The Second Part of Chapter 1: Encounter

The snow was falling softly late Saturday afternoon as James put on a nice tie and a dark suit to go with it. The silence outside, with no birds, no animals, only the snow falling quietly in the evening contrasted with the nervousness he was feeling at that moment. It was not as if this was his first time, either, as he had several girlfriends in high school and university; he had simply chosen not to settle.

James felt it was important to be chivalrous on the first date and pay for both meals, after which they would drop these old-fashioned pretences later. He looked outside, thinking that the snow, which had fallen heavily since November, obscuring the landscape in its muffling mantle, was getting burdensome; he was finding it difficult to keep the driveway clear, given that the snow banks had piled up well over his head on both sides of the two metre wide lane, and all this was exacerbated by the fact that there had been exactly five days when the temperature had risen above freezing since the beginning of the previous December. He didn’t know why he was counting this; it was one of the unfortunate side-effects of being single that he had noticed since his last break-up three years previously with a woman named Claudine, and he had noticed it with break-ups before that: he found he paid much attention to the banal things that other people––married people––would not have noticed or considered. He looked at his watch: five o’clock; he had better get going. He walked out of the door to his car, noting with mild irritation that he had to brush it off: five centimetres had accumulated, and since the temperature was only minus two, the snow was of the thicker, heavier variety.

He had combed his hair, which, given that it was curly, was a futile gesture, showered that morning, and had shaven the previous evening. He was thinking of everything that could possibly go wrong: he could trip over the carpet as he introduced himself; he could trip her accidentally at some point in the evening; he might guffaw at an inappropriate time; what if the dinner landed on his lap rather than in his mouth, and what if he ordered the wine he hated, and had to drink it through the evening? He dismissed the last concern, as he did not have much taste for wine anyways, and as it happened, these scenarios failed to materialise.


“So, how long have you worked in economic consulting?” asked Clarissa; it was a conventional first date question; background checks were always essential, after all.

“Five Years. Before that, I worked at Scotiabank.”

“How long have you worked at HRSDC?”

“Four years. Before that, I was at Heritage,”

The conversation at dinner flowed smoothly, and he thought that they had hit it off, thought James.

He was saying, “The causes of reduced performance are always the same: the market, lack of regulation, and so on; but it’s the ‘universal remedy: vigorous downsizing––layoffs of those least responsible’, that bothers me.” He then reached for the saltshaker and sprinkled some salt on his chicken and some more on his mashed potatoes.

Clarissa perked up. “You’ve read Galbraith too? He’s one of my favourite economists, and his last book was really interesting,”

The economics of Innocent Fraud, published a few years ago, was interesting, thought James. It had taken him only an hour and a half to read, as it was such a slim volume; it was also highly prescient, and it was for this reason that he liked John Kenneth Galbraith so much. With this, the conversation turned to that economic thinker and paragon of liberalism in the American sense of the word.

James said, “He didn’t predict the downfall and financial crisis, of course, but what he said about fraud was very well-timed. By the way, when did you read it?”

“Two years ago; timed it right with the housing collapse in the States. It’s a pity he didn’t live to see his rhetoric proven, but on the other hand, he was ninety-seven; I don’t think he had anything to complain about, given that long and rich life.”

“No indeed,”

“If only people had listened to him more back then; were his words given their proper weight, we might never have had a stock crash, or an accompanying recession,”

“Things like that would have been consigned to the history books where they belonged,”

“The parallels between the two booms, of the 1920s and the millennium, that is, are so obvious as to be farcical: both were housing booms; both were driven by rampant speculation; both were accompanied by a lack of oversight, and still nobody did anything,”

“People saw it coming, though,”

“True; especially Paul Krugman. He’s my modern economic hero; he predicted the bursting of the bubble several years before it happened,”

“Well, innocent fraud was a very apt way to describe the ways in which executives were getting paid; I remember a case with a company, now bankrupt––Jessups, they were a conglomerate that made wrenches, various other tools, and dabbled into paper manufacturing, furniture and electronics. Anyways, the average salary for a factory worker was twenty dollars an hour; not too grandiose, but one could live on it, and a couple could raise a child on it if they knew what they were doing. The bigwigs––the CEO, the CFO, and the COO, made many millions, which a board essentially rubber-stamped because they were all agog with their star power, and I mean real star power; they were former Wall Street wizards, and supposedly knew their stuff. They went on a massive spending spree, bought up all sorts of skyscraper office space in Toronto, a whole skyscraper in San Francisco, and an island off the coast of Russia in a fit of ill-advised mineral speculation.”

“I doubt that they ever found anything on that island, and it was nationalised two years later. I have no idea what they were thinking; nobody in that company, as far as I know, was a geologist, and there was little expertise around. Debt fuelled all of this, and then the recession hit, and the creditors came to call; a recession has a funny way of making people think they need to redeem their bonds. They couldn’t pay the creditors, and had do declare bankruptcy. I take it they were cheats?”

“Yes, and magnificent actors, too,”

“A morality tale, as it were: never bite off more than you can chew, never buy what you can’t pay for, and definitely never pay people more than they are worth.”

“I think the executive pay set off an arms race; one company did it, so every company had to do it to ‘attract the top talent’.” James put air quotes around the last phrase in indication that the aforementioned rationale was, at best, laughable, and at worst, immoral and sinful. Of the seven deadly sins it was obviously greed.

“What happened to the executives at the top?”

“As it happens, the CEO, Isaac Scura, kept his job while Jessups haemorrhaged workers and eventually closed.”

The conversation went on in a similar fashion, exalting Galbraith and Krugman for the remainder of the evening, as they consumed their roast duck. After that came dessert: cheesecake drizzled liberally with chocolate syrup and topped with blackberries for him, and a sundae for her; the blackberries, whose season was late July and August, had been frozen, which resulted in them being runny. By now, the chivalrous streak that James had started the evening with had worn off, and they decided to split the bill, paying for their respective dinners; the gift would not be a meal, but each other’s company. The evening left James thinking very well of Clarissa; he looked into her eyes and saw that she was a kindred spirit; he reflected on this at length after he delivered her to her apartment.

Clarissa hugged James warmly before he departed from her apartment at 10:15 in the evening.


That went decently, thought James: there were no disasters; in fact, that went quite well. It is always very nice when a couple’s ideas are consonant rather than dissonant. Had he been a Keynesian and she a monetarist, the conversation would not have carried on nearly so smoothly, but would have been just as long, with a lot more gesticulating. It would have been worse still had she known nothing at all of economics, and had rather been into something like biology or English.

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