Two headlines sat next to each other this morning and I couldn’t stop reading them as one story. Bloomberg has Goldman set to lead Wall Street’s $19 billion stock-trading haul this earnings season. Reuters has Ajay Banga saying the World Bank is in talks with dozens of countries about crisis aid, somewhere between 30 and 40 of them, with figures up to $100 billion floating around.

Same quarter, same shock. A trading desk makes money when prices move a lot and clients are nervous enough to pay for the privilege of repositioning. A country that borrowed in dollars, imports its fuel, and now watches the 10-year sit above 5% experiences that same movement as a bill. Volatility doesn’t disappear. It gets sold on one end and invoiced on the other.

I don’t think anyone involved is doing anything wrong, which is what makes it tidy and uncomfortable. The banks are providing a service. The bonuses that Bloomberg has headed for records are what a functioning intermediary earns in a month when everybody needs to hedge something. And the aid talks are what a functioning lender of last resort does. It’s just that one of them gets announced as a quarter and the other as a rescue.

Meanwhile Barron’s says investors are biting their nails at record highs, and Yahoo has a piece on “debt crisis chatter,” which I’d bet is mostly French. Nail-biting in New York and a negotiating table in Washington aren’t the same anxiety. One is about a number going down, and the other is about whether a government can pay for diesel in November.

I wonder which one the S&P is actually pricing.

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