There goes the neighbourhood I

/ Alex Good / 9 Comments

So the house just behind me, which was a very nice home, was recently sold and the buyer (a developer) just finished tearing it down. He’s going to build two or three units on the lot for student housing. This doesn’t bother me too much, as I’ve noticed that students aren’t the rowdy, noisy types they used to be. They don’t drink or party as much. But it does mean that I’m going to have to listen to the noise of construction all summer, as they want the units ready to rent by September. I’ll keep you up to date.

Today they were just in with chainsaws cutting the last of the trees down. (You an click on the pic to make it bigger.)

Wimsey: Whose Body?

/ Alex Good / 12 Comments

Introducing Lord Peter Wimsey. And he sure doesn’t seem like much in the first description we have of him: “His long, amiable face looked as if it had generated spontaneously from his top hat, as white maggots breed from Gorgonzola.”

He does better after that, but the takeaway is that Lord Peter is an eccentric character. A dandy in his dress, a toff in his manners. He can put on a monocle and top hat to go out, or lounge at home “in a bathrobe cheerfully patterned with unnaturally variegated peacocks.” His clothes, we’re told “are a kind of rebuke to the world at large.” He collects incunabula and plays Brahms on his piano. He also talks to himself and drops his “g”s, which is something I didn’t think British aristos did, but I’ll defer to Sayers as an authority. Though I’ve tried and I’m still not sure what pronouncing “ordinarily” as “or’nar’ly” actually sounds like.

For such a fellow, becoming a detective is something incongruous. As one serving lady complains to Lord Peter’s butler Bunter, “policework ain’t not fit occupation for a gentleman, let alone a lordship.” And it’s a handicap he recognizes, feeling himself to be an “amateur” who has been “hampered in his career as a private detective by a public-school education.”

But being a member of “the real aristocracy” (his mother’s a duchess, his older brother a duke) has real advantages. For example he gets hired here because the mother of a man who has been falsely charged with murder feels “safe in the hands of a real gentleman.” And even more than this his being a member of the upper class gives him powerful connections that put him on an equal footing with the police. Indeed, they have a tendency to defer to him. When the lead detective on the case tries to get Lord Peter to butt out of the investigation, his chief phones him up and tells him that “every facility is to be given to Lord Peter Wimsey.” The Chief is a close friend of Peter’s mother, you see.

Of course, the police defer to Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple too. You tend to see this most often in British detective fiction and I guess some of it has to do with the class system. Though it rubs off on the one American character we meet here as well, who makes time to be interviewed by Lord Peter because “if he had a weak point, it was the British aristocracy.” And much the same goes for forensics. I’ve mentioned before how often Miss Marple is casually invited in to look over crime scenes along with the police, and something similar happens in this book as apparently police tape hadn’t been invented yet and Lord Peter can examine the corpse that is found in the bathtub on his own, even having pictures taken, before the police arrive.

Other people though are aware of Lord Peter’s preciosity, and in the case of his Scotland Yard buddy Parker they can even call him out on it:

“You want to be consistent, you want to look pretty, you want to swagger debonairly through a comedy of puppets or else to stalk magnificently through a tragedy of human sorrows and things. But that’s childish. If you’ve any duty to society in the way of finding out the truth about murders, you must do it in any attitude that comes handy. You want to be elegant and detached? That’s all right, if you find the truth out that way, but it hasn’t any value in itself, you know. You want to look dignified and consistent – what’s that got to do with it? You want to hunt down a murderer for the sport of the thing and then shake hands with him and say, ‘Well played – hard luck – you shall have your revenge tomorrow!’ Well, you can’t do it like that. Life’s not a football match. You want to be a sportsman. You can’t be a sportsman. You’re a responsible person.”

To this Lord P can only make the sulky response that all of Parker’s reading in theology have had “a brutalizing influence.” That’s quite funny, in a dry way, but the fact is Parker is another eccentric. And I could expand further on the number of weirdos in this book who fall into the category of “men without women” but my notes are likely long enough as it is.

As readers of golden age detective fiction, however, we know that Lord Peter’s persona does have a “value in itself,” just as the posturings of Holmes and Poirot and countless other fictional detectives have. It makes them fun to read about. And further in his defence, the eccentric killer (who Lord P likens to an “artist” and a “poet of crime”) takes a similar “sportsman” tack, effectively shaking hands with his nemesis at the end by way of a written confession. I wouldn’t say it takes an amateur to catch an amateur, but in this case it probably helped.

Finally, Lord Peter gets points for having had a distinguished record in the Great War, an experience that still haunts him. I don’t know, but seeing as this book came out in 1923 I think it likely he’s one of the earliest cases in the fiction of the period of PTSD.

