Much more thoughtful and receptive than Barney Frank, but the ravening beast in me prefers Barney Frank.
Month: September 2009
Don’t Let the Door Hit Your Ass on the Way Out
So, we are now hearing the inevitable stories about how rich hedge fund type folks are fleeing the UK because they don’t like the plans to raise the marginal tax rate. (paid subscription required)
Seriously, let them go.
When all is said and done, when the people at the very top of the pyramid leave, and stop bidding up the prices of essential commodities, like shelter, you end up with a more livable city with a real middle class.
If you have concerns about the tax base, just implement a Tobin tax on financial transactions, and you get the money, with the bonus that you reduce speculative arbitrage.
The financial “masters of the world” do not create wealth, they extract it from the rest of us through fees on our 401(k)s and retirement funds.
The expansion of financial services in the past 30+ years have been parasitism, not improved productivity.
Hovercat
Elections Matter, White House Visitor Edition
So the White House will now release its visitor logs:
The first names posted to the White House Web site included health industry executives who met with the Obama administration to discuss his plan to overhaul health care.
The visitors, whose names were released in July, included Jeffrey Kindler, chairman and chief executive officer of New York-based Pfizer Inc., the world’s biggest drugmaker; New Brunswick, New Jersey-based Johnson & Johnson’s chairman and CEO William Weldon; and Stephen Hemsley, CEO and president of Minnetonka, Minnesota-based UnitedHealth Group Inc., the largest U.S. insurer by sales.
Other visitors included former Representative Billy Tauzin, now president of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America; Rich Umbdenstock, president of the American Hospital Association; and Karen Ignagni, president and CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans.
They are also releasing the Bush logs.
Gee, that was easy, why wasn’t this done 6 months ago? Why did they fight it until now?
Deep Thought
Demotivator Edition
Buh Bye
Diebold has just sold its voting machine unit for a $55 million loss.
It appears that they think that the touch screen voting machines are bad for the corporate bottom line.
Imagine that.
When you release a buggy and insecure voting system, people begin to wonder about the security of your ATM machines…..Hoocoodanode?
Kitteh vs. Potato
Sweet!
Or should I say, “Sweet Potato”, but I yam what I yam.
Yes, This Photo Needs to be Published
On the right is a photo of Lance Cpl. Joshua M. Bernard, 21, of New Portland, Maine, in happier times.
Below is a photo of him dying, after being struck by an RPG in Afghanistan.
Secretary of Defense of Robert Gates tried to strong arm the Associated press into not distributing the photograph.
It is Secretary Gates behavior, and not that of the Associated Press which is repulsive.
In Bob Gates world, or for that matter, in George W. Bush’s world, there must be no reporting of the realities of war.
Robert Capa War PhotosFollowing the Vietnam War, the defense establishment concluded that the only way to deal with bad press is to muzzle the press, hence the press restrictions in Grenada, the Gulf War, the invasions of Afghanistan, and Iraq.
In there world, there is no Bob Capa, documenting, and honoring soldiers at (top to bottom) Omaha Beach, or the Spanish civil War, of the invasion of France in 1940 (I think).
Far from being decision “appalling” and a breach of “common decency,” as secretary Gates suggests, these pictures reveal the sacrifices of our fighting men, and honor them.
People like Bob Gates want to bury this sacrifice, because in showing it for all to see, it will sometimes raise questions about whether that sacrifice is truly justified, and that is not acceptable in the minds of the old men who send the young men to die.
In addition to being a craven way to think, as it implies an unwillingness to support one’s own ideas, it is a slap in the face of the idea that it is civilians who decide when and where we fight, and when it is no longer worth it for us to fight.
This is about REMFs covering their own flabby, generally lily-white, asses.
Lance Corporal Bernard Doing Honor to Himself and the CorpsEconomics Update
Employment-population ratio, part time for economic reasons, and hours worked economic graph pr0n courtesy of Calculated RiskThe employment numbers are out, and you can look at the cup as half empty or half full, with non farm payroll falling by 217K, but unemployment (U3) spiking to 9.7%.
Note that the drop was less than the 276K in July (up from 246K following revisions), U6, the broadest measure of unemployment, and the one closest to the Depression era metric,* spiked to 16.8%.
Other than that, there was not a whole bunch of news, priobably because the upcoming Labor Day holiday, though Treasuries fell, and their yields rose, as a result of the job numbers, which also drove oil and the US dollar up, so the markets considered all this generally good news.
Minor, as I write this though, the FDIC bank closing page does not have any closings yet.
Normally, they like to move on 3 day weekends, it gives them more times to get things done.
*Though still more conservative than the 1930s version, so we are getting very close to the 25% rate at the height of the Depression.
Quote of the Day
1000 Words on the Stress Tests
As can plainly be seen, the unemployment rate has consistently been worse than the worst case stress test suggested by Timothy “Eddie Haskell” Geithner, where then banks all passed…Go figure.
On The Failure of Modern Economics
Krugman, on the failure of modern efficient market economics.
His basic thesis is that the belief in the infallible markets, which has been dashed repeatedly over the past 200 years, came back, and when juxtaposed with beautiful mathematics that were unfortunately completely disjoint from reality, we got our current situation.
