Howzit Howard

Music post: The evolution of the scherzo

People who talk about fusion music - melding elements of jazz, rock and classical music - may not realize that classical music began as a fusion of church music and party music.

Church services gave music a serious purpose, and showed composers the majesty of music made by many people. Music written for performance in royal courts, often in social settings, brought all the dances of 16th century Europe into orchestral music.

When the symphony gelled into its most common format during the 1700s when Haydn influenced a whole generation of composers, many dance formats could be adapted for orchestral suites, but the minuet became a virtual requirement for one of the inner movements of a four-movement symphony.

Classical music was evolving quickly in the very late 1700s and early 1800s, and several composers decided at about the same time that if one of the inner movements of a symphony was slow and one was fast, the fast one needed more energy than a polite dance like a minuet could supply.

That's when the scherzo replaces the minuet as the second or third movement. The word "scherzo" means "joke" in Italian so the idea was not merely an upbeat movement but a lighthearted one. Of course, Haydn had been putting little witty bits in various movements of various symphonies. Mozart did outright humor only occasionally, but liked the energy of a scherzo. Beethoven turned the scherzo into something that could be funny or forceful but always carried plenty of vigor.

The default format for a scherzo is ABA or ABABA, in which A is the scherzo part while B, in a different key from A, is the "trio section," quieter, different in mood and rhythm, usually with fewer instruments. As always with symphonies, most composers break at least one of the rules each time.

For instructional purposes, one of the best symphonic scherzos is in Beethoven's 7th Symphony. It follows the ABABA format very obviously, and it even has a joke at the end, where Beethoven modulates to the trio section key a third time, as if he's going for ABABABA, but after a couple notes he modulates back to the main key of the movement for a boisterous and rapid conclusion, as if to say, "Ha! No, I'm not going to waste your time after all!"

Another really good symphonic scherzo is in Tchaikovsky's "Little Russian" Symphony, in which Tchaikovsky creates two wonderful moods in the A and B sections, injects lots of energy, then morphs the mood with a few well-chosen changes to harmony.

On my radio show Saturday morning, I'll play scherzos from four Beethoven symphonies, five by Tchaikovsky, and others by Bruckner, Mahler, Nielsen, Barber, Mendelssohn and Copland.

Howard's Day Off is a program of classical music and related materials, packed in authentic juices, and presented live Saturdays at 5 a.m.-7 a.m. HST on KHPR Honolulu, KKUA Wailuku and KANO Hilo as well as streaming on http://www.hawaiipublicradio.org . Max Cacas of Washington, D.C., founded the Howard's Day Off Listener Appreciation Society on Facebook. All the music played on the program comes from Dicus's personal CD collection.

The cost of consumer ignorance - yours and mine

Every day we report local gas prices - not all of them, but the AAA averages in the three Hawaii cities it tracks - and not a week goes by that I don't get an email from someone asking a question about gas prices who betrays by the tone of the question that he thinks the gas stations are gouging us.

I don't have any connection to the oil industry, and I hold the view that the big oil companies generally are able to outwit members of Congress to get tax breaks they neither need nor deserve. But most consumer anger at gas prices is based on nothing but a hunch that it isn't right.

This becomes evident when someone writes who has no basis for his ill-feeling and has decided to have me supply it - then, when I offer some reasons why local prices may not be so bad, they respond with even more irritation, because I have not supported their prejudice. Well, sorry.

Gas prices are higher on neighbor islands because there is less competition, and this is also true in more remote areas of the mainland. Gas prices are higher in Hawaii because real estate is more expensive and a gas station has a rent payment to make.

But mostly gas prices are higher because people keeping buying more car than they need. Almost nobody drives less when prices go up. And many, many of us continue to buy outsized SUVs that guzzle gas. Hey, it's not Chevron's fault you bought a Lincoln Navigator.

Uncle Howard's rule: if your car won't fit in any local parking space, you have too much car. And that's costing you way more in gas than any pricing decision made by the Tesoro station down the street.

This whole thing is emblematic of a larger problem, which is that American consumers, not just in Hawaii but everywhere, know very little about the arithmetic of household finance. We just go through life spending, spending, spending, and complaining that prices are too high.

Many people complain about gas prices but, when they gas up, walk into the gas station shop and buy food and drinks marked up to far more than the increase in the price of gas.

