HistoryInTheUnmaking

It's difficult to live in this city and not learn a little about the financial sector. After all, it is one of the engines, only slightly more glamorous than tourism, that keeps this city moving forward. 

As with most things that happen in this gigantic small town, moments with global implications often take on a local feel. With this in mind, I took a stroll up Seventh Avenue this morning past the global headquarters of Lehman Brothers on my way to work. 

The building I work in also houses a large Lehman presence, but I knew the real action today would be on Seventh, between 49th and 50th. 

I wasn't sure what to expect; there was obviously something seismic happening on Wall Street. After a year or more of shifting quicksand revealing the fatal structural flaws in the backbone of our financial system, the Fed had finally grown a pair and told the douchebag contingent to suck it up and deal with their own mess. There was a last-minute hail mary for Merrill Lynch, but no such luck for Lehman Brothers or AIG (Correction! We found an extra $85B lying around!). The essential interconnectedness that these companies have to the larger global economy seems to have given these "too big to fail" entities a certain amount of hubris that has led inexorably to a tragedy of Greek proportions. 

Lehman Brothers, a company founded in 1850, and which once accepted raw cotton as payments for merchandise, lost one employee and a large chunk of property on September 11th. They quickly moved into a midtown glass and steel fortress wrapped in the kind of new media gimmickry one might expect from a bunch of tools trying to look hip in an arena clearly out of their range. Pleated pants soon infested the area. Armed with little more than Blackberries and a sense of entitlement, the financial world found its way solidly above Canal Street.

It is with no small sense of irony that I felt as if this locale had become a type of ground zero in its own right this morning. As I walked past the giant glass doors of 745 Seventh Avenue, hundreds of New Yorkers (with the obligatory European presence we now have to endure) stood in muted expectation, waiting for, as usual, very little to happen. But we all sensed that we were witnessing the historic unraveling of something very large, both to New Yorkers and the world at large. 

As I pushed past the crowd, I found myself suddenly caught between the front entrance of the building and the small guerilla army of photographers there to catch every last gasp of this dying giant. Lenses the size of stop signs faced me, hundreds of them, and I felt a twang of pity for those who choose to endure this form of scrutiny for a living. There is a cold sort of entropy to a wall of hungry cameras. A black hole of voyeurism and postmodern consumption. 

I pranced by them, giddy and unnerved. When I got to 1301 6th Avenue there was a noticeable nervousness in the demeanor of those huddled outside - smoking, talking, fidgeting on their Blackberries. Outside of the cameras glare, I couldn't help but feel sorry for those real people, taking the elevator with me, watching the small interactive screen on the way up telling us how bad it was getting for them. 

On my way home, I grabbed the image above of 745 Seventh with my iPhone. The cameras will get no sleep tonight, it seems.

The news, such as it is so far, remains muddled and uncertain. Are we doomed to endure a decade of recession and financial ruin, as the Japanese did? Will the Feds save the day, literally and figuratively, by bailing out just enough of the sector to keep us solvent, while still reminding the Street that there is "moral hazard" to what they do? Is this yet another harbinger, among many others, of a larger decline in American power and influence? The question marks, especially in an election year as pivotal as this one, are not in short supply. 

It is surely my continuing pride in being an American that makes it all so fascinating and difficult to witness up close.

Comments

[Sprague D]

Here's my 2 cents: the Guys Running The World were completely cynical and knew that the bubble they were riding had gotten so big they would have to get bailed out -- allowing for a couple of them taking one for the team (Bear Stearns and Lehman). Capitalism has changed, maybe forever, and maybe that's not such a bad thing if it leads to more oversight.

[sell gold]

Should stay forever.

[Bpmhalrqxz]

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