getting their money back, they don’t lend it. When they worry about making money, they don’t buy things, they don’t hire people, they don’t do anything that they don’t absolutely have to do. If you can convince people that there’s nothing to worry about, then spending resumes. But it’s very hard to do this when people feel that they’ve been lied to for years. We’re in need of trustworthy persuaders.

My own feeling is that a long-running commercial model has played itself out. It climaxed with the capitalization of heavy industry about a hundred and fifty years ago and has been running on fumes since the 1960s. Just as we have hardly any business organizations that owe their very conception to the capabilities of the personal computer (still the bridesmaid and rarely the bride), so we try to reduce positive business activity to production — or its postmodern bastard, productivity. Everybody likes being productive. What makes people uneasy is trading. Trades are by nature unique, but we try to make them productive-like by imposing uniform prices: you don’t trade with the supermarket when you buy a quart of milk. (If you did, you’d be sure that the other guy got a better deal.) So trade and production need to be reconciled (as they may have been; I’m barely literate in this area). Finally, there is service. The willingness of a nation that has always had a major servant problem to embrace a “service economy” is most peculiar.

The new commercial model will place these terms into equations that solve. And another thing: the days when businesses grew and flourished beneath the contempt of highly educated people are over. I may not have a knack for business myself, but I know that business is as important to social life as my understanding of the humanities. Yes — at least as important. And savvy businessmen are a lot less likely than their forebears to tell me that what I’m doing isn’t important, too.

§ Sext. Writing about the drop in retail sales from a broader point of view, Floyd Norris wonders if buyers can’t get credit (easy to fix) or if they’re scared (not so easy). What if the love is gone? What if, like cranky children, consumers have finally been overwhelmed by the complications of stuff (impossible)?

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
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