Dry Creek Chronicles

I’m far from having a solid understanding of the current economic crisis, but I’ve been closely watching it for the past two years when it began to manifest itself in the housing crash, and I think at this point there are quite a few important facts about housing that are by now uncontroversial. I’ll list them here with minimal interpretation, saying only that I think the housing crash is still at the center of the overall crisis.

• In the past ten years many, many people have bought homes which by any traditional standard were far more expensive than their incomes and savings could justify.

• Buyers bought these homes with mortgages that were far larger than they could reasonably expect to repay.

• Buyers were able to take out mortgages larger than they could repay because:

  • Lenders relaxed the traditional requirement of a 20% down payment from the borrower, accepting 10% or 5% or sometimes nothing at all.

  • Lenders offered mortgages with adjustable interest rates (ARMs) that were initially low but would rise later, making the loan more affordable up front.

  • Lenders offered mortgages where in the beginning the borrower could choose to pay only the interest on the loan, or even less (Option ARMs), meaning that the principal would stay the same or even grow over time, but further reducing the payments made early on.

  • Lenders often did not require documentation proving that the borrower had sufficient income and savings to pay off the mortgage (stated income or “liar’s” loans).

• Buyers were encouraged to take out mortgages larger than they could repay because of intermediaries (real estate agents and mortgage brokers) who stood to make good money when the transaction took place and were at no risk if the buyer later defaulted.

• Because of these lax lending practices, buyers were able to arrange for mortgages whose initially low payments they could barely manage to pay, and whose future larger payments were far beyond their ability to pay.

• Buyers were willing to take out mortgages larger than they could repay because they did not intend to repay them, but planned to sell them at a profit before repayment became too difficult.

• Because buyers were able to obtain so much leverage (i.e. ability to borrow with respect to their income), demand for houses grew and housing prices rose far higher than could be justified by average income in an area; at the peak houses cost about twice as much nationally as average income could justify, in some areas three times as much.

• Because of the demand, far too many houses were built that were far too large, at least compared against the traditional needs of the population.

• Because of the demand, the housing industry became an important component of the economy. Between 2000 and 2007, half of the new jobs created were connected to the housing market.

• As prices rose, owners began to add further to their debt by borrowing against the increased value of their home (home equity loans, or second mortgages).

• Many owners ended up with zero or even negative equity in their home (i.e. their loans were equal to or greater than the value of the home), either by never having paid a down payment or by taking out second mortgages.

• As mortgages began to age, payments began to rise and borrowers found themselves needing to sell because they could no longer pay them. At the same time housing prices began to drop.

• As housing prices began to drop, many owners found themselves “underwater,” owing more on the home than the home was worth. To sell their house, these folks would have to bring a check to the closing to pay off what they owed even after selling it. A recent report claims that 16% of all mortgage holders in the U.S. are currently underwater.

• As housing prices began to drop, the market began to freeze up because buyers were mentally unable to accept (or financially unable to handle) selling for less than they had thought the house was worth.

• As the market froze, new housing construction also ground to a halt, and jobs connected with housing began to disappear.

• Many first mortgages in the U.S. are what are called “non-recourse” loans, that is, if the borrower defaults on the loan then the lender agrees to take possession of the house in lieu of further payments. This is unlike, say, a car loan, where if the borrower defaults the lender can repossess the car, sell it, and then require that the borrower pay the difference between the loan balance and what the car sold for.

• When a borrower defaults, first mortgages holders are first in line for any proceeds from the sale of a foreclosed house, followed by second mortgage holders. However, second mortgage holders must agree to the sale. Many second mortgage holders are reluctant to agree to the sale of a house whose price has dropped, because there is little or no money left for them after the first mortgage holder has taken its share.

• Buyers have become increasingly willing to “walk away” from their mortgages, turning the keys over to the lender; default has become socially acceptable, the effects on one’s credit record are erased after seven years, and many buyers feel that lenders bear much of the blame for enticing them into a bad deal.

• Increasing default levels have made the mortgages owned by banks increasingly worthless. One early event in the credit crisis came in June 2007, when two Bear Stearns hedge funds that had heavily invested in subprime mortgages were forced to sell them; it turned out that the better fund was able to sell them for nine cents on the dollar, while the other fund discovered that their mortgages were worth nothing at all.

Strangely enough, all these things were true by mid-2007 and there has been nothing interesting to add to the list since then. All that has happened since is that these trends have picked up speed and made themselves increasingly felt. Housing prices continue to drop. Borrowers continue to default. Buyers are increasingly scarce. Mortgage pools held by banks continue to lose value. Housing-related businesses continue to lose sales.

I think what I’ve written so far is widely acknowledged to be true. What follows is speculation, but I think it is fairly well grounded in the facts:

• Borrowers will continue to default in growing numbers for many years. This is in large part because the riskiest mortgages (Option ARMs) are just beginning to have their payments reset to higher amounts, a process that will continue for at least three years. Remember, these are the loans where grossly exaggerating one’s income was a common thing, and the buyer had the option of paying a payment that didn’t even cover the interest; these folks will now have to pay enough to cover interest and principal, at a new higher interest rate based on LIBOR, which is sky-high at the moment.

• Because of increasing defaults, banks will fail in greater numbers and the survivors will continue to be unable to lend, not because the credit market is mysteriously “frozen” but because they are insolvent, i.e. broke. Their mortgage assets will become ever more worthless.

• Housing prices will continue to drop for a long while, and will not rise for a very long while. One calculation claims that the relationships between housing prices and household income during the 20th century was steady and predictable until the mid-90s when all this nonsense began. If we take the steady trend that existed and apply it to current income levels, national housing prices at their peak were 2x what they should be, 3x in areas like California and Florida. A $600,000 California home will have to drop to $200,000 before things are normal again.

Finally, I think there is nothing that can be done to fix these problems:

• Housing prices rose because people were willing to pay far more than a house was truly worth, because they thought that other people down the road would be willing to buy their house for far, far more than it was truly worth. Once that trend disintegrated, those people found themselves in possession of a financial obligation all out of proportion to the worth of what they had purchased. There is no way to re-interest buyers in buying those houses at inflated prices.

