A Great Article by Walter Kirn which appears in this week's New York Times Magazine
nytimes.com
THE WAY WE LIVE NOW
My Fault
By WALTER KIRN
Five years ago, at the urging of a market guru known for his folksy approach to stock picking and his prematurely snow white hair, I divided my economic self into two theoretical entities: an innocent middle-American consumer who roamed the malls in search of new sensations and a second, analytic self who monitored the first self's purchases in the hope of spotting smart investments. The idea, as outlined in Peter Lynch's book ''One Up on Wall Street,'' was to unleash my inner market genius by setting aside all those fancy charts and graphs and concentrating on the world around me. Was I drinking a lot of espresso? Buy stock in Starbucks. Were all of my friends on Prozac? Buy Eli Lilly.
It was an existential transformation, and I was not alone in making it. Aiming to score what Lynch called ''10 baggers'' (stock investments that appreciated tenfold or more), I turned myself into a human market indicator. No longer would I waste my life by merely living it; by seeing myself as a roving one-man focus group, I would learn to profit from it too. Did I like my long-distance carrier? Buy WorldCom.
Which I did -- lots of it -- and you know the ending. But as much as I'd like to blame the current market slide on megalomaniacal C.E.O.'s, corrupt accountants, lazy federal regulators and Martha Stewart's extended social circle, my own little feverish random walk down Wall Street reminds me that even the largest market bubbles are inflated one breath at a time, by millions of suckers blowing in unison.
Since there's no Congressional hearing room large enough to hold us all -- the lunch-counter Morgans and couch-potato Rockefellers whose hunches and tips and systems warped the markets as surely as all those fraudulent corporate audits -- the investigations into where the money went will, of necessity, be witch trials. Which isn't to say they won't feature some actual witches many of us will be happy to see burned, if only to exorcise our guilt for making them celebrities in the first place. Years ago, when the great fever struck me personally (I was drinking a Gatorade one minute and buying Quaker Oats, its maker, the next), I alarmed myself by sitting down one day and listing the names of 20 C.E.O.'s I hadn't realized I'd known until that moment. The names came to me from the media ether, magically, the way ballplayers' names had when I was 12. I resented this unbidden mental invasion. Ellison, Welch, McNealy, Ebbers, Whitman -- useless info-bytes breeding in a brain that soon, to make room for them, would be forced to dump whole college seminars on Roman history and the complete set of Los Angeles area codes.
It seemed like such vital information then: P/E's and Ebitda's and split dates and Morningstar rankings. But what was this esoterica displacing? Just as every stock purchase implies a sale, every thought about stocks implies a nonthought about, well, you name it -- art, love, gardening. If the rest of the amateur investors were behaving anything like I was then -- pondering why they'd lunched at Wendy's that day rather than at Outback Steakhouse; walking several blocks out of their way for a glimpse of an electronic jumbo ticker; checking the closing numbers on the Nikkei before looking out the window at that day's weather -- then a whole lot of things worth doing in America weren't getting done.
No matter how many subpoenas Congress issues, we'll never know the toll of our obsession with making money while remaining motionless. For how many years was the cure for cancer delayed by researchers staring at streaming real-time quotes? How many novels went flat in Chapter 6 when their authors were interrupted by e-mailed ''sell'' alerts? How many budding romances went cold when one lover broke the other's searching gaze to peek at a stranger's open Wall Street Journal?
Real-estate agents call it ''deferred maintenance'': the squalor that results when property owners are too distracted to make routine repairs. Deferred maintenance feels like American capitalism's general condition now. There are the corporate officers who postponed telling people during all those quarters of rising earnings that they barely cleared enough money for a cold soda minus the deposit on the can. There are the brokers who postponed telling clients that everyone inside the firm had just sold the stock it now rated a ''strong buy.'' There are the husbands who postponed telling their wives that they'd have to postpone that trip to Paris they'd planned, not to mention their retirement. It's as if the whole country put up an ''Out to Lunch'' sign sometime around mid-1997, except that we didn't really go to lunch; we logged onto the Motley Fool Web site behind closed doors and screened our calls while quietly tracking Intel.
That was me, at least, and I'm glad the fever has broken, since I'm not sure I could have cooled down on my own. By the end there, the market and I had merged. Every time I stopped to smell the roses, I asked myself, ''Who owns the roses?'' and ''What's their share price?'' When I noticed how much organic baby food my wife was buying after our first child was born, my reaction was not ''What a careful, thoughtful mother,'' but ''How does Merrill Lynch rate Whole Foods Market?'' Every Pampers change was a promotion for Procter & Gamble, but then came our household's sudden switch to Huggies, which my wife said fit better. How to trade on this?
To gain the market but lose one's soul. It sounded like a good deal once, and may again someday (though not too soon, I hope). In the meantime, as the fall guys fall and the pros take their high-profile legal beatings, we amateurs have permission just to live again.
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Walter Kirn is the author, most recently, of ''Up in the Air,'' a novel.
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company |