Many people who love to complain about gas prices barely glance at their cable, telephone or wireless bills, paying far more in premium services and add-ons than anything the gas station can wrest from their wallet.

The Credit Counseling Service of Hawaii says some people got sold high-interest rate mortgages they couldn't afford because they couldn't do the math themselves and simply trusted the salesman who said it was okay. Senator Daniel Akaka has argued for years that many people are needlessly impoverished by failure to understand compound interest on their credit cards.

We all know someone who "saves money" by purchasing huge quantities of food at Costco or Sam's Club and winds up throwing some of it away because it goes bad before it can be eaten.

I do not mean to imply that I'm smarter than these guys. I make my own mistakes. Every year I overpay my taxes because I'm too busy to study the tax law and look for every penny that's mine. Just because I don't complain about my own gas bill doesn't mean it's financially wise for me to drive a Thunderbird when a smaller car would do.

All this comes to mind because the Hawaii Council on Economic Education, which is dedicated to supporting economics education in schools, holds its annual fundraising dinner at the Sheraton Waikiki on Friday night. Bernadette and I will be attending as guests of our banker. We could argue about how much economics education there should be in the schools, but no one dare argue that, at a minimum, the economics of household finance should make up some lesson plans.

 

Hawaii Supreme Court rules against HSTA

The leadership of the Hawaii State Teachers Association has failed in its bid to undo the imposition of a contract by the state government. The state supreme court also ruled that the union leadership's assertion that it could not strike until its complaints were resolved is wrong.

The decision is a win for the Abercrombie administration, and for the UH Professional Assembly, which sided against HSTA because it didn't want its own right to strike to be abridged, but it may also be a win for teachers, if, as may be the case, they could not have gotten a better contract than this one.

The teachers and their own union leadership have sometimes been at odds over what any reasonable outside observer must admit was a difficult and tricky situation for all sides at the bargaining table.

In boom times, state government workers could count on their labor unions to bargain to impasse, get the matter handed off to binding arbitration, and the arbitrator who do something vaguely Solomonic that got employees a nice raise that used up a lot of the rising state tax revenues.

That was good for the workers while it lasted, but then we got it by a recession followed by an achingly slow recovery that could delay a return to prosperity for years. Tax revenues fell off and suddenly there wasn't enough of it for government managers to sit still for more raises.

The state government said its last, best offer was a 5% wage cut and a 50-50 split on health insurance premiums, and asked the union to put that to the rank-and-file for a vote. The union leadership refused. That's when Gov. Abercrombie imposed those terms.

HSTA didn't call a strike because it wasn't sure how many teachers would actually walk. Instead, it took a legal course, and what the state supreme court ruled on today was the union's call for immediate relief from the new contract, something the state labor relations board declined to do.

"No statute or rule prescribes a time in which (the labor relations board) must resolve a motion," the justices ruled, so the timely resolution of a complaint "is within the discretion and judgement" of the state labor relations board.

I have seen some pretty harsh criticism of the teachers union for going this route. Well, I dunno. Once they decided a strike wouldn't work, they tried a creative legal means of achieving results. It didn't work, either. In this economy, any contract talks were doomed to be in blood-from-turnip mode.

 

Are insurance companies trying to make Obamacare look more costly?

The research arm of Kaiser Permanente has done a study that measures how expensive health care has become in the past decade. It confirms your worst fears, it shows how hard those soaring costs have hit both you and your employer, and it has set off a controversy over the role of insurance companies in raising premiums.

Average U.S. wages have risen a third since 2001 but average health care costs have more than doubled. Kaiser says average health premiums have risen 113% while worker contributions have risen 131%, though your employer still shoulders about two-thirds of your health care costs yourself.

Here's a key point that isn't in the Kaiser report: averages are useful to economists and policymakers, but there is actually a wide-range between high-end and low-end increases in health care costs, and some employees have been socked a lot harder than others.

And here's a key point that the report does contain: this year, for the first time, more than half of Americans with employer-provided health care plans have annual minimums of $1,000 or more.

When costs rise very rapidly, the people who are supposed to control those costs become desperate. We have seen how universities have not only raised tuition costs a lot but have offered fewer choices for required courses so that many students have to attend college for five years to get a four-year degree, effectively increasing the cost by whatever the tuition increase was, plus 25% for the extra year.

In health care, the copay has been the analogous way to control soaring costs. Every dollar shifted to your direct payment doesn't count toward the percentage increase in premium costs. Unfortunately, $10 here and $10 there and pretty soon you're talking about real money.

Let's cover the insurance industry angle. Kaiser estimates that the average price of a family plan has more than doubled since 2001, and is now more than $15,000, but how much of that goes to insurance company profits?

The insurance companies say, it's not us, it's Obamacare. But Kaiser, itself a health insurer since it is an HMO, estimates less than 2% of the increase in health care premiums this year is caused by new laws.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Nancy-Ann DeParle says premiums rose 9% this year because insurance companies overestimated the effect of Obamacare and noted that 13 of the 14 biggest insurance companies reported higher first quarter profits.

Consumer activists have gone further, citing years of record profits and record executive compensation by some insurance companies that blame the White House for rising costs.

The biggest avoidable cost of soaring health care costs, other than the wonder drugs and machines that are prolonging our lives, is the growing number of employers who evade their employee health care responsibilities by hiring "outside contractors" for what amounts to full-time work.

Many people who work without employee-provided health care coverage simply go uninsured, and when they're sick, they go to the emergency room for free care. Only it's not free. The cost is shifted to you and your employer.

The economics of health care works only when there are a lot of young, healthy people with medical coverage, offsetting the higher number of medical services consumed by seniors. When companies evade their responsibility, they're screwing other employers. Some companies are profiting at the expense of others.

So New York can shoot down aircraft - why is everyone surprised?

New York to Terrorists: We got your antiterrorism right here.

New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, on "60 Minutes" Sunday, said his force has the ability to shoot down an aircraft. Scott Pelley got him to repeat it, to make sure he got it right, and Kelly did.

"I prefer not to get into the details," Kelly said, "but obviously this would be in an extreme situation."

On Monday, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg backed his top cop by saying that since 911 NYPD has developed secret counterterrorism measures, though he declined to say what they were.

"The NYPE has lots of capabilities that you don't know about and you won't know about," Bloomberg said.

NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command in Colorado Springs, Colo., said it "remains responsible for defending the U.S. and Canada from air attacks on our nations."

Judging from a variety of scolding remarks from security consultants, retired FBI agents, and the like, there was a widespread feeling that Kelly had revealed something scary and new.

But on reflection it's not clear to me that this is the case.

It's not true that NORAD is solely responsible for shooting down aircraft. The specific wording of the NORAD statement was generally accurate. But if someone aims a Stinger missile at Air Force One, no one is going to waste time calling Colorado Springs. The Secret Service and a dozen other federal police departments including the FBI, the Capitol Police, the Park Police, and the Executive Protection Service, all have protocols for firing when there is an imminent threat.

If a situation arose that was closely analogous to 911, and there was time to give some thought to what to do, and military aircraft could not be scrambled in time, and NYPD had armed helicopters in the air, federal officials might well tell NYPD to "take the shot," and all sides would be glad NYPD had the resources to comply.

Finally, NYPD officers, like officers of any police department, have protocols for taking out imminent threats themselves, and if a light plane with one pilot opened fire on police, police might indeed return fire if there was no threat to the public in doing so.

The concern over Kelly's remark may have stemmed from imagining a police officer shooting down a commercial jetliner. But that's not what he said.

 

The king of Saudi Arabia gives women the right to vote

Oh, your majesty!

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia got himself a few more allies - specifically, half the people of his realm - by announcing Sunday he was granting Saudi women the right to vote, and, more than that, the right to run for office.

We in the West - where virtually all of the Saudi leadership was educated - often criticize what we call the perversion of Islam that focuses so closely on holy wars at the expense of principles of love and hospitality that are also to be found in the Koran. Less often discussed has been the focus of many modern Muslim clerics on the parts of the Koran to seem to support subjugating women.

And not only the Koran. You can find those passages in the Bible, too, and I think we've all known otherwise pious and principled men who, too insecure to face women as equals, hide behind the skirts of Scripture, giving obsessive focus to a few passages that seem to order women to do what their husbands tell them. Fundamentalist and charismatic Christians have by and large worked their way past this, having noticed that the man whom a woman is supposed to obey is in turn supposed to honor the woman, and how better to honor her than to appreciate her own judgment, her intelligence and her equality? It is inevitable that right-thinking Muslims come to the same place spiritually.

Saudi Arabia remains a monarchy, and those elected to office merely advise, but this is still progress, and I believe that the political system in Saudi Arabia, more subtle than it looks, will benefit from recognizing the contribution women can make.