• Borrowers went to extremes to be able to afford their loans, exaggerating their income, arranging for artificially low initial interest rates and artificially low initial payments that would rise greatly in just a few years. They took out loans far beyond their ability to repay because they expected never to have to repay them; they did not buy a $600,000 house in order to have a $600,000 house, but in order to sell that house at a profit later on.  No modification of the loan terms will make that buyer want to pay the rest of the $600,000 plus interest for a house that is now worth $200,000. The law will not force them to fulfill that obligation, and I doubt that a sense of honor will. So those loans will be defaulted in large numbers.

• And if the borrowers default, the mortgages owned by the banks become worthless, and the banks edge closer to insolvency. Nothing short of giving them free money can change this.

On Tuesdays and Fridays I often drive produce to Lexington for Jerome Lange; the past couple of months the deliveries have included our own tomatoes and garlic and squash. I’m up at 4:30am and out the door by 4:50, to get to Jerome’s place by 5:15. He has already loaded the van the night before with boxes that don’t need refrigeration; we load stuff from the cooler into the van, and I’m usually on the road by 5:40. I arrive at Good Foods around 7:30, then take an hour or so to unload and deliver boxes to the produce department and the cafe kitchen. By 8:30 I’m usually on my way home, stopping to do whatever errands I need to run, getting home around lunchtime.

My first car came without a radio and I drove it for years before having one installed, so I’m quite used to driving in silence with only my thoughts to occupy me. Often I’ll make the trip to Lexington in silence. But it’s a long one, and sometimes I get tired of my interior monologue and turn on the radio. Lately I’ve done that a lot, since I am very interested in the news. Usually between 5am and 9am I’ll manage to catch most of NPR’s Morning Edition.

That’s what I did this morning, and I was delighted to hear two back-to-back segments that actually made some sense of the current crisis. The first one, Bank-To-Bank Loans Front Line Of Credit Crisis, was good enough that I took the trouble to transcribe it. Here is the text:

NPR’s Adam Davidson visited the front lines of the credit crisis.

Tradition Azel Securities has a massive trading floor, nearly a hundred men and a handful of women, sitting in front of computer screens. It’s in lower Manhattan, right near Ground Zero, and these guys like Will Aston Reese have no doubt about how important their jobs are:

Voice: “This is the pump right here. When you hear about priming the pump, money flows through the banking system.”

Reporter: “The pump of the U.S. Economy?”

Voice: “The pump of the U.S. Economy. The world economy.”

In normal times–meaning, before three weeks ago–these guys were the middlemen when one bank wanted to borrow from another. They called Tradition Securities and asked them to put the deal through. A billion dollar loan was routine. At this desk and a handful of others around Wall Street, trillions of dollars used to flow from one bank to another every day.

Voice: “Joe, count them up. Count them up. Give me a quick count.”

Will’s boss, Steve Merano, points out the board that lists the banks, all of them huge, famous banks, that are looking to borrow money.

Voice: “How many? Forty five.”

Reporter: “Forty-five banks have called you and said ‘We need money.’”

Voice: “Right. And how many do you see on the right?”

Reporter: “Zero.”

Voice: “So forty-five banks need money. Zero banks have money.”

That right there, on a whiteboard in an office four stories above Greenwich Avenue, that is the financial crisis. Forty-five banks can’t borrow money. That means forty-five banks can’t lend as much money to you or your boss or your corner store. That is how this crisis moves from Wall Street to your street.

Voice: “It’s hard to sit in the de facto temple of capitalism begging for a socialist solution to the problem.”

Aston Reese says these guys here, these traders, they are the last ones to want government help. But they need more. Nothing so far has worked. This interbank lending froze three weeks ago. The government guaranteed money markets to help out; that did nothing. Then the bailout finally passed; that did nothing. Then on Tuesday the Federal Reserve offered to directly buy short term loans; no help at all. Will and Steve can’t remember their last trade, it was at least three weeks ago. [....]

The second, Liquidity Crisis Hampers Financial Rebound, does a good job of describing current circumstances and also of explaining liquidity, but I think it makes a mistake in characterizing the current crisis as due to a lack of liquidity. Sources I trust, most notably Mike Shedlock, claim that the problem is not lack of liquidity but one of insolvency, i.e. firms are unable to transact business because most of them are in fact bankrupt, regardless of what their balance sheets claim. Here’s the second piece, with some comments.

One crucial element in understanding and fixing the financial crisis is liquidity. That waterfall of cash that has buoyed the global economy in recent years has gone dry. Getting capital flowing again is proving to be an enormous, and so far unsuccessful, challenge.

Liquidity basically refers to movement. Imagine a faucet: When it’s opened, water flows out to where it’s needed. The seizing up of the credit markets has basically dropped the water pressure for the whole economy. A lot of companies are opening their faucets — and nothing’s coming out.

Economy’s Pump Houses Tapped Out

“Money is like the tap water in the economy, and normally you have two different pump houses that supply it,” said Pete Kyle, an economist at the University of Maryland.

Traditional lending by banks is one pump house, Kyle said; the other is what’s called the “commercial paper market.” Companies use that to go straight to investors and borrow money outside the banking system.

“Today, you’re seeing that that commercial paper market, that extra supply of liquidity, is just not available.”

Comment: Shedlock would say that this is not due to a lack of money in the system, but because the lenders do not want to lend what money they have to insolvent borrowers.

With that pump house down, banks are in a tough spot. And that is not good for the economy: “I’m predicting a pretty severe recession,” Kyle said.

Case Study: Marriott Hotels

As an example of how it all fits together, take the Marriott hotel company. It’s a good, solid business. Marriott Chief Financial Officer Arne Sorenson explains that in a normal month, the firm would borrow about $900 million through that commercial paper market.

“You could think about that as being, you know, $30 to $45 million a day that would come due. And we’d go into the markets and we would, in effect, renew that — we’d roll it over,” Sorenson said.

Comment: you have to ask yourself why they don’t simply avoid the cost of borrowing by slowing down a bit, saving up that money, then running on a cash basis.

Marriott uses that money to pay employees, contractors who are building new hotels and so on. Then, three weeks ago, Lehman Brothers failed. That spooked investors in money market funds, which have several trillion dollars to invest. They usually buy a ton of commercial paper — in effect, lending money to big companies like Marriott. But money market funds stopped doing that.

“During that week, the commercial paper markets seized up,” Sorenson said. And losing that source of liquidity has taken a toll on Marriott’s business.

“In at least two hotels under construction and getting near opening in 2009, construction has stopped,” Sorenson said.

Plans for other hotels have been scrapped in recent months because of the situation in the credit markets, he said — including a 2,000-room hotel in San Diego that now will not be built.

