wakeupsheeps

The Pink Bicycle My Bloomberg Terminal was blinking furiously. “So much smoke… SO HOT.” “We’re trapped.” ”Go to the roof,” I said. “It’s impossible..people are jumping,” they responded. “Nobody is coming to help.” The messages were coming from friends, acquaintances and sources inside the World Trade Center. More than thirty people I knew were inside those buildings. I was sitting on the sparkling set of Bloomberg Television on the 15thfloor at 499 Park Avenue. It was the morning of September 11, 2001, shortly after 9 a.m. I was 29 years old. I was live on television. I was working with my colleagues trying to tell people what was happening. The people inside the buildings were telling me. I would look down at the terminal, read another message, absorb whatever I could and continue broadcasting. I had spent the first years of my career covering Wall Street. Bloomberg had thousands of clients across the financial industry and many inside the World Trade Center. These were traders, bankers, analysts and executives I had interviewed, called for information, met for drinks and gotten to know. Now they were writing to me from inside burning buildings. The messages became more frightened as the morning went on. Smoke. Fire. Confusion. People trapped above the impact zones. People making choices no human being should ever have to make. I had arrived at Bloomberg before 6 that morning expecting to finish the morning broadcast around 9. I stayed on the set. Imagine sitting behind a television desk trying to remain useful to the people watching while somebody you know is typing to you from inside a burning skyscraper. There were roughly thirty people I knew, in one way or another, inside those buildings who would die that morning. Then the towers came down. The messages stopped. There isn't much more to say about that moment. I had spent the years before September 11 having what I can now recognize as a golden period of in American life. New York was extraordinary. We were was young. We had a jobs we loved. We were learning every day. The city felt creative and free and slightly reckless. You could work all day, go out all night and somehow believe you hadn't missed anything the next morning. Life seemed very large. It also seemed endless. At 29, you know intellectually that people die. You don't really believe it applies to you or the people around you. September 11 ended that illusion in a few hours. But something else happened that day. New York became profoundly human. The normal machinery of the city stopped. Subways stopped.. Phones failed. Streets filled with people trying to get home. And people simply began helping one another. Cars became communal transportation. People walked together. People gave strangers food and water. Somebody had a bicycle. Somebody else needed it more. One of the most famous traders on Wall Street somehow ended up with a girl's pink banana-seat bicycle. There were no trains to Westchester. So he rode it home. One of the most powerful men in finance, pedaling north out of Manhattan on a child's pink bicycle because that was the way home. I still smile when I think about it. Nobody cared what the bicycle looked like. Nobody cared who was important. There was somewhere to go and somebody needed to get there. Bloomberg faced another problem. Many of our clients had worked in the towers. Their offices were gone. We had empty desks. So Bloomberg opened them. In the days that followed, I found myself sitting on a floor surrounded by people who had walked out of the World Trade Center. There was something strange about them. They were among the only people in New York who had not seen what happened. The rest of us had watched the airplanes hit. We had watched the fire. We had watched people fall. We had watched the towers disappear. The people who escaped had experienced it from the inside. They had simply walked down the stairs and kept walking. Then Monday came. The New York Stock Exchange was going to reopen. Getting downtown was still difficult. Lower Manhattan was restricted. Transportation wasn't functioning normally. You needed credentials to get anywhere near the Exchange. So I got a mountain bike and rose down 5th avenue at 330 am on Monday September 17. I had covered financial markets for years. I would cover them for many more. I have been on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange for crashes, rallies, panics and celebrations. Nothing felt like that Monday. The Exchange wasn't reopening because anybody particularly cared where the Dow traded. It was reopening because New York was trying to stand up. The mayor came onto the floor. People who had spent their careers shouting orders at one another stood together carrying the knowledge that friends and colleagues who had been alive the previous Monday were dead. Then the bell rang. The market opened. Life continued. The emotion was overwhelming. I stayed in New York for more than a decade after September 11. My career grew. I moved from Bloomberg to CNBC and MSNBC. I traveled. I made money. I lost things. I built things. I failed at things. I got older. But there is a clean line in my memory. New York before that morning. And New York after it. Before September 11, I thought life was primarily about what might happen next. Afterward, I understood that the fact that anything happening at all is remarkable. Twenty-five years later, what stays with me most is not the machinery that failed that morning. It is what people did when the machinery failed. The financial system couldn't help you walk home. The transportation system couldn't get you there. Your title couldn't save you. Your money couldn't help you. So people helped people. A stranger gave somebody a ride. Bloomberg gave somebody a desk. A Wall Street trader rode a girl's pink bicycle to Westchester. And people inside burning buildings sent messages to friends outside until they couldn't anymore. I have spent much of my life since then thinking about systems. Financial systems. Political systems. Media systems. Technology. September 11 taught me what sits underneath all of them. When the systems failed, human beings didn't. We build systems because they can help us live better lives. But the systems are never the point. Life is the point. For a terrible few days, nobody had to explain what had value. Money, status and all the other things we spend our lives accumulating became secondary to something much simpler. We had each other. We still do.+++I write one of these every day. If you’d rather get them directly from me instead of hoping an algorithm shows them to you, subscribe free to Dylan Ratigan on Substack.