It is a sign of the times, I think, that in Saudi Arabia many women are less interesting in winning the right to vote than in winning the right to drive a car, and King Abdullah has not acted on this particular issue.. The Koran is silent on driving, cars not having yet been invented, but Saudi clerics are not silent and they mostly believe that a woman's place is in the back seat, chauffeured. Women in Saudi Arabia are also not allowed to practice law in court.

Members of the Saudi royal family spend a great deal of time abroad, in Europe, the United States and Asia, and they are well-acquainted with the way the rest of the world operates. Saudi Arabia looks like a country on the map, but it is in some respects like a very large estate, whose rulers are used to making their own rules. Change is taking time. But I might point out that the suffrage issue has been addressed by a monarch who is 87 years old and acted against the wishes of some of his brothers.

Feds order rehiring of fired Countrywide watchdog

Federal regulators this month ordered Bank of America to rehire a fired employee whom it inherited when it bought Countrywide Financial following the 2008 subprime mortgage meltdown.

Countrywide, which led the way in selling mortgages at extra-high interest rates to people who shouldn't have qualified for loans at any price, employed Eileen Foster as chief of fraud investigations. Even Countrywide let her investigate some of the worst violators of ethical behavior and good sense - some of them were fired and six entire branch offices were closed - though Foster always suspected that some complicit superiors were getting a pass.

It was only after Bank of America bought Countrywide that Foster, a vice president of the company, was fired for "unprofessional conduct" after an investigation of her behavior that somehow never managed to extend either to interviewing her direct supervisor or briefing him on its progress. An underling said the investigation, at least when he was in the room, consisted of inviting him to confirm negative impressions of Foster that started with the words, "Everybody says...."

We get this deep detail courtesy of Michael Hudson, author of "The Monster: How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America," who has written an article on Foster's firing for The Center for Public Integrity's  I Watch News. Here is a link:

http://www.iwatchnews.org/2011/09/22/6687/countrywide-protected-fraudsters-silencing-whistleblowers-say-former-employees

Foster has been fighting her firing by Bank of America for three years. This month the U.S. Department of Labor's Occupational Safety & Health Administration said Foster was wrongly fired and should be rehired with back pay. The letter notes that while the investigation of Foster began at Countrywide, it was Bank of America that went ahead with the firing. Since the Sept. 13 letter, Foster and Bank of America have reached a settlement.

Foster's investigators, who apparently believed at first that anything sketchy they discovered would be dealt with severely, with grateful thanks from higher management, discovered signs that mortgage applications were doctored, even to the point of cutting pieces of paper out and pasting new paper in, to make risky applications look safer.

This is significant because Countrywide executives insisted afterwards that any fraud was committed by the borrowers, with few if any complicit loan officers. Whistleblowers said many loan officers were not merely complicit but led the way in teaching borrowers how to game the system by claiming more income than they actually had. The thinking apparently was that if anything went wrong, the borrower could always resell the house in an ever-rising housing market and get out clean, perhaps even make a profit. The problem with this, from a math point of view, was the "ever-rising housing market" bit. From a moral point of view, the problem was that it was dishonest.

The most amazing thing in this new inside account is that Countrywide was so delusional about its shady behavior that it maintained a fraud investigations office and actually let Foster target some people for dismissal from time to time. She even closed half a dozen entire branch offices. But by the time of the 2008 meltdown, Foster says she had begun to notice that a number of whistleblowers were being fired a few weeks after reporting improper behavior.

Another fascinating detail is that Foster thinks Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo, who has often been cast as head crook, may actually have been out of the loop on the really illegal stuff.

I also notice that Foster reported getting furious calls or emails from people accusing her of a witch hunt. The seemingly retaliatory investigation of her own behavior may not have been cooked up, but could have stemmed from real complaints by crooked loan officers who had so thoroughly convinced themselves that their fraud was okay that they were really indignant, not just pretending to be, truly believing themselves to be unfairly targeted. This, of course, is the scariest part of all.

 

 

Music post: Toot suite

Bernadette has been learning to play the cello, just for the sheer joy of making the rich sounds that instrument can produce. But in high school she played flute, and when I tried to make a noise with hers, I couldn't generate any sound at all. The embouchure eluded me.