Comment: this strikes me as disingenuous. Hotels are notoriously overbuilt. It’s awfully convenient to blame this change in plans on a frozen credit market.

“There probably are already tens of thousands of those jobs that would have been created that probably have been lost,” he said.

It’s not a life-threatening problem for Marriott. The firm had a backup line of credit with a bank, so it can keep making payroll — and it’s in good shape, Sorenson said. The biggest corporations usually have more options.

Banks ‘Hoarding Water’

But back to the tap-water analogy: Companies like Marriott suddenly need billions of dollars in extra liquidity from regular banks. Many of those banks are already short of cash because of losses in the housing bust, so they’re a lot less willing to lend money to everybody else.

“The banks are hoarding water because they are afraid people are going to come and demand water from them,” economist Pete Kyle said. “So they keep as much in supply as they can.”

Comment: this is probably true. But it is also true that commercial construction projects are now very high risk, with builders going bust with increasing frequency.

And in an environment like this, “The people that need the money the most will get it the least,” said Bob Froehlich, vice chairman of the mutual fund arm of Deutsche Bank.

He says liquidity is so scarce right now that things could get much worse very quickly. He thinks many small- and medium-size companies could start falling apart and laying off a lot of people.

“Companies that are solid companies do not have the cash flow to be able to meet payroll — that’s the magnitude of the crisis we’re facing,” Froehlich said. “There has never ever ever been anything like this in the 33 years I’ve been in the business.”

Fed Sends In Tanker Trucks

That’s why Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson looks like he hasn’t slept in weeks. The government is scrambling to fix this liquidity crisis before the fallout gets worse.

It has been lending to banks and is now lending directly to all kinds of companies to meet that demand for liquidity.

“The Fed is saying, ‘We’re gonna be the firemen here and we’re gonna put our hoses into the system and start pumping water out of our trucks, or out of our reserve system,’ ” said Kyle, who has been watching all this closely.

Comment: the most telling evidence that this is not a liquidity crisis is that the Fed and the Treasury have already pumped trillions of dollars into the system since the credit markets froze, and none of it has helped. This makes no sense if the problem is liquidity. This makes perfect sense if the problem is insolvency, i.e. lenders no longer have confidence that borrowers are financially sound enough to repay a loan.

He says the Great Depression happened in part because the government didn’t respond quickly enough to a credit and liquidity crisis. But he just can’t see that happening again. He thinks the credit markets will soon get back under control. He thinks we’re headed for a tough recession, with unemployment rising above 8 percent, but nothing really cataclysmic.

I spent my nine years of college studying theoretical linguistics. Basically, the idea was to study recurring patterns in the world’s languages and come up with rules that accounted for those patterns. I hung around with some very smart people, much smarter than me. One professor in particular stood out as being exceptionally quick, sharp, and knowledgeable no matter what topic was under discussion, language or otherwise. But most of the students agreed that he was a lousy linguist, fielding cockamamie explanations of the facts one after another.

I asked a friend whose work I respected why he thought this was so. He told me that he thought the fellow was too smart, that is, he could grasp the most complex explanations so readily that he was unable to distinguish between them and much simpler explanations of the same facts. My friend considered himself blessed that he was baffled by complexity, since it forced him to seek out simple solutions, those being the only ones he could understand.

I took that idea to heart. And even though I abandoned theoretical linguistics when I left college, the idea served me well during my twenty years as a computer programmer, where I specialized in debugging programs (i.e. finding mistakes in them), especially programs that I hadn’t originally written. Computer bugs are like flaws in any other system, manifesting themselves through symptoms that aren’t always easily traceable to the source. A common weakness I saw in other programmers when debugging their own program was that they thought they understood what they had written, and so once they had come up with a plausible explanation for what was going wrong they would make some changes as if their explanation were true. This would often make the symptom go away, and they would pronounce the problem solved. But usually they had only treated the symptom and not the problem, which would manifest itself through other symptoms eventually.

Meanwhile, I always tried to maintain the attitude that I had no idea what was going on, and would spend the time understanding the relevant parts of the program from the ground up until I had that understanding. And, of course, once I understood it usually wasn’t long until the mistake became obvious. You might think that this approach is so obviously superior that everyone would use it; it certainly doesn’t require any special skills or intelligence. But it does require an ability to resist the intense pressure to Do Something!, as well as patience, and I suppose a measure of humility for admitting that you still don’t really understand what is going on.

That approach, never assuming that I understand the situation before I’m certain that I do, became a habit, and has guided me as I’ve tried to learn any sort of new thing. One helpful effect is that it is very easy for me to learn from writers that I mostly disagree with, i.e. eat the fish and leave the bones on the plate. Occasionally I’ll read something that is so contrary to what I think I know that I will instinctively rear up in response—which I have learned is exactly the time I need to calm down and reevaluate, to figure out whether or not I actually know what I think I know.

Sometimes I do, but often what I think I know is actually received wisdom from sources I trusted somewhere along the way. And often that received wisdom is actual wisdom, but all too often it is nowhere near as reliable as I thought it was when I swallowed it whole. One recent example of this is classical economics, which I took for granted as being the right and proper way to conduct an economy until I read a few histories that taught me (a) there are other perfectly reasonable ways to govern economic activity, and (b) classical economics often doesn’t yield the results in practice that it claims in theory. One of those histories is The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, which I was tempted to reject out of hand because of the extreme left position that the writer takes. But after doing some independent research I decided that Klein’s presentation of the facts was accurate and her interpretation even-handed in most respects. So even though I think that Klein paints a picture darker and more conspiratorial than the facts support, and I have no interest in the solutions she proposes, I found her history to be an important corrective against the free-market cheerleading I’ve read way too much of.

My initial interest in agrarianism had nothing to do with economics. In fact, I had no real interest in economics at all until recently; I understood the basics of classical economics, and was willing to accept the word of others that it was true and good and preferable to all other systems. It wasn’t until we had been here on the farm for more than a year that things changed, and only because of an urgent email from a friend in December 2006 forwarding an article saying that the economic situation was now dire. That idea surprised me, but what surprised me more after a bit of reflection was that I really had no idea at all how the modern economic world worked, much less what sort of shape it might be in.

