Analyses Hold Stock Market Warnings to be Heeded

By Arthur Hoffman

(NOTE: This is the latest in a series of articles and commentaries written by Gotham team members that we will be featuring here. This article originally ran in St. Louis Business Journal on April 17, 2009.)

It seems like a very long time ago. But in October 2007, presidential candidate Sen. John McCain said he’d appoint octogenarian, former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan to lead a review of the U.S. tax system, joking that “if he’s dead, just prop him up and put some dark glasses on him, like ‘Weekend at Bernie’s.’”

McCain made that remark days before Oct. 9, 2007, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit its all-time record high close of 14,164.53.

In those heady days, long before the financial system began to come apart, no one questioned McCain’s adulation of Greenspan’s acumen, even dead.

Today, no politician talks about appointing Greenspan — to anything. While Greenspan has rejected the thought that he bears any responsibility for our economic meltdown, he has ruefully admitted that he made “a mistake” in believing that bankers would act in their self-interest to protect their shareholders and institutions. By way of explaining his error, he pointed to “a flaw in the model... that defines how the world works.”

This brings us to Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable,” published in 2007 (Random House). Taleb argues that models, like the one Greenspan trusted, are inherently unreliable and, indeed, worthless because they cannot predict the highly improbable, or black swan, event.

As a quant, or expert in quantitative finance, Taleb understands sophisticated mathematics. But Taleb has little faith in highly complex models. Indeed, he cites research by Spyros Makridakis and Michele Hibon of actual forecasts and their conclusion that “statistically sophisticated or complex methods do not necessarily provide more accurate forecasts than simpler ones.”

Taleb also describes the work of psychologist Philip Tetlock involving 300 specialists (one-fourth economists) and thousands of their predictions that showed “an expert problem: There was no difference in results whether one had a Ph.D. or an undergraduate degree.” In fact, those who had a big reputation were worse predictors than those who had none.

How can this be? Taleb speculates that our inherited instincts reflect a relatively primitive environment eons ago in which highly improbable events were limited to encounters with new predators, human enemies or abrupt weather shifts. Today’s global, intensely informational and statistically complex environment bears no practical resemblance to the primitive world in which those instincts were learned.

“Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions” by Dan Ariely (HarperCollins, 2008) expands on human frailties in making even simple decisions. A professor of behavioral economics at Duke University, Ariely devises experiments that prove people do not act according to the assumptions of economics. Instead of making rational decisions based on information, we succumb to a variety of irrational influences from the environment, called context effects, and make predictably irrational decisions.

Many of these influences, like the power of “free,” are well-known to retailers and advertising copywriters. Still other forces Ariely identifies — for example, how pricing affects the efficacy of placebos — are not well-understood outside the world of pharmaceuticals and medical ethics but should be. Also, Ariely’s research on honesty has profound implications, except for the extreme case such as the 30-year fleecing of friends and nonprofits by Mr. Madoff in which societal norms obviously did not influence his behavior.

If we’d read Taleb’s “The Black Swan” in 2007, would we still be mired in the stock market today? I believe the sad answer is yes.

There are many reasons found in both these thought-provoking books. One example: Anchoring, or relativity, is a classical mental mechanism in which a starting reference point, say a Dow Jones of 14,164.53, will mean dismay, or worse, when an investor expects the Oct. 9, 2007, record closing high to continue to be exceeded.

The reality is that the Dow Jones Industrial Average began in May 1896 at 40.94. So, half the index value created in more than a century has been wiped out in less than 18 months. Anchoring to the 14,164 level can lead to depression and perhaps even more irrational behavior.

Both authors write about the power of anchoring or relativity. Ariely says, “We fall in love with what we already have,” and, “We focus on what we may lose, rather than what we may gain.”

This does not bode well for short-term market performance — not to mention investors’ emotional well-being.

But the reality is that most of us stayed in the market well after its October 2007 high, at least in part because of anchoring — and the belief that past trends that demonstrated our genius would continue.


Arthur Hoffman is an executive speech writer and president of Hoffman Creative, Inc. in St. Louis.

Fighting Cancer a Win for Both Parties

By Matthew Dallek

(NOTE: This is the latest in a series of articles and commentaries written by Gotham team members that we will be featuring here. This article originally ran on Politico on April 7, 2009.)

