In this case, he discusses financial reform with John Kellogg Hodgman, and he nails it.
I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry.
Year: 2009
These have Epic Fail Written All Over Them
In order to deal with budget issues, Mayor Daley of Chicago is considering selling its water system to private operators, and allowing them to charge whatever they want.
So he gets the money, and succeeding generations get the revenue loss and more expensive water.
Also, the state that has so many bad ideas that it gave us both Barry Goldwater and John McCain is looking to turn over operation of their prisons to a private firm.
This one is a little different though, because private prisons have already been tried, and failed, with some of the institutions going so far as to bribe judges to send children to them for minor crimes.
This will not end well.
Ford’s Unions Draw a Line in the Sand
There have been 6 plants so far that have rejected Ford’s request concessions on their contracts in order to match the terms at Chrysler and GM.
I understand it. If I were a worker on the Ford shop floor, and I had already made major concessions about 8 months ago, I’d want to make sure that the shareholders, including the Ford family, were wiped out before I would give anything more:
[UAW Local President Tom] Spears, who backed the contract changes, said in an interview. “The membership did not have a warm reception to additional contract modifications. We did this in ‘05, ‘07 and in February and now they’re back at us again.”
Of course, you will doubtless hear how these guys are being selfish and stupid, and have to give back more, but if you go through those same papers over the weeks before and after, you will find them defending the outrageous pay and bonus contracts as sacrosanct.
It’s kind of like the Droit de seigneur, where of the local lord in the old days had the right to deflower any new bride, only with the banks, we all get f#$@ed.
Signs of the Apocalypse: Wall Street Journal Edition
There it is in black and white, on the opinion page of the Rupert Murdoch owned Wall Street Journal, a we have an article that calls out the Rupert Murdoch owned Fox News for lack of journalistic integrity:
But no journalistic operation is better prepared to sing the tragedy of its own martyrdom than Fox News. To all the usual journalistic instincts it adds its grand narrative of Middle America’s disrespectful treatment by the liberal elite. Persecution fantasy is Fox News’s lifeblood; give it the faintest whiff of the real thing and look out for a gale-force hissy fit.
The author, Thomas Frank, had better hope that Rupert Murdoch does not read the OP/ED page of his flagship newspaper.
Luckily for Mr. Frank, I’d give 2 to 1 odds that he doesn’t.
A Level of Class that You Would Never See Out of Bush and His Evil Minions™
How will Fox call this Communist?
Or for that matter, his Dad, who instituted the shameful news blackout on the repatriation of the bodies of servicemen killed in action.
I have been disappointed about a lot of things, but his going to Dover Air Force Base to honor troops killed in Afghanistan is a demonstration of Menschlichkeit.
Bush Jr. spent his entire term avoiding things like this, because he’s a coward with no integrity.
The picture on the left is him saluting* the men as they are transported off the transport
Video below.
*I know that this is a picayune observation, as this is a genuine show of respect, but I thought civilians weren’t supposed to salute, could someone with military experience please inform me on the finer points?
Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert Tag Team Insurance
Stewart is more about the wankitude of the pundits and the political process, particularly Joe Lieberman, who gets absolutely savaged.
Colbert, on the other hand, goes more into the nuts and bolts of insurance, and describes getting screwed by insurance company execs as, “A pre-existing condition.”
Two Shot at LA Synagogue Parking lot
Just heard it on the radio.
No clue as to what is going on, but it was an underground lot for the synagogue, so whoever did this wasn’t just a crime of opportunity.
Details on Healthcare Bill
PDF link to house bill. (1990 pages)
I don’t read that fast, but here is a my summary based on reading the Wonk Room’s summaries:
- Bill won’t really phase in until 2013 (stupid, you need the benefits to become apparent sooner, rather than later).
- Adds a high risk pool for the time between the enactment and when the benefits kick in.
- Public option is not the “strong” (based on Medicare reimbursement) option.
- Requires large (how large?) employers to provide health insurance.
- Makes the medicare doctor reimbursement permanent, eliminating the annual reimbursement rate Kabuki in the Congress.
- Kills insurer antitrust exemption.
It’s better than anything likely to come out of the Senate.
Breaking: House Dems Announce Their Bill
Listening on CSPAN.
Pelosi is giving her House leadership is giving their press conference on the steps of the Capitol.
Pelosi:
10: 38 am — Will close “Doughnut Hole” on prescription drugs.
10: 39 am — Will have public option and end preexisting condition exclusion.
Hoyer:
10: 39 am — No specifics
Other folks:
10: 46 am — Carole Shea Porter brings out the “Petting Zoo”: a medicare recipient from New Hampshire to talk about Doughnut hole.
10: 49 am — Doughnut hole will be phased out between 2010 through 2019.
