I thought of you when I read this week's column by Alan Abelson in Barron's. The paragraph that really gave me a good chuckle is highlighted below:
Muni Woe?
By ALAN ABELSON
From gorilla to guerrilla.
From homicidal hood to pasha punk.
From Chicago street gang to al Qaeda.
That, as told by our beleaguered spy-catchers, is the saga of Jose Padilla, known as Abdullah al-Muhajir for short. Snared at O'Hare back in early May after arriving on a flight from Switzerland, Jo-Abs, as his old gang chums call him, was on assignment. On the face of it, just one of your regular al Qaeda capers: Find a nice place to blow up, just make sure it's filled to overflowing with innocents of all ages.
What made this job special was that the bomb of choice was a dirty one (the clean ones are reserved for targets close to home), laced with radioactive stuff guaranteed to make a very nasty mess.
Given his resume, it's not inconceivable that Jo-Abs thinks radioactive material is extracted from a radio, and -- we can only hope -- even if he somehow stumbled on to some, all he'd likely end up doing with it was getting a fatal tan.
The feds expressed "bafflement" at what made a small-time Chicago thug turn Muslim terrorist. But it's obvious. He got to see the world -- Zurich and Karachi sound pretty alluring to anyone who spent some of the juiciest years of his adolescence, as Jo-Abs did, looking out the barred windows of a juvenile correction facility (or whatever the current chichi usage is for reform school).
And Jo-Abs really dug those terrific turbans with the ribbons trailing out from under them that the al Qaeda dudes sported. For that matter, after a lifetime in T-shirts, he was hot to try on those long, roomy threads and Middle East hip-hop pants his new gang favored. And all that jihad jive was music to his ears.
By no means least, after having to serve his apprenticeship in crime armed only with such primitive equipment as baseball bats, being able to step up to mega-blast bombs must have seemed like a shot at the big leagues. So, the only thing puzzling about Jo-Abs' career change was that anyone would be puzzled by it.
Washington, of course, is the cynical capital of the world, and the fact that Padilla-al-Muhajir had been kept in custody for six weeks and his monstrous intentions only publicized when the heat was turned on the Administration for alleged lapses in pre-9/11 vigilance stoked suspicion that the hoopla was designed to deflect mounting criticism. But do those carpers realize how long it takes merely to fumigate an al Qaeda operative?
In any event, the President is seeking to plug gaps in the nation's security structure by gathering under one roof the nearly two dozen disparate agencies that currently have a hand in preventing or combating terrorism -- all the agencies, that is, except the FBI and the CIA. Which is a little like telling the world to relax because all parties to the dispute have agreed that India and Pakistan should make nice to each other -- all parties, that is, except for India and Pakistan.
But not to worry. According to the New York Times, the FBI and the CIA have declared a truce in their recent covert war of words over whom was to blame for the terrorists that got away. Instead, they're agreed to hold their fire until they can loose it on the White House's new antiterrorist unit, when and if it ever gets up and running.
Terrorism, of course, has been and remains a heavy psychological presence in Wall Street. How could it be otherwise, if only because of the constant reminder of the awful emptiness where the great twin towers once massively loomed?
Obviously profoundly disquieting in itself, the fear that terrorism inspires hugely inflates the sense of vulnerability induced in investors by a profitless, jobless recovery, an alarmingly limp stock market, a surfeit of scandal (that has even muddied the pristine apron of Martha Stewart, can you believe?) and the ugly detritus left by the burst bubble, so much of which is still splattered over the investment landscape.
Terrorism has been taking an enormous economic toll. It has put a fearsome strain on federal finances, as much as anything why the dread disaffect is back. It has raised costs and created woes for Corporate America in ways both subtle and evident. The commercial real estate market has been badly crimped by the often impossibility of getting insurance coverage against terrorism or, when it can be purchased, its extreme priceyness.
Comes now maverick economist Stephanie Pomboy, of MacroMavens, to tell us that a bad situation could easily become worse. (Something we're always prepared to believe, in any case.) She takes note that Moody's put some $7 billion of commercial mortgage-backed paper on its watchlist after the Senate failed to pass a terrorism insurance measure. That's not an inconsiderable chunk of the entire $70 billion worth of such debt currently extant.
But, in one critical respect, Stephanie observes, the credit raters seem to have been asleep at the switch. So far, they've ignored the implications of how tough it is to get affordable coverage -- or any coverage at all -- against terrorism for the muni market. Such neglect does not constitute a minor lapse, since there are, at last count, $1.4 trillion in municipal bonds outstanding. And yet, she asks rhetorically, "don't municipalities face the same risk of terrorist attacks that the private sector does?"
Even the rating agencies, she suspects, can't long ignore the question and its inescapable answer. A bit of nosing around those arid precincts, in fact, leads her to believe that they'll soon address the issue. And when they do, including raising the possibility that lack of terrorism coverage translates into technical default, there's likely to be, as Stephanie puts it, "a rather rude awakening in the sleepy land of minus."
For that matter, it's a rude awakening that's apt to assure a lot of folks outside that sleepy land won't get a decent night's rest, either. Still another thing bin Laden and his boys have to answer for. |
