Too Small to Fail: How My Baby Girl Explains the Current Financial Crisis

My little girl (8 months old) has developed a behavior that I like to call “baby deathwish.” If she sees something she wants, she lunges for it. It doesn’t matter where that object of desire is, or what lies between her and her goal. In the morning she sits facing me lying against my bent knees, and invariably spies my alarm clock four feet away. She tries to reach it, but her tiny arms don’t go four feet. So she hurls herself towards it, heedless of the precipitous drop off the side of the bed and the hard wooden floor. Restraining her can be surprisingly difficult. Similarly, she will try to launch herself off the couch and will someday succeed in toppling her high chair with the imbalance, again utterly heedless of the long drop to the wooden floor. So far, she has not worked out the principle that crying a lot may get me to bring the desired item towards her.

Now, we could teach baby deathwish not to do this. All we have to do is let her fall on her head. If we allow her to fall, she will likely learn to stop launching herself off precipices. If we pursue this laissez-floor attitude, she will stop this behavior… one way or another. For reasons that I hope do not need explaining, we do not employ this strategy. Let’s just say she’s “too small to fail.”

My baby does not just provide an example of risk-taking without consequences. She also resembles the investment banker in other ways. We are amazed at almost any sign of real sentience, and praise her for almost everything she does well, even making poop in her diaper. We then clean up her diaper, and her, without complaint.

Our greatest current desire as parents is to see her start crawling, then running, making all of these behaviors even more dangerous.

Then there are the sublime messes which are also totally predictable, but we do not prevent. This past week, she has discovered that it is fun to blow bubbles through her solid food while eating in order to form a Jackson-Pollock-like spray pattern. At the end of the feeding, the area around her rembles a binomial distribution of splattered puree – one concentration in front of where I am sitting, another in front of whatever other thing caught her attention the most. There is as little subtlety in investing in a bull market. So long as the input (puree du anything) is sufficiently endless, there will be waste. Once again, we are unwilling to teach our baby the value of food by limiting the available amount to that which she can use.

So that’s it. Our financial sector has had all the self-control of an infant, and the government has coddled it in exactly the same manner. Well, I think the diaper genie is finally full. Target is out of pampers , and there’s no more Boudreaux’s Buttpaste in the tube. It’s time to let the financial sector go head-bonk. The problem is a credit crisis, and the government would do better to set up its own bank than finance these Wall Street bankers who refuse to lend money. It’s time for adults to step in here.