Making the grade

November 20, 2008 | Author: Paul Sullivan | Filed under: News

The recession turned possible depression has become the scariest episode of Fear Factor, worse than eating worms while swimming in a vat of leeches. The only joy is trying to figure out who to blame. (You say Wall Street; I say greedy, delusional home-buyers! It’s a bit like tomayto, tomahto at this point.) But a story I wrote today in The International Herald Tribune on the role rating agencies played in this disaster adds another character into this never-ending drama of financial calamity. The idea of it – groups of people who assign letter grades to securities – may seem boring, but the story itself highlights the great will to believe: if a respected company says something is good, then it must be, right? If nothing else, writing the story, as the Great DeNuch has pointed out, kept me from obsessing about the state of trees in my backyard.

To further to take part in the unsettling of the world order, I appeared twice on Fox News’s The Strategy Room and am scheduled to appear again on Monday, from 3pm to 4pm. If me giving my opinion on a live show does not herald the end of civilization as we know it, I don’t know what does.

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