House Republicans released their version of a budget last week, and the familiar partisan potshots began to ring out across Capitol Hill. But on one issue, at least, there is hope for bipartisan agreement. Republicans and Democrats alike should put partisanship aside to endorse a plan to double federal funding for cancer research by 2014.

Cancer research is an issue that resonates profoundly, without regard to party affiliation. It frightens, maims and kills Democrats and Republicans alike. To cite just a few members of Congress who have cancer: Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) has brain cancer, and Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) has twice survived Hodgkin’s disease. Sens. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) and Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) share the distinction of having survived prostate cancer, and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has battled melanoma.

In the House, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) has undergone seven major surgeries in the past year because she not only had breast cancer but also has the BRCA-2 gene — putting her at increased risk for developing ovarian and other cancers. Her colleagues Sue Myrick (R-N.C.) and Jim Marshall (D-Ga.) are also among the cancer survivors serving in the House.

The history of the “war on cancer” shows that this is an issue where bipartisan solutions are within elected officials’ grasp. In 1937, Franklin D. Roosevelt signed legislation that received the support of every senator to establish the National Cancer Institute. The National Cancer Institute Act not only created the first federal cancer-fighting agency but also called for better coordination of cancer research, the purchase and distribution of much-needed radium to hospitals, and an education campaign designed to raise awareness about the need for early detection.

Four decades later, Republican Richard Nixon built on FDR’s legacy when he increased the federal commitment to cancer research. He declared that America should muster the “federal will” and provide the “federal resources” that could be used to launch a “campaign against cancer.”

While FDR’s and Nixon’s efforts have not resulted in a cure for cancer, it is clear that federal support for cancer research has saved the lives of thousands of Americans through the decades.

Building on that bipartisan legacy, congressional Republicans and Democrats should agree that the time is right to step up the fight against cancer at the federal level. During last year’s presidential campaign, the politics of this issue were already beginning to move in the right direction. Republicans and Democrats expressed mutual support for funding cancer research.

Even conservative Republicans like Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas, a melanoma survivor, strongly support cancer research. On the campaign trail in 2007, Brownback called cancer “the leading cause of fear in America today.” In his February address to a joint session of Congress, President Barack Obama talked about “seeking a cure for cancer in our time.” Obama’s mother died of ovarian cancer at 53, and his budget proposal includes doubling the funding for cancer research over five years.

Congressional Republicans and Democrats alike should rush to support that reasonable goal and all of the benefits that might flow from achieving it. On ideological grounds, liberal Democrats should unanimously show their support for a federal institute that conducts research, distributes grants and supports doctors whose clinical trials and laboratory research will save countless lives.

But Republicans should also be able to rally around the idea that the NCI isn’t just a Big Government bureaucracy stifling economic innovation and the private enterprise system. On the contrary, NCI distributes grants to researchers employed at private medical institutions and leading hospitals. It makes the United States more competitive on a global scale in the areas of science, medicine and cancer research. And it deepens a public-private partnership that, whatever its flaws, has led to innovation, strengthened the scientific marketplace of ideas and helped the American people live healthier lives.

A final reason for bipartisan support for cancer research is that potentially lifesaving research projects are much too dependent on the whims of private donors nowadays. At M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, one wonderful physician, Elizabeth Ann Mittendorf, relies significantly on private sources of funding to conduct clinical trials vaccinating women who have had breast cancer to lower their risk of a recurrence. (One of my friends is enrolled in this trial and is attempting to raise tens of thousands of dollars just to help keep the trial going.)

At the Johns Hopkins Sol Goldman Center for pancreatic cancer research, a team of brilliant doctors has recently mapped the pancreatic cancer genome. But they do not have as much funding as they need to conduct research that could translate their genetic discoveries into simple early detection tests for the disease and to develop better treatments for pancreatic cancer, which has a five-year survival rate of 5 percent.

This issue is a no-brainer. “A permanent 1 percent reduction in mortality from cancer has a present value to current and future generations of Americans of nearly $500 billion. If a cure were feasible, that would be worth about $50 trillion,” said Mittendorf.

