The XX Factor: What women really think.

Faithful and True?

So I'm reading the most recent issue of the Economist (April 4-10, 2009), and on Page 9 is an ad for Fidelity Investments, which reads like so:

In medium-size bold type at the top:
Retirement income guaranteed.

In very large bold type in the top-third sweet spot:
There are no guarantees in retirement. Except maybe this one.

In medium-size bold type below, in the middle of the page:
Guaranteed income for life.

In regular-size, nonbold type below that:
With an income annuity through Fidelity, you can rest assured that you, and your spouse, will always have income.

It's all sounding pretty good, right? Safe, secure, steady, guaranteed for chrissakes, just like old times. But then comes the kicker in parentheses but the same type size immediately below that:

(Guarantees are subject to the claims-paying ability of the issuing insurance company.)

And my bubble deflates.

This is how ads are supposed to work: Each line of text, each image is supposed to make you say and feel "Yes!" in your head. There should not be a "No!" in there. And if they need to put in a No for legal reasons, they put it in way at the bottom of the page in tiny type.

But no longer.

So really, there are no guarantees in life. This ad reveals its own lie. AIG, your reach is far and wide and nightmare-inducing! Or maybe it's good that they can't baldly lie to us anymore.

The People's Sub-Zero Fridge

The Seppuku Solution

Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican from the great state of Iowa, ponders the AIG bonus scandal:

I would suggest the first thing that would make me feel a little bit better toward them if they'd follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say, I'm sorry, and then either do one of two things: resign or go commit suicide.

And in the case of the Japanese, they usually commit suicide before they make any apology.

Grassley, of course, voted for bailouts that were structured in such a way as to allow taxpayer dollars to go to bonuses. But he’s not the only guy calling for ritual purification. “The American people,” as Grassley puts it, obviously want to focus their animus on something less nebulous than a broken feedback loop. Jim Cramer will do; anonymous cigar-smoking yacht club members who happen to work at AIG will do as well. Thus we get round-the-clock newspaper coverage of the unremarkable fact that a massive insurance corporation cannot simply rupture its contracts at will.

Grassley has a habit of saying appalling things, but he’s not stupid enough to believe that AIG’s boardroom fatcats are the only movers in this mess. A huge swath of Americans making large numbers of small decisions contributed to our current situation, so you have to wonder how far down the chain of moral culpability Grassley is willing to go. This collapse involved Wall Street bankers hawking mortgage-backed securities based on what they may or may not have known were lousy mortgages. It involved lowly local retail bankers knowingly making sketchy loans because they could just sell them on the secondary market to Fannie and Freddie. One step further down, it involved homeowners pretending they could afford the suburban McMansions of their dreams. I would venture to guess that it even involved some Iowans. But I don’t foresee Grassley calling for the blood of his own constituents.