Warren Buffett is buying American

At times like these, it’s good to get a reality check from someone like Warren Buffett, who understands the current financial crisis, doesn’t underestimate it, yet is able to see beyond short-term panic to long-term opportunity. The day after this op-ed appeared, it was the most-emailed item at the New York Times website.

A simple rule dictates my buying: Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful. And most certainly, fear is now widespread, gripping even seasoned investors. To be sure, investors are right to be wary of highly leveraged entities or businesses in weak competitive positions. But fears regarding the long-term prosperity of the nation’s many sound companies make no sense. These businesses will indeed suffer earnings hiccups, as they always have. But most major companies will be setting new profit records 5, 10 and 20 years from now.

A run on the banks

October has been a perilous month for the economy for many years, it seems. Here’s what Thoreau had to say on October 14, 1857, contrasting the panic among those who rely on the commercial banks with the security of the crickets who rely on the banks of sand near Thoreau’s cabin.

I’ve read this passage several times before, but it was only this time that I noticed the neat pun on Suffolk Bank and suffocation. 

A Writer’s Britain by Margaret Drabble

Margaret Drabble is one of my favorite authors, but for many years I made no particular effort to read A Writer’s Britain. I figured it was a typical coffee-table book: a lot of pretty pictures of English countryside with some skimpy text. But eventually I was curious enough to take a look for myself.

I should have known that the industrious Drabble, whose reaction to writer’s block was to edit The Oxford Companion to English Literature, would not have put her name on a book that was less than thorough and well researched. A Writer’s Britain is packed with allusions, quotations, and thoughtful discussion of writers from Mrs. Gaskell and Charles Dickens to Wordsworth and Thomas Hardy.

Drabble is too modest to discuss her own work, but her sense of place and the way it shapes human lives is second to none. This is from The Witch of Exmoor:

Frieda walked on through the ancient woodland. It spoke to her of decay, her own decay. The trees were encrusted with lichen, and small ferns sprouted from them, as orchids sprout from the trees of a tropical rain forest. Fungus grew from living holes and dying trunks and dead logs. Grey-white oyster outcrops clustered. Ash, birch, oak and thorn, the old trees of Northern Europe. Some leant from the steep slope at perilous angles, and others were uprooted, reaching their inverted crowns into the air like great matted discs of red ogre hair, of monstrous curling fibre. Twisted faces peered at her from severed, scarred and stunted limbs. She passed the hollow tree, inside which stood a small lake on which a miniature elfin armada might sail. Scale was crazily distorted in this wracked and rent, this Rackham woodland. There was an overpowering smell of rich wet damp and decay. Stumps rose through the leafmould like old teeth. Frieda’s tongue joggled her bridgework, and from beneath her loose bridge an acrid, bitter taste seeped into her mouth. It was the taste of death.

Corporate rat

At the corner of Broadway and Howard Street, someone has painted this marvelous corporate rat on a wall facing a vacant lot. Presumably it’s connected with the Wall Street credit crisis and the impending bailout or “rescue.” A close look reveals that the rat has blood on his hands.

Update: On October 15 I spotted another rat painted in similar style on the side of building on Houston Street. Some intentionally half-obscured type that accompanied the rat makes it look as though this is part of a viral campaign for some kind of new gossip show on Fox. Too bad: I preferred to think that it was the work of a freelance social critic. At any rate, I liked it better than the viral campaign for the new TrueBlood vampire show, which was initially intriguing but soon became exhausting. These guys are trying too hard.

Attitude

Do New Yorkers have attitude? Or just New Yorkers who drive Lexuses and live on the Lower East Side? This license plate was spotted near the corner of Chrystie and Rivington Streets.