Category: McCoy 431 Spring 2020

Continue reading “Scope and Humble Comprehension: Why English Matters”

The crash of the United States stock market in 2008 led to a severe housing crisis across America. Trying to understand why the stock market crashed is a difficult task. As I read The Big Short by Michael Lewis to familiarize myself with the crashing of the stock market in 2008, I realized that the process of subprime mortgage loans, credit default swaps, and artificial securities was confusing to me. However, I realized that the professional businessmen who created them didn’t know what they consisted of; in fact, nobody knew exactly what the loans consisted of. The complexity of the financial crisis wasn’t just big scale, but also small scale. After reading The Big Short and trying to gain a financial perspective of what happened on the business side of the financial crisis, I then read The Turner House by Angela Flournoy, which gave a smaller scale perspective of how the Turner Family in Detroit was affected by the mishandling of mortgage loans on Wall Street. 

Continue reading “Large-scale vs. Small-scale Perspectives – 2008 Housing Crisis”

When we first began Michael Lewis’ The Big Short, I was quite apprehensive while reading it as I had no clue about what was happening with all of this business/finance talk. I found myself referring to Google searches or Investopedia trying to identify certain terms to help me understand things a little bit better such as a credit default swap, but it was still difficult to follow along as the material was heavy on the business side of things. I feel as though this was Lewis’ intention, emphasizing the idea that people had no idea what was happening unless you were a banker yourself. While I enjoyed the language (mostly metaphors) that Lewis uses in discussing the events leading up to the housing crisis, I couldn’t help but feel as though the story was incomplete or missing something from it allowing me to feel connected with the work and feel fully satisfied with the story. While we saw what led up to innocent people being hurt by the housing bubble burst, we didn’t really get to see how they were affected and if they recovered from it. Yes, there is some mention toward the end of the book in how the people on Wall Street knew this would broadly affect the average American, but we didn’t get to see beyond that. We did not get to see a more human aspect to it, which as a result added to my sense of disconnect from The Big Short. 

Directly after reading The Big Short, we jumped into Angela Flournoy’s The Turner House, a novel that turns its attention toward an American family that would be affected by the actions of the investors. To some level after reading both The Big Short and The Turner House, I would say that they work well together to tell somewhat of a complete story and nearly complete Freytag’s Pyramid that we have discussed in class in explaining the housing market crash. Each work tells one half of a version of the story (The Big Short telling the first half and The Turner House telling the second) that nearly completes Freytag’s Pyramid where there is a rising action, a climax, and a falling action, except in this case there does not seem to be any real resolution to complete the pyramid, therefore showing the 2008 housing and financial crisis does not really follow the complete storyline structure we are accustomed to.

Continue reading “The Incomplete Story of the 2008 Housing Crisis”

The 2008 housing crisis in the United States had major effects on everyone involved. After reading The Turner House by Angela Flournoy, and The Big Short by Michael Lewis I was able to see and understand two different perspectives on the housing crisis, one being the Turner family and how the housing crisis impacted them, and the other being the bankers and investors involved in causing the crisis. I don’t believe that The Turner House sheds light on what is missing from The Big Short, instead each novel offers a different perspective on the housing crisis. For the purpose of this essay, I will discuss how the housing crisis of 2008 as told through The Turner House and The Big Short is complex and does not follow the classic Freytag Pyramid structure as seen in most novels (refer to next paragraph). Instead, these two novels allow for several ‘mini Freytag Pyramids’ or individual character plot lines throughout the text. Both novels do not display an overarching resolution, similarly to the housing crisis in that there was no true resolution. 

Continue reading “2008 Housing Crisis rejects the Freytag Pyramid structure”

Given the recent reactions to the spread of Coronavirus in the state, the schools, and sports, it has been increasingly hard to concentrate on one specific thing, unless that thing is Coronavirus. To have to swap so much of my routine lifestyle for a completely new way of life is going to be difficult. Yet, even with such difficulties, this class has allowed me to think through a lot. Today’s issues and the 2008 market crash are more connected than a person may originally think! 

The Coronavirus, like the stock market crash of 2008, felt like a rumor until it’s affects reached me and my friends. Although the virus came up sporadically on the news, it seemed too far out of reach to impact my own life. I admit that I was foolish to assume the virus’s power. In Michael Lewis’s The Big Short, Lewis conveys how unaware people were of the stock market crash and its impacts on the streets of New York City. Lewis explains, “The monster was exploding. Yet on the streets of Manhattan there was no sign anything important had just happened. The force that would affect their lives was hidden from their view” (251). Just like the market crash, the virus was out of my view until recently. Now that its impact is in full swing, it is all I can think about.  

