too many Daves

I’ve delighted in Michael Lewis’ journalism ever since encountering his blunt, funny, observant book about the roadkill candidates of the 1996 presidential election. If he’s written a mediocre book before or since, I haven’t found it. Today, I started Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World. There’s so much I’d like to quote, but I’ll limit myself to three passages.

1) “… on top of several thick strata of architecture that should be called Nordic Pragmatic lies a thin layer that will almost certainly one day be known as Asshole Capitalist. The hobbit-size buildings that house the Icelandic government are charming and scaled to the city. The half-built oceanfront glass towers meant to house newly rich financiers and, in the bargain, block everyone else’s view of the white bluffs across the harbor are not.”

2) “To remain in the euro zone, they were meant, in theory, to maintain budget deficits below 3 percent of GDP; in practice, all they had to do was cook the books to show they were hitting the targets. Here, in 2001, entered Goldman Sachs, which engaged in a series of apparently legal but nonetheless repellent deals designed to hide the Greek government’s true level of indebtedness. … The machine that enabled Greece to borrow and spend at will was analogous to the machine created to launder the credit of the American subprime borrower—and the role of the investment banker in the machine was the same. The investment bankers also taught the Greek government officials how to securitize future receipts from the national lottery, highway tolls, airport landing fees, and even funds granted to the country by the European Union. Any future stream of income that could be identified was sold for cash.”

3) “The extent of the cheating—the amount of energy that went into it—was breathtaking. In Athens, I several times had a feeling new to me as a journalist: a complete lack of interest in what was obviously shocking material. I’d sit down with someone who knew the inner workings of the Greek government: a big-time banker, a tax collector, a deputy finance minister, a former MP. I’d take out my notepad and start writing down the stories that spilled out of them. Scandal after scandal poured forth. Twenty minutes into it I’d lose interest. There were simply too many: they could fill libraries, never mind a book. The Greek state was not just corrupt but also corrupting.”

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For background on why I value Lewis’ financial journalism, see this post of mine from back in March.

Today, while reading “California and Bust” by Michael Lewis, I reached a passage that felt familiar, a kind of echo that at first I couldn’t place but eventually traced back to 1992’s Young Men and Fire by Norman Maclean. The echo amounts to this idea: If a big thing is incomprehensible, try to get much much closer and look for small things that explain it.

Here’s Young Men and Fire:

… they ended with a definition which, when reduced to its main simplistic terms, says that a spreading fire is a series of little fires.

… Therefore, when Dodge spoke of a solid “wall of flame” behind him, 250 to 300 feet deep, he was speaking figuratively as a poet, as most of us do. What was behind him were hundreds of thousands of little fires multiplying so fast that only a computer could keep up with them.

… If a spreading fire is a bunch of little fires becoming many more little fires, then a lot of counting has to be done to make a study of it. Think of what a lot of counting of a lot of pine needles had to be done …

Here’s the Lewis passage, which comes from last month’s Vanity Fair and reached me thanks to author David Dobbs’ “Top Longreads of 2011”:

What Meredith Whitney was trying to say was more interesting than what she was accused of saying. She didn’t actually care all that much about the municipal-bond market, or how many cities were likely to go bankrupt. The municipal-bond market was a dreary backwater. As she put it, “Who cares about the stinking muni-bond market?” The only reason she had stumbled into that market was that she had come to view the U.S. national economy as a collection of regional economies. To understand the regional economies, she had to understand how state and local governments were likely to behave, and to understand this she needed to understand their finances. Thus she had spent two unlikely years researching state and local finance. “I didn’t have a plan to do this,” she said. “Not one of my clients asked for it. I only looked at this because I needed to understand it myself. How it started was with a question: How can G.D.P. [gross domestic product] estimates be so high when the states that outperformed the U.S. economy during the boom were now underperforming the U.S. economy—and they were 22 percent of that economy?” It was a good question.

I’ve neglected this blog. Partly it’s Twitter and the reckoning it forces: Can I say what I want to say about thus and such without forcing people to read more than 140 characters? Often, despite my susceptibility to the jackass habit of swooning over my own prose, I conclude that more than 140 characters would amount to an imposition.

I’ve also been writing stuff that I hope to publish and, crassly enough, get paid for. This has to do with the supermarket refusing to give us groceries in exchange for proof that my blog gets hits from around the world. (Even when I neglect the blog, this post and this post get hits from more countries than I’ll probably ever get to visit. This fact never stops making me marvel. But, as I indicated, the supermarket doesn’t care and stubbornly insists upon cash, credit, or debit.)

As my new non-blog writing finds good homes, I will post links. If the newspapers and magazines of the world have the bad manners to reject the work, I will post it here, unless I realize that there’s really only 140 characters worth sharing from my 5,952-character essay or my 3,221-character short story. Not likely. I’m excited about both the essay and the short story and will feel grateful to have people reading them in their entirety — either here, elsewhere online, or in print.

The title of this post promised Michael Lewis. So we need a bridge to get from here to him. The bridge is this: Lewis’ new book, The Big Short, engrossed me so thoroughly that it — just like Twitter and my need to make money — shares responsibility for my neglect of this blog.

The Big Short is superb for the same basic reason Nat Fein’s photo of Babe Ruth’s retirement is superb. As this Smithsonian essay on the photo explains, it’s all about vantage point.

I’ve been talking up Lewis and The Big Short a lot lately. Yesterday, during a jog, I subjected my friend Josh to a panting, semi-coherent explanation of how deftly Lewis used vantage point to tell the story of the massive doomed bond market built atop the quicksand of home loans made to people who never stood a chance of affording them. What I love is that Lewis told this story from the perspective of various investors who foresaw disaster, bet big against the conventional wisdom folly, and stood to get very very rich when the quicksand ate the financial system. I have just discovered that Michael Lewis does a better job of explaining Michael Lewis than I did. In fairness to me, though, Lewis does not seem to have been jogging. What I’m about to quote comes from an April 12, 2010 interview Lewis did with Christopher Lydon of radio’s Open Source:

Why did they see what other people couldn’t see? Why did they see that this market was doomed? And the more I kicked around with them, the more I came to see that their decision to make this bet against the financial system was very deeply rooted in either their experiences or their character or theories about financial markets. And I also came to see that if I could describe these people, I would be describing traits that really should have been present in the financial system that weren’t. It was a way of describing the financial system by describing the holes in it. 

And that last bit is the point. It’s not enough to find a different angle. The different angle has to illuminate in some new, better, more complete way. Nat Fein could have photographed Babe Ruth from a zeppelin or by wiggling on his back until he maneuvered into the space between Ruth’s right shoe and his baseball bat. We’re glad he didn’t.