10: 52 am — More “petting zoo” with a small business owner.
James Clyburn:
10: 56 am — Just introduces Mary Joe Kilroy, who has MS.
10: 52 am — Changes on caps, pre-existing conditions, etc.
11:03 am — More petting zoo.
11:11 am — We’re just into soundbites now, bye.
D’oh!!!!
You know, when you are an insurance company, like Blue Cross/Blue Shield, it is not a good idea for you to include a request for your customers to contact their Congressman to oppose the public option along with a notice of a rate increase:
First, they learned their rates will rise by an average of 11 percent next year.
Next, they opened a slick flier from the insurer urging them to send an enclosed pre-printed, postage-paid note to Sen. Kay Hagan denouncing what the company says is unfair competition that would be imposed by a government-backed insurance plan. The so-called public option is likely to be considered by Congress in the health-care overhaul debate.
“No matter what you call it, if the federal government intervenes in the private health insurance market, it’s a slippery slope to a single-payer system,” the BCBS flier read. “Who wants that?”
Plenty of people, it turns out.
Indignant Blue Cross customers have rebelled against the insurer’s message, complaining that their premium dollars have funded such a campaign.
They’ve hit the Internet in a flurry of e-mails to friends and neighbors throughout the state. They’ve called Hagan’s office to voice support for a public option. They’ve marked through the Blue Cross message on their postcards to instead vouch support, then dropped them in the mail — in at least one case taped to a brick — to be paid on Blue Cross’ dime. Or dimes.
(emphasis mine)
As the saying goes, “ない愚かさはない薬です”.*
*Pronounced in Japanese, “baka ni tsukeru kusuri wanai”, which means, “There is no medicine for stupidity.”
Just When You Thought that the Karzai Family Could Not Get Any Sleazier
Would you buy a used car from this man?It turns out that Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of Hamid Karzai is multi-tasking something fierce, he’s not just a major figure in Afghan opium production, but he is also on the CIA payroll:
Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials.
The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home.
The article then notes that this “raises questions” about our current Afghanistan policy.
Well duh!!! The army fights the Taliban, which is supported to a large degree by opium money, and the CIA pays money to one of the biggest opium producers and smugglers in the region, which would imply that in some small part, the CIA is paying the Taliban to kill American troops.
Those boyz from Langley are such kidders.
Here’s a Shocker
People who got laid off from Boeing have better mental health than those who remained:
Would it surprise you to learn that survivors can suffer just as much, if not more, than colleagues who get laid off? It certainly surprised a team of academic researchers who embedded themselves at Boeing (BA) from 1996 to 2006, a tumultuous decade during which the company laid off tens of thousands. The results of the study will appear next year in a Yale University Press book called Turbulence: Boeing and the State of American Workers and Managers. “How much better off the laid-off were was stunning and shocking to us,” says Sarah Moore, a University of Puget Sound industrial psychology professor who is one of the book’s four authors. “So much of the literature talks about how dreadful unemployment is.”
…
In the greatest surprise of all, the researchers discovered that the people who had been laid off often were happier than those left behind. Many had new jobs, even if they didn’t always pay as well. Over and over, Moore says, average depression scores were nearly twice as great for those who stayed with Boeing vs. those who left. The laid-off were less likely to binge drink, often slept better, and had fewer chronic health problems.
(emphasis mine)
Boeing is claiming that morale has improved since they got the new company president it, but I kind of doubt that.
BTW, this kind of morale is one of the reasons that they are having the problems that they are having with the 787: When you outsource basic engineering to another firm, people in your firm, don’t make the extra effort to examine things that look funny to them.
Signs of the Apocalypse
A retired chairman of Citigroup writing to the New York Times suggesting that the Glass-Steagall separation between commercial and investment banks should be re-instituted post haste:
To the Editor:
Re “Volcker’s Voice, Often Heeded, Fails to Sell a Bank Strategy” (front page, Oct. 21):
As another older banker and one who has experienced both the pre- and post-Glass-Steagall world, I would agree with Paul A. Volcker (and also Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England) that some kind of separation between institutions that deal primarily in the capital markets and those involved in more traditional deposit-taking and working-capital finance makes sense.
This, in conjunction with more demanding capital requirements, would go a long way toward building a more robust financial sector.
John S. Reed
New York, Oct. 21, 2009The writer is retired chairman of Citigroup.
Seriously, this is Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man kind of news.
H/t The Big Picture
Your Moment of Schadenfreude
!So, it looks like yet another organization has had to downsize. It’s moving out of its headquarters, in the heart of Washington, DC, which they moved into about a year ago, because it’s too expensive for them now.
