Category: Money

While the country was wobbling and reeling, my husband set about having spinal fusion surgery in order to stand up straighter. The country still lists and lurches, but my good husband Bud, thanks to some extraordinary surgical skills, is upright. More upright by several serious percentage points, even. Would that the Dow might do the same. Would that the campaigns might also consider uprightness.

These financial and political sagas have done an inordinate amount of roller-coastering of late; but seen through the lens of modern medicine it all makes perfect sense.

First there was the move across the corridor from ICU (heavy duty wires and tubes and interventions) into TCU (fewer attendants, longer interims between pulse checks, etc) and thence to another floor with spare breathing room and long halls for physical therapy. This was roughly during the run-up to the second presidential debate.

Then the Dow took a dive and Bud went upstairs once again into telemetry, for a closer watch on the erratic heartbeat and recurring fever. The papers were crammed with stop-the-bleeding stories. Bud got a transfusion and the rescue package finally passed. Helped a little, for a while.

But deep breaths are only intermittent these days. Having fallen asleep over an article comparing Democratic/Republican health plans, I woke up to a 3 AM phone call saying Bud was headed back down to ICU. “So we can administer continuous medications…” Try going back to sleep after that.

Another day, a little more physical therapy, and the husband will come home. But the Dow keeps diving, businesses keep hand-wringing and the last presidential debate was hardly uplifting. (Although I thought my guy exceedingly presidential.) Here, though, is a relevant question: after the much-discussed 3 AM phone call, what’s our next president likely to do? Leap into action? Go back to sleep and let events take their natural course? Or lie there writing a blog in his head?

OK, let’s see. Derivatives; mortgage-backed securities and collateralized investments (which means stuff that is insecure and lacks collateral); credit-default swaps; tranches and bonds and TARPs oh, my; these are the words one needs today to throw around in casual conversation. In addition to the Rescue plan, formerly known as the Bailout.

For those of us who never wanted to know anything about the economy other than that it was, as Mr. McCain recently assured us, fundamentally sound, all these additions to the everyday vocabulary can be more than bewildering. But we are learning.

Being married, as I happily am, to an old-school economics geek who supports the family quite comfortably with online NYSE and Nasdaq reports plus old-fashioned ledger and a hand-held calculator, my learning curve has enjoyed patient support. Primarily in the form of courses in Economics 101 nightly at the dinner table. He maintains, actually, that we are now up to somewhere around Economics 4; I’ve got my own doubts about retention of earlier class data.

But here’s what I do know: Father knew best. As did Mother, grandparents and probably ancestors to the nth generation. And here’s what they knew and taught:

If you have a dollar, you put 10 cents in the savings account. Then you give 10 cents to the church (synagogues, mosques, etc would have qualified with the ancestry) and another 10 cents to your favorite educational institution, preferably the one that educated you in everything but Economics. The next three dimes go to the grocer and the next three to the landlord (or maybe, if you’re lucky, the mortgage holder.) After careful consideration, you might want to spend the last dime on an ice cream cone. Unless you decide to put it in a separate piggy bank for eventual purchase of a new coat. If the ancestors had approved of borrowing 10 cents from your cousin so you could buy the coat before winter – which they might or might not have – I’m certain that repaying the loan, next paycheck, would have come in before buying the next ice cream cone.

Worked for a long time; when did we forget?