Embouchure, a French word originally encompassing the word "bouche," or mouth, refers to the particular way you have to move your facial muscles to use the mouthpiece of a wind instrument to make noise properly. This may involve a round mouthpiece, like the brass instruments, or a single reed, like the clarinet or the saxophone, or a double reed, like the oboe or the bassoon, or, in the case of the flute and piccolo, you blow across an opening in the tube, much as you do to produce a sound from a bottle. With a flute, it's harder than it looks.

Flutes are thought to date back 30,000 to 40,000 years, beginning with the femur of a small bear with holes in it. A transverse flute dating back to before 400 B.C. has been found in China. A transverse flute is the kind held horizontally, as opposed to a recorder or shakuhachi where you blow in the end. Recorders appear to be older than transverse flutes and the flutes Bach composed for sounded like recorders. But transverse flutes grew increasingly common during his lifetime, 1685-1750, and some Baroque instruments that sound like recorders are actually wooden flutes. It was a century later, after Mozart and even Beethoven, in 1847, that Theobald Boehm patented the design widely used today. The modern flute can play three octaves and most of a fourth, starting from middle C.

Does a flute sound to you like it has a "clean" sound? A flute generates fewer harmonics than most instruments. Yes, overblowing produces higher tones, but for all practical purposes whatever tone is produced, is out there more or less by itself.

The flute entered jazz with Chick Webb's big band in the 1930s and gained a more prominent role in the cool jazz era of the 1960s. Then it began to appear a lot of rock music, especially Chicago, Blood Sweat & Tears and Jethro Tull, though you can also hear it in the music of Canned Heat, the Mamas and the Papas, and lots of other groups. Hubert Laws has made a career doing flute-centric versions of jazzed-up classics.

On my radio show Saturday, I'll open with Hubert Laws playing Debussy's composition for solo flute, "Syrinx," overdubbing himself to turn certain arpeggios into real chords. Through the show Laws will return to play Bach, Chopin, Bizet, Rimsky-Korasakov and Stravinsky. You'll hear Dick Halligan of Blood Sweat & Tears do Erik Satie's "Gymnopedie No. 1," and more conventional classical performers will offer samples of flute music by Beethoven, Poulenc and Debussy. Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull will perform a Bach bouree.

Howard's Day Off airs live 5am-7am HST every Saturday morning on KHPR Honolulu, KKUA Wailuku (Maui) and KANO Hilo (Big Island) and streams on http://www.hawaiipublicradio.org . Max Cacas of Washington, D.C., created the Howard's Day Off Listener Appreciation Society on Facebook.

 

 

 

Ex-men and the weak global economy

We tend to measure our economic conditions using government statistics, because they look really accurate. They're boring and filled with really precise-looking decimal-pointed numbers. It's easy to forget that these reports are not Census counts but surveys, and are constantly revised as more information comes in, which is a polite way of saying they're always wrong to some degree.

Fortunately there are ways of getting a better sense of the economy for those of us who want to know what's really going on in the actual world we live in. A good example of this is how many packages are being shipped by FedEx.

The Ex-men today posted a quarterly profit of more than $400 million on revenue up 11% to well north of $10 billion. But they also reduced their annual profit forecast and announced cutbacks in air freight flights as their business slows. The economic recovery is indeed weak when people and companies are not shipping as many packages.

And the Christmas rush?

"We don't anticipate a significant peak this year," CEO Fred Smith said.

His chief financial officer Alan Graf said traffic softened for FedEx Ground, FedEx Freight and FedEx Express, with the latter declining too fast to cover it with operating cost savings. "Our customers' hair is not on fire," Graf said. "They're just saying... steady as she goes."

The International Air Transport Association says more than half of the world's air freight capacity, including cargo holds of passenger jets, is going unused at the moment. And cargo traffic is down 8% at Hong Kong International, which I believe is the single busiest cargo airport in the world. But these bits of information can partly reflect a cooling off of Asian economies that are really still doing well. The FedEx information tells us more about the situation in America.

"I still think there is evidence of a recovery," Smith said, echoing statements a few days ago by his larger rival United Parcel Service. "But it's weaker than we hoped for."

Smith blamed it "largely" on "a lack of confidence that U.S. and European policymakers will effectively address current economic challenges." So once again we have a key business leader saying the business community fears U.S. and European officials will fail to fix any of these and might possibly do something to make it worse. This is worrisome coming within 24 hours of the House of Representatives failing to pass a simple stopgap spending bill, setting the stage for another ridiculous brinksmanship squabble next week as the money again runs out.