Who is this organization? Why it’s the Mortgage Bankers Association, of course, who have discovered that their new $76 million dollar digs are no longer affordable:
Since the purchase in May 2008, the U.S. economy has suffered one of the most severe recessions in a century, and the residential and commercial real estate markets have materially deteriorated. These factors, coupled with a challenging leasing environment, led the MBA Board to conclude that continued ownership of 1331 L Street was economically imprudent, and over the long term would impair MBA’s ability to continue providing our members with MBA’s full range of services.
My guess? That they got f$#@ed over by the fine print in their mortgage.
The New Hate Crimes Bill is Now Law
It was attached to the defense appropriations bill, and Obama just signed that into law.
That’s not all, the bill also (finally) puts a stake through the heart of the unnecessary and gold plated F-22, and provides funding for the (IMNSHO essential) 2nd engine for the JSF.
Economics Update
Remember yesterday, when I said that consumer confidence fell? Well, that was the Conference Board. According to Nielsen, U.S. consumer confidence is up for the first time since 2007, as well as most of the rest of the world.
I think that both organizations conduct reputable surveys, but they got different answers because they asked different questions. This is something that one should consider for any survey.
In the world of slightly more objective metrics, we have durable goods orders rising for the 4th time in 6 months, which is good news, but New home sales unexpectedly fell.
I’m not sure why new home sales falling was “unexpected”. They are recorded when the contract is made, and not when they close, whereas existing home sales are recorded at closing, which means that people who had not bought new homes by the end of August, were really pushing it to qualify for the first time buyer tax credit, which require that the deal be closed by the end of November.
The end of the tax credit is why mortgage applications fell, even though rates fell.
In fact the divergence between new and existing home sales (more later) is a real indicator of how much that tax credit is goosing things.
In the world of central banks, the Norwegian central bank raised its benchmark rate, but the New Zealand bank kept its rate steady.
Of course, there is some apples and oranges here, because Norway raised its rate to 1.5%, and the Kiwis kept their rate steady at 2.5%.
In either case, the markets are not being optimistic, with oil falling below $78/bbl, and the dollar and yen strengthening on a flight to safety.
Well, This Sucks
It looks like one of the bad policies out there is on a path to be extended,
The Senate is close to a deal to extend the new home buyer tax credit, which means that we will continue to keep paying people to overpay for their houses.
What an Unbelievably Lame Meat Market
I went to a job fair today down in Rockville, MD.
I have never gotten a lead from going to a job fair, and I don’t expect one now, but I wanted to get some practice in “meet and greet”.
I did get some schwag*, a bottle opener and a 1 liter drinking bottle, but I don’t expect anything else.
45 minutes talking with a dozen or so firms and handing out resumes, and an hour there and back…Time that I will never get back.
*Some people claim that the term is swag, and that schwag is reserved for skanky and low quality weed.
Adventures in Wankitude
Donald J. Boudreaux writing in (where else) The Wall Street Journal, suggests that insider trading is actually a good thing:
Time to stop telling horror stories. Federal agents are wasting their time slapping handcuffs on hedge fund traders like Raj Rajaratnam, the financier charged last week with trading on nonpublic information involving IBM, Google and other big companies. The reassuring truth: Insider trading is impossible to police and helpful to markets and investors. Parsing the difference between legal and illegal insider trading is futile—and a disservice to all investors. Far from being so injurious to the economy that its practice must be criminalized, insiders buying and selling stocks based on their knowledge play a critical role in keeping asset prices honest—in keeping prices from lying to the public about corporate realities.
Prohibitions on insider trading prevent the market from adjusting as quickly as possible to changes in the demand for, and supply of, corporate assets. The result is prices that lie.
Do you get it? It facilitates price discovery to allow people to make a profit with information that allows them to know which way the price is going.
This is much like the arguments for naked Credit Default Swap (CDS) contracts, where people are getting insurance for items in which they have no interest in its continued existence, and so give people a reason to burn down your house, or at least your bond, and it is just as vacuous.
A look at the Wiki reveals that this guy is a card carrying Randoid puke through and through.
H/t Jeff Matthews Is Not Making This Up, who does a much better job of demolishing this crap than I do, so just go and read his.
For your amusement, here are his last 2 ‘graphs:
Communism didn’t work for the simple reason that those who were first in line stole the means of production from the poor shlubs with whom they were supposed to share those means of production.
And unfettered insider information won’t work, for precisely the same reason.
New York Times Calls Out Obama on Torture
Their editorial board just called out Obama as Bush II on torture and secrecy.
OP/EDs generally don’t mean much, but I think that the Times, at least in its unsigned editorials, is a barometer of a certain segment of the population, or at least that segment that doesn’t live inside the DC Beltway, and as such, this could mean a trend.
I’d give it about 5 to 1 against it being a trend, but a week ago, I would have said 20 to 1.