A Riff on the Rift

Here's the thing about that generational rift in Yankee fandom, Duque. 

There was this thing called the Great Depression. Pretty rough time, from what I've heard. So the government put in these safeguards, of sorts, to try and stop it from happening again. Glass-Steagall was one of those, kept banks from screwing with people's money by getting into the markets and being investment banks along with being a regular bank.

Then move ahead to many years later. Lots of people who were in government and banking and Wall Street...heck, even the common Joes from the Great Depression were all dead or really old and out of the money game entirely. And people in the financial industry and their goons in Congress started saying, hey, we don't need no stinking Glass-Steagall or any of that old crapula. It's holding us down. We could be making lots more money RIGHT NOW and ratcheting up the paper economy. So the younger types, who only knew the Depression as stories from their drooling family members and some statistics in a book, dismantled those safeguards because what happened before could never happen again...everybody involved was too damn smart and sophisticated now.

And then there was 2007 and 2008, and the housing derivatives collapse, and the Great Recession (which we've really never recovered from) and the ever-moving bubble machine in one market after another. A couple of guys in Congress even said maybe we should bring back that Glass-Steagall stuff, after all. Maybe those old farts actually knew something.

Duque, you and I and our already slightly shrinking pool of gray-haired types lived through the stupid. We know how it happens. It's always, "But this is our chance! We have to do it this year or we never will! Bet the farm, NOW...or better yet, ransack the farm and trade it away!" Win now, whatever it takes, the future is unknown, we have to make our move, yadda yadda yadda.

Bullshit. We've seen that movie. The millennials haven't. They think what we lived through can't happen again.

They're wrong.

For whatever his reasons, Cashman didn't scuttle Glass-Steagall. Good for him. At some point, there's more than today at stake. In a couple of years, we'll be free of some long-term contracts and have, it looks like, some interesting young players to start adding to the mix even before those older players are gone.

Jeter, Bernie, Jorge, Mo, Andy. We need the next group of them, it's been too long already. The kids we didn't trade today are our Social Security. Millennials can't foresee the day they might need it because...well, I couldn't either when I was their age. But life teaches you things. 

Hats off to Cash. Way to go on this one.