Noonan Snippets

Peggy Noonan, in her latest column:

Five weeks ago, when I asked a Wall Street titan what one should do to be safe in the future, he took me aback with the concreteness of his advice, and its bottom-line nature. Everyone should try to own a house, he said, no matter how big or small, but it has to have some land, on which you should learn how to grow things. He also recommended gold coins, such as American Eagles. I went to the U.S. Mint Web site the next day, but there was a six-week wait due to high demand. (I just went on the Web site again: Production of gold Eagle coins "has been temporarily suspended because of unprecedented demand" for bullion.)

"Wall Street titan", in terms of credibility, doesn't carry quite the same panache as it used to does it? Although I did put a little money in a gold mutual fund a while back and I'm big in the gardening thing, so I'm with him there. Noonan continues with the sort of fascinating thesis I hadn't heard anywhere else:

The sale of antidepressants and antianxiety drugs is widespread. In New York their use became common after 9/11. It continued through and, I hypothesize, may have contributed to, the high-flying, wildly imprudent Wall Street of the '00s. We look for reasons for the crash and there are many, but I wonder if Xanax, Zoloft and Klonopin, when taken by investment bankers, lessened what might have been normal, prudent anxiety, or helped confuse prudent anxiety with baseless, free-floating fear. Maybe Wall Street was high as a kite and didn't notice. Maybe that would explain Bear Stearns, and Merrill, and Citi.

I think the underlying assumption with the banks was that housing prices would never go down as a group. Maybe Michigan's housing would, and California's, but not the whole country's. I don't think there's a pill responsible for that but I could be wrong.