DOWNTOWN TRANSFORMATIONS

Lower Manhattan has changed considerably in the years since I had an office there. From my window you could see the World Trade Center, and its destruction is at the root of the transformation. For one thing the area is swarming with tourists, where in the past there was never that many downtown. Whenever I used to get frustrated I'd take a walk down to Wall St to see George- that is George Washington's statue in front of Federal Hall, where there were few visitors. Now poor George is surrounded by tourists taking pictures of each other next to or in front of him. But at the same time security has been greatly heightened. You can't drive there any more; the streets are full of barriers, and it's a nuisance trying to wade through the crowds if you have business in the area. Back up by City Hall there is now so much iron surrounding it citizens no longer have the easy access they once had, where you used to be able to drive and park in front on business. Police headquarters is even worse. There are so many barriers and iron gates it is like a fortress, and the nearby underground municipal parking garage is gone for security reasons. I don't understand this siege mentality at all; it is not like the police are a vulnerable target. Whatever the case,  it makes walking around a nuisance as well as an unpleasant experience.

Both buildings I used to have offices in are now residential, as are many others in the area as businesses vacate either for midtown or out-of-town, due to the onerous tax burden in NY City. The result is there isn't much of what people think of when they say "Wall Street" left on the actual Wall St.  The area where the Trade Center was has gone through many transformations. Once Cortlandt Street was known for electronics stores, and I remember shopping there for tape recorders at a very young age. Not far away on Washington Street there was a produce market from  where wholesalers would supply restaurants and other customers. I used to send orders there when I was in the shipping business when the offices of shipowners were located way downtown.  Then there was St. Nicholas church, where I was married, which was turned to rubble when the Trade Center was destroyed. There were years before that event when I had a parking space right next to the WTC due, I'm ashamed to say now, to a government connection.

Just across from what is now known as Ground Zero is Century 21 department store, which got its start in the Brooklyn neighborhood I grew up in, Bay Ridge, or Fort Hamilton as part of the area is also known. The downtown store is now always crowded with foreign,  mostly European tourists, who oddly enough are there to buy European designer clothes, if you can figure that one out. There are long lines at the checkouts everywhere, and their arms are full of apparel to take back home with them.  That brings me to the subject of

 FASHION CLASSICS

 I prefer a classic look in clothing, which has a timeless sophistication about it, as opposed to the ephemeral trendiness of fashions that, especially when executed in the extreme, quickly go out of style. I used to buy some of the Italian designer stuff I like at Century, but not any more. I  was quite taken aback to find virtually all of the men's suit and jacket section  full of garments with very narrow lapels. It's as though they've flipped out over the Mad Men tv show. But given the cost of many of these clothes, notwithstanding their lack of particularly fine fabrics, you have to be crazy to spend good money on them. It won't be long before these look as silly as the extremely wide lapels of the 1970s. To make matters worse, many of these jackets are cut so short that it leaves the distinct impression of a poor fit rather than anything attractive. Couple this with ties that are proportionately much wider and you look ridiculous, yet this is the look you are now seeing in many garment ads, at least for much younger people, but then the young always look ridiculous. Put that jacket over baggy pants perched on the behind and it is a very clear statement of very poor taste. It takes years to get passed the youthful impulse towards trendy conformity, but the sooner that happens the better off we always are.  At the same time I must note that the traditional men's clothing stores nearby were pretty empty by comparison. But that's where people who work buy their clothes and they aren't likely to be out shopping in the middle of the day.

I'm no expert on women's clothes, but one day I glanced through a style magazine my wife had that was full of various celebrity actresses in outfits that failed to impress. Then I came across an advertisement that had a full page picture of Audrey Hepburn in an elegant outfit, and that image just put all the contemporary women featured to shame. There was such a timeless beauty about it that the only way I can describe it is "classic." Again, you can't beat a well proportioned classic look.

ON WALL STREET

The City of New York finally evicted the “Occupy Wall Street” protestors from their encampment, never mind that most of the institutions they were protesting are no longer located on Wall Street but in midtown or elsewhere. While they expressed little in the way of a coherent platform, one recurring theme is that banks and corporations have too much power. This will come as a surprise to virtually every CEO in the country since they do not see themselves as all that powerful, but instead feel they are constantly under siege by shareholders, competitors, consumers, and the government. Their decision-making space is constrained by all these factors.

Then there is the 1% that presumably controls everything. But the people in the 1% are no different from the 99%, and in fact are in a place where most of the latter would like to be. Nor are the 1% a fixed elite with anything in common, and have themselves mostly emerged from the 99%. The make-up of the 1% is very fluid. I used to be part of the 1% but now I’m not. Those who currently compose it have worked at climbing the ladder of success, but on the other hand this doesn’t mean they are a pure meritocracy, since luck, focused ambition, and networking ability have at least as much to do with it as talent. Furthermore, rather than being any kind of reactionary force, most would like to think of themselves as “progressive.” Thus a majority of the 1% voted for Obama, who raised the most money in history from Wall Street and even now he has raised more money from bankers than all the Republican Presidential candidates combined. On this basis alone they deserve to get shaken up a bit and continuing Republican resistance to any increase in taxes on them makes no sense. 