So I started in on studying, subscribing to online contrarian publications, reading up on the things they said that I didn’t understand, noting and digesting any sort of financial news that struck me as unusual or not well explained by what I thought I knew about economics. Along the way I was fortunate enough to stumble across intriguing references to works that have shown me very different ways to understand economic behavior, some of which I’ve posted about on this weblog.

All the while I’ve stayed mostly quiet about what I’ve been learning, not out of shyness or fear of being pegged as a nutjob, but just because I still didn’t understand circumstances sufficiently to say anything helpful to my readers. As close as I’ve come to speaking out is participating in this winter’s discussion of Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, here, here, and here, and that only because I remembered it as being consistent with what I thought; if I had re-read the book before agreeing to discuss it I would have kept silent, since my thinking had diverged significantly from Hazlitt’s but I wasn’t prepared to explain why.

All this is prelude to the point of this post, which is that I think I understand something about the current economic crisis well enough to bring it up. It is probably something that you have heard before, but mixed together with a hundred other factors. But I think now that this particular factor is a fundamental one, a lens through which many aspects of the crisis can be viewed and understood.

Basically, the crisis is one of confidence; we no longer have a reasonable expectation that others will be able to do what they promise to do. I think the word “trust” might be more accurate, but it is also loaded. To say that we don’t trust someone implies that we think they are deliberately out to do us wrong, and that’s not what I mean. “Faith” is another possible word to use, indicating that we no longer believe in the promises we’re offered. But I’ll stick with confidence.

Lack of confidence is most clearly seen in the credit crunch. Banks are deciding not to lend, to consumers or businesses or even each other, for a very simple reason: they are no longer confident that they will be repaid. Again, it isn’t that they think they will be defrauded, but just that the economy is so uncertain now that they no longer know with any certainty that the folks taking their money will be in a position to repay them further down the road.

There has always been some amount of uncertainty about this, some risk, but until recently it could be calculated and counted as part of the cost of doing business; some known percentage of loans would go bad, but the money made on the good loans would cover this expense. But that percentage is no longer known.

There is a number that shows fairly clearly how much banks trust one another, called the TED spread, roughly the difference between what it costs a bank to borrow money from the government and what they are charging to lend that money to another bank. Usually it runs between 0.25% and 0.5%. Since the crisis began a year ago, the spread has run between 1% and 2%. And here is a graph of how the TED spread has increased over the past three months:

This doesn’t include today’s number, which has run as high a 4.13%. But in a real sense the number is meaningless beyond indicating that banks simply don’t want to lend to one another.

Most of the sources I follow claim that the range of actions available to the Fed and the Treasury are completely useless for fixing this problem, which they call “pushing on a string.” They say that the credit markets are frozen not because of a lack of available money, or a balance sheet clogged up with toxic debt, but because lenders can no longer have any certainty that they will get their money back. Offering a lender more money or cheaper money, or even agreeing to take current bad debt off their hands, does nothing to change this uncertainty. Short of taking on the risk itself, i.e. becoming a lender, the government has no way of persuading lenders to lend.

All that is straightforward, and has been said better by folks who are smarter than me. And we’ve all certainly heard enough lately about how credit is the lifeblood of the modern industrial economy. But what exactly does that mean? What is it about the modern economy that depends so heavily on credit?

One lightbulb went on when I read that California is “in need of an emergency $7bn loan to pay for public services such as law enforcement, hospitals and firefighting.” It didn’t surprise me that California is in trouble, but it surprised me very much to learn that taking such a loan is standard operating procedure for the state; along with many others, California regularly takes a huge short-term loan to pay upcoming bills, which it then repays with income it expects later in the year from sales and income tax. Instead of saving up their revenue to pay those bills, they get a year’s jump on things by borrowing and repaying. Worse, this is not emergency borrowing but just normal business procedure.

But for the first time all the usual lenders have told California, “Thanks, but no thanks.” Because those lenders cannot assign a number to the likelihood that California will be unable to repay that loan. Meanwhile, California’s obligations have all been incurred, and the bill comes due at the end of this month. Without that money, the state cannot pay the people who did work for them in exchange for promises of later payment. And those people—the schoolteachers, the firemen, the policemen, the doctors and nurses—are not likely to continue working without payment, and will be much less likely to continue to work in exchange for future promises of payment.

The second lightbulb went off today when I read this article about grain piling up in Canadian ports:

The credit crisis is spilling over into the grain industry as international buyers find themselves unable to come up with payment, forcing sellers to shoulder often substantial losses.

Before cargoes can be loaded at port, buyers typically must produce proof they are good for the money. But more deals are falling through as sellers decide they don’t trust the financial institution named in the buyer’s letter of credit, analysts said.

“There’s all kinds of stuff stacked up on docks right now that can’t be shipped because people can’t get letters of credit,” said Bill Gary, president of Commodity Information Systems in Oklahoma City. “The problem is not demand, and it’s not supply because we have plenty of supply. It’s finding anyone who can come up with the credit to buy.”

Ah, now I see. Credit is actually the mechanism which allows us to operate on expectations rather than tangible value. It is actually a way of commoditizing trust. We cast our bread on the waters in faith that we will eventually receive payment for it. In fact, we can even assign a number to the likelihood that we won’t be dealt with honestly, factoring in the small percentage of cases in which the buyer won’t make good on his promise and setting our prices to account for that expense.

It all works, as long as all participants have confidence in the system. But as soon as a participant loses faith, there is only one way to keep him participating: payment up front, cash on the barrelhead. That puts his buyers in the sudden position of having to pay with cash rather than promises, and to raise the cash they need they must demand cash of their buyers in turn.

How might such a trend play out in everyday life? Well, one obvious example is that you may no longer be able to buy a car without paying in advance. That by itself is an idea that isn’t too hard to swallow, since it would keep people out of debt and prevent them from spending beyond their means, both good (if painful) things.

But even having the cash in hand, will you be able to walk onto a car lot and choose a vehicle to buy? Probably not, because those oceans of cars we see today are there based on promises of future payment from the dealer to the manufacturer. So if the dealer was demanding cash on the barrelhead, you would have to first hand your cash to the dealer, who would then send it to the manufacturer along with the order for your car.

Which, as it happens, doesn’t even exist in finished form, because the manufacture is unable to obtain the materials to create your car without paying his parts suppliers in advance. So he also needs to wait for an order to come in, accompanied by payment, so that he can in turn send orders with payment to the suppliers.

