The question is whether White America will vote differently in the privacy of the real polling booths.
As the US economy registered a fall in output in the third quarter, the electoral debate seems to be focusing more and more on economic policies like tax cuts, regulation of the financial system, fiscal support to health care and education for the worse off — in short, a battle between the right and the left, which the latter, as represented by Obama, seems to be winning. In this context, the following extracts from a Wall Street bond trader’s diary may be of some interest.
“The other day, I explained to Lucy Kellaway of the Financial Times my problem: ‘at a dinner party, I was asked what I did and I said I was an investment banker. The way they looked at me, I might as well have said I was a paedophile’. Kellaway suggested that my answer to such questions should be that I work for the government — this is of course partly true as my employer been partly nationalised.”
“Such incidents apart, I cannot help feeling nostalgic about the last couple of decades when we were truly the Masters of the Universe; when we forced the real economy to become the servant of the financial economy; when we increased the profit of the financial services segment, from 10% to 40% of the aggregate corporate profitability in the United States; when we exemplified the ‘greed is good’ principle. During these decades, we had two earlier shocks. Both times we managed to recover quickly thanks to the ‘Greenspan put option’ we had.”
“Is it going to be different this time? So many subprime borrowers we helped to finance — and I am proud of the role I played in creating all those complex CDOs and the algorithms used to measure the risks — are being thrown out of their houses and the real economy is slipping into recession. Too many people seem to blame us — and Greenspan — for what is happening to the real economy! Very unfair, if you ask me — how can I or my colleagues be blamed if mathematical models fail? If the poor borrow without having the ability to repay merely because brokers and bankers marketed the loans aggressively? Don’t they know the principle of caveat emptor (buyer beware)? Life would have been so much better if we could have had derivatives without the underlying, the tragedies of the unemployed, of those dispossessed of houses.”
But, in my weaker moments, I sometimes wonder whether Karl Marx was right in claiming that ‘all nations with a capitalist mode of production are …… seized periodically by a feverish attempt to make money without the intervention of the process of production’; what socially useful work I am doing to deserve so much money as Michael Lewis mused in his ‘Liar’s Poker’. I have even stopped using my Porsche and changed over to the Lexus, the cheapest car in my stable.”
“I am feeling much better however after reading John Plender’s article, ‘Shut out’ in the Financial Times of October 18. I am now convinced that our profession has a much higher purpose — nothing less than disciplining the democratically elected governments, and hence fully deserving our eight figure compensations. As Plender argued ‘this was the era when traders known as bond market vigilantes would refuse to finance rising government deficits for fear of inflation’. To be sure, we were always selective in our vigilantism — for example, we did not punish Bush for his huge fiscal excesses, given that they had occurred because he cut taxes on people like us, and because he was spreading democracy and finance capitalism in the rest of the world.”
“We also saved the financial system from the excesses of those Asians. They have a nasty habit of saving too much and we bond traders have fulfilled the onerous responsibility of having ‘to absorb the excess savings of Asia’, to this country. Once the dust of the current problem settles down, I am looking forward to the day of going back to using my Porsche.”
Polls are suggesting an Obama win tomorrow: Are they inflating his true support because of whites’ unwillingness to be seen as racists by the pollsters, a prejudice (often discussed using the euphemism ‘cultural differences’) that may well determine the actual voting inside the privacy of the polling booth? But this apart, Palin, the Republican Vice Presidential candidate (‘monumentally dreadful selection of a running mate’, Joe Klein, Time, October 27), is the darling of the anti-abortion Christian fundamentalists, who are not unduly bothered by her daughter’s pregnancy before marriage. Can you imagine their reaction if Obama’s daughter were to be in a similar situation?