Sayers wanted to write detective fiction that would also have literary merit. Or, in her own words, she set out to produce something “less like a conventional detective story and more like a novel.” Many people think she did. I don’t, but that’s not a knock against what she did achieve. The thing is, genre fiction has its own special qualities and I don’t think trying to be literary helps it at all.

I did, however, think that a book like this would be helped by including the sort of academic textual apparatus that you find in novels that are part of the Penguin Classics or Oxford World Classics series. Endnotes in particular would have been helpful. Among the names that I thought general readers might appreciate some assistance with were Adolf Beck (a famous case of false conviction from the 1890s), Leon Kestrel (an adversary of the fictional detective Sexton Blake, a contemporary of Sherlock Holmes), Charles Garvice (a prolific author of romance novels who died in 1920), George Joseph Smith (the Brides in the Bath killer, referenced twice here for obvious reasons), G. A. Henty (a late Victorian adventure novelist), Joey Bagstock (a character in Dickens’s Dombey and Son), and Michael Finsbury (a character in the Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne novel The Wrong Box). I got about half of these and I thought that was doing pretty well.

So far I haven’t said much about the actual mystery being solved. It’s a double-barreled affair, with a dead body being discovered in a bathtub at the same time as a prominent financier goes missing. Obviously the two crimes are linked, but it’s hard to say what’s going on when the body in the bath can’t be identified.

I don’t think it will take many readers long to figure out whodunit. Why he dun it the way he dun did it is another matter. The killer sees himself as a criminal genius, but despite having years to plan the perfect crime what he comes up with is the silliest ruse imaginable. Just for starters, why does he stash the body in a bath, and give it a pair of pince-nez? Just because he happened to pick up the pince-nez by accident, and putting the body in his neighbour’s tub struck him as a lark. “It occurred to me pleasantly how delightful it would be to deposit my parcel with him and see what he made of it.”

We had been warned by Sayers about putting much stock in a killer’s motive, but that’s not the issue here. The killer had as reasonable a motive as any killer does. What’s disturbing is that he had no motive aside from whimsy for arranging things the way he did. Admittedly, disposing of a body is where a lot of real killers, especially serial killers, fall down. But I don’t see why such a clever fellow as this couldn’t come up with something better than what he did. I guess, when it came to killing, he was just another amateur.

Wimsey index

Easy come, goeasy

/ Alex Good / 15 Comments

Actual screenshot of goeasy’s stock price taken at the end of last week.

Last week shares in the Canadian subprime lender goeasy (they don’t capitalize the “g”) crashed 70% and it’s an open question whether the company, which at the start of the week had a market cap of over $5 billion, will survive. For the last several years goeasy has been a champion dividend stock, paying investors big returns. But one of their divisions specializing in loans for autos and “powersports” (ATVs and snowmobiles) recently had to report a much higher than expected amount of charge-offs (loans that were not going to be collected). All dividends have been cancelled. The bloom is off the rose.

Suspicion has now been raised that management knew about the trouble the company was in and was concealing this information from investors. Comparisons have been made to the kind of thing that happened in the mortgage meltdown in 2008, and what is happening with private credit markets now (I should point out that goeasy is not a mortgage lender, nor is it a private credit company, being publicly-traded.) Some class action suits are in preparation, and as of this writing it’s still unclear how this will all play out.

I have some goeasy stock, but not a lot, and at this point I’m assuming it’s a write-off. Easy come, goeasy. Overall I’ve done well as an amateur investor the last thirty years so I’m not jumping out of any windows. You win some, you lose some. Still, the news did make me want to “think in ink” a bit here about what’s going on. What other shoes are waiting to drop?

I think you should always assume the worst in life, as it means you’ll have fewer bad surprises. So where are markets at and where are they heading?

If you listen to voices on the Internet, and there are a lot to listen to, you might have picked up on the increasing note of panic. Does this reflect something real, or is it just that these are the sort of voices that get magnified by the algorithm? I’d be inclined to attribute most of it to clickbait, but there are some prominent voices joining the chorus of doom, with much talk of a “reckoning” that’s on its way. Which leads me to a preliminary observation: if there is some kind of collapse coming it will be, if not the biggest, the most widely predicted in history.

I think there are some real grounds for concern, and I’ll arrange them under four headings. The four horsemen, if you want to pump things up, of the market apocalypse. And just to underline a point in advance: these are all interconnected. Each one affects all the others.

(1) Credit crisis:

In his book MegaThreats the economist Nouriel Roubini uses the concept of debt as a master metaphor for the various faces of the polycrisis the modern world faces, from economics to politics to environmental collapse. He has a point, especially when looking at the big picture. A bill is coming due for the way we’ve been living beyond our means, both as states and as households and individuals. Since 2008 the national debt in the U.S. has gone from $7 trillion to $38 trillion. And it’s set to explode even further, given the massive tax cuts handed out by Trump. The “debt death spiral,” where a government must borrow just to pay interest on the debt, is in sight.