Now, I don’t think it would be necessary to take this to the absolute limit. A supplier not wait for payment before taking the very first step; he might have an inventory, i.e. materials that he has invested his own savings in, so that he can fill an order promptly when it comes in. The car manufacturer might have paid in advance for enough materials to assemble the cars it thinks will be ordered within a reasonable amount of time. The car dealer may have used his own money to order some cars to have on the lot available for sale to people with the money to buy them. Here on the farm we plant crops in advance with no guarantees that the buyers will buy them, but with reasonable expectations that they will (and minimal investment lost if it turns out that they won’t).

But perhaps you now have an inkling of how much flexibility will be eliminated from the system if promises are no longer accepted as payment. Look at the next ten things you buy with cash, and try to understand how much of the economic system is waiting for their eventual slice of your payment. And ponder whether it will be worthwhile or even possible for someone to put a car in a lot, or a can of beans on a shelf, or a shirt on a rack, or a movie in a theater, or gas in a pump, if even some of the participants involved in creating the product begin to demand payment in advance.

Last evening after supper we heard a delightful sound that has been absent for far too long, namely a steady rain falling on our metal roof. The sound continued off and on throughout the night, very comforting, and at breakfast this morning we saw from the gauge that we have gotten an inch so far. Right now there’s a break, but I see on the radar that another healthy storm is moving towards us from Nashville. That’ll be it for the day, but the forecast says that more should be coming early next week.

And now we wait and see. I don’t know enough about drought and rain and fall temperatures and the nature of grass to guess whether we’ll see any significant growth in the pastures before it turns cold, but I expect I’ll be learning something about that in the next few weeks. I do know that grass goes dormant at some point, cued by the weather. We’ve had a few sub-50 degree nights, but the forecast is promising low temperatures n the high 50s for the next week. Perhaps God will be gracious and hold off the cold so that our pastures can recover, at least a bit.

In any case, I think this will be enough moisture that Chris can get a start preparing garden beds, for the fall garlic planting and for next spring.

Those who were interested in my post on the cost effectiveness of home grown should be sure to read the substantial comment that Granny Miller kindly took the time to add. Lots of good stuff in favor of doing it yourself.

This talk of home grown reminded me of Chapter 9 in Janice Holt Giles’s book 40 Acres and No Mule, where she describes cooking and eating on the ridge. Here’s the opening section:

Speaking of cooking (I wasn’t, but I’m going to), I must confess that I do not always cook the ridge way for Henry and myself. I make biscuits, for instance, much shorter than is common on the ridge. We like very crisp, very short, golden brown biscuits. And I accomplish them better with sweet milk and baking powder. But we are alone in our liking for this kind of biscuits. Ridge biscuits are made with buttermilk and soda, and as a rule they are rathe rflat and what I call “pully” for want of a better word. A ridge cook would apologize for my short, browned biscuits. She would say she had had a heavy hand with her biscuits that day.

Of course I always use butter for shortening. Of course. We do not have a cow, but we have an arrangement with Henry’s folks to help feed their cows in return for milk and butter. Miss Bessie is so afraid we won’t have enough that she keeps us supplied with much more than we can use on the table. I shall never forget the look on my sister’s face when I baked a cake one day while she and her family were visiting us. Nearly a pound of butter went into the cake proper, and then another quarter pound went into the icing. Her eyes widened. “Do you always use that much butter in your cakes?”

I had forgotten how extravagant it must look. “Of course.”

She shook her head. “I’ve got to get my menfolks away from here, she said, “before they become so spoiled by all this good food they aren’t satisfied at home any more. Why, we’d go broke in no time if I cooked the way you do!”

I remembered then. You can’t cook the way I do in the city. Take creamed cauliflower, for instance. I make the sauce with pure thick, yellow cream, and even add a generous dab of butter to that. And for new little creamed potatoes, or chipped beef, or tuna fish. I wouldn’t think of making a cream sauce out of milk. All puddings and custards are made of cream—and, naturally, ice cream. All pastries, dumplings, breads, cakes, are made with butter. There hasn’t been a can of shortening in my kitchen since we moved to the ridge.

Isn’t it sad how so many simple, healthy, pleasurable foods were once seen as abundant staples but are now viewed as costly luxuries to be indulged in sparingly? The real luxury, of course, is not fresh clean food but living in an urban setting, where obtaining any sort of food at all becomes difficult and expensive.

When we moved to the farm we decided to begin living like farmers as best we could, not letting old habits or lack of farming skills or expense keep us from it. We set out deliberately to eat as we would eventually be able to do naturally. We bought the vegetables that we would eventually grow. We bought the raw milk we would eventually have from the cows we planned to buy. We bought the cows and pigs from neighbors and had them slaughtered for the meat we would eventually raise ourselves. We bought lots of butter. And we didn’t use these foods sparingly, but as we liked.

Slowly the bought foods were replaced by our own food. But more important, our eating changed, not so much intentionally but in response to the changing ingredients. We drink lots of fresh milk, and eat lots of butter. Lots. We savor the fat on the meat we eat. We eat lots of raw and fresh vegetables, but also vegetables cooked southern style (i.e. to death, with some meat and grease for flavoring) and canned vegetables. We eat as much home-baked bread made from home-ground wheat as Maggie is willing and able to make, which is increasingly much, often spread with butter and homemade jam as thick as one likes. We eat ice cream better than any I’ve ever had. The recipes have become fewer, and simpler as well, counting on the flavor and quality of the ingredients to carry the dish.

At the same time, our eating has moderated. Where once we would have kept on eating a favorite dish until our bellies began to ache, now what stops us eating is satisfaction—we eat a plateful, and that is enough. We eat as much as we want, and yet nobody is fat but me, and even I am slowly dropping pounds. We all seem to be healthier, and—I promise I’m not making this up—teeth are straightening up and spacing out in the mouths of the four youngest. Best of all, food has become a major source of pleasure for us; we like what we eat, we like spending time together eating it, and we like the fact that we grew it ourselves.

Mrs. Giles continues on describing the glories of home cooked, home grown food on the ridge, but she also hints at something darker:

Unfortunately, I am alone in the practice of using so much cream and butter in my cooking. For some reason people who have to take care of cows and milk and butter frequently do not like them. I know few families on the ridge who will touch butter. The cream is sold to the cream truck and most of the milk is poured out to the hogs. Some buttermilk is saved out to make bread with, and that’s about all. And ridge women like to bake with lard better than with butter.

