penfield | Divestiture of Corporate Trust

"A penny will hide the biggest star in the universe if you hold it close enough to your eye."
- Samuel Grafton

Ever since the global economy started to circle the bowl about two months ago, I've taken to watching CNBC during the weekday. And no, it's not just about Erin Burnett.

Her free-market appeal makes me want to laissez-faire with the "invisible hand"

CNBC is one of the few channels I can keep on my office television without drawing the fish-eye from bosses and coworkers. To the outside observer, watching CNBC is the television equivalent to reading The Economist, or having bookshelves full of leather-bound volumes. It makes me, the viewer, both feel and appear erudite, intelligent and important.

Because the whole idea of CNBC is based on the same pretentious principle that has made the Wall Street Journal such a successful brand: the idea that all news is ultimately financial news; the notion that every single thing that happens has an economic cause and an economic effect. This is a very superficial and self-involved way of looking at problems, but that doesn't mean it's untrue.

We are a capitalist society, and as you well know, the last two months have been chock-full of economic cause-and-effect. Since many of financial/business reporters and analysts necessarily adhere to established business principles, the coverage sometimes veers dangerously close to outright advocacy.

But, in this way, CNBC's reporting often paradoxically yields the most objective coverage. Because all information is examined through this prism -- "what does this mean for my money?" -- The coverage tends to be more cold-hearted and practical than hot-blooded and political, governed by facts and undistracted by personalities.

It's like a food reporter. It's a lot easier, and perhaps more useful, to report on the objective measures of a steak (i.e., the size, how hot it is) and speculate on its flavor than it is to subjectively describe how it tastes.

A lot of news outlets focus on flavor. For example, if you care about things like rights -- not just human rights, worker rights, civil rights, etc., but what is Right and who is Wrong -- CNBC is not the station for you. Tune in to CNN. "Rights" do not exist in the business universe any more than they exist in the animal kingdom. CNBC and the financial world are about survival.

The general survival of the American economy has a direct impact on my employment, increasingly on a day-to-day level. And I can't help but watch as the sky falls. CNBC specializes in this kind of meteorology. But it's not just the suits and CEOs that are freaking out. The financial panic is infecting everyone, including friends and family.

Everyone, it seems, except all the goddamn people at my local shopping mall. J. and I went out this weekend and happened into the Fashion Centre at Pentagon City, four floors of unrelenting retail. I swear, we could not move three feet in any direction without bumping into a shopper and/or their bulging Nordstrom bags. Macy's was mobbed; The Gap appeared to have been filled-in; The Victoria's Secret checkout line looked like a queue for Oprah tickets. Recession, my ass.

I realize that "flagging consumer confidence" is just one supposed aspect of our current economic quagmire, and the real challenge rests in stimulating big-ticket purchases like homes, cars and vacations. And maybe my anecdotal observation is isolated to the local economy. It could simply be that everyone was at the mall because there were no decent movies playing and all the college football games were lousy.

But one of the few upsides to the current economy was going to be an easier walk through the mall. So much for my sterling silver lining. Everyone is saying that this holiday season will be a bloodbath for retailers, but based on my half-hour adventure this weekend, it sounds like maybe it won't be as bloody as everyone says.

Either way, my guess is that we won't see a lot of complaints about signs like this: