Financial crisis: advice from the dead.

"It would be nice to think that if George Bailey had been around in September, the United States government could have saved itself $700 billion, Iceland could have averted near bankruptcy, and the rest of the world could have avoided another trillion dollars in bailouts and the prospect of a deep and long recession," writes Edward Rothstein in the New York Times. He's referring, of course, to Jimmy Stewart's character in It's a Wonderful Life who forgoes his dream of seeing the world to take over Bailey Brothers Building & Loan Association, which he sees, as Rothstein puts it, "as a form of social welfare institution.... As it has turned out, of course, both George's charitable dream in which banks would cuddle with their communities and avoid foreclosures and Potter's dream of profit-taking maneuverings unhampered by other considerations collapsed under the unrealistic weight of their fantasies a few weeks ago." Trust evaporated. "Liquidity turned solid; credit froze."

Rothstein then turns to Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice: "Written at a time when Elizabethan England was being transformed by European trade and its own growing international ambitions, the play can even seem to be about how to create trust in a tumultuous marketplace." Next up: Trollope.

"Saul Bellow's description of market speculation in Seize the Day or Don DeLillo's account of a financial meltdown seen through the eyes of a currency trader in Cosmopolis are compelling in their own way," writes Robert Douglas-Fairhurst in the Telegraph. "But there are good reasons why it is Dickens to whom we should now return. The centre around which the Victorian age revolved and Dickens's combination of ambition and anxiety make him unmistakably our contemporary. And not only can we find parallels in his novels with the current crisis, we can also learn from them how to survive and triumph over it." Via the NYT's Ideas.

Rex Sorgatz: "I sure wasn't expecting to see Derrida invoked in the financial crisis debacle in this week's New Yorker!"

Posted by dwhudson at November 5, 2008 11:28 AM