My best guess:  Greece shuffles away on a busy weekend night.  Say, on a Saturday during the middle of a summer Olympics event that attracts record-breaking viewership.  As the gun sounds on some nail-biting relay race, the government would announce that any Euros withdrawn from Greek banks would be now be stamped or perforated to signify “neo-euros,” or “neo-drachmas.”

Greek leaders may have power over the army, the navy and price subsidies for feta cheese and olives. But the government has no tools to stop a retail run on the banks.  So far, perhaps 30% of deposits have been withdrawn, mostly by higher income people who’ve figured out, by wire transfer or speed boat, how to shuttle their savings to Switzerland, Germany, or even Turkey.  But the average Greek has trusted in the euro.  When the bank runs begin, I’m afraid the fable is over.  If the announcement takes place on an Olympic night, it would be an ironic nod to Greece’s role in history. 

I’ve been a euro skeptic since 1999 when my book Market Shock argued that countries such as Ireland and Italy do not belong in the same monetary zone.  I don’t even think they belong in the same musical performance.  Irish tenors don’t sound good singing Verdi, and Italian tenors make a mess of Danny Boy.  The moans of the savaged Greek middle class will sound even more sad, cacophonous, and harder to bare.

And while the number of undergraduate slots is fixed, the number of students applying is rising.  That shortage drives prices higher, and federal aid policies add a turbo-booster to that trajectory.  Better to use government funds to help colleges expand and provide more room to accept more students.  (As schools like Stanford and Harvard post more classes on the Internet, online education will relieve some pressure.) 

Andrew Carnegie endowed over 2,500 libraries across the world.  Why don’t some of our plutocrats today endow new colleges?          

Here’s the PBS TV transcript: 

The vaudeville comic Henny Youngman had a classic routine.  Someone asks him, “how’s your wife?” He replies, “compared to what?” That’s what I ask when someone moans about college costs.  What is a college these days?  Sure, it’s professors, backpacks and occasional keg parties.  But increasingly, it’s also fitness centers that rival anything used by the U.S. Olympic team.  Colleges spend enormous sums on lifestyle promises.  Now, I’m all for fitness centers, but I wonder whether families will ever be able to afford the kind of rolling-hilled country club campus that shows up on brochures, looking like Faber College from the movie “Animal House.”

We may need to redefine our expectations for what colleges look like and who runs them.  In the past 20 years, colleges have gone on a hiring spree of administrators—up about 40 percent; actual classroom professors, just 18 percent.  Pay for administrators has jumped 70 percent faster than for professors.  What are these people doing?  Maybe they’re processing drop-out forms, because 60 percent of students fail to graduate in four years.  The old model of colleges might have worked in keg party comedies, but nowadays, the laughs are on parents and young people.

Some inside dope:  the show is broadcast in the same studio as The Price is Right, and so the  the game show logo shows up on every backstage door.  It would be fascinating to do a surprise switch.  Bill would host his edgy show before the apple-cheeked Price is Right crowd, and Drew Carey would give away refrigerators to the wild-eyed Maher fans looking for a protest march. 

I am worried that an aversion to risk has crept into the psyches of young people. Perhaps it’s from overprotective parents who drive their Little Leaguers to first base in the minivan. Or maybe it’s a lingering cloud of hopelessness despite the “hope and change” bumper stickers. But it’s not healthy.

And governments make matters worse by setting up roadblocks. Almost one in four jobs requires a permit from a state agency. And most are not brain surgery! Heck, they’re not even tree surgery. Say you want to move to Alabama to become a manicurist, you’ll first need 750 hours of training. 

We need to encourage mobility, not stagnation. Sometimes the first rung on an economic ladder is hanging just above your parents’ sofa-bed.

Listen to the commentary here.

What has squashed the dim sum miracle? Put simply, a few years ago only a few brave or foolish Western business leaders had the nerve to step up to a microphone and speak the truth: “We can’t make money here.” In 2010 GE’s CEO Jeffrey Immelt was scolded by his own company for complaining that GE couldn’t take any profits out of China: “I am not sure…they want any of us to win, or any of us to be successful.” China’s tax, trade, and regulatory mandarins prop up terribly high hurdles for non-China management, unless those companies kowtow to aggressive policy demands for technology transfer, reinvestment and financial subsidies for Chinese competitors.

