Its weird – I started this just as a place to rant, where I could do in what I figure is a certain anonymity (no names, context, or anything of the sort), but a part of me wishes I could just say this out loud. Internalizing is something I’ve gotten awfully comfortable with, and it may not be the fix-it I’ve always imagined it to be.

This has been making the rounds on the baseball blogosphere, and its worth reading (I promise you, being a baseball fan is not neccessrary). Its just a good way of re-affirming your faith in a world that sometimes gives us little reason to.

“So right after the Bear Stearns funds blew up, I had a thought: This is what happens when you lend money to poor people.

Don’t get me wrong: I have nothing personally against the poor. To my knowledge, I have nothing personally to do with the poor at all. It’s not personal when a guy cuts your grass: that’s business. He does what you say, you pay him. But you don’t pay him in advance: That would be finance. And finance is one thing you should never engage in with the poor. (By poor, I mean anyone who the SEC wouldn’t allow to invest in my hedge fund.)”

Read the whole piece. Clearly, there’s an element of satire involved, but Lewis is always at his best when writing about finance (forget Moneyball – revolutionary ideas, at least to those who weren’t as informed about baseball, but not a great piece of writing per se) – Liar’s Poker should be on the required reading list of every finance or business curriculum – heck, I learnt more from that book than I did from many of my other courses. The sub-prime clusterfuck is a direct product of human ingenuity running into human greed (both of which are good things – fyi) – the consequences can be enormous. Its hard for to feel sympathy for people who insist on spending above their means, and then expect those who did not to bail them out. If anything, I don’t think this is a liberal-conservative issue – The guy making $40,000 a year shouldn’t have his tax dollars go to bail out the $70,000 a year guy who bought a house he could not afford, and the reverse holds true.

• “Some days even my lucky rocketship underpants won’t help.”
• “People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don’t realize how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world.”
• “Girls are like slugs. They serve some purpose, but its hard to imagine what.”
• “Careful. We don’t want to learn from this.”
  
• “It’s a magical world, Hobbes ol’ buddy. Let’s go exploring.”
• “Its not denial. I’m just selective about the reality I accept.”
• “I’ve got to start listening to those quiet, nagging, doubts.”
• “I’m learning real skills that I can apply throughout the rest of my life…Procrastinating and rationalizing.”
• “History is the fiction we invent to persuade ourselves that events are knowable and that life has order and direction.”
• “Sometimes I think the surest sign intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.”

Believe it or not, I wrote a significant portion of my college essay regarding Calvin and Hobbes – and still got in. I can’t help but thinking that whoever read it was a fan.

I suppose you can’t lose something you never had. And that just kinda sucks.

If only I could find a comp for Marvin Bernard….