She doesn’t say, but I suspect that the cream truck is the culprit. For a long time cream, butter, and eggs were a significant source of cash in Appalachia. I expect that the “dislike” for these things developed out of an increasing preference for the cash they could be turned into. Having been such a fundamental part of country life for so long, I suppose they were just taken for granted, along with their intangible benefits (health, pleasure), and folks weren’t able to count the cost properly when they gave them up. This is the sort of thing I had in mind when I said that cash has a corrosive effect on subsistence living.

This note appears in the Organic News section of the current Acres USA magazine, titled “Doubtful Organics.”

After years of pressure from watchdog organizations such as the Organic Consumers Association, the Cornucopia Institute, and others, the USDA has finally acknowledged publicly that it is having problems monitoring and enforcing the National Organic Program. Its recent announcement that half of the accredited organic certifiers under investigation failed the agency’s audits has raised the hackles of organic practitioners and enthusiasts all over the country.

That, following on the heels of two more food safety recalls, this time concerning tainted organic beef and ginger, has elicited some fiery responses, such as the following from the OCA: “We need to stop unscrupulous certifiers and USDA bureaucrats from allowing Chinese importers, U.S. factory farm dairy feedlots, and body care companies from labeling their products as ‘organic’ when in fact they are not. We need a professional, well-funded, and independent NOP Peer Review Board, composed of respected members of the organic community, as required by law, and we need it now!”

A bit further down there is another item, titled “Chinese Ginger Flap.”

The presence of aldicarb pesticide in organic ginger from China was first disclosed by certifiers? Government testers? Organic overseers? No! By a Washington D.C. based television news program reporting on imported organic food products in a local Whole Foods store. Public reaction was so spirited that the station decided to sponsor pesticide-residue testing of two dozen of those products. Only one of the 24 tested positive: the organic ginger from China. The alert was called, and companies began recalling the product.

The fellow we bought our piglets from stops by occasionally to chat. The last time, he remarked on how dry it has been lately. Then he said, “Come to think of it, it’s been dry ever since you folks moved here.”

Although we don’t think the two events are connected, he is right. Our first summer here we didn’t really have enough going on in the garden or the pasture to notice the dryness, although I can remember long stretches of August spent standing in the corn patch with a hand sprayer. Last summer was our first try at growing produce for market, and the mixed results (some crops did fine, some did nothing at all) were partly due to the lack of rain; and the $1500 we paid for winter hay was definitely due to that.

We had high hopes as the year began, as the winter and spring were pretty wet. But in June things changed, and since then it’s gotten progressively dryer: 2.5″ inches in June, 2.9″ in July, 1.3″ in August, .35″ in September. None in the forecast for the next seven days.

We are officially in a severe drought. If you look at the Kentucky map, we are about in the center of the orange section. The national map shows that much of this part of the country is at least abnormally dry, with some of the Carolina/East Tennessee area being in severe drought and a small spot in exceptional drought.

We water the garden and the animals using municipal water, and our bill roughly doubled when summer arrived—one hundred dollars rather than the usual fifty, which is still manageable and certainly worth it to keep our cows and chickens and crops alive. The wet winter and spring plus the moderate rain in June and July gave our crops enough momentum to make it to August when the harvest began, through now as the last of the tomatoes are coming off the vine.

Initially the kids were watering by hand using watering cans, but that became way too time-consuming so we laid out drip irrigation tape for most of the garden. That worked very well, and next year we will use it for the entire garden.

We’re looking at a couple of possibilities for developing water on the property: digging a pond in the pasture where a number of water flows converge, and damming up a small gorge up the hill from the house. We’re reluctant to dig a deep well, since neighbors tell us that no one has successfully done so in this part of the hollow.

Pasture is where we are hurting most. The fenced-in section of pasture was eaten down by the middle of September; since then the kids have been picketing Dory so she can eat a few patches around the property. The two calves have been moved to a corral set up near the house, where there was a bit of grass. We started feeding hay a couple of days ago, meaning that we’ll be feeding hay six months this time around, and the hay we’ve bought so far will only last for about two-thirds of that.

We were hoping this year to begin managing pasture so that the cows would be able to graze on sections of it until at least early winter. Through mid-summer that still looked like a possibility. For the past few months, though, we’ve been praying for a burst of rain that might give us a final growth of grass so they could make another circuit of the pasture. It never happened, and now with the evenings getting cold there won’t be any more growth even if it does rain.

If nothing else, we’re learning something about the complex interactions that determine what grass you’ll have available to feed in the winter. And although the drought makes things difficult for us, I’m grateful that these difficulties have come so early in our farming career.

Long before I was ever interested in farming I was reading the first volume of Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, which begins with a brief history of the Texas hill country west of Austin (where we were living at the time). That area is borderline arid, getting an average of thirty inches of rain per year, just enough to support farming. But Caro pointed out that the thirty-inch average represented a fifteen-year cycle where the rain ranged from a low of twenty-five to a high of thirty-five inches. This lead to a repeated boom-and-bust cycle; every fifteen years or so farmers would come in during the wet years, have great success farming, expand their operations, then go bust as the weather turned dry.

I’d prefer to learn the hard lessons of farming under dry conditions in the beginning, when failure won’t cost us nearly as much, knowing as well that better times are coming.

I disagree with Dave Winer about so many things in so many ways that I’m reluctant to even mention him here, but I have to give him credit for stating an important truth about the current crisis:

Fact is the people who run this place aren’t qualified to run it. No one is. You can see that the legislators have basically no idea how the economy works, yet they make decisions that determine where trillions of dollars flow. The Secretary of the Treasury, a banker, has no idea how the legislative process works, and even harder to accept, doesn’t have a basic understanding of the Constitution, how the three branches of government work.  [...]

So the NY Times today says the voters rebelled because no one from Washington explained to them what was going on. Folks, that’s just the tip of the tip of the problem. They couldn’t explain it because they themselves needed to have it explained to them.

I’ve read oceans of words about the current crisis and its underlying causes, but only one sentence in one article gave me something new to think about:

House Democrats summoned to a lunchtime meeting to discuss the proposal yesterday received a glossary of financial terms, such as “credit default swap” and “illiquid assets.”

Now, if you think it is foolish that people so badly educated about the workings of modern finance are rushing to decide how much money to throw at our financial problems, I agree with you. But is it really fair to expect a congressman to understand the workings of modern finance and every other area he is responsible for in such detail that he could make an intelligent decision when called upon?

