24. Optics

Paumgarten, Nick, "The Death of Kings: Notes from a Meltdown" New Yorker Magazine, May 18, 2009 pp.40-57.

Pictures from the thirties of breadlines or dairy farmers pouring out milk mean something to us now because we have a name for the Great Depression, and a discrete sense of the whole. This doesn't look like anything yet. The cities aren't crumbling; the Plains aren't turning to dust; your four grandparents are not sharing a bed, like Charlie Buckets's....

The news that A.I.G., the most egergious bailout pit of them all, was giving out a hundred and sixty-five million dollars in bonuses and "retention payments" stirred civilian outrage...Heinous opitcs. But the sums were tiny in comparison with those likely to be deployed for the purches...of toxic assets on the ailing banks' books...In other words, for the plan to work, the government must be gulled. But the arrangement doesn't look like anything yet. It has no optics.