THE CORRECTION, when it finally came, was not an overnight bursting of a bubble but a much more gentle letdown, a year-long leakage of value from key financial markets, a contraction too gradual to generate headlines and too predictable to seriously hurt anybody but fools and the working poor.
Interpretation
The financial correction was slow and subtle, affecting primarily those who were least prepared for it.
In this quote, Jonathan Franzen discusses the nature of financial corrections, emphasizing that instead of a sudden collapse, the decline in value of key markets occurred gradually over time. This slow decrease not only went unnoticed by many but also disproportionately impacted those who were financially vulnerable, highlighting the fragility of certain economic groups during such transitions.
In practice
In a speech on economic policy, you might cite this quote to illustrate the impact of subtle economic changes on vulnerable populations.
Every good writer I know needs to go into some deep, quiet place to do work that is fully imagined. And what the Internet brings is lots of vulgar data. It is the antithesis of the imagination. It leaves nothing to the imagination.
The problem was money and the indignities of life without it. Every stroller, cell phone, Yankees cap, and SUV he saw was a torment. He wasn't covetous, he wasn't envious. But without money he was hardly a man.
Each new thing he encountered in life impelled him in a direction that fully convinced him of its rightness, but then the next new thing loomed up and impelled him in the opposite direction, which also felt right. There was no controlling narrative: he seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive for staying alive's sake.
If multiculturalism succeeds in making us a nation of independently empowered tribes, each tribe will be deprived of the comfort of victimhood and be forced to confront human limitation for what it is: a fixture of life.
To read is to have experiences; every book changes my life at least a little bit. The first time I can remember this happening was when I was 10, with a biography of Thomas Edison.
Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.
The focus of our public discourse has been on how American companies are competing with Japanese, German, and other foreign companies. What this allows us to ignore is how each of those American companies is really in competition with the families of the workers. That's the real competition.
Many markets work best with little or no outside interference. But others - especially those subject to big 'externalities' - need a helping hand.
Economy consists in a due and proper application of the means afforded according to the ability of the employer and the situation chosen; care being taken that the expenditure is prudently conducted.
The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.
Tax laws favor capital over labor, giving capital gains a lower rate than ordinary income. The rich get humongous mortgage interest deductions while renters get no deduction at all.
The 'boom-bust' cycle is generated by monetary intervention in the market, specifically bank credit expansion to business.
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