Another alleged evil is “greed.” Many people do in fact have good reasons to be angry at “Wall Street,” but greed is not one of them. It is more a case of people being told over the years to make “secure” investments like GM and Citicorp only to see them fizzle- in other words poor performance handling 401(k)s that have gone nowhere for years. But this is more a matter of incompetence than chicanery. The truth is that a lot of the people in charge of things at this time are not very good at what they do. We live in an age of mediocrity not meritocracy. This is true of celebrities as well as CEOs. Is much of this “talent” overcompensated vis a vis everyone else? No doubt, but this does not justify class warfare. Taking something from one person does not make another richer. 

Nostalgic 60s leftists in the media have been sympathetic to the protests, for which the term “occupation” has been attached. But to refer to this phenomenon as “the occupation” is a very sick parody of the real thing, which occurred during World War II. My parents were stuck in Greece for the duration of the war owing to the Nazi occupation and saw a third of the population of Athens starve to death. That’s was the real occupation, not this gathering of clueless miscreants. 

I can’t get too excited in opposition to these demonstrations. From a policy standpoint they are vacuous, and participants clearly have no understanding of economics. They reject hierarchy and order, and favor a vague mix of anarchy and socialism. But they do not represent a serious challenge to authority and their actions are relatively mild. After all anarchists in the past assassinated President William McKinley and in the 1920s set off a bomb on Wall Street. Today we see nothing of that magnitude. 

Although these protestors have little in common with the Tea Party, one thing that stands out across the board is a general disillusionment with elites. This attitude is well founded, given the extent to which the people in charge have mismanaged things. It is increasingly difficult to believe that this is the best we can do, but any changes requires improved mass perception of quality.  In truth we can and must do better, and for elites to justify themselves they must rise above the pervasive mediocrity of our age.

LET'S BLAME WALL STREET

Having lost popular support for their socialist agenda watch the administration and Democratic congress try to gain traction by focusing on a new target- Wall Street. This new “populism” will be an attempt to tap into public anger about the economy and divert attention from the fact that they have done nothing to improve it. “Wall Street” is a euphemism for the bankers and financial industry.

There are a few problems with this tactic. First of all Wall Street like most big corporations has no political principles. It simply goes with the flow. If there is money to be made by dealing with the government that’s where they’ll go. Many on Wall Street were quite comfortable with Obama. In fact Wall Street gave more money to the Democrats in the last election cycle than Republicans. Are they going to bite the hands that feed them? So just how real is this populist attack on Wall Street likely to be? It will amount to little more than divisive rhetoric.

Second, any action will involve punishing the banks for doing what the government wanted them to do. It was the government that forced the banks to make loans to unqualified borrowers in order to expand home ownership through the Community Reinvestment Act and other instruments. I don’t like derivatives and other exotic financial instruments, but insofar as they deal with mortgages they are government-inspired, particularly with low interest rates maintained by the Federal Reserve. Easy money and credit forced by the government had the effect of inflating real estate prices to unsustainable levels.

Third is the myth of the bailout, which assumes that Wall Street somehow obtained billions of dollars of taxpayer funds and then walked off with them or paid themselves bonuses. The truth is that Wall Street received no grants, no gifts of taxpayer funds. They received loans to shore up the financial system, even if they didn’t want or need them in many cases. Most of these loans have been paid back with interest. The only money not coming back is what the government gave to the auto industry, which has nothing to do with Wall Street. So Wall Street has not gotten any benefit from the government, and in fact is having to eat huge losses on government-inspired loans.

What the Democrats seek to do is divert populist “tea party” away from them and the government and towards Wall Street. True enough there is some anger at Wall Street as well, but I would wager that has more to do with a drop in the value of 401(k)s than any fundamental antipathy. These accounts are on the mend and will recover in the long run and require a healthy Wall Street to prosper.

Meanwhile the government is moving forward with “reform” legislation, before the commission it appointed to investigate this matter has reported, not that this commission is objective given the grilling the left-wing Chairman Phil Angelides gave to top bankers last week. It is blaming Wall Street before the investigation has even been completed. Any objective accounting must acknowledge the seminal role of government in creating the crisis.

But government is not going to blame itself. Yet given a jobless “stimulus” waste of money, increased debt, and a 10% unemployment rate this phony “populism” not likely to gain much traction. The notion that “We screwed up so let’s blame Wall Street” is too transparent to be taken seriously. It will not create a single job, which will only happen when there is a stable system and incentive for private capital to invest in future growth.