More specifically, however, what we seem to be entering into now is the tight-money part of the credit cycle. This is partly what happened in 2008 with the financial crisis. A lot of bad debt had to be written off, leaving lenders feeling gun-shy. This is the same signal being sent up by what happened to goeasy. And, on a much larger scale, it seems to be what’s behind the headlines regarding the private credit market, whose full exposure to bad loans we can’t determine as it’s not publicly reported. But for sure some lenders are now going to have to take a haircut or go under (again, as in 2008). This will of course have knock-on effects throughout the rest of the economy. Someone is lending lenders that money, after all.

(2) Economic stagnation:

Unemployment numbers in both Canada and the United States have slipped into the red, with Canada losing a remarkable 84,000 jobs just last month (the U.S. lost 92,000). The only sectors that can still be seen as holding their own are health care and some government work. Last year was also a record year for corporate bankruptcies in the U.S. And even the stock market (“the DOW is at 50,000!”) has been kept afloat by questionable means. As I understand it, take away the investment in building A.I. infrastructure and the U.S. economy shrank this past year.

(3) Incoming inflation shock:

In the tight-money phase of the credit cycle prices usually go down. This is what we see already happening in many housing markets, and it comes with its own set of problems. But that doesn’t mean inflation isn’t a bigger threat, and what Trump has done with his scattershot imposition of tariffs and beginning a war in Iran makes it hard not to see prices on essentials (food, energy) going up. Also, given Trump’s resistance to raising interest rates, it isn’t clear to me what his plan would be to address that situation. This may lead to quite a whipsaw effect, and if consumers choose (or are forced) to cut back on their spending that could lead to a greater slowdown in the economy, more unemployment, and market collapse.

(4) AI bubble:

Is all the investment going into AI the sign of a bubble? The current valuations don’t make sense to many analysts. Still, maybe it isn’t a bubble, at least to the extent that crypto is (though I don’t know if I’d characterize crypto as a bubble so much as call it gambling app, which makes it the perfect investment vehicle for our casino/betting economy). As with crypto, or a casino, there may be winners in AI. But there will be more losers, and they now stand to lose a lot, with (again) major knock-on effects throughout the rest of the economy. We’ve already been getting reports of this in connection with rising energy costs due to how much power AI data centers use and predictions of massive job losses. And that’s just the start.

So these are the four big areas of concern I have moving forward. To be honest, the only reason I’m not more full of doom and gloom is that nobody knows anything. We could ride this long bull market for another ten years. But it’s good to keep the potential downside in mind. You’ll often hear it stated how the market, in the long run, always goes up and that all you have to do is invest in index funds and you’ll be fine. Timing the market never beats time in the market, as the conventional wisdom has it. And this is good advice. But I’d want to register two caveats.

In the first place, when the market goes down it can stay down or be flat for ten years or more. It’s done that twice in my lifetime, in the 1970s and the 2000s. You could easily see the last 125 years as consisting of just two or three big booms. So the wealth elevator may be out of order for a while, and the “long run” might need to be longer than most people will want or be able to manage.

The second point is that while it’s true the history of the market is one of growth, there’s no reason to believe in that as some kind of natural law. The market doesn’t have to go up, even in the long run. Because Canada and the U.S. have never suffered a total collapse of their monetary system, with money becoming worthless and “blood in the streets,” doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Just something to keep in mind.

Holmes: The Darkwater Hall Mystery

/ Alex Good / 10 Comments

This is called a “mystery” in the title, but I think it would have made more sense to have called it, as Watson dubbed most of Holmes’s early cases, an “adventure.” Holmes himself isn’t involved, having been sent away by Watson for some much needed rest and recuperation, and the story has our narrator heading off alone to Wiltshire and the usual pile of a country estate, apparently to act as a sort of bodyguard for Sir Harry Fairfax, the sixth baronet of Darkwater Hall. Sir Harry had sent one of the local peasants, a degenerate churl by the name of Black Ralph, to jail (or gaol, as they say in the old country), and now that Ralph is out he is apparently gunning for revenge.

Watson, using skills picked up from assisting Holmes, is able to figure out some elementary things and in the end he stops Ralph from killing Harry, though not without a bit of luck. There’s no mystery to any of this though. The only mysterious business going on is the S&M playacting that the lord and lady are up to, and Watson just blunders his way into finding out what that’s all about. Otherwise, this seemed a pointless sort of a story, interesting mainly for being written by Kingsley Amis and for the sexy subtext (it was first published in Playboy). This latter point shouldn’t be held against it though because Playboy really was a magazine worth reading, back in the day. When you were done looking at the pictures.

Holmes index