Un-Scroogelike

Reports from Wall Street and Washington, starring inside trades and inside tips, make money managers sound like latter-day Scrooges who spurn any value that cannot be entered in a ledger.

Not necessarily so, according to a letter that a friend received recently, unsolicited, from the credit union at the University of Southern California. Its records, it said, showed that our friend lived in an area that was hard hit by the Oct. 1 earthquake. Since paying for repairs and getting through the holiday season might leave the season a financial shambles, the letter said, our friend could skip the December payment on an automobile loan, perhaps even January if necessary.

We can’t read the mind of Isaac Barrocas, general manager of USC’s credit union, but we can see him sitting in the office one day, thinking of human values that transcend greenbacks and wondering whether any customers were in trouble. Obviously there are money managers and there are money managers. We’ll take the special kind that wastes his time rummaging through files for names of customers in Whittier and Pasadena and other hard-hit areas so that he can offer to help out.