The Real Charlie

Traffic Advisories

Just three quick tips for my local driving friends out there:

1) The VFW Parkway/West Roxbury Parkway rotary statie hasn't been around this week in the afternoon. She must be on vacation. She'll be back, and she'll be hoping you forgot her. Don't.

2) In the morning, people drive out of the Dunkin Donuts on Route 9 eastbound in Newton (right after the beat up gas station where the woman had a baby last year) happily drinking their coffee and munching on a crullah. They don't see you coming because they are immersed in their nourishment. They might hit you, or you them. Beware.

3) Next week the college kids will be back in town. Ever driven a U Haul? Once or twice? Same with them. Low clearance on Storrow Drive? Wide turning radius? Blind spots? What? Just stay away, and remember that without the college kids, we'd be Hartford.

Guinea Worm, Bad Tuna and Abby

A good MMWR this week. The lead story talks about the effort to eradicate the truly disgusting disease of dracunculiasis, or Guinea Worm Disease. It is disgusting (think meter long worms in the skin) and totally preventable. It still exists because it is a difficult to treat disease of poor African people. If people in Brookline caught it it'd have been cured 100 years ago. We seem to be slowly getting rid of it, and not a moment too soon. Another piece talks about scombroid, a kind of food poisoning that one gets from tuna or mackerel that has gotten too warm. Also gross, and easily preventable by keeping fish cold after it is caught. My years working at Harvard School of Public Health taught me that prevention is the key to good health so often as in these cases. Or as my old t-shirt from HSPH says, what didn't you die from today?

And on a happier, less wormy note, congratulations to my darling Abby, whose work in a group exhibit at the Three Graces Gallery in Portsmouth, New Hampshire (Live Free Or Die!) is featured in the local paper this week. Check it out here, and check out the show if you have a chance. And buy, please, so I can be supported by my wife's art in an opulent lifestyle to which I will rapidly become accustomed. It's that or Stella becomes a starting pitcher, or Roxanne starts a successful hedge fund. Um, scratch that last idea. I better keep my day job.

Risks In Spelling and Asset Pricing

Thanks to Jon for pointing out the spelling errors (now fixed) in my last post. Readers: if you find an error, feel free to post a mocking comment. It will just drive me to fix it and check my work slightly better.

So as part of my work life I was at a meeting today where various people make asset allocation decisions about a large amount of money. One small piece of this pie had an allocation to a supposedly conservative (AA to A credits) bond fund that ended up down 9% for the month of July due to exposure to mortgage backed securities backed by sub-prime home loans, a 2 or 3 standard deviation event. The people on the committee were furious, and their angst spread to every asset allocation decision on the agenda. Every statement and every assumption about risk was being questioned, sometimes too much, sometimes just right, always with care and passion. There were a few sparks.

It made me think about my own portfolios, and the risks they carry, and how accurately those risks are described and priced. I think, for example, about the AAA bonds that are actually AA or A credits with insurance from issuers (MBIA, FGIC, etc.) that have their own (flawed?) ratings. I think about some financial stocks, and some stealth financial stocks (GE, for example), and their exposure to credit risk through the same problem of risks either incorrectly rated or concealed. The fear in the room today is making me take another look at the allocation of risk throughout my portfolios, the riskiness of individual securities and funds, and my tolerance for 2 and 3 standard deviation events involving my "safe" assets. You should probably entertain the same thoughts.

Firing the Grey Lady

My apologies for the blog lull since July 25th. I had a major (and successful) work event the next day that left me pretty wiped out, and ready for the three day weekend with my friends Adam and Jen and their crowd out on the Cape. I returned to a busy week at work, Abby's 32nd birthday and a need for some serious daddy duty this weekend. But I'm back now.

My big decision of the past week was canceling my subscription to the New York Times. I have been reading the Times since I was a little kid (my father was a newspaper wholesaler, as was his father, and I have photos of an adorable baby Real Charlie literally crawling around on the Times) and have had my own subscription since the first day of freshman year of college. I could never imagine life without a daily paper, and for as long as I can remember, that paper has been the Times.

But I've moved on the past few years. The Jayson Blair scandal was very disillusioning, and the continued string of forgeries and distortions (many of them, irritatingly, seem to be designed to make the President, people of the Right and/or religious people look bad) has broken my confidence in the paper's quality. The culture coverage has become obsessed with celebrity and television. The arch "New Yorky" tone has gotten stronger, and bothers me more as a Bostonian. And the anti-Israel bias definitely bothers me more than in the past.

I've gotten The Boston Globe at work for years, and it is a decent paper. It is written at least four grade levels below the Times, but it covers the Sox well (except for the CHB, of course), reviews museums and restaurants I might actually visit someday, and features the obituaries of people I know, giving me the opportunity to cluck my tongue at the Angel of Death each morning over my muesli. Abby is eager to see more local news, get some ideas of things to do with the kids and, also, feels that the Globe covered her show at the Wellesley Free Library well last year. So we are Globe subscribers now, and I'll miss the Times (the article on wealthy but not super wealthy people in Silicon Valley today was super) but not so much (the Noah Feldman magazine section hatchet job on Maimonides School is shaping up to be another disaster).

On the subject of Abby, those in you in, near or able to travel to Portsmouth, New Hampshire should check out Abby's work at Three Graces Gallery starting this Friday. The exhibit is a group show called "Things With Wings" and Abby has some great new stuff for you to see. She is the featured artist on the exhibit announcement - check it out. I am always so proud of my creative and brilliant wife, who makes such beautiful things and cares for our two little people and keeps me on the straight and narrow, too. If you can catch this show, please do so.