I've always preferred to wallow in country music when I was blue…

…beginning in the 1950s when unrequited puppy love was responsible for my almost wearing out Hank Williams' record, Lovesick Blues, on the juke box at my Dad's Truck Stop. It's never been improved upon for a good pity party. Fortunately, living in Texas, I don't have to choose between the Blues and Country, because they amount to about the same thing in Texas. Texas Country is more bluesy and has less twang than, say, Nashville Country. If you want just a hint of country in your blues, try Delbert McClinton.

You can get solace from country, but not much useful advice. As Kenny Rogers taught us, you've got to know when to hold ‘em and know when to fold ‘em. Well, okay, so when do you hold ‘em and when do you fold ‘em? One thing I know is that I held them too long during the great 401K meltdown. I held on all the way down, like Slim Pickens riding the bomb down in Dr. Strangelove. Billy Joe said let me down easy Lord, and leave a mark in the dust where I lay.

Fortunately, living in Frisco, Texas, I can some day write some blues without having to change my address. The Frisco Blues sounds pretty good, almost as good as the Fort Worth Blues. You just couldn't write the Plano Blues or even the Dallas Blues.  I don't know why; you just can't.

I'm tired and weary, and have some country blues tonight myself. So, instead of my doing all the work for you, if interested, you can go to YouTube and relive Hank Williams, especially "Lovesick Blues." And, if you're not from Texas, you might check out Delbert McClinton ("When Rita Leaves, Rita's Gone"), Billy Joe Shaver (I've Been to Georgia on a Fast Train and many others), and The Flatlanders: Butch Hancock, Billy Dale Gilmore, and Joe Ely. Try to find one or more of them doing "Dallas From a DC-9 at Night." It's not blues, of course, but it's a good song.

Enjoy your week-end. The stock market is closed.

What do you do when your well runs dry, your muse gets an unlisted telephone number, and your hits fall like a stone?

I dig up bones. Now, strictly speaking, Digging Up Bones, as defined by country music legend, Randy Travis, involves rummaging through the old home place and finding tangible memories of a lost and long gone love, which activity is not necessarily confined to country. City folks can also get those "Gone, but not Forgotten Blues."

Of course, everything, it seems, has its generic version. I seek the elusive muse while standing in front of my book cases staring at the titles hoping to rekindle a lost thought or two. It's almost as productive as panning for gold, which is to say not very, but at least you can keep your socks dry.

[You will find a treat at the end, so hang in there.]

I was watching Kris Kristopherson- second rate singer, first rate song writer (Bobby McGee, for example)-talking about working on the oil rigs south of Corpus Christi early in his career. A real Texan would probably just say Corpus as in Neiman's rather than Neiman Marcus, but that's another story. Anyway, he was talking about night time on his hands on the oil rigs, and he said he wrote songs with this old guitar, which he was holding close to his heart. Since then, I've been pretty sure the muse would visit more often if I relocated to an oil rig south of Corpus and strummed an old guitar to lure her in.

The pulling power of a guitar and a little strumming, if you ever doubted it, was illustrated brilliantly by Sara Evans in "Three Chords and the Truth." It seems her baby left her, or did something that caused her to leave him, but he finally wormed his way back into her good graces with what she took to be the truth set to good, traditional, country, three-chord, whining music-straight from the heart and through the nose.

Michael Lewis stoked my creative juices in an interview talking about song writing in general and writing Panic in particular. (I use the term writing loosely in this case. Editing is okay, but it should be as clearly marked on the book cover as the health warning on a pack of cigarettes.) It seems that Michael has a little stone cabin at the end of a trail behind his house that he uses to rendezvous with his muse. Then he almost spoiled it for me by saying he puts on his earphones and plays the same rock music over and over. I can understand and accept the over and over part, but it's the rock part that turns me off. Rock must roll to be palatable to me, but that's rare these days-a sure sign of moral decay.

For the record, the person most responsible for dropping the roll from rock and roll deserves to suffer severe discomfort. (I'm understating this, trying not to incite a mob.) Anyway, my muse fantasy has expanded to include seclusion, if not on an oil rig, at least in a little rock cabin with great air conditioning, a guitar, and Ray Charles, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Fats Domino beating out the boogie on dueling pianos.

A Dove with Attitude
Presented at a meeting of the Rotary Club of Dallas, July 21, 2004

Lately, I've had second thoughts
About doves and hawks.

I wonder what justifies the magnitude
Of the typical hawkish attitude.

Are hawks the magnificent seven
With the keys to central banker heaven?

Can't doves put their wing tips
on their hips
And also shoot from the lip?

And give hawks the evil eye
As they fly high in the sky?

I don't want hawkish platitudes;
I greatly prefer a dove with attitude.

Big Al, the Flation Fighter
Bob McTeer wrote this poem to honor (roast) his good friend and colleague, Al Broaddus, retiring president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. He read it at a Conference of Presidents meeting at the Boston Fed on May 25, 2004.

Tell me it ain't so, Big Al.
Tell me the Fed's #1 inflation fighter,
The top hawk,
The hawk in a room full of hawks,
Tell me our hawk hasn't gone soft.

