UH... WHAT JUST HAPPENED?

I'm sitting in front of the TV and trying to figure out what I think about the 700 billion dollar bailout plan failing.

I wasn't thrilled with the first plan, but the compromise reached on Saturday night seemed a little better. But under it all was the feeling of fundamental unfairness in bailing out firms that had made unwise choices. After all, I didn't profit from their risky investments, so why should I have to pay when the investments didn't pan out?

But now that the plan has failed, I'm faced with another set of queasy feelings. Now we're staring down into the abyss, and there's no telling what's down there. One week ago, we were told the US economy would utterly collapse unless a bailout plan was ready when the markets opened on September 22nd. There was no plan last Monday, and my ATM card still worked (even though my bank failed). So maybe everything will be ok. Maybe the invisible hand of the market will punish the firms that did stupid things and reward those who stayed away from the casino.

But maybe not. Maybe things are going to get much worse. I don't know. The only comfort I took in the bailout plan is that it was something. It was an imperfect something, but, well, it was something. Now there's nothing.

There's a chance that nothing is better than something. But it could be some time before we know. In the meantime, I guess I'll stock up on ramen noodles.

WELL, MY BANK FAILED...

...did yours?

Washington Mutual Goes Tits Up.

I feel proud to be part of the largest bank failure in U.S. history. Something I can tell my kids about when we come home to our refrigerator crate.

MARKET MELTDOWN BLUES

It's hard to know what to make of the financial meltdown we've seen over the last week.

Big financial firms are vanishing, the government is buying insurance companies, and by the time you read this, the government may have agreed to spend 700 billion dollars of our money to buy bad mortgages from banks.

On one hand, I guess I should be proud that, as a taxpayer, I now own thousands or perhaps millions of homes. I look forward to spending the night in some of them the next time I travel. And it certainly is exciting to own the world's largest insurance company. I trust I can look for a discounted premium next time I need car insurance?

But on a less silly level, I'm stuck with a vague sense of anger, but I don't know enough about economics to know if it's justified.

I know about the sub-prime mortgage mess and how people who shouldn't have had mortgages were given them anyway and now these loans are traded between financial institutions. And I know that these financial instruments may now be worthless and it's causing a lot of banks and investment houses to crash.

But the rest is a mystery to me. The simple facts don't add up. A bunch of people made some bad loans, but they made a lot of money making those loans. Those people still have that money they made, even though the loans are bad. I never made any money in the go-go era of sub-prime lending. Yet now I'm being asked, as a taxpayer, to buy those bad loans so the banks that were poorly run can keep from destroying the economy.

We're told the nation's financial markets are on the brink of freezing up, and if that happens, the entire American economy will collapse. What exactly do they mean by "collapse"? Do the stores run out of food and we all lose our jobs? Does our money immediately lose its value? I'm not being sarcastic, I'm being serious. Is this what happens? Because I have no idea, and if you sent me to school for another 12 years I still may not be fully equipped to evaluate the claims some in the financial sector are making.

So we're all supposed to pay a lot of money to help fix a problem wealthy financiers have made... or the economy as we know it may collapse. But I have a sinking feeling those financiers will still be wealthy when this is all over. And most of the rest of us will somewhat worse off.

If we are indeed facing the end of the world as we know it, then I guess it's worth the money we're going to spend. But I don't know, and I don't have a way of finding out. Instead we have rely on the types of people who got us into this mess to get us out.

In a world where nothing is certain and money is nothing more than an idea, that's hardly a comforting thought.

ALL THAT GLITTERS...

...is not plastic.

It arrived in the mail a few weeks ago and I didn't really know what to do with it. Without asking me, my bank replaced my normal ATM card with a gold debit card. Gold. For a guy who once lived in his car, that's not the kind of color I had ever expected to see staring back at me from my wallet.

I remember when gold cards were first introduced in the 1980s. I was working in a fish store and some guy handed me the colored piece of plastic. He gave me a look that indicated I was supposed to be impressed. I just smiled and began leafing through the newsprint mailer the credit card companies sent us each week.

If you're older than 40, you don't need to read the following paragraph: You see, kids, there wasn't always an Internet or credit card machines and stuff like that. Instead, each time we had a credit card purchase, we had to look up in the credit card mailer to see if the card had been cancelled or used in some kind of fraud. If there was any question, we had to call a toll-free phone number.

Checking on credit numbers was a time consuming and cumbersome process and most customers would get impatient with us. But Gold Card Guy was quite upset that I would even dare check his card. It was a GOLD CARD! What part of GOLD CARD didn't I understand? They don't just hand these out to anyone.

As it turns out, his card wasn't stolen, and his purchase went through without any further hassle. But I learned an important lesson from this exchange: people with gold cards are dickheads.

In the decades since their introduction, credit card companies really will hand out gold cards to just about anyone. The colored plastic arms war has produced platinum cards, and even mythical black American Express Cards that can't be applied for and are only for the super rich. (They really do exist. I knew the guy who ran the call center for the a competing white card put out by Visa. But that's another story.)

So gold status in the credit card world doesn't mean as much as it used to. As near as I can tell, everyone who has a Washington Mutual ATM card now has a gold card. But I'm still uncomfortable whipping out a gold piece of plastic when I buy something. I feel like that wanker in the fish store all those years ago.