Continue reading “Understanding the Root and Understanding Each Other”

The texts The Turner House and The Big Short are both very effective in telling one perspective of the story of the 2008 financial crisis. However, they’re very different in their story-telling styles and the how they shape our view on the crisis. For example, The Big Short is mostly about the economic side of the crisis, explaining how businesses and the stock market works, while The Turner House gives a more humanistic approach to the situation, showing us how it really affected everyday people. Both are beneficial to read on their own, but having the advantage of reading both gives readers a more well-rounded understanding of the crisis and what it meant in different strokes of life.

Firstly, The Turner House sheds light on the personal, real-life experiences of families expelled from their homes during the crisis; a perspective that The Big Short didn’t emphasize. Viola, the mother of thirteen and a widow, faces a myriad of hardships which prevent her from paying the mortgage on the beloved Turner home, which in turn means she must give it up and vacate with her family. Not only does it give us a real-life example of what the crisis did to families, but it also emphasizes the relationships of the family members and the dynamics between each one while at the same time expressing their own narratives as individuals. The children’s father Francis, for example, struggled with addiction. That was part of his own individual story, but it affected the children and his wife Viola in terms of their relationships with one another. It also, of course, affected the characters individually. Everyone in the novel’s interactions with one another shaped their individual identities in one way or another; one action could create a ripple effect. As a young couple, Viola and Francis had moved to Detroit in the 1940’s with their newborn son, Cha-Cha. With intricate details and description, Flournoy illustrates the different stages of life in the Turner home; violence, labor disputes, economic depression, but also fun, loving, and joyous times. 

These details of the story are important because it gives perspective to the parts of the story that The Big Short didn’t cover. The main aim of the book was to help the reader understand the business side of things, giving examples and diagrams of how the financial system works. What it lacked was a humanistic, real-life example of what all of this meant on a small-scale, individual level. Most of the themes discussed were about the system as a whole, and what it meant in terms of numbers. Big figures such as “hundreds of thousands of homes affected” were thrown around, but it was never really dissected as to what that really meant for just one of those homes. One of those individual families whose whole lives revolved around their home being the epicenter of their lives, bringing everyone together and keeping them safe. And when one loses that, when families are expelled from their homes, it can be life-altering and change things from financial instability all the way to shifting familial relationships. One quote that describes this very well to me is when Angela Flourney said:

“Humans haunt more houses than ghosts do. Men and women assign value to brick and mortar, link their identities to mortgages paid on time. On frigid winter nights, young mothers walk their fussy babies from room to room, learning where the rooms catch drafts and where the floorboards creak. In the warm damp of summer, fathers sit on porches, sometimes worried and often tired but comforted by the fact that a roof is up there providing shelter. Children smudge up walls with dirty hand prints, find nooks to hide their particular treasure, or hide themselves if need be. We live and die in houses, dream of getting back to houses, take great care in considering who will inherit the houses when we’re gone.”

To many people, a house is more than just a house. It’s a home, with immense sentimental value to the people who spend most of their lives in it. This is why the story told in The Turner House is so important when learning about the financial crisis; it wasn’t all just about financial instability and losing money.

One term that comes to mind when discussing The Turner House is sonder – the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own. When talking about the housing market and foreclosures and expulsion in a broad, general sense, you don’t think about the families individually affected by such things. But the novel gives the reader a sense of sonder that we don’t get from reading the analytical approach of The Big Short. There are a plethora of things included in The Turner House that weren’t expressed in The Big Short, and that’s why it’s so beneficial for people who’re interested in learning about it view it from all angles, really taking time to understand what these large figures and fancy terms meant in an everyday sense.