(This one was weird, too: the bill was supported by House Republican leaders but failed when the Tea Party freshmen crossed over to join Democrats in voting against it!)

Soft demand for shipping services may be softening the price of bunker fuel, that kind of oil burned in containerships. Matson today announced its second fuel surcharge cut in as many months, effective this coming Sunday. To keep this in perspective, the surcharge is still well over 40% of overall container shipping fees, which themselves have risen in the past year. But shipping is still relatively cheap for Hawaii, or else we'd be producing all our food here instead of getting most of it from the West Coast.

 

 

Stock market acts Fed up - but with Congress

The Fed did something today, and the Dow plunged more than 280 points, but that doesn't mean stocks took a dive because of what the Fed did. In fact, it looks to me like Wall Street is much more concerned about Congress than the Federal Reserve governors.

"Economy in Congress's hands as Fed runs out of bullets," one headline said, expressing the belief on Wall Street that the Fed has done all it can do, so Congress has to save the day, and if that's what Wall Street thinks, than the 280-point Dow dive may say more about confidence in Congress than the Fed.

Much of the Dow decline actually happened before the Fed spoke, and was driven by Moody's Investor Service downgrading its ratings on Bank of America and the other U.S. megabanks, because, Moody's said, Washington seems less inclined to treat them as "too big to fail." So this, too, this other factor in the plunging Dow, reflects Wall Street's low regard for Washington.

This should not be surprising. Republicans and Democrats keep telling us the other camp is wrong, and, let's face it, an increasing number of Americans have decided that both are right.

Republicans have also been attacking the Fed, especially its chairman Ben Bernanke, but on the evidence of what the Fed did and said today, they have him all wrong.

The problem here is that we're experiencing an economic situation that is new - a mild recession, already over, followed by a recovery so excruciatingly slow that it still feels like a recession to millions of Americans. What makes it new is that several things are happening at once:

1. Countrywide Financial, AIG and the rest of those greedy morons in the financial markets crashed the credit markets in 2008 and three years later the banks are still afraid to lend.
2. Millions of good-paying jobs moved to China and India and other developing countries and economic recovery won't bring them back. They're gone forever.
3. Economic expansion in the countries that got those jobs has caused their need for oil to explode, sending global oil prices soaring, and America is paying those prices, too.

Washington has been clueless throughout - promoting free trade without any idea what the long-term effects would be - tearing down financial sector regulation and oversight at every opportunity regardless of which party is in power - and simply trusting Wall Street to behave responsibly.

The Fed under Ben Bernanke, who did his college thesis on the role big banks played in the Great Depression, has been creative in stimulating the economy without causing a resurgence of inflation, but the global economy is simply too big to be fixed by the Fed, or Congress, or anybody. It can only fix itself, and the lead role should be played by the big banks, but they're holding their breath until the rest of us turn blue. This is irresponsible, but I believe we've already established that big banking CEOs stopped being responsible some time before 2008.

The Fed got creative and created money out of thin air by purchasing Treasury bills - the financial embodiment of the federal debt, and also a nice safe place to park your money in sketchy times - putting the bonds in banks. It made more credit. Banks, which are required to keep a certain amount of money handy in case of a run on the bank or something, have more credit on hand because of what the Fed has been doing. But they still aren't lending much. Today, rather than create more money from nothingness, the Fed simply announced it will begin to shift its money from short-term to long-term bonds. It was a conservative action by the Fed, despite political attacks that effectively accuse it of risking inflation by not being conservative about what it does.

What happens now? The Fed can't make enough money to fix the economy. Congress mostly has the power to make the economy worse, by cutting domestic spending, since that spending is part of total U.S. economic activity. Consumer spending, which is 71% of all economic activity, can be increased much, because the wealthiest 5% do more than a third of all consumer spending and they're reluctant to spend because their portfolios are down; the middle class needs to pay down its credit cards some more because it can spend, and it doesn't have the buying power it used to as a result of the shifting of wealth to the upper end. As if that doesn't bum you out enough, Europe's economy is more rickety than ours, and a lot of U.S. companies rely heavily on their European sales.

Any upside? Well, real estate is a bargain. And anyone of these stock dives gives a canny investor a chance to buy and hold stock in companies that will survive this stronger. And the private sector is actually hiring, provided you have a skill that they need going forward.