Dave Winer has rightly identified the problem, but he is no different from any other pundit in thinking that he (as opposed to the idiots in charge) understands the issues well enough to chart a course through these waters. I’d like to suggest another possibility: some processes are complex enough that nobody is able to properly control them when they go haywire, no matter how gifted, no matter how well educated, no matter how popular, no matter how well intentioned. In these cases, the mistake was not to put the wrong people in charge, but to put anyone in charge.

A man can more or less properly control the workings of a farm. A man cannot properly control the workings of a national government. Somewhere between the farm and the national government we cross a threshold beyond which our reach exceeds our grasp. I don’t know exactly where the threshold lies, but I suspect it comes far more quickly than our modern arrogance would lead us to believe.

We’re in the midst of canning season right now. During our first two years on the homestead we did some amount of canning, trying to keep in mind that the transition from store-bought to home-grown involved much more than just putting the food we like into jars for later eating. Some things are much easier to can than others, and our diet needed to shift so as to emphasize those foods. Some of those foods were things we weren’t yet growing, so putting them up required that we buy the produce. And canning is hot, tedious work that can easily become discouraging if you don’t have a clear understanding of its value for the family economy. So we took it slow, putting up things we thought we’d enjoy the most, and learning to appreciate the fruits of those efforts over the winter.

This year Debbie decided that we were ready to can as if we meant it, so beginning with two posts that Granny Miller made describing her 2007 and 2008 plans for stocking her pantry, she began to develop her own goals for the year’s canning, taking into account our larger family, depending heavily on the two-week menu plans we write out and then save after using. The first result of that was a list of the number and types of canning jars we would need to buy in order to hold it all; several hundred, which required multiple trips to the Wal-Mart to obtain (and, for what it’s worth, the Wal-Mart canning aisle is much, much bigger and better stocked these days than in years past).

Here’s roughly what has been put up for the year, as it happened:

• We don’t have any cherry trees, but our neighbors do. In June one gave us enough to make two cherry pies with, which we ate right away. Another invited the kids to come and pick as many cherries as they wanted once he had enough for himself; they spend a couple of mornings and brought home enough for eight pie fillings (which we froze), 2 pints of cherry amaretto jam, and a pie that we sent back to him as a thank you.

• When it came time to snap scapes off the garlic in late June, we saved some to make five pints of pesto, which we froze.

• A pint jar of dried oregano.

• We bought a fancy fermenting crock, designed so that no scum forms during the process, and used it to make six quarts of sauerkraut, which we refrigerated. Boy, is it good. One quart went into the freezer as an experiment.

• Two gallon bags of broccoli from the garden, in the freezer.

• 1 quart dried yellow squash chips, 2 quarts canned.

• 2 pints tomatillo-serrano salsa.

• 12 quarts pickles.

• 5 quarts kale.

• 17 pints of basil pesto, frozen.

• We have a field full of wild blackberry bushes. The kids don’t look forward to picking them because of the chiggers, but they picked enough for us to make 51 half-pints of preserves. We use Dutch Gel lite to make them, using a bare amount of sugar. The result is a wonderfully fresh taste, and we spread it thick on bread and biscuits with no regrets.

• Two pints of herbal vinegars, using tarragon and marjoram from the garden.

• We don’t have bearing peach trees yet, but in season out-of-state peaches are plentiful and cheap. Ours usually come from South Carolina, and this year they were excellent. We bought two bushels, about $50 worth, and canned 50 quarts of peach halves.

• Our green bean of choice right now is Fortex, stringless but with a very green-beany flavor. We also grew some half-runners, the bean of choice in Kentucky but with a string, thinking that we might sell some (we didn’t). We had a lot of green beans left from last year, so we didn’t put up too many, 10 quarts canned and 10 pounds frozen. As far as Peter is concerned they make great finger food for babies, so a lot of them get served to him cold, straight from the jar.

• Our pastor Roger Murrell introduced us to purple-hulled peas, which taste to us just like black-eyed peas (which we love) but don’t attract wasps in the garden like black-eyed peas. It takes time to shell a decent amount of them, but we managed to get three quart bags in the freezer, plus a bunch that we dried on the vine that will either be seed or more food for us. Next year we want to plant maybe five times as many.

• A neighbor had a bountiful plum harvest, and brought us enough to make six pints of jam.

• When we harvested potatoes, we canned eight quarts of the smallest ones. The rest are in the basement, maybe 300lbs or so.

• Chicken broth, 21 pints.

• When the onions came in, we chopped and froze 15 quart bags.

• Tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes. One hundred eighty quarts in various forms.

• Okra, one quart of dried slices.

• One gallon bag of tomatillos, frozen.

• Fourteen quart bags of bell peppers, frozen.

• As far as meat goes, in the freezer we have 1.5 pigs (about 225lbs), 1.5 cows (about 500lbs), and fifty chickens about 3.5lbs apiece.

And right now it’s apples. Lots of apples. We have planted apple trees along the driveway, but it will be years if ever before they bear. I had been stalling on buying apples, since we wanted large quantities but I wasn’t excited about paying for them. And then one day Matthew decided to check on some old apple trees on the far side of the property, the remnants of a thirty-tree orchard that was mostly bulldozed by a previous owner. The remaining few trees were covered with apples. Not only that, they were delicious, crisp and sweet.

The kids spend most of the day picking the two trees that were easily accessible, and brought home twelve bushels. I haven’t checked local prices, but I figure that much would cost us between one and two hundred dollars. We’ve given some to friends, but most of it we plan to can. We’re getting about twenty quarts of applesauce to the bushel; the goal was one hundred quarts, but we may decide to do much more (especially remembering last year’s late freeze which destroyed all the local apples). Some of it we will experiment with, with our new steamer juicer or with making into cider.

It’s a joy to review all that, and to think of how bountifully God had provided for us this year, and how pleased and grateful we will be this winter as we diligently reduce our stores. But I also watched all the work that went into producing it, the long days of canning done mostly by Debbie and Maggie, and I ask myself the question that will occur to anyone looking at that list: was it worth it?