Economic terms are not just for Wall Street bankers. Every day, in one form or another, we participate in economic transactions. There is so much complex jargon that accompanies these transactions, yet three important terms are liquidity, swap, and expulsion. Investopedia defines liquidity as the degree to which an asset can be quickly bought or sold in the market at a price reflecting its intrinsic value. For example, cash has a high liquidity. I can quickly use cash to purchase a box of chicken nuggets at my local Wegmans that are sold at a price the companies have determined is reasonable. Additionally, Investopedia details swap as a contract through which two parties exchange liabilities from two different financial instruments. If I decided that I wanted a slice of my friend’s pizza, I could negotiate a swap where we create a verbal contract in which I give her five of my chicken nuggets for one slice of her pizza.  Lastly, Merriam-Webster describes expulsion as the state of being forced to leave by official action.  If my friend and I had conducted this swap in a Red Lobster, the employees could legally expel us from the restaurant as we were not customers and we had brought outside food into the restaurant. These terms name not only day-to-day interactions, but they also label larger and more pressing relations that can have much grimmer effects. Shakespeare’s King Lear begins with a swap which disturbs not only King Lear’s family, but England in all. While exchanging his land for his daughters’ flatteries, King Lear’s emotions undercut the intrinsic value of his land, therefore causing the expulsion of his truthful daughter and overall the death of his family.

In a highly important swap, Lear decides to sell his land (England) to his daughters, Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia, using a currency of their flattery. He determines that the liquidity of his land is high and could be quickly swapped for his three daughters’ declaration of their love for him. Lear decides not to use his prior knowledge about his daughters in this exchange. He thoughtlessly relies on the controlled statements from each daughter. It is common knowledge that incentives affect behavior. Surveys on the receipts of fast food restaurants purposefully include an incentive for completing the survey, such as a free drink, because they know it will convince customers to take the survey. Lear ignores this knowledge by offering his daughters a part of England. Unsurprisingly, Goneril and Regan fraudulently “purchase” this land using counterfeit sycophancies. They lie to their father by saying they love him more than they actually do. After hearing her sisters’ lies, Cordelia refuses to engage in this swap of flattery for land and power. She tells her father that she has nothing to say. When prompted, she tells Lear that she loves him as much as a daughter should. Her refusal to participate in the swap displays her belief that the deal undermines the intrinsic value of the land and power. Lear allows these ingenuine compliments in this swap for something of extreme importance, and Cordelia does not believe that the exchange is legitimate due to this. Lear is enraged by Cordelia’s refusal and her attempt to negotiate. As a result, he expels her from the family and the country.

King Lear’s power and regality allow him to make such impactful decisions without regulation. Even when Kent, his trusted advisor, asks him to think about his actions, Lear expels him as well. He uses these primarily surface-level interactions in this highly important swap. Liquidity is how quickly something can be bought at its intrinsic (actual) value. As a king who honors his country, Lear should know that egocentrically asking his daughters of their love for him will not create a scenario where England is intrinsically priced. Lear’s illogical acceptance of Goneril and Regan’s deceitful offer causes Cordelia’s refusal to participate in the swap. Cordelia and Kent attempt to appeal to Lear’s sensibleness but Lear’s emotions take precedent. In such critical swaps, emotional decisions do not result in fair trades. Cordelia and Kent also represent how truthful and well-intended advice cannot always be met with reason. Instead, their expulsion represents the ideology that sound knowledge can be overpowered by emotions and deceit. The long-term result of this underestimation of liquidity, corrupted swap, and expulsion of the most loved daughter is the death of King Lear, Cordelia, Regan, and Goneril.  

The traceable origin of all four characters’ deaths are King Lear’s initial trust in Goneril and Regan and his lack of trust in Cordelia after she refuses to participate in the swap. King Lear did not make decisions based on what he already knew about his daughters. Then, he refused to listen to those he said he trusted and allowed his anger control him. This corrupted economic transaction caused their deaths. Lear did not stop to consider his actions until the consequences of it had already started. Although probably not as important as Lear’s economic transactions, everyone experiences forms of liquidity, swaps, and expulsions in their own lives even if they are not specifically titled as such. Lear caused this chaos as he did not make logical decisions. He did not consult with those he knew to trust and most importantly he did not consult his own knowledge. With our power, we need to ensure that we are using what we know and who we trust to make educated transactions. In the U.S., we are lucky enough to not have a king like in King Lear. We are able to vote to determine who gets more power that affects our lives. We can swap our votes for who we think will make extremely important transactions. Unlike Lear, we need to ensure we use all of our knowledge, resources, and beliefs when making all, and specifically these, decisions.

Shakespeare’s King Lear deals extensively with the theme of expulsion as depicted through characters like Cordelia, Kent, and King Lear himself and connects almost immediately with seemingly unconventional terms like swap and liquid. According to Investopedia, swap refers to an agreement between two or more parties exchange monetary value of an asset for another. As for liquid, the Oxford English Dictionary, defines the term as a material substance in that “condition (familiar as the normal condition of water, oil, alcohol, etc.) in which its particles move freely over each other,” and typically symbolizes renewals and rebirths- which tend to occur after certain expulsions.