Members of Congress should join together, double the federal funding of cancer research and provide themselves and their constituents with a bipartisan measure of hope that one day the “leading cause of fear in America” will be sharply reduced, if not eliminated.


Matthew Dallek writes a monthly column on history and politics for Politico, teaches at the University of California Washington Center, and is a visiting fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center.

And the Tweet Goes On...

Last week we put up a post asking for your thoughts on the recent phenomenon of ghost-twittering. From "lucrative" to "ludicrous!", our writers offer their final word...

"New rates! By the character, not the word!" -- Ellis Henican, Staff Columnist, Newsday

"While the concept of someone needing to know the daily details of a celebrity’s life is a bit disconcerting, I’m sure writing such “tidbits” is enjoyable." -- Rich Mintzer, former Writer, MSNBC

"Beware of ghost Twittering, your brain may become a shadow of its former self." -- Jessica Copen, Communications Consultant, UNICEF

"Very funny! That's the problem with Twitter. It's for people with zero attention spans. 140 characters doesn't even get my throat cleared." -- Doug Garr, Speechwriter

-Blog Runner

Searching for the New Mencken

By Mark Lewis

(NOTE: This is the latest in a series of articles and commentaries written by Gotham team members that we will be featuring here. This article originally ran on Forbes.com on April 2, 2009.)

America's wealthy elite could use a latter-day Sage of Baltimore to shield them from populist wrath.

These are hard times for elitists. On the left and on the right, populist mobs are lighting torches and passing out pitchforks. Soon they may start herding plutocrats onto tumbrels and rolling them toward Wall Street, the new home of the Place de la Revolution. Amid such dire portents, who will dare to take a stand for aristocracy?

H.L. Mencken comes to mind, at least as a model. The last time populism crested, back in the 1930s, the so-called Sage of Baltimore sided with America's oppressed patricians and poured scorn on the overweening hoi polloi. Mencken was no worshiper of Wall Street, but he instinctively sided with the few against the many. Especially when he sensed a witch hunt in the offing. "The whole history of the country has been a history of melodramatic pursuits of horrendous monsters, most of them imaginary," he wrote.

Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956) was a newspaper pundit, literary critic, magazine editor and agent provocateur. He first rose to prominence as a Progressive Era dissenter who ridiculed the very notion of uplift as laughably naive. What ailed America, he announced, was "the lack of a body of sophisticated and civilized public opinion, independent of plutocratic or government control and superior to the infantile philosophies of the mob--a body of opinion showing the eager curiosity, the educated skepticism and the hospitality to ideas of a true aristocracy."

Mencken derided the common man for envying the rich. "He hates the plutocrats of the cities, not only because they best him in the struggle for money, but also because they spend their gains on debaucheries that are beyond him," Mencken wrote in his caustic classic Notes on Democracy (1926). "The seeds of his disaster, as I have shown, lie in his own stupidity: He can never get rid of the naive delusion--so beautifully Christian!--that happiness is something to be got by taking it away from the other fellow."

Mencken was hugely influential during the roaring '20s, when he functioned as a bipartisan scold, flaying socialists and Rotarians alike. But the Great Depression pushed the country to the left and stranded Mencken on the right. As a libertarian, he viewed the New Deal with horror. His eloquent denunciations of Franklin Roosevelt alienated many former admirers but presumably earned him the gratitude of those aristocrats who considered Roosevelt a traitor to his class.

These days, with the Wall Street bailout fueling populist rage, there is an opportunity for a new Mencken to show his mettle. But is there anyone among the current crop of right-wing pundits who can bear comparison to the Sage?

"Absolutely nobody," declares Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley, who edited Mencken's posthumous memoir My Life as Author and Editor.

"These people are self-important pipsqueaks," Yardley said, via e-mail. "I don't respect a single one of them, much less think that a single one of them deserves to be compared to H.L.M. I do have a measure of respect for David Brooks, whose knee doesn't seem to jerk in his sleep, but he's no Mencken and I suspect he'd be the first to say so."

Naturally, there are those on the right who would reject Yardley's assessment. "I think I am the right-wing Mencken," Ann Coulter asserted on CNN in 2006. (For good measure, she also claimed to be the right-wing Mark Twain.) R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., editor in chief of The American Spectator, has been compared to Mencken, as have the Canadian writer Mark Steyn and humorist P.J. O'Rourke. (O'Rourke gets bonus points for being the H.L. Mencken Research Fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute.)

