One Is Too Many

Earlier this week the Dow Jones Industrial Average on the New York Stock Exchange briefly topped 40,000. I don't know who Dow Jones is and I have no idea what the 'Average' is averaging, but I see people at intersections with cardboard signs asking for help in god-awful weather so I wonder if one of them might be named Dow. But probably not.

Depends on who you are, and what you consume in terms of news media, but we are more or less living in a remake of Dickens; Tale of Two Cities though distinguishing the best of times from the worst of times is getting harder to do.

The Invisibility of Poverty by Kevin Lee

Over three-quarters of us live 'paycheck to paycheck.' And it doesn't really matter much to the DJIA or the NASDAQ (another acronym I don't understand; and that definition did fuck all to improve my comprehension so I hope you got something out of it.).

Holding on by your fingertips would be those below the paycheck-to-paycheck level at what we call the 'official poverty rate' (for 2022, the last year I found stats) of 11.5 percent, or if you like counting noses, thirty-seven point nine million human beings. In a nation with boundless opportunities and abundant resources, how does this compute?    

As Frank Buchman once noted, 'There's enough in this world for everyone's need but not enough for everyone's greed.' 
-bill kenny

Real, Surreal, and Cereal

Willie Sutton a legend from when my parents were children once explained that he robbed banks because “that’s where the money is.” He meant I am sure, paper with portraits of Presidents on it that you could fold up and put in your pocket. 

Meanwhile and maybe the bleeding has been staunched, as of ‘close of business’ this past Tuesday, the New York Stock Exchange had ‘lost’ three trillion dollars of I-don’t-actually-know-what. Value? Triple-S Green Stamps? Perhaps that’s what has happened but what I don’t understand, with my apologies to the “other” Willie, if the value ‘lost’ was real or a paper chase.

I have trouble with our checkbook and get a lot of get-well cards from my bank as a result of many of those troubles so I’m not the guy who can tell you if we should worry about a run on the banks or getting a line for a dinner setting at the soup kitchen. Am I, too, too big to fail or too small to matter?

I ‘follow’ stock reports as part of newscasts but only notionally. ‘A company’s stock did something somewhere and this other thing happened.’ As a guy who’s hoping to stop showing up for work in the not too distant future in order to retire and live from my pension and investments (I stopped working a very long time, unless you are my boss reading this, in which case I have no idea how that sentence fragment got into this line of typing), I am just dumber than a bag of rocks on the stock market and how (and why) what it does affects me.

I’m pretty sure stocks and bonds are a better investment than scratch-off lottery tickets, but I cannot tell you why that is. I’m not looking forward to collecting discarded bottles and cans to redeem for their deposit in order to supplement my retirement income but I watch the fiscal machinations on the world’s stock markets the way I visit libraries filled with books written in a language I don’t speak.

I’m conflicted between paper money and paper cuts. Somewhere there is a blaze burning and someone is feeding the flames. If we follow the smoke, do we find our future or someone else’s past?

-bill kenny