QUESTION: What are your thoughts on the current economic and banking crisis?

MARY: I’ve lost my faith in banks and in bankers. And I never would have thought that could happen. I don’t want to give them my money. I don’t know what to think. Maybe my bed is a safer place to put my money.

JULIA: I think that’s true. And it’s happened so fast, like everything else has.  When I was a kid there were small town —

MARY: Right. Small-town banks.

JULIA: They were bank-owned, not by some conglomerate you never heard of, a string of banks. My father started a business because Wade Hallowell, the president of the bank, knew him and trusted him and said, “OK, I’m going to take a flyer on you, kid.” And my father said he didn’t think he would have worked as hard if he hadn’t known that Wade Hallowell would come and put it to him if he didn’t make the money back. Those relationships are long gone. The jump from that to, say, John Thain, who fortunately was ousted from his job last month, is just mind blowing to me. How fast we’ve come to this! I remember sitting next to Thain when he just took over the job at Merrill Lynch and he seemed like a nice enough fellow. And then I’m sitting here reading about his $85,000 rug and the bonus that he demanded, that he didn’t earn. All these guys just turned out to be sort of petty thugs in a lot of ways. It is shocking.

MARY:  There are so many kinds of bankers now. There are so many kinds of vehicles. There are so many ways to invest that have grown topsy over the last ten years. And nobody seems to have regulated a lot of them.

JUDITH: I never thought I’d see the demise of newspapers. My breakfast goes faster because there’s less newspaper, and it scares me to death that one day there won’t be any. It’s not totally the fault of the economic crisis, although that has certainly contributed to it. Not only because I’ve been with them professionally, but because it doesn’t seem right to start the day without finding out what’s going on in the world. We’re going to be dependent on people who are not known and edited. Goodness knows the newspaper business isn’t perfect, but it scares me that unedited news is going to be the only way we’re going to find out what’s going on in the world.

JULIA: I totally agree with Judith. That’s a real personal loss as a reader, not just as a writer. It’s sort of like Mary saying she doesn’t have faith in banks. That loss of faith is sort of an emotional thing. This is equally emotional. I don’t want to get my news from bloggers and whomever all the time. But on a more personal level, this has happened so fast. My good friend, Michael Boodro, was until recently the editor-in-chief of Martha Stewart Living. Well, they just slashed their budget in half, let him go as part of that deal and, of course, made him a scapegoat, when he’s certainly not responsible for the fact that their ad pages were down by 20 percent. But, he said to me a few weeks ago, when he saw the handwriting on the wall, he said, “You know, I knew that print-media journalists were all about to become dinosaurs, but I didn’t know it would happen this fast.” And sure enough, two friends of mine at Domino lost their jobs when the magazine was closed. And that had been a magazine that started with real promise at Condé Nast and it was a success. And a month ago a friend of mine at Cottage Living, which closed, wrote and said, “Do you have any idea where I can go to get a job?” And I didn’t have a thing to say to her.