Our first encounter with the expulsion of a character occurs as early as the first Act of the play, in which Cordelia’s refusal to flatter Lear with excessive proclamations of love results in her immediate disownment, disinheritance, and exile. This is is conveyed in Lear’s spiteful declaration:  “Cornwall and Albany, With my two daughters’ dowers digest this third; Let pride, which she calls plainness, marry her” (Act 1. Scene 1). By redistributing his land and wealth so that Goneril and Regan can consume Cordelia’s share, Lear is essentially swapping Cordelia’s rightful land over to her sisters. Even Lear’s trusted confidant, Kent, is banished from his service simply because he disagrees with Lear’s impulsive decision to punish Cordelia’s honesty and reward Goneril and Regan’s deceitfulness. 

Therefore, as the events unfold later on in the play, it is of no surprise that Goneril and Regan plot against Lear to diminish the remaining power that he holds. Their fight for control is first demonstrated in the dispute between Lear and Goneril about the disorderly conduct of his men and is later exacerbated when Regan gets involved. Together, both sisters seek to condescend and attack Lear from both sides as they argue over the amount of men he should be allowed:  

Goneril: Here, me, my lord. 

What need you five-and-twenty, ten, or five,

To follow in a house where twice so many 

Have a command to tend you?

Regan: What need one? (Act 2, Scene 4)

It is clearly evident that by allying together on their efforts to reduce Lear’s authority, Goneril and Regan leave him no choice but to remain dependent on them. Later on in this scene, Lear must face an ultimatum: either live without his men or be cast out from both Goneril and Regan’s estates. Unfortunately for Lear, this swap of power for shelter pushes him closer to the edge of madness. Thus, when faced with this ultimatum, Lear lashes out ruefully against his daughters and goes as far to refer to Goneril and Regan as “unnatural hags” and promises: “I will have such revenge on you both, that all the world shall- I will do such things- what they are yet, I know not but they shall be the terrors of the earth!” (Act 2, Scene 4). After this declaration, Lear hastily exits because he would rather walk the heaths than swap his power for shelter, and as a result, Regan orders that Lear ought to be locked out of her estate.

That being said, while the theme of expulsion is deeply connected to the consequences of swapping land from one rightful person (Cordelia) to two less deserving people (Regan and Goneril), liquidity seems to play an essential role in understanding the ways in which Lear’s toxic tyrannical demeanour is cast out and replaced by a more sympathetic perspective. If we consider the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of liquid alongside the storm that is raging on after Lear has been cast out from Regan’s estate, then we might better understand the symbolic cleansing that Lear undergoes as a dynamic character. According to the 2006 film adaption of King Lear, the storm that Lear is forced to endure is depicted as a rainstorm. Rain often connotes despair and rejection, but has also conveyed emotional cleansing and renewals of both the mind and soul which often appear in various works of literature (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, etc.).

It is interesting to note that Lear’s immediate reaction to the storm is to refer to it as both contentious and pitiless, almost as if it were a manifestation of the injustices that he has suffered at the hands of Goneril and Regan. While the storm is indeed tumultuous, I believe its function is paramount to the change Lear undergoes as a dynamic characters in two ways. The first being that it strips him of his entitlement and forces him to endure the storm as a human being as opposed to a former king. This is clearly evident when Lear refers to himself as a slave to the storm and continues to berate himself as: “A poor, infirm, weak, and despis’d old man.” The storm forces Lear to concede that he is, in fact, not at all powerful nor can he always have or be in control. That being said, Lear’s exposure to the lack of protections that his subjects have endured during his reign forces him to recognise his own shortcomings as a ruler, which is evident in his declaration: 

“Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,

That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,

How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,

Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you

From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en

Too little care of this! (Act 3, Scene 4)

The monstrous storm brings out a kinder, gentler side of Lear that we have never encountered before and forces him to challenge his perspective both as a member of the ruling class and as a father. In fact, once reunited with Cordelia in Act 5, Lear prefers to avoid confrontation with Regan and instead spend the rest of his days with Cordelia, living jovially and at peace with one another- even if it means living in confinement. Lear’s passivity is certainly uncharacteristic of him, but it’s not at all surprising that this ease of heart occurs once the storm has passed.