fic: there's a trick with a dragon i'm learning to do, H/D, with thinkery
Reveals went up on hds_beltane a while ago and I have come to the conclusion that the more I try to write the thinkery that goes with this year's fic, the more it reads like rambling. So. One last shot before I give up on the thinkery part and just post the story header.
title: there's a trick with a dragon i'm learning to do
author: curiouslyfic
pairing: Harry/Draco, * Severus/Viktor Krum *
warnings: * none *
w/c: ~20k
disclaimer: Transformative work of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series.
a/n: Written for chantefable for hds_beltane 2012. Most further notes in the thinkery and spoilery for the fic, but this fic made possible by rockstar efforts from crazyparakiss, kinky_kneazle, and lordhellebore, and the fabulousness of fest mod thisgirl_is. Title based on a line from a collection by poet Michael Ondaatje via an SGA fic by laceymcbain.
summary: Harry’s live-in’s a workaholic being courted - harassed - by an array of weeping minions and an assortment of overprivileged pricks. Harry’s bloody portraits are being harassed - courted - by, well, an assortment of things Harry doesn’t even want to think about. Harry’s had a long week already and so far, his weekend’s not looking much better. At least he can say with certainty there's no place like home...
[Right. So. Thinkery time.]
Right. So. Thinkery time.
This fic owes a tremendous debt to Andrew Ross Sorkin's Too Big To Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System -- and Themselves, Draco's storyline in particular, and to fundamental tenets of both post-WWII state finance policy and contemporary international financial systems.
Was that paragraph jargon? No worries, let me break it down.
Sorkin's book is pretty decent narrative of the bank failures behind what we now call the Global Financial Crisis, which really kicked into high gear with the failure/bankruptcy filing of Lehman Bros, one of the major Wall Street banks. Lehman faced a situation not unlike the one Draco lays out for Harry, assuming the bit about the Gringotts dragon serves as the failure of Bear Sterns (another mid-sized Wall Street bank, which went tits up in the Spring of 2008) and that the fallout of the dragon bit serves as Wall Street's increasing reliance on derivatives like credit default swaps, which are basically a combination of bad gambling and shell game investment.
Investor confidence and the need for liquidity to maintain existing credit levels, though, that's the same. So if you read the fic and you got that part, congrats, you're now doing better than big chunks of my economics class. :)
The really huge debt of Draco's storyline to Sorkin's book, though, comes from a specific story about an early attempt to save Lehman Bros from itself. Months before the bank filed for bankruptcy -- the largest filing in U.S. history, so arguably the largest filing in history; they had $600 billion in assets on their books and still couldn't cover their debts -- the head of Lehman and U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson talked about a plan that might boost investor confidence enough to let Lehman cover their ass.
That plan involved pitching U.S. investor Warren Buffett, known as the "Oracle of Omaha" for his ability to back winners, on the prospect of investing in Lehman. Paulson couldn't legally organize anything but fuck yeah, he was interested in how it went down, but at the end of the day, the ball was squarely in Buffett's court.
It, uh, didn't go as planned. You can read more about where it went wrong -- and how -- here (with an interesting epilogue here), but basically, Buffett didn't like the numbers presented and he really didn't like the fact that Lehman wasn't willing to meet him halfway.
So for a time, Warren Buffett held the fate of the U.S. economy in his hands. I wonder if he knew it.
Draco's busy schedule owes a debt to Hank Paulson's schedule September 17, 2008, two days after Lehman filed: Paulson logged 69 phone calls at his office between 7:10 a.m. and 8:55 p.m. -- constant throughout the day -- and he took so many calls on his cell that it's now in the Smithsonian archives. He was a crazy busy cat, is what I'm saying.
The, uh, economics and politics and political economy (politics as determined by economics) of the story are all reasonably accurate, with adjustments in timeline to account for the smaller size I'm projecting for the international Wizard banking system and the subsequent lower trade volume they'd have.
Ministry financial policy -- the bits about deficit spending, stimulus, and reconstruction -- are taken from post-WWII European economics, because fml, apparently despite trying to sleep my way through economics history, I learned shit anyway.
The bit about how deficit spending should be stimulating for the economy is straight-up John Maynard Keynes, who said a lot of shit but who's probably most famous for pointing out that if the economy is crapping out because people aren't buying things, giving them extra money to buy shit should get things moving again.
The bit about "tragic monetarism" is a shout-out/fuck you to Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of economic theory, who defined the principles underlying modern capitalism and basically laid the theoretical framework for, like, disaster capitalism and the things that sparked the Occupy Wall Street protests and fucking austerity and Thatcherism and shit. Wealth funneling upwards, fuck the poor.
Uh. Sorry. Not a Friedman fan.
So I think that's probably it for information acknowledgements, though I should probably include a tip of the hat to The Atlantic, The Economist, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post for their coverage of last summer's U.S. debt ceiling "crisis" and the subsequent credit rating downgrade, all of which gave me a worst-case scenario for the Ministry, i.e. reasons behind Kingsley's non-smiles and an explanation for why the Ministry chose to ignore the signs things were going bad for as long as they did.
The distinctions between cyclical deficits (putting shit like emergency car repairs or wedding gifts on credit because you're temporarily short but have reason to believe you'll pay off the one-time cost) and structural deficits (putting shit like groceries or gas on credit because you never have the money but you hope you will) round out the Ministry's position: cyclical deficit for economic recovery/stimulus, which turned into structural deficits at some point and got away from them.
Oh, and investopedia explained with reasonable clarity the terms and distinctions I needed to check.
chantefable set this fic in motion by asking for politics, economics, and Machiavelli -- three of my very favourite things -- and kinky_kneazle kept me writing it when I got frustrated. crazyparakiss was all-round awesome with encouragement and feedback, and she and lordhellebore went over the economics in the story for me to make sure they were reasonably clear for non-econ nerds.