That was bad enough. But now I’m hearing something more worrisome: Chinese companies complain that they too can’t turn a profit in the Middle Kingdom. With rapidly rising wages and outrageous favoritism to the relatives of Party members, Chinese management and Chinese capitalists are wringing their hands and looking for escape routes. To tamp down riots and suicides, provincial leaders have just catapulted the minimum wage by 35 percent in Henan and 23 percent in Sichuan. This is not leadership; it’s fear.  China’s trade balance flopped to a negative $31.5 billion in February (the February crater may be exaggerated by Chinese New Year partying and other ephemera). The elites are already packing up their sons and sending them far away to Harvard, Stanford and Cambridge. Those boys — the princelings – are just the leading edge.

Here’s the irony for foreign exchange traders. For years, U.S. Treasury officials have urged China’s government to let the Yuan rise. Since 2005 the Yuan has grudgingly climbed about 23 percent. But if China’s finances are stumbling and elites are clawing to find the exits, a free-floating Yuan might actually sink, as frustrated Chinese try to convert their Yuan into Dollars, Pounds and Euros.

Back in 1949, as Mao marched into the Forbidden City, U.S. politicians beat themselves on the heads wondering, “Who lost China?” Now Chinese are worried that they’ll be left wondering, “Who lost China’s economic miracle?”

Last month I was addressing an electric utility convention, when a women engineer from Florida asked what her stay-at-home 20-something college grad should do.  He can’t find work in Cocoa Beach, along the state’s Space Coast.  I asked: “Does he have a mortgage?”

 ”No.”

“A spouse?”

“No.”

“Kids.”

“No, Joshy just graduated a few years ago.”

“Then tell Joshy to grab a cheap flight on Southwest to Fargo, North Dakota.  He’ll have to change planes and hop the overnight Greyhound in Omaha, but the unemployment rate is just 3.3 percent.  Joshy will nab a job right as soon as the captain turns off the fasten seatbelt light.”

I also asked if Joshy liked skiing or maple syrup, since Vermont’s jobless rate is just over 5 percent.  I don’t know whether Joshy will take my advice, but his generation seems stuck in front of Xboxes.   Even bicycle sales are lower than they were in 2000.  This generation is literally going nowhere.

Read the Nrw York Times essay here.

The timing is terrible.  In a few years, baby boomers will be looking to dump stocks in order to get steady retirement income from bonds.  We should be cutting dividend tax rates to keep boomers in the market, not shove them out.   In a 2008 radio commentary on NPR, I pointed this out, as I did in my 1999 book Market Shock.  Here’s the NPR transcript, and a link, if you’d like to hear my silky but over-caffeinated baritone.

Todd Buchholz: Ah, the boomers. It’s always the boomers. Their music, their nostalgia, their neuralgia. Those 76 million boomers, the generation that shouted, “Hell no, we won’t go,” is shouting it again. But they don’t mean Vietnam. They mean: “we’re not dying. And if someday we do pass away, well, we’re going to look great because we’re pumped up with Botox, breast implants and every antioxidant we can squeeze into a soy-milk latte.”

People who retired in 1950 on average lived another 12 years. Now that number has doubled. And when a baby boomer couple retires, odds are at least one of them will be smacking tennis balls into her 90s.

Which brings us to dividends. Serious scholars warn that we are careening toward a stock market crash in 2011, when the boomers start hitting age 65. Why? Because retiring boomers will need a steady income, beyond what they snatch from the Social Security pyramid scheme.

They will sell their stocks and jump into bonds, which will pay them a steady stream of income. But that may not be so good for the rest of us who would like to hang onto our equities.

How can we avoid this fearsome future? By keeping dividend taxes low.

Dividends can give boomers the regular stream they need to keep paying for their Pilates classes. Since 2003, dividends payments have climbed over 12 percent per year. With a low 15 percent dividend tax, companies pay out more cash.

But if Congress jacks up taxes on dividends, well, boomers will more likely dump their stocks, grab those bonds instead and go off to pasture dancing to that great boomer icon James Brown: “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.”

Of course, the rest of us will end up holding the old bag.

Long before Donald Trump’s “Apprentice,” Billy Crystal starred in the movie “Mr. Saturday Night.” Crystal plays a crotchety TV host who chews out his staff: “You’re fired! You’re fired!” One guys squeaks, “I don’t work here.” Crystal says, “You’re hired. Now you’re fired! Get outta here!”

Americans aren’t shy about firing their president when the economy flounders. That should worry President Obama. Today the jobless rate is 8.5 percent and drifting lower. But the American people threw out George Herbert Walker Bush in 1992 with a 7.4 percent jobless rate — and he’d won the Gulf War.