If by that question I mean, “Was it cost effective?”, then the answer is No. Just no. I can buy one hundred eighty quarts of canned tomatoes at Sam’s for about one hundred and eighty dollars, and it would have been much easier and quicker to earn one hundred and eighty dollars than to can those tomatoes. Same goes for everything else on the list. It is possible to fuzz that question up by scrambling to include intangibles like the healthiness of the food, or the joy of having done it yourself. But I am not a snob about industrial food—it feeds you at a price, and if you can’t justify paying a higher price or can’t afford to pay one, then by all means buy and eat it with a clean conscience. I would never ask anyone in my family to work as hard as they have been working merely to save the money we’ve been saving.

Which should tell you that it isn’t how we mean the question at all. True, for the longest time it was the only way I knew to understand the question, but I think now that not only was I wrong, it was such an understanding that kept me solidly trapped in a modern industrial mindset. Some of my fellow moderns dabbled in homegrown as a hobby or for health reasons, but not many; the rest of us had learned to think of time as money, and even the most gingerly experimenting would confirm that the money saved by homegrown and homemade was far outweighed by the time, effort, and money that such a project cost.

And approached in a modern, industrial context I don’t think it can be otherwise. There is no denying that mass produced goods are cheaper, and in many tangible ways the quality is as good or even better. Which I think is why the conquest of agrarian America by modern industrial culture was so quick, decisive, and even effortless. When the tradeoff is portrayed as the choice between spending long hours doing the hot, tedious work of canning tomatoes, versus spending fewer hours doing the lighter work of manning a cash register or working behind a desk, the choice is a no-brainer.

But for this to be a true choice for the agrarian, there is a prerequisite: you must join the cash economy, so that your labor is transformed from an integral (and priceless) part of your life into just one more commodity that can be traded at market prices. The choice is actually an invitation to begin a journey away from the agrarian life.

It wasn’t so long ago that most of the world was not part of the cash economy. In his book Captains of Consciousness Stuart Ewen quotes a nineteenth century New England farmer who briefly describes how it was for about 90 percent of the American populace prior to 1830:

Ewen offers this great excerpt from the diary of a nineteenth century New England farmer:

My farm gave me and my whole family a good living on the produce of it and left me, one year with another, one hundred and fifty silver dollars, for I never spent more than ten dollars a year, which was for salt, nails, and the like. Nothing to eat, drink, or wear was bought, as my farm produced it all.

I’ve written before about the difference between a cash-centered family economy and one that is subsistence-centered, mostly quoting people that are wiser than me; you’ll find examples here and here. I don’t think that the two approaches to a family economy can be freely mixed, in the sense that we might favor a cash approach for some things and a subsistence approach for others, each family settling on the mixture of cash and subsistence that suits its personal preference best. Rather, the two approaches represent different mindsets, different ways of looking at the job of meeting our needs.

Worse, whether or not a cash outlook has its own integrity, it appears to have a highly corrosive effect on a subsistence outlook; that is, even when introduced in small quantities into a subsistent life, it seems to quickly exert irresitable pressure towards living a cash-based life, a downward slide well-described in the little book Henry and the Great Society. At the same time, even the smallest efforts to introduce subsistence into a cash-centered life are way more difficult to sustain than one might expect, and are usually crushed when confronted with that simple question: is this cost-effective?

Given the corrosive power of that simple question, I think the only way to move successfully towards a more subsistent lifestyle is to render it irrelevant. Some people may do it by elevating their preferences above the demands of cash, simply deciding that they just like to grow their own food or make their own clothes or supply their needs directly in other ways, and they don’t care how much it costs them to do it. For those who take this route I think it is a fine thing, since they will be blessed by their efforts in many ways that can’t possibly be quantified.

Our path is a different one, because our goal is to extract ourselves as thoroughly as we can from the cash economy, in an attempt to reclaim a pre-industrial way of life for ourselves. Glancing at where we are might not always reveal that, because we are also very cautious about how and when we take particular steps toward the goal. I’ve read plenty of stories about how folks much bolder than us would plunge enthusiastically into homesteading, accomplish things we still only dream of, live life as we think it should be lived, only to abandon the project five or ten years later.

We want our agrarian-ward steps, small as they are, to be permanent ones, and so we are careful not to take them until we can view them as not only a necessary change to our lives but a beneficial one. I used to joke with Debbie that the guy’s approach to simplifying life was to replace the automatic washing machine with a manual one. But I also insisted when we moved here that our washer and dryer be used just as they had before, until we decided we wanted to do things differently. At some point Debbie began hanging some of our clothes to dry on a line that the previous owners had strung on the porch, and then this May we bought a sturdy rotary clothesline where she now hangs most of our clothes when the weather is good. But we still run the dryer when the weather is extremely humid or threatening rain, and without guilt.

One thing that has helped keep us on this path, not surprisingly, is dwindling cash. As our efforts turn ever more towards supplying our needs from the farm, less of our time is spent doing things that earn cash, and so what we do get (and what we have in savings) is increasingly precious to us. So now I’m very aware of what it costs me to drive to the different places I need to go, and how much it costs to pick up fast food on the road rather than arrange to be home or pack a meal to go with me, or to buy a drink with a meal or a cup of coffee in the afternoon; I still do all those things on occasion, but not as casually as I once did. Likewise I am diligent about comparing prices at the grocery store, and think twice about buying a book rather than getting it through the library. In other words, as cash becomes more precious we look for ways not to spend it, which not only conserves the cash we do have but pushes us further down the road to a cash-free life.

So, to return to the initial question about our long, laborious effort to put up food for the year: is it worth it? From a modern viewpoint, no, it isn’t cost-effective no matter how you spin it. But for us, yes, because we’re convinced it is the way out of modernity.

The previous post on practice was in some ways an example of the point it was trying to make. All week long I’ve wanted to write several lengthy posts, but I’ve also been struggling with the symptoms of a head cold. So I decided to tackle the topic that I thought would be easiest to write about, and briefest as well. But as I began to write the topic began to take me places I wasn’t planning to go.

Eventually I found myself needing to write some things that I’ve avoided discussing in the past because giving concrete examples would have me writing uncharitable things about other people—or, at least, I wasn’t a clever enough writer to avoid being uncharitable. I almost abandoned the post, but decided instead that this was an instance of exactly my point, that high standards can actually inhibit us from ever reaching them because we are reluctant to take a shot at something when we know the result will be far from adequate.

Taking my own advice, I finished the piece with words and thoughts which were vague and muddy enough to make me cringe, yet still better than what I’ve been able to say on the topic in the past. I went ahead and published it, and for awhile I’ll be thinking about ways I could have done a better job. I’m sure I’ll think of some.