So that's not the promised/teased bibliography but I think it does the trick.
title: there's a trick with a dragon i'm learning to do
author: curiouslyfic
pairing: Harry/Draco, * Severus/Viktor Krum *
warnings: * none *
w/c: ~20k
disclaimer: Transformative work of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series.
a/n: Written for chantefable for hds_beltane 2012. Most further notes in the thinkery and spoilery for the fic, but this fic made possible by rockstar efforts from crazyparakiss, kinky_kneazle, and lordhellebore, and the fabulousness of fest mod thisgirl_is. Title based on a line from a collection by poet Michael Ondaatje via an SGA fic by laceymcbain.
summary: Harry’s live-in’s a workaholic being courted - harassed - by an array of weeping minions and an assortment of overprivileged pricks. Harry’s bloody portraits are being harassed - courted - by, well, an assortment of things Harry doesn’t even want to think about. Harry’s had a long week already and so far, his weekend’s not looking much better. At least he can say with certainty there's no place like home...
[Right. So. Thinkery time.]
Right. So. Thinkery time.
This fic owes a tremendous debt to Andrew Ross Sorkin's Too Big To Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System -- and Themselves, Draco's storyline in particular, and to fundamental tenets of both post-WWII state finance policy and contemporary international financial systems.
Was that paragraph jargon? No worries, let me break it down.
Sorkin's book is pretty decent narrative of the bank failures behind what we now call the Global Financial Crisis, which really kicked into high gear with the failure/bankruptcy filing of Lehman Bros, one of the major Wall Street banks. Lehman faced a situation not unlike the one Draco lays out for Harry, assuming the bit about the Gringotts dragon serves as the failure of Bear Sterns (another mid-sized Wall Street bank, which went tits up in the Spring of 2008) and that the fallout of the dragon bit serves as Wall Street's increasing reliance on derivatives like credit default swaps, which are basically a combination of bad gambling and shell game investment.
Investor confidence and the need for liquidity to maintain existing credit levels, though, that's the same. So if you read the fic and you got that part, congrats, you're now doing better than big chunks of my economics class. :)
The really huge debt of Draco's storyline to Sorkin's book, though, comes from a specific story about an early attempt to save Lehman Bros from itself. Months before the bank filed for bankruptcy -- the largest filing in U.S. history, so arguably the largest filing in history; they had $600 billion in assets on their books and still couldn't cover their debts -- the head of Lehman and U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson talked about a plan that might boost investor confidence enough to let Lehman cover their ass.
That plan involved pitching U.S. investor Warren Buffett, known as the "Oracle of Omaha" for his ability to back winners, on the prospect of investing in Lehman. Paulson couldn't legally organize anything but fuck yeah, he was interested in how it went down, but at the end of the day, the ball was squarely in Buffett's court.
It, uh, didn't go as planned. You can read more about where it went wrong -- and how -- here (with an interesting epilogue here), but basically, Buffett didn't like the numbers presented and he really didn't like the fact that Lehman wasn't willing to meet him halfway.
So for a time, Warren Buffett held the fate of the U.S. economy in his hands. I wonder if he knew it.
Draco's busy schedule owes a debt to Hank Paulson's schedule September 17, 2008, two days after Lehman filed: Paulson logged 69 phone calls at his office between 7:10 a.m. and 8:55 p.m. -- constant throughout the day -- and he took so many calls on his cell that it's now in the Smithsonian archives. He was a crazy busy cat, is what I'm saying.
The, uh, economics and politics and political economy (politics as determined by economics) of the story are all reasonably accurate, with adjustments in timeline to account for the smaller size I'm projecting for the international Wizard banking system and the subsequent lower trade volume they'd have.
Ministry financial policy -- the bits about deficit spending, stimulus, and reconstruction -- are taken from post-WWII European economics, because fml, apparently despite trying to sleep my way through economics history, I learned shit anyway.
The bit about how deficit spending should be stimulating for the economy is straight-up John Maynard Keynes, who said a lot of shit but who's probably most famous for pointing out that if the economy is crapping out because people aren't buying things, giving them extra money to buy shit should get things moving again.
The bit about "tragic monetarism" is a shout-out/fuck you to Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of economic theory, who defined the principles underlying modern capitalism and basically laid the theoretical framework for, like, disaster capitalism and the things that sparked the Occupy Wall Street protests and fucking austerity and Thatcherism and shit. Wealth funneling upwards, fuck the poor.
Uh. Sorry. Not a Friedman fan.
So I think that's probably it for information acknowledgements, though I should probably include a tip of the hat to The Atlantic, The Economist, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post for their coverage of last summer's U.S. debt ceiling "crisis" and the subsequent credit rating downgrade, all of which gave me a worst-case scenario for the Ministry, i.e. reasons behind Kingsley's non-smiles and an explanation for why the Ministry chose to ignore the signs things were going bad for as long as they did.
The distinctions between cyclical deficits (putting shit like emergency car repairs or wedding gifts on credit because you're temporarily short but have reason to believe you'll pay off the one-time cost) and structural deficits (putting shit like groceries or gas on credit because you never have the money but you hope you will) round out the Ministry's position: cyclical deficit for economic recovery/stimulus, which turned into structural deficits at some point and got away from them.
Oh, and investopedia explained with reasonable clarity the terms and distinctions I needed to check.
chantefable set this fic in motion by asking for politics, economics, and Machiavelli -- three of my very favourite things -- and kinky_kneazle kept me writing it when I got frustrated. crazyparakiss was all-round awesome with encouragement and feedback, and she and lordhellebore went over the economics in the story for me to make sure they were reasonably clear for non-econ nerds.
So that's not the promised/teased bibliography but I think it does the trick.