Ronald Reagan got the American people to toss Jimmy Carter overboard. Reagan had a great  punchline, worthy of Billy Crystal. “Recession is when your neighbor loses his job. Depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his.”

Reagan, like Obama, inherited a lousy economy. But Reagan won a landslide re-election with patriotic ads that rang true because Reagan himself appeared like a nostalgic Uncle Sam poster. People felt his tax cuts worked. The slogan: “It’s morning in America.” What can Barack Obama say? “It’s 2012, but it’s not the end of the world!”

Obama’s got to do more than prove the Mayans wrong. He’s got to show he’s on the side of discouraged independents. That’s tough when you come off as cool as a be-bop riff. Obama told Rolling Stone he listens to a lot of Miles Davis. But Davis used to play with his back to the audience. A president is not a jazz virtuoso. Instead he’s our national talk show host — Johnny Carson, Brian Williams, Conan, Regis, Letterman and Leno rolled into one. Right now, when Americans see Barack Obama, they’re ready to change the channel.

Some Occupy protestors wave posters, whiskey and hypodermic needles. Others clutch iPads, Kindles and Nooks. I wonder how many are reading The Great Gatsby. After all, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s flawed, all-American tycoon earned his last stash of illicit loot trading shady corporate bonds, just like the villains of the Occupy story. With his champagne flutes and flapper-filled parties on Long Island, Gatsby sure looks like a poster-child for the lucky and boorish “1 percent” that the Occupy crowd despise. In Gatsby we read that “one thing’s sure and nothing surer, the rich get richer and the poor get – children.”

Fitzgerald was of course the literary star of the Roaring Twenties, a decade that didn’t turn out so well. In his 1925 novel, crass and thoughtless Daisy Buchanan crashes her car into a pedestrian, wrecking the lives of blameless bystanders. “They were careless people…they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money,” Fitzgerald charges. Four years later in 1929 – in real life — a financial market driven by slick stock traders careened out of control, crushing innocent victims and steering a million of them into soup lines across America. Pretty prescient, that “old sport” Fitzgerald.

With protestors and pundits decrying today’s skewed income distribution, it’s no surprise that Leonardo DiCaprio just began filming a new version of Gatsby, having already tackled flawed, megalomaniac kooks like Howard Hughes and J. Edgar Hoover. No surprise either that Fitzgerald takes a star turn in Woody Allen’s recent Midnight in Paris, Allen’s most successful film since the 1980s.

I was in Paris a few weeks ago and re-read Gatsby. On my flight back to New York, I watched Midnight in Paris. And then I hit the replay button and watched it again. I’ve never done that before, neither for Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai nor for Rocky IV. Both Gatsby and Midnight in Paris offer pointed lessons about today’s socio-economic plight. But I have to confess: Woody Allen’s got more to teach us than F. Scott Fitzgerald. Between these two, who is the cynic and who is the realist? Who sees demons where they don’t belong, and who holds out hope? I was surprised to find that Woody Allen – who’s been cracking mother-in-law jokes since the 1950s – does not take the easy way out. Fitzgerald does.

Yes, I know, Jay Gatsby tops Book magazine’s poll of literary experts as the greatest character in twentieth century American literature, and no kid can squeeze past high school without at least buying Fitzgerald Sparknotes. Fitzgerald is literature. Heck, Harold Bloom has published his notes on Gatsby. Meanwhile Woody Allen is an NYU dropout who started as a gag rider for Sid Caesar’s television show and starred in a movie in which he kidnaps a nose (Sleeper). But that’s the point: both Gatsby and Midnight in Paris are quintessentially American: in both a hero tries to remake himself while shrugging off the costume that others want him to wear.

Start by comparing Fitzgerald himself to Gil Pender, played in the film by Owen Wilson. Pender hops into a chauffeured yellow car (like Gatsby’s) with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, who are already pouring cocktails. They sweep Gil into a bubbly party where Cole Porter croons his own tunes at the piano. What a swell party this is!

In real life, Fitzgerald was an insecure writer, worried about his paycheck and his penis size. After selling some books he fled to Hollywood to write screenplays, becoming one of the guys Jack Warner was referring to when he called screenwriters “schmucks with Underwoods.” Fitzgerald cashed the studio paychecks and apparently blew the cash on gin. Gil Pender takes the opposite route. He’s already lapped up Hollywood success, written a bunch of lucrative but critically crappy movies, and hopes finally to write something worthy, a literary novel. In his words, “I’m a Hollywood hack who never gave real literature a shot.” He probably has a shelf full of Sparknotes, for he admits “I failed freshman English.”

