I can't believe you just upped my credit limit

Dear Credit Card Company Which Shall Remain Unnamed,

I'm unemployed. I've been unemployed since November of 2008.

I'm transient. In the past 14 months, I've been in six different countries and traversed opposite sides of the globe.

Finally, I'm homeless. I gave up my apartment in August and have been living with friends and family since.

So, why in the world would you up my credit limit? I have no means of repaying any money I spend, and I shouldn't really be in the position to spend indiscriminately. It's highly irresponsible of you to provide me additional credit, and I'm pretty sure if you keep this up, you'll soon be the subject of a congressional hearing.

The U.S. Economy as told through a game of Monopoly

From K.

How Michael Osinsky helped blow up Wall Street

by building the CDO software that helped create the real estate feeding frenzy that played a vital role in putting the world economy where it is today.

It's an interesting article: http://nymag.com/news/business/55687/

How does that saying go again? Put shit in, and you get shit out.

Um, is this a scam?

New York's Bailout Begins in Times Square

On Tuesday, February 3rd and Wednesday, February 4th, New Yorkers can simply visit the Bailout Booth in Times Square, where visionary entrepreneur "Bailout Bill" will be giving away cash bailouts, starting at $50, to EVERYONE who walks up.

Surprise, you've been rightsized!

Yeah, that's right.

Rightsized.

And, by rightsized, what they actually meant was, downsized.

As in: You have been laid off. Now, get out.

Not surprisingly, just because they called it rightsized didn't make me feel any better about being downsized. It might have made me feel worse. Except that it's not sunk in yet. Because, I'm not upset yet.

As of 10am this morning, I made the walk of shame from my office building down the street to the building that houses my former company's HR department.

I was joined by 3,199 other rightsized employees that made up the 10% reduction of the 32,000 large workforce that the company promise earlier last month. Each of us carried bankers boxes, duffels and shopping bags full of personal items quickly gathered from our desks in the few minutes we had between the time we were told we'd been laid off and the time it took to return to our desks to turn off our computers and leave the building.

We didn't have to speak to each other, we didn't have to make eye contact, and no one had to ask where the other was headed. We were all able to tell who was on the walk of shame with us. We were all able to tell who expected the axe to fall, they were the ones who walked with a spring in the step, relieved that the uncertainty was finally over. We were all able to tell who had hoped they'd be the ones to be asked to leave, they were the ones with expressions of hope, who saw this as an opportunity to pursue their dreams. The saddest to see, however, were those it took by surprise, evidenced by the subtle stoop of defeat in the shoulders, the shopping bags crammed full of banking tombstones, the crystal paperweight presented to employees that have been with the firm for at least 10 years, awards presented by financial associations and preschool drawings with bold headings that read "To: Dad."

Us 3,200. Strangers to each other, and strangely united. We didn't speak to each other. No one was in a talking mood. We didn't make eye contact. Guess no one was in a looking mood. Stone faced, everyone gazed resolutely ahead as we headed to HR.

HR was all business. We walked in, turned in our employee IDs, blackberries, laptops and corporate cards. In exchange, we got our severance packages.

Package is a generous word.

As I left HR, I ran into some former colleagues walking in. We exchanged hugs and made tentative plans for lunch along with lame half jokes about how we'll now have time to have lunch.

Now that we're unemployed, we'll have time to do the things we've always secretly envied others for having the time to do. Our secret envy was also our secret source of superiority and self worth. Our lives were so busy, our jobs so important to us, we never had time for anything other than work.

"So, now we have tons of time, want to do lunch next week?"

"Sure," I say, "let's do lunch."

Welcome to rightsizing.

10 things to love about the credit crunch

LONDON (MarketWatch) -- While the global credit crunch is clearly beginning to bite hard, there are some positives to the financial turmoil that it has wrought.

The U.S. election is no longer leading the news.

Whatever your brother-in-law's brilliant financial move was last year probably looks pretty boneheaded now.

Wall Street bigwigs are exposed as blubbering hypocrites in congressional hearings.

You probably didn't do anything as embarrassing as the head of Iceland's central bank, who issued a statement announcing a 4 billion euro loan from Russia when Moscow hadn't actually agreed to it.

The world will no longer have to spend trillions of dollars to cut carbon emissions since the crisis will do more to reduce greenhouse gases than all the government initiatives, wind farms and cap-and-trade schemes combined.