Meanwhile, many on the left still cherish Mencken as a humorist, an iconoclast and a masterful stylist, even as they deprecate his "survival of the fittest" philosophy. In liberal precincts, the Mencken label has been affixed to such writers as Gore Vidal, Lewis Lapham and Alexander Cockburn.

Victor Navasky, a journalism professor at Columbia University and a former editor and publisher of The Nation, illustrated the protean nature of the Sage's enduring appeal. When polled by Forbes, Navasky offered three extremely diverse nominees for the "latter-day Mencken" title: Calvin Trillin (who writes verse for The Nation), Mark Steyn (who is anathema to The Nation) and Christopher Hitchens (a former Nation mainstay who left after his support for the Iraq War alienated its liberal readership).

Hitchens, as a proud contrarian, might be tempted to interpose himself, Mencken-like, between the current populists and their well-heeled prey. "Populism, which is in the last instance always an illiberal style, may come tricked out as a folkish emancipation," he once wrote in an essay about Mencken. "That is when it most needs to be satirized."

That old saw "vox populi, vox dei"--the voice of the people is the voice of God--is "a treacherous saying that has often been used to cement alliances between the plutocracy and the mob," Hitchens wrote. "It helps, of course, in resisting the populi bit, if you are convinced that the dei part is nonsense also. Thus we have Mencken, in his heroic period, defending Eugene Debs and Robert La Follette, not because they were tribunes of the plebs but because they were individuals of integrity who stood out against the yelling crowd as well as against the oligarchy."

But neither Hitchens nor any other current pundit can truly fill Mencken's shoes, because none espouse the Sage's gleeful brand of social Darwinism, which animated almost everything he wrote. These days, anyone admitting to such mean-spirited views is relegated to marginal publications. Was Mencken's extreme elitism a pose, something he exaggerated for effect? Not according to Terry Teachout, the drama critic for the Wall Street Journal and author of The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken.

"Mencken was every bit as heartless as he made out," Teachout said, via e-mail. "Not on an individual level--he was capable of great personal kindness--but everything that he wrote in Notes on Democracy should be taken seriously as an expression of how he thought the world worked. Another way to put it is that he believed that politics existed in order to block the otherwise inevitable operation of social Darwinism. For that reason, he didn't have any serious expectation that his ideas would ever be adopted in America: He knew that elitism has no appeal in a democracy."

"It's important to keep in mind, though, that Mencken was the furthest thing from a practical political thinker," Teachout added. "He was essentially a literary artist who played with ideas. This doesn't mean that he wasn't serious about those ideas, but it would never have occurred to him to think through how they might be made to work in the real world. That wasn't what he understood to be his job--he was a critic, period."

As such, Mencken left his mark on America, even if he failed to thwart the New Deal. Truth be told, his libertarian crusade had little practical effect, other than to put a severe crimp in his popularity. But at least it boosted the aristocrats' morale as they made their way to the Trans-Lux newsreel theater to hiss Roosevelt. Today's upper-crust types may get little love from today's pundits, but they can still order themselves a copy of Notes on Democracy and let it lift their spirits. We'll give the last word to the Sage himself:

"I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing. Does it exalt dunderheads, cowards, trimmers, frauds, cads? Then the pain of seeing them go up is balanced and obliterated by the joy of seeing them come down. Is it inordinately wasteful, extravagant, dishonest? Then so is every other form of government: all alike are enemies to laborious and virtuous men. Is rascality at the very heart of it? Well, we have borne that rascality since 1776 and continue to survive. In the long run, it may turn out that rascality is necessary to human government and even to civilization itself--that civilization, at bottom, is nothing but a colossal swindle. I do not know: I report only that when the suckers are running well the spectacle is infinitely exhilarating."

Mark Lewis is a former Senior News Editor at Forbes.com.

Take Your Word for It

As you may have seen last week, the New York Times ran a front-page piece spotlighting the newest and perhaps strangest form of ghostwriting -- ghost twittering. It turns out a growing number of celebrities and public figures like Britney Spears are turning to others to craft their brief words of wisdom for the twit-o-sphere.