In Midnight in Paris we see the story through Gil’s eyes, while in Gatsby we witness the display through Nick Carraway, an all-around good guy from the Midwest who witnesses the climbers and the upper-crust, all culpable in their disregard for the servants and the little people. The women seem especially bad, as Daisy acquires the “voice of money.” Likewise, Gil’s materialistic fiancée Inez accuses Gil of always taking “the side of the help. That’s why Daddy says you’re a communist.”

But here’s the mistake of Nick and Fitzgerald himself. They take the easy way out and blame the City and modernity. If only Nick and Gatsby had stayed in the wholesome west; if only Gatsby had stayed in North Dakota, no car would’ve crashed and no champagne would have corrupted common folk and twisted them into the despicable nouveau riche. Nick states that he’s “one of the few honest people that I have ever known,” and realizes that “this has been a story about the West,” not the East. It’s a story of innocents perverted by the big City, the jazz music, the high ball cocktails and the cosmopolitan high life. It doesn’t hurt this theme for Fitzgerald to throw in city-slicker, baseball-game-fixer, Meyer Wolfsheim, whose cufflinks are made from human molars. He’s Bernie Madoff without the good diction. In Gatsby, everyone would’ve have been better off in they had stayed out west, milking cows or shearing sheep in the barn.

This sounds like the same noble savage fantasy that’s made the rounds of literature ever since Jean Jacques Rousseau. The jungle and the farm are noble. The city and “civilization” are corrupting. Contrast Tarzan with Dorian Gray. In Tarzan immoral Londoners deceive the innocent ape-man, who knows more about honesty and decency than they. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, the urban and urbane Dorian is a selfish, immoral monster. Clearly, he’d spent too much time in the civilized world and not enough time swinging from the trees in the jungle. These depictions are fantasies, not just because they are written by fiction writers. They are fantasies because crime rates are lower among city-dwellers than among primitives. Murder rates in Europe today are about one-tenth as high as in 1300AD, when just about everyone lived on the farm. As societies have become more focused on trade, commerce, and capitalism, they have become less violent, not more. In ancient burial grounds for primitive people, between 20-50 percent of the skeletons appear to have been bludgeoned to death. Unfortunately, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby falls into the same fantasy camp as Tarzan.

Woody Allens’ Midnight in Paris takes a different tack, a more sophisticated and truer route to understanding good and evil. At first, when Gil goes back in time to the 1920s, Cole Porter does harken back to the purity of rural life. He sings of the young farmers who “desert the farm.” (Coincidentally, the song comes from a 1929 show called Fifty Million Frenchmen.) And Gil does yearn for a simpler life than one plagued by Los Angeles freeway traffic, know-nothing movie producers and dropped cell-phone calls. He’s a lost soul in 2011 and would rather retreat with the “Lost Generation” of Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Gertude Stein. When writers wrote in longhand or pecked away on typewriters that made a clickety-clack sound.

But as the film progresses, Gil learns that his nostalgic yearning for a simpler time is both common and ultimately pointless. While relishing the Lost Generation and the parlor of Gertrude Stein, he falls for a girl who assures him that “I’m from the 1920s, and I’m telling you the golden age is la Belle Epoque,” not the 1920s. Then together they magically ride by carriage to a restaurant where Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas are dabbing at their palettes. These Belle Epoque artists yearn for an ever earlier époque. Finally, Gil realizes that there is no golden age, that we’re imperfect people anywhere we live. Those simpler days in the past may not have been so blissful after all. He concludes that the present is “a little unsatisfying because life is unsatisfying.” Better to live in the present with novocaine, antibiotics and iPhones than to have your teeth pulled without anesthesia or to place a telephone call by tying two cans together with string.

While the Occupy protestors slam the rich and denounce capitalism, very few of them seem to be willing to give up their cell phones and all the other good things in modern life brought to you by the hard-driving, striving capitalists. In 1896, when Fitzgerald was born, life expectancy was just 47 years of age. Life was simpler but more deadly. Parents didn’t worry about snooping Facebook friends; they worried that their children were dying of cholera. Woody Allen once wrote a facetious commencement speech offering just two stark paths for humanity: “One leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.” Most of human history has marked by despair, hopelessness and near extinction. Whether by wisdom or sheer luck, we somehow tripped upon a third way, just about the time that F. Scott Fitzgerald was giving up on America.