March 26, 2008
In late 2001/early 2002 I was working at The Food Magazine, and one of the insights its editor had was that when times get tough (a terrorist attack, the beginnings of a recession) it was good to be in an industry that was considered an affordable luxury. "People still have to eat," I was told. "And if they can't afford to go clubbing or go out to fancy restaurants, they'll entertain at home, or have dinner at home."
We started running a lot of "comfort food" on the covers of the magazines and cookbooks, and emphasizing a "back to basics" approach. Simple elegance. Less caviar, more chicken pot pies. Fewer celebrity chefs, more on the visceral pleasures of food.
Of course, for the upper crust (yeah; I meant that) cooking is an affordable hobby.
So what's that thing the you can do at a level that is perceived by those around you to be a special value? What is, to put it in Hackbarthian terms, the equivalent to stocking up on Young Adult paperbacks, and relying less on YA hardcover sales?
How do we survive? How do we thrive?
What in your life—emotionally, financially, temporally—is the equivalent of a blue-chip stock?
I have some ideas, but it's taken me a while because I happen to be a bit dimwitted.
Posted by: Attila Girl at
08:29 PM
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March 17, 2008
I'm also reading McArdle, in an attempt to make sense of it all.
(For the record, Sean seems more deeply concerned than Megan, but it's early in the day. A lot may happen over the next few news cycles.)
Posted by: Attila Girl at
11:38 PM
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There's an argument, of course, that successive Fed interventions, starting with the Russian bond crisis, have turned bankers into ever-greater risk takers, making each crisis bigger and more expensive than the last. The thinking goes that we need to draw the line here, whatever the cost, because if we let the financiers go on their merry way, eventually they'll create a wave that will swamp the Fed's power to intervene. Possibly so, but from what I hear, the people on Wall Street are pretty much scared right down to the tips of their Gordon Gekko underoos.In some sense, right now it's the Fed's job to manage that fear--to scare them enough to ratchet back their risk profile, without scaring them so badly that they hunker down inside their weekend house and refuse to buy or sell anything. That's very tricky, and since in the long run we'll all be dead, I'd rather the Fed err slightly on the side of cheering them up. Perhaps Helicopter Ben should start pumping anti-depressants into the Wall Street water supply.
Or we could simply provide each Wall Street trader with the stuffed animal of his or her choice.
Posted by: Attila Girl at
04:19 AM
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