This practice of hiring a ghostwriter to produce such short, seemingly mindless content raises a lot of questions -- starting with why bother. We thought who better to provide some answers and shed some light on the topic than the Gotham team of ghostwriters? We've sent this article out to our crew to get their thoughts -- in 140 characters or less, naturally -- and over the next several days will we be posting their responses. We hope you find the dialogue as enlightening as Shaq's last tweet.

-Blog Runner

"And then there are those who *should* be hiring ghost twitters, such as Ms. Courtney Love" -- Jerry Weinstein, Editor-At-Large, Jack Myers Publishing

"Too busy to Twitter? Hire a ghostwriter to Gwitter." -- Laurie Kilmartin, Comedian

"Warning to would-be ghosts: Twitter can smell a phony from a million pixels away. Sell softly." -- Ben Boychuk III, former Moderator, RedBlueAmerica.com

The Last Great Editor Remembered

By Lawrence S. Dietz

(NOTE: This is the latest in a series of articles and commentaries written by Gotham team members that we will be featuring here. This piece was originally read at Jim Bellow's memorial service in Los Angeles, and later quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle.)

I met Jim Bellows when he moved to the L.A. Times after the N.Y. Herald Tribune collapsed. Tom Wolfe had befriended me and gotten me writing for New York, the Sunday supplement to the Tribune.

Jim asked me to meet him at the Times; we’d go out for lunch from there, but we wouldn’t drive: we’d walk over to a nearby place, which turned out to be the dining room of the once splendid but by the 60s down-at-the heel, Alexandria Hotel.

It was drizzling, and to his surprise Jim slid on the sidewalk. I told him that L.A. sidewalks weren’t as gritty as New York’s – they weren’t constructed with inclement weather in mind. He filed that one away.

He filed a lot away. He was a sponge for information about Los Angeles, unlike subsequent editors from New York who came to the Los Angeles Times with the same air of pious certitude exhibited by missionaries going to Africa in the 19th Century to bring enlightenment to the savages. Of course, those editors were from the New York Times.

At the L.A. Times, Jim oversaw the “back” of the paper – the features and the Sunday magazine, West, the sections that “real” newspapermen sneer at as “soft.”

The guy who’d really made the careers of Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin and so many others was clearly open and accessible to ideas. I was barely starting as a free-lance writer, but when I suggested West, which was drab-looking, could use great design (after all, New York and the Herald Tribune were sensational to look at) Jim hired a friend of mine, the brilliant and mercurial Mike Salisbury, to be the art director. Mike made West the best-looking magazine in the country.

I went to New York to edit a new magazine, and when it folded, Jim lured me back to L.A. to write for West. Jim personally worked with a few writers – I was lucky to be one of them – whose words could keep up with Salisbury’s graphics.

West was the first thing people turned to on Sunday. It even attracted the Holy Grail, younger readers. But editors in the vast Times bureaucracy opposed Jim getting the top job; so he left and went to Washington.

After his stint editing the Washington Star, throwing darts at Ben Bradlee, he came back to L.A. and took over the Herald-Examiner, the distant #2 paper in town. With slender resources he actually challenged the behemoth Times. Finally, though, it was time for him to move on.

No more newspapers to edit? He became the managing editor of “Entertainment Tonight”, hired after the show debuted to embarrassing, accurate reviews labeling it a studio flack’s wet dream. He brought in some of us print guys, and asked that field reporters ask real questions. What a concept. ET flourished.

Later he developed editorial content for Prodigy, a web service ahead of its time (a combination of AOL and the Huffington Post, with a stable of terrific columnists).

After Prodigy faded, some young Stanford grads hired him to create short reviews of websites to distinguish their new search engine, Excite. Again Jim turned to journalists, and we beavered away in the days of dial-up 14.4 kbps modems and pages that took forever to load. (A colleague wrote the best Excite web review, of a bestiality chat room: “Lassie! Go home! Quick!”)

Google proved that web surfers just want links, not reviews, so Jim wrote his autobiography, all the while looking for the next opportunity. It came from UCLA’s communications staff: perhaps a great magazine written by the faculty could move the campus up the college pecking order.

