against boredom

The assorted fiscal and political crises now saturating western intellectual conversations and cocktail party bon mots are united by their total lack of appeal. When anyone with even so much as a passing interest in the “Credit Crunch” must learn about the particularities of Collateralized Debt Obligations and Keynesian financial stimulus theory, we are lost.

There is a general consensus that the global economic crisis of 2009 has its roots in deeper contradictions in Western capitalism. The term itself, however, is emasculated by its very preponderance: it is safely confined to newspaper headlines, blog entries, and primetime “issue” roundtables. Safely conceptualized, it is only dangerous as long as the media bothers to cover it.

Think back to earlier crises, and we can see how different this one is than the others. The savings and loan scandal of the early 90’s was safely confined to a few shoddy bankers in the Southwest. World War II was about fascism. The Cold War was about communism. Americans defined themselves and their solutions against a common enemy.

This negative definition of crisis-resolution is convenient: it limits blame to a small, superfluous aspect of a society: the Nazis in Germany, the Internet in 2001. The trend can be seen in all aspects of American politics. After the attacks of 9/11, we sought to define our inaugural effort of the 21st century as a “War on Terror”. Slowly, we have come to realize that the class does not circumscribe its true members. States we thought trustworthy harbor terrorists (Pakistan) and Terrorists we thought implacable have come to see the rationality of cooperation (the Sunni Awakening).

It is easy to arrive at this kind of generalization, that a successful fight must take as its object an easily discerned and lazily dispatched enemy. Yet it is a truth lost on most, simply because we do not see how seriously we depend on our ability to discern such an antagonist in times of crisis. “Credit crunch”, “Credit crisis”, “Economic crisis”, and other terms take the economy as the root cause of today’s problems. No matter how vaguely construed, these terms seek to constrain, by force if necessary, the problems we face to merely economic causes. Economics can be understood by economists, the reasoning goes, and may just as easily be fixed. I believe the crisis runs much deeper, however, and it is boredom that must be blamed.

Before we can understand the futility of our current language of catastrophe, we have to understand the origins of these terms. In 2007 I interned at private equity firm in London. Since I couldn’t perform due diligence with any diligence (I was a philosophy major, after all), I was assigned the pet projects that analysts and directors had no time to work on themselves. One of my supervisors had me researching horseracing tracks in mainland Europe; another had me looking at the organizational structure of British naval contractors.
One day at the end of the summer, a salty Indian trader named Roy who sat next to me on the main floor of the office told me to start making calls to Moody’s, S&P, and Fitch Ratings. He told me to find a list of companies who had issued short-term junk bonds in the past 3 months. “Junk” bonds are an entire class of bonds that carry the least protections for lenders but also yield the highest interest rates. A company issues junk bonds when it is hard up for cash and needs some on a short-term basis.

Several things about my assignment stand out to me today. First of all, Moody’s, S&P, and Fitch did not make lists of junk-bond issuers. They had all of the data, of course, but it would have to be made into a list at a hefty fee. That none of the major ratings houses maintained lists such as these stands out to me in my recollection; that Roy was unwilling to spend the £250 to obtain such a list protrudes even more.

Roy could only imagine so far as the comfort of his situation was willing to take him. He could not see that junk bond issuers would be but one of many future victims of the brewing shitstorm. And this is a truism: nobody could see beyond the limits their own means afforded them. Roy was a private equity trader whose job it was to find companies in distress to make a pretty penny off of. He was not worried that junk bonds would be a victim of a wider crisis; rather he saw that junk bond issuers would come to him for credit. This is because Roy’s own myopic viewpoint could not exist if it were not for easy lines of credit. If General Motors or Tata or Babcock could not find credit, he would for them.

I cannot claim to have known then myself: I was a philosophy student over in London to enjoy my summer and have an entry on my resume that would indicate my willingness to work hard, mundanely. My interest lay with drinks and concerts and simply being in London, because that was my stated prerogative (only in a time of easy money can being be disentangled from the considerations that would normally make existence superfluous and subsistence primary).

Gordon Brown was on the television a small uproar about the tax loophole that allowed private equity firms to pay only a 5% tax on earnings. The workers in the office seemed worried, but only because the government wanted a greater share of the spoils. I lost interest in junk bonds and looked into other projects; my supervisor had me compile a list of every single hard asset that the U.K. government owned. This was make-work but it also showed where we all were in the summer of 2007—private equity firms were so thoroughly leveraged that hospitals in Swansea were making it into their designs.

Why does “credit crisis” fail as a term? It doesn’t refer. A creditor lends money; a debtor supplies it. Where there is demand, there is supply, and where there is supply, demand inevitably follows. The supply of credit has vanished, but demand remains. What is the problem? A few months ago, the New York Times complained that banks had simply put their bailout money “under the mattress”.

Even writing about it fills me with feelings of despair and dullness: once the problem is assessed, we see how utterly boring it actually is: it is boring not because it is unimportant or because it lacks the subtleties and nuances which make for brilliant pieces in The New Yorker. It is because it is so utterly numbing, the feeling that there is nothing to do and nothing to say about it anymore. We carry on, buying food and clothing, living in motels if our houses have been foreclosed upon. But life is without meaning because the consequences of our profligacy have been divorced from the actualities of our life: there will be no soup kitchen lines, no destitute widows and no stock brokers leaping from windows in this crisis. The catastrophe only appears in the dead faces of families living in motel rooms because their houses have been foreclosed upon.

No dirt, no public works, no sunshine or wrathful grapes. Only receipts, stimulus actions, deferred credit, abstracted servitude. This is the pyrite reign of ennui, commemorated by a meaningless fiscal crisis and ceased only when the young seize the world in front of them out of frustration, necessity, or best of all, out of sheer boredom.