Today is Labor Day. A day America created to honor work. So there may be no better day to ask two questions. What kind of work are we creating? And what does American society actually value? The latest jobs report says America added 162,000 jobs in August. The headline was strong. Look underneath it. Much of the growth came from leisure and hospitality, government and schools, healthcare and social assistance. Meanwhile information and financial activities lost jobs. A job that pays the rent is different from a job that buys a house. A job that covers this month’s bills is different from one that creates savings. A job that requires a second job is different from one that creates independence. Counting them all the same and telling Americans everything is great is like peeing on somebody’s feet and telling them it’s raining. People know the difference. The American bargain was never simply employment. It was mobility. Work was supposed to change the circumstances of your life. You became more valuable. You earned more. You saved. You bought a house. You accumulated equity. You took a risk. Maybe you started a business. Maybe your children had opportunities you never had. Work became capital. Capital became ownership. Ownership created independence. That was the deal. Last week in The Physics of Money, I described money as having three states: ice, liquid and gas. When you have almost none, money is ice. Every dollar is already committed to housing, food, transportation, healthcare and debt. Work is supposed to melt the ice. But if the cost of living consumes everything the job produces, the paycheck arrives and disappears. The government counts the person as employed. The politician counts the job as a success. The worker hasn’t moved. The ice never melted. But there is something even more disturbing underneath this. What does America pay people to do? We say we value education. What do we pay the teacher? We say we value health. What do we pay the nurse? We say mental health is a national crisis. What do we pay the person sitting across from a suicidal teenager trying to keep that child alive? Then look at what the modern economy can reward spectacularly well. Attention. Get people to look. Keep them looking. Make them angry. Make them afraid. Make them horny. Give them somebody to hate. Sexual content works. Political extremism works. Outrage works. The algorithm doesn’t care. Attention is the commodity. A teacher can spend a lifetime educating children and struggle to accumulate capital. A mental-health professional can do work we call essential and worry about rent. A nurse can care for the dying and struggle to buy a home. Meanwhile, someone who discovers a sufficiently effective way to extract attention can become enormously wealthy. The point isn’t that entertainers shouldn’t make money. The point is that economic rewards send signals. Human beings respond to them. If we say teaching matters, healthcare matters, mental health matters and raising children matters, while building an economy that can reward outrage, extremism and sexual stimulation vastly more than any of them, we shouldn’t be surprised by the society that economy produces. So on Labor Day, celebrate work. Then ask what that work pays. What kind of lives it creates. What behavior our economy rewards. And what kind of country those rewards are building. Because a job isn’t the American bargain. Mobility is. +++I write one of these every day. If you’d rather get them directly from me instead of hoping an algorithm shows them to you, subscribe free to dylanratigan.substack.com

The Physics of Money Bono asked me for a light. I asked him for a cigarette. More than twenty-five years ago, I was at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Bono was there raising money for some of the poorest people in the world. I was there reporting for Bloomberg. We were in a lounge when he asked me for a light. I had one. I lit his cigarette. Then I asked him for a cigarette. He gave me one. We sat down, smoked and drank coffee. And we talked about money. The conversation continued later at the Belvedere Hotel, where I interviewed him for Bloomberg. What stayed with me was a very simple idea. That money, like water changes state depending its context. We talk about it as if money is always the same. It isn’t. Money is like water. It changes state. Ice. Liquid. Gas. And the state of your money may matter more than the amount. When you have very little money, it is ice. It is frozen. Rent. Food. Transportation. Medicine. Debt. Every dollar is already spoken for. The money can’t move. Neither can you. You can’t easily leave the job. Move somewhere else. Take time off. Try something new. Survive a mistake. This is what we misunderstand about poverty. It isn’t only the absence of money. It is the absence of mobility. As the amount of money increases, the ice begins to melt. Money becomes liquid. Now it moves. You earn it. You spend it. You save it. You invest it. You can move. You can leave. You can build. You can take a risk. This is where income begins turning into capital. And this is where we tax money most aggressively. The worker. The doctor. The lawyer. The executive. The entrepreneur. Even people earning enormous incomes are still earning. Their money is flowing through their lives. The more success they have the more brutally they are taxed. It is liquid. Then money changes state again. At enormous scale, for extreme wealth holders money becomes a gas. It expands rapidly with zero effort or action. The money expands. It no longer depends primarily on the activity of the person who owns it. That is gas. And this is where the American relationship with money becomes exactly backward. We largely abandon the people whose money is frozen. We brutally tax the people whose money is liquid. And we protect the largest pools of wealth precisely when the money has become capable of expanding on its own. We neglect the ice. We tax the liquid. We protect the gas. It should be the exact opposite. Thaw the ice. Give people enough room to move. Let the liquid flow. Encourage work to become savings. Savings to become investment. Investment to become ownership. And when money reaches the point where enormous pools of capital naturally produce more capital — tax the gas. Not because money is bad. Because money changes state. That conversation with Bono stayed with me because he was in Davos asking some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world to help some of the poorest. The entire physics of money was sitting in the same town. People representing those with almost none. People earning and building. People with more capital than they could ever produce through their own labor. Ice. Liquid. Gas. Money is not life. It is stored possibility. With very little, the possibility is survival. With more, it becomes mobility. With enormous amounts, it becomes power. The mistake is believing those are the same thing simply because we measure all three in dollars. They aren’t. And an economy should be judged by whether people can move between them. Can someone who is frozen become mobile? Can someone who works accumulate capital? Can someone with capital build something useful? That is the point. The physics are simple. Our policy is backward. Thaw the ice. Let the liquid flow. Tax the gas. ++ I write one of these every day. If you’d rather get them directly from me instead of hoping an algorithm shows them to you, subscribe free to DylanRatigan.substack.com