Jim turned to me and we developed the idea of mixing UCLA contributors with “real” writers, many from Jim’s enormous Rolodex. We created a smart and beautifully designed dummy and a business plan. The project made its way slowly, slowly through the bureaucracy; finally it won the support of the faculty Senate, but when it got to the then-Chancellor, who had come to UCLA from Harvard, he said that while he worried about the finances, it couldn’t succeed because no one in Los Angeles reads. I was too stunned even to sputter.

Jim’s health had begun to fail, so the UCLA journal would not be a terrific last hurrah for an editor who, most of all, revered talent. Even as he slowed down, though, he talked about another project.

I’ve written mostly about work. Jon Carroll printed some of this piece in his column in the San Francisco Chronicle. Jon, who worked for Jim at West, wrote: “Sooner than most of us, Bellows understood that information was fungible, and nostalgia for a particular medium was not useful.”

But beyond work, what a sense of humor Jim had. After ET, Jim was hired by ABC-TV to develop a news show, so he went back to New York for a while. As always, he liked working with the people he had faith in, and among the crew he assembled for the project was Jack Nessel, who had been Clay Felker’s #2 at New York. Jack sent me this e-mail message after Jim died.

“I brought my Akita [about 85 pounds] to a meeting with Bellows about the TV show we were supposed to invent. He said he supposed I thought my dog was tough, but he had a dog that could take mine in seconds, and he proposed a ‘dog-off’ the following Sunday in Central Park by the bronze sled-dog statue. At the appointed time he showed up with a dog the size of a large rat, on a leash that looked like a string. The two animals barely looked at each other. Whereupon Bellows claimed he won because my dog was clearly intimidated.”

Finally, much has been made of Jim’s mumbling. I think it was a brilliant strategy for dealing with writers who parse every word an editor says to them, and never forget what they deem criticism.

You knew when Jim didn’t like something from the shake of his shoulders and his pained expression. If you were any good, you didn’t need him to tell you exactly what to do to make your piece or editing job or headline better.

And when you did fix it, there was nothing better in this world than the smile that lit up his face.


Lawrence S. Dietz is the former editorial manager for Excite.com.

You Can Tax Away AIG's Bonuses, But Capitalism's Never Gonna Be Fair

By Richard Korman

(NOTE: This is the latest in a series of articles and commentaries written by Gotham team members that we will be featuring here. This piece originally ran on ENR.com.)

Let's tax away AIG's bonuses because we now own AIG. And let's try to prevent Wall Street traders from running the world economy over a cliff. But don't pretend that we will ever tame big corporations or even bring executive compensation under government control through regulations. Business isn't fair.

After the crisis has passed, President Obama and the Democrats will have to step aside and let American business run on its own without trying to micromanage executive compensation, union organizing and other matters. Otherwise we'll waste years with experimentation and controversy, as FDR and the New Dealers did, instead of letting their sound reforms (the FDIC) and basic Keynesian stimulus do their work. The risk of a D.C.-centric economy is that investors will just sit on the sidelines.

We have a capitalist system that needs to be bailed out and re-regulated but sooner or later we must return to capitalism and all its potential excesses to produce more wealth and jobs.

For some perspective, let's talk about trust-busting Teddy Roosevelt. I love almost everything about him, including his personal bravery and environmentalist drive and his actual voice (but not his imperialist warmongering). I'll refer you to historian Richard Hofstadter, who pointed out that a lot of the trust-busting was not a true expression of class conflict and that Americans are basically at peace with corporate capitalism as long as the job-creation machine is keeping most everybody warm and dry. That populist rhetoric is a disguise for the accommodation we have with large corporations. And that there is more consensus in American life than class conflict.

Manhattan Island was settled by Dutch traders and the very first financial panic, in 1792, came only five years after the ink was dry on the Constitution. Changing the culture of Wall Street is about as likely as Bernie Madoff getting birthday cards from his former clients. Take the AIG bonuses as just another burst of excess that needs to be turned back. Right now I'm more concerned about keeping America out of the soup kitchen than whipping up a populist storm about the malefactors.

Richard Korman is the editorial manager for ENR.com.