Today I actually made my first physical purchase with the card. I was buying pizza.

"How do you want to pay for that?"

I hand him my new gold card and say, "They just sent me this. I didn't ask for it or anything."

"Pardon?"

"Oh, it's just... they mail these gold things to anybody. I don't know why."

"It's all fine by me as long as the computer approves it."

"Oh yeah, I understand. It's just odd, you know... they paint your ATM card gold and you're supposed to feel honored by it or something."

"Sign here."

"I mean, they're everywhere. What's the big deal with it being gold, right?"

"Your pizza will be ready in about 15 minutes."

"If it takes longer, that's no big deal for me. I'm just a normal guy. I'll wait like everybody else."

"We'll bring it right out to you when it's done."

Overall, I think it went pretty well. Perhaps I am cut out for gold card membership after all.

EAT IT, BEAUMONT!

First, a little background. Nielsen Media generates ratings for TV stations across America. They send out diaries, people fill them out, and Nielsen determines how many people are watching your station. It's an imperfect system but, oh well.

They also carve up the nation into Designated Market Areas, or DMAs. There are 210 DMAs in the US. New York City is #1, Glendive, Montana is #210. If you work in TV, you generally want to work in the biggest DMA you can. The bigger the market, the more money you make.

Nielsen adjusts its DMA rankings each year to reflect population changes and the 2007 results are in and I'm pleased to announce that I no longer work in market #141. Medford is now market #140, replacing Beaumont, TX. And watch out, Topeka, Kansas, we're after you next.

And, on behalf of all my colleagues in the news business, allow me to request a retroactive pay increase. It only seems right that we start making market #140 money. 141 cash just won't due.

IN IT TO WIN IT

Last week, the Powerball jackpot got somewhere around 150 million dollars, so I decided to spend a dollar to buy a ticket. A few days later, I check the winning numbers and I can’t believe my eyes. I’ve won. I had promised myself years ago that I would quit my job if I won the lottery, so I marched right into my boss’s office and broke the news, “I won the lottery! So I quit! Woo Hoo!”

I decide to surprise my wife with the news when I come home from work that night. She’s somewhat less impressed when she learns that I did not win the 150 million dollar jackpot, or the $250,000 prize, or even $1,000. I won three bucks. I am sent back to work to grovel for my old job.

When I lived in LA, I always knew what I would do if I came into many millions of dollars. I would take a cab down to LAX and waltz into the international terminal. The ticketing area of the international terminal is immense. About 30 airlines fly out of the structure and you can get a nonstop flight to just about anywhere in the world.

As I write this, there are flights leaving that terminal for Taiwan, Singapore, Cancun, Hong Kong, Auckland, Melbourne, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, South Korea, and Manila. Most of the flights to London, Paris, and points east took off a few hours earlier. (I haven’t memorized this information, there’s this really cool tool that will tell you what flights are boarding at that terminal.)

Inside the ticketing area, there is a huge computerized departures board. If I won the lottery, my plan was to view that board as a menu, and pick the most exotic destination, then stroll up to the ticket booth and get a first class ticket there. I would only pack a toothbrush and buy whatever I needed once I got there. I’d come home when I got sick of it.

(There is an alternate version of this fantasy where I go to this very cool site and buy a round-the-world plane ticket, but that lacks the spontaneity of the first plan.)

Of course, there are some problems with my LA plan. First, I’ve since learned that most first class seats on international flights out of LA are sold out well in advance. Second, buying a plane ticket for immediate departure with cash and not carrying luggage is the sort of behavior that the Department of Homeland Security frowns upon these days. (When I hatched my plan, there was no Department of Homeland Security.) And third, the odds of actually winning the lottery are about one in 145 million, so it’s not going to happen anyway.

So my little plan has remained dormant, and my live has changed a lot since I lived in LA. But now the country has Lotto fever again. The Mega Millions jackpot is somewhere around 350 million dollars, and tomorrow I will drive to California and do a news story about people buying tickets.

While you’re never supposed to become part of the stories you cover, everyone at work has pitched money into a pot and I’ll buy some lottery tickets before I head back to Oregon.

As always, as I was extorting 5 dollar bills from my co-workers, the talk turned to how the money would be spent if we pick a winner. Some people said they’d quit work, others said they wouldn’t. And I realized that I don’t really know what I’d do anymore.

Recent life changes have made me somewhat less impulsive and more boring than I used to be. This week, I got a profit sharing bonus check. (My first ever!) What did I splurge on? A new toothbrush. Mind you, it was a really fancy and expensive toothbrush. But still, it was a toothbrush.

With that in mind, a trip to the international terminal at LAX with Julie and two babies seems completely out of the question. Even if I had all the money in the world, there’s nothing that’s going to make a 14 hour flight with infants any better. I’ve been on a 2.5 hour flight with them, and that was long enough.

So what would I do if I won the lottery? Boring stuff, I guess. You know, pay off the mortgage, set up a college fund, buy a solid gold potty training seat for Nate and Will. I guess I’d buy an Avid because I think they’re cool. Other than that, I guess I’d keep showing up to work… unless all my co-workers quit. There’s no way I’m going to be the last one there.

UPDATE: 3/7/07 We checked the numbers to see if we won. Through pooling resources, we were able to buy 50 tickets. We won a total of $3.