Tell me it's not so, Preemptive Al,
Enemy of pricing power.
Slow to ease,
Quick to tighten.

Lover of transparency
And credibility.
Hater of reciprocal currency arrangements.

Your heart was pure,
Your course was clear.
You were never behind the inflation curve,
You never lost your nerve.

Until lately.

Just as your goal appeared near,
You began to fear
An excess
Of success.

Would disinflation
Go too far
And make you the dog
That caught the car?

The specter of zero bound
Began to hound you
In the middle of the night.

So Big Al, inflation fighter,
You went a bit wobbly.
And began to sound gobbly,

Gobbly being the sound of love
Made by a snow white______. (No, not yet.)

So Big Al, you became deranged.
Your vocabulary changed.
You promised accommodation
For a considerable period.

Again, and again, and again, and again.

And with inflation picking up,
Big Al, the inflation fighter, counseled patience
And then patience once again.
Audacious patience.

Then with patience no longer treasured,
You went along with measured.

What happened to our hawk, Big Al?
I swear by the heavens above
You've been sounding more like a ______.

Let's just say . . .

I've found some white feathers
In some of your letters.

Now, Al, I know this is not your version of the story . . .

You've spun a web of plausible deniability
Around price level stability.
You say you're for price stability
No matter which direction the threat.
I guess I'll have to give you that.

Your hawkish tendencies
Are balanced and symmetrical,
A symmetrical hawk, you bet.

You're an inflation fighter, par excellence,
And a deflation fighter, too.
And all your colleagues are very proud of you.

Some of us are sometimes right
Some of us are even righter.
But you're the only one that can be called
Big Al, "Flation Fighter."

I'd just about forgotten about hawks and doves until last week-end when a dove flew into our too-clean glass window. He was stunned. A hawk, which had been lurking in a tree-top all morning, pounced and flew off with him, leaving only a couple of feathers floating down.

What do you suppose is the meaning of that?

Buddy Holly's Plane Crash Stopped the Music 50 Years Ago Today

I paid tribute to Buddy Holly last year; so I'll be brief today. Last year I mentioned my PBS interview with Bob Edwards when he asked me if it was true that I had visited Buddy Holly's grave. I admitted it; so, he then asked me what Buddy Holly ever contributed to the economy. I said Buddy's Rave On would have made a great anthem for the new economy of the late 1990s.

A reader emailed me to suggest another Buddy Holly song for today's economy: Crying, Waiting, Hoping. Yes, precisely. But hopefully, we can Rave On again soon.

In the beginning, there was the stretch for yield that led to subprime, best described in a Japanese Haiku:

If regular loans
Don't earn enough to suit us
Maybe bad loans will.

The wolf can huff and puff and try to blow the house down. He doesn't have to puff too hard if the house is made of cards, as our financial house turned out to be. A culture of debt had made our financial system more vulnerable than anyone knew:

My house is under water, for sure
My car is upside down, you bet
But I'm getting me a consolidation loan
And finally getting out of debt.

The crisis has led to an ongoing painful deleveraging of balance sheets causing the

Deleveraging Blues:
My capital is too thin to spread on a cracker
What I need is a Middle Eastern backer
Or maybe a Chinese sovereign wealth fund
Will lend me back some of my mon-
ey

Having inexplicably refused to do the inexpensive, easy thing and amend mark-to-market accounting rules so that phantom losses don't destroy real bank capital, the government is injecting more capital into banks. Which banks? Well, those that don't need it of course. They are following the practice of bankers, as described by Ogden Nash:

Most bankers dwell in marble halls,
Which they get to dwell in because they encourage deposits and
  discourage withdralls,
And particularly because they all observe one rule which woe betides the banker who fails to heed it,
Which is you must never lend any money to anybody unless they
don't need it.

Happy Holidays Everybody

Thinking part time
For part-time pay

But my little plan has one big flaw
It fails to account for Parkinson's Law

It's sometimes hard to pay your dues
When you spend your time waiting for the muse

But one big advantage is important to me
A location outside of Washington, D. C.

Its traditions are richest outside my field
But that just gives me more room to build

Medicine, social security and other pensions
Have received John's main attentions

Aligning incentives for health care users
Removing incentives for potential abusers

Helping the customers of the health care industry
Avoid Hillary's health care ministry

Creating Health Savings Accounts
In increasing amounts

It's alledged

Making payers of users
Avoiding a third-party wedge

Making the patient and payor one and the same
Removing moral hazard from the health-care game

Sounding the alarm on social security
Offering solutions closer to purity

Promoting personal accounts with a higher gain
Giving their owners some skin in the game

Designing and promoting Roth IRAs
Following up with Roth 401Ks

Helping employers give their workers more clout
By changing opt in provisions to opt out

Working for taxes, lower and flatter
Making the supply side really matter

Lowering tax rates with no revenue crunch
Is as close as it gets to the proverbial free lunch

Keeping the capital in capitalism, we have a hunch
Means taxing it less and only once.

Nearly 25 years of private sector solutions
Now is no time to permit dilutions

So, come to our aide, help us contend
We depend entirely on the help of our friends