A high-finance interlude

Having given birth last week, I feel the need to write about something that has nothing to do with babies or even children. Enough about poopy diapers, sore nipples, and sleep for a minute; let’s take a relaxing break with a little high finance. And here’s my chance to give another shout out to Andrew Leonard of Salon’s How the World Works, this time for a sensible suggestion on the current financial mess.

“Nationalize the rating agencies!” he says, and it makes my heart swell. Leonard explains that when in 1970 the SEC decided to penalize brokers for holding less-than-investment-grade bonds, it designated three private firms as official bond-rating agencies, effectively outsourcing its regulatory responsibility. This created a glaring conflict of interest:

The creators of new securities pay the agencies to get their "paper" rated. But if they don't get the Aaa "investment-grade" rating that they desire from one agency, they might just take their business to another. The structural imperative of the market forced the ratings agencies to give everyone a gold star.

So, says Leonard, let’s insource the ratings game. With the financial wizards of the “free” market showing themselves incompetent to understand the very things they were buying and selling, the claim that the free market is wiser than government rings particularly hollow right now. As Leonard notes, nationalizing the credit-rating agencies might actually save us taxpayers some money, by forestalling more bailouts of investment banks.

Which brings us back to children and babies, since it’s our kids who will be paying off the national debt incurred from things like bailing out Bear Stearns. Really, it’s like the Kevin Bacon game—everything comes back to poopy diapers. They are, after all, where we all begin and end.

It's our fault, installment #5,727

I’ve always kind of liked Salon’s Andrew Leonard, of How the World Works, but now I have a warm fuzzy feeling for him for defending moms against a weird attack from biologist E.O. Wilson.

Just when you thought there wasn’t anything new to blame mothers for, Wilson says “soccer moms are the greatest enemy in modern life of natural history and proper biological education.” By “soccer moms” Wilson means mothers who take their children to arboretums, aquariums, zoos, and natural history museums, where living things are labeled and corralled—which I guess means I’m a soccer mom and so are a huge chunk of mothers. “The worst thing you can do to a child, in my opinion, is take them on a hike through a botanical garden where there are the names of the trees on the side.”

Sure, I agree with Wilson (and Rachel Carson) that setting children free to explore untrammeled nature without labels or cages is the best way to ignite their curiosity about the natural world. But labeled and penned nature has its place too.

As Leonard scathingly notes, there are, like, far, far worse things one can do to a child than take her to an arboretum. Wilson proves himself not only a jerk but a passive-aggressive weenie when he prefaces his labeling of this problem “the soccer mom syndrome” by saying “I hope I'm not offending anyone.” Says Leonard:

If you're going to classify a group of women (and what about the soccer dads, huh, where's their ring of hell?) as "the greatest enemy" of anything, then you might as well take full pleasure in your offensiveness. Because anyone who gets upset isn't going to be assuaged by hearing that you "hope" you're not being an insufferable twit.

Quite.