Back when the term “California wine” connoted jugs of indistinguishable blends from Gallo, Almaden, Paul Masson, Sebastiani and Inglenook, Your West Coast Oenophile contemplated a career in Comparative Literature. That meant acquiring command of six separate languages, so, at various junctures throughout the course of my academic history, I studied French, Latin, ancient Greek, Russian, Italian, and, of course, English. I didn’t quite make it to the PhD, having hied back to California in time to plop myself on Red Rock Beach the day I was supposed to attend the MA ceremonies at a place to which I sometimes allude in my fictional passages as Coprochrome University, nor did I ever return to the hallowed halls of Holy Child to inquire of my eighth grade instructress Sister Frances (“I am a rara avis”) Heron just what certain expurgated passages in Juvenal really meant.
One might note the absence of Spanish in my hexalingual curriculum. I offer no apologies for never having studied this language, something I may expound in a subsequent entry. Nor did I ever take a course in the “beautiful science,” as some proponents describe Economics. As conservative columnist Jeffrey Hart once told me, “I believe whatever economist I happen to be speaking to;” uncharacteristically, I find myself in complete agreement with his wry assertion.
Back when I ran off to London to craft my creative undergraduate thesis, The Love Story of Big Daddy’s Пошлость,I had the good fortune to convert my savings over to pounds sterling just days before Jimmy Carter made a particularly dismal pronouncement—even for him. Overnight, the value of the dollar plummeted 30%. The foreign exchange professors I had accompanied howled how their meager academic stipend, paid in US currency, how now dwindled past the point of subsistence, but I regaled in the unexpected increment in my personal fortune.
Still, it struck me as utterly absurd that I should suddenly become quantifiably wealthier simply because of something the President of the United States said on television. It made absolutely no sense, unless one ascribed to a particular school of economics. Or maybe to its antithesis. All in all, it just seemed to me to be utter contrivance, and had the economic pundits decided to have been glowing in their assessment of Carter, instead of disparaging, I would probably have found myself proportionately bereft.
| In 1998, Random House published two polls of the 100 Best Novels. One list came from members of the Modern Library Board; the other was compiled from a year-long poll of 217,520 readers. Seven of the Top Ten novels on the Readers Poll were written by either of those towering luminaries of 20th century intellectualism, L. Ron Hubbard or Ayn Rand. Now both deceased, their respective philosophies are extolled today by that Scientology’s most prominent proselytizer, John Travolta, and the principal acolyte of Rand’s Objectivism, Alan Greenspan. Greenspan’s laissez-faire approach to governance virtually gave license to the abuses of Enron and WorldCom and enabled the sub-prime mortgage scandal that has fueled our current economic nadir; still, his principal hubris stemmed from his sheer delight in crafting pronouncements that could catalyze baseless volatility in the stock exchanges (recall how his exultant epithet “irrational exuberance” precipitated the collapse of the dot.com boom). |  |
Ad hominem attacks aside, the root of my disdain for the former Fed Chairman is not the well-warranted disparagement of the individual but the notion that economic prediction is anything but social alchemy. I have long maintained that the economic climate can be easily be understood by a most empirical methodology (in other words, my guess is just as good as your guess). Every year I assay the state of the economy by a simple methodology: on what date do I first receive a new coin from that year’s mintage?
 The former Fed Chairman aka Mr. Andrea Mitchell |
It’s not quite reductio ad absurdum, but the underlying logic of my economic theory is profoundly simple. Deftly pour a small splash of wine (we can use Taylor Lake Country Red to mitigate any pain over wasting a fine vintage) into a tub of cold water and the red pollutant will remain relatively static; agitate the water and the coloring will soon diffuse across the entire bath. Similarly, in a vibrant economy, newly-minted coins will radiate rapidly from the Denver (or Philadelphia) nexus; in stagnant times, circulation moves at an excruciatingly lethargic pace. |
So far, my results have varied widely, but, in retrospect, have proved precisely accurate harbingers of what lay ahead financially in every year that I have conducted this survey. if memory serves true, the earliest appearance of a new coin was around January 30, somewhere in the 1990s (perhaps 1999?). Median time frame is around February 25- March 10. Last year, I did not see a single 2008 coin until May 16, and I believe most people know what happened to the economy thereafter.
2009? It was starting to seem bleak enough that I had set my sights on the Fourth of July, until the Ginkgo Girl presented me with a brand-new District of Columbia quarter this morning. Featuring Duke Ellington and the motto “Justice for All,” this pristine ducat actually wound its way into her purse last Thursday, so the official date this year is April 30. That still bodes rather ill for the economy, but compared to 2008, perhaps things are rebounding after all.