Capitol Hill bigwigs are exposed as blubbering hypocrites in congressional press conferences.

You probably didn't do anything as embarrassing as Germany's KfW Bankengrouppe, which transferred 300 million euros to Lehman Bros. just before the investment bank filed for bankruptcy.

Instead of foreign aid programs or the United Nations, your tax dollars will now go to fund assistance where it's really needed -- Wall Street.

Gasoline's back down to merely extortionate prices from obscenely extortionate prices.

It's as good a distraction as any from the Chicago Cubs' abject playoff failure.

- Tom Bemis, assistant managing editor

Hippie, Yippie, Yuppie, Hipster! Schlemiel, Schlimazel, Hasenpfeffer Incorporated!

With New York City caught in the vortex of one of the worst financial crisis in history, is the New York of old to be the New York of new?

Jay McInerney looks back at 20 plus years...



I first remember hearing the Y-word in ’83, when I was living in the East Village... I was enjoying a hung-over midday breakfast (we didn’t use the word brunch in the East Village; it was breakfast whenever you woke up)... An ostentatiously besplattered painter was sitting next to me at the counter, and I heard him mutter, “Fucking yuppies.” I looked up to see a young couple I myself would have characterized as “preppy” waiting to be seated. They looked as if they were visiting from the Upper East Side—all chinos and oxford cloth. We were all uniformly nonconformist in our black jeans and our black Ramones and Television T-shirts. As a Williams alum, I knew all about preppies even before they’d gone mainstream with the publication of The Official Preppy Handbook in 1980. My younger brother, a Deerfield senior, was a preppy. Many of my classmates were preppies. But this yuppie thing was new to me.

The term probably first appeared in print in 1983, when columnist Bob Greene wrote a piece about former Yippie leader Jerry Rubin, who was hosting “networking” events at Studio 54. Greene quoted a participant as saying that Rubin had gone from being the leader of the Yippies to the leader of the yuppies. The neologism stood for Young Urban Professionals and might have gone down in history as yups if not for the Rubin connection. The term yuppies suggested a certain evolutionary—or devolutionary—trajectory from the hippie and the Yippie. The story had everything—the double irony of the revolutionary trickster turned entrepreneurial capitalist cheerleader and the setting in the glam palace of mindless hedonism, as well as a zippy catchphrase that actually seemed to describe an instantly recognizable new minority. Once we had a name for them, we suddenly realized that they were everywhere, like the pod people of Invasion of the Body Snatchers—especially here in New York, the urbanest place of all. We might have even recognized them as us.

From the beginning, there was a certain subject/object confusion associated with the yuppie concept, a certain “we have met the enemy and he is us” self-reflexivity to the phenomenon. Downtown mohawked squatters aside, it was sometimes hard to find a Manhattanite without some taint of the new lifestyle. Did gym membership qualify you as a yuppie? Snorting coke? Eating raw fish? When I heard a movie agent slinging the term at a group of bankers at the Odeon, I wondered about pots and kettles.

“Who are all those upwardly mobile folk with designer water, running shoes, pickled parquet floors, and $450,000 condos in semi-slum buildings?” asked Time magazine in its January 9, 1984, issue. “Yuppies,” we were informed, “are dedicated to the twin goals of making piles of money and achieving perfection through physical fitness and therapy.” The Yuppie Handbook, which had just been published, defined its subject: “(hot new name for Young Urban Professional): A person of either sex who meets the following criteria: (1) resides in or near one of the major cities; (2) claims to be between the ages of 25 and 45; (3) lives on aspirations of glory, prestige, recognition, fame, social status, power, money, or any and all combinations of the above; (4) anyone who brunches on the weekends or works out after work.”

Apparently, the creatures anatomized in The Yuppie Handbook were just common enough to elicit recognition, but not so general as to provoke a shrug. The concepts of “brunching” and “working out” were apparently new and humorous. A few of their defining characteristics—dhurrie rugs, potted ferns, pickled parquet floors—sound suitably dated. But many more—European automobiles, gourmet kitchens, computer literacy, designer clothing, and sushi—fail 25 years later to convey the exoticism that the authors seem to have intended. Oh, those wacky yuppies, eating raw fish and going to the gym.

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