Go read.
Friday Cat Blogging, and the Kitchen Sink
On Being Clueless
Mike “Mish” Shedlock writes about a lot of things, and he tends to come from the position of the “Treasury View”, which states, among other things, that deficit spending cannot hasten recovery, since it takes money from other things.
It should be noted that this theory has been widely, from Keynes and Galbraith to Friedman, has been discredited since the 1930s.
In his latest, he goes after Paul Krugman for writing in 2004 that the Bush tax cuts should be rolled back to help with the deficit, and for writing in 2009 that the stimulus package, and the resultant deficit, are not matters of immediate concern.
Of course, in 2004, we were dealing with a frothy economy, most notably in the housing market, though it was still 2 years off peak, while in 2009, we are suffering from the worst recession, and worst banking crisis since the depression, with the central bank unable to lower rates because they have run up against the zero bound.*
Of course, Mich has the answer:
Q. What’s different?
A: Politics: a democrat ultra-liberal is in the White House.
(If Barack Obama is ultra liberal, I’m Jayne Mansfield)
It’s complete crap like this that keeps him off my blogroll and my feed list (it went there via a link).
I do actually check out some sites that I disagree with vociferously some times, Mat Rodina comes to mind, but in those cases I get insight into a point of view, in that case Russian nationalism, that I would not otherwise understand.
There are people who are cogent writers who help me understand opposing views. Mike “Mish” Shedlock is not one of them.
*Zero bound: When rates cannot be lowered, because they are effectively 0%.
Quote of the Day
“He [Volker] scoffed at the notion that clamping down on banks, hedge funds, and other players would stifle ‘innovation.’ The only innovation that real people cared about for the previous twenty or thirty years, he said, was ‘the automatic teller machine.’”
(emphasis mine)
Repairing the Damage That Bush and His Evil Minions&trade Have Done
Barack Obama and Eric Holder have to go on a hiring binge for the DoJ’s Civil Rights Division.
It appears that after 8 years of forcing competent, experienced, and qualified people out, and replacing them with hacks who got their diplomas from the back of cereal boxes, they need to bring in some people who are not implacably hostile to the idea of Civil Rights.
Of course, some of these same hacks, most notably Hans “der Novotenfuhrer” von Spakovsky, who has built a career on keeping blacks from the ballot box, are claiming that this is “nakedly political,” but they think that the law, and for that matter facts, have a liberal bias, to paraphrase Stephen Colbert.
I Guess That They Are Morally Superior
Stephen is on the left, Melina is on the RightThe former assistant dean at Pat Robertson’s Regent University, formerly CBN University, and his wife, Stephen and Melina Mcpherson, pled guilty to sexually abusing three teenage sisters at Hope Haven Children’s Home.
Court records show the McPhersons manipulated the teens into submitting to fondling, kissing and other sex acts. They cited Bible verses that they said justified the abuse and, afterward, would pray together for God’s forgiveness.
It gets better, because he has already pled guilty to forcible sodomy and object sexual penetration on two of the girls.
I guess that the members of the religious right are just better than the rest of us.
Seriously, Tartuffe looks less and less like a comedy every day.
H/t Pam’s House Blend.
A New Term to Describe Our Economy
The shrill one, Paul Krugman, noted on Stephanopoulos’ show, that, “We’ve got a problem with terminology because we usually say either the economy is in recession or the economy is recovering. Either you’re in hell or you’re in heaven. And the trouble is we’re actually in purgatory.”
You can see it on the video at about -7:20. (it counts down, not up, and there is a 15 second ad)
This is a term which should stick. “Jobless recovery,” like the last 2-3 recoveries, sounds so benign.
On the Greatness of Franklin Delano Roosevelt
And guess what, it was not about bipartisanship or bringing in stake-holders:
….With the exception of the Emergency Banking Act of 1933 (which gave the president authority to close the nation’s banks and which passed the House of Representatives unanimously), the principal legislative innovations of the 1930s were enacted over the vigorous opposition of a deeply entrenched minority. Majority rule, as Roosevelt saw it, did not require his opponents’ permission.
When Roosevelt asked Congress to establish the Tennessee Valley Authority to provide cheap electric power for the impoverished South, he did not consult with utility giants like Commonwealth and Southern. When he asked for the creation of a Securities and Exchange Commission to curb the excesses of Wall Street, he did not request the cooperation of those about to be regulated. When Congress passed the Glass-Steagall Act divesting investment houses of their commercial banking functions, the Democrats did not need the approval of J. P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs or Lehman Brothers.
Word.
No go read the rest.
How Matt Taibbi Changed Goldman Sachs
It’s clear that he’s got them rattled, because they are trying to claim that hostility toward them is motivated by antisemitism, and their marionette, Timothy “Eddie Haskell” Geithner, has felt it necessary to deny that Treasury has a tilt toward Goldman.
The idea that either GS or the Treasury would actually feel defensive about this would have been ludicrous just a few months ago, but now everyone has heard of That great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity.*
It appears that he has them scared.
*Alas, I cannot claim credit for this bon mot, it was coined by the great Matt Taibbi, in his article on the massive criminal conspiracy investment firm, The Great American Bubble Machine.