Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
From the shit you can’t make up file:
Dr. Daniel E. Fass, another chairman of the event who lives surrounded by financiers in Greenwich, Conn., said: “The investment community feels very put-upon. They feel there is no reason why they shouldn’t earn $1 million to $200 million a year, and they don’t want to be held responsible for the global financial meltdown.”
Those poor babies.
NSFW, unless your boss is a hardcore otaku:
H/T Jezebel, where it ran over the weekend under the title “Fly Away Home, Gentle Underpants”
That wall between Fox opinion and Fox News that Howie Kurtz and the Snooze Hour stooges are always babbling about? Not so much.
I have a weird urge to buy one of those cardboard clocks that you see on retail desks when the clerk is at lunch. It will say ‘Gone Galt. Back in…’
In other news, a couple of photos from a walk around town yesterday.
Chat about whatever.
I don’t know enough about climate science to critique much of what Levitt/Dubbner write, but there’s something that gets me because it’s so typical:
“The problem with solar cells is that they’re black.” Try googling “solar cells” — [Nathan, you can Bing “solar cells”] — and most of the panels you’ll see are in fact blue. I’ll call this half a howler. Lots of the cells are black. As we’ll see, however, it is NOT a problem. This is a bogus issue.
Now, I’m sure Levitt/Dubner would say this is a small thing, call off the pedant police, blah blah blah and so on. But the trouble is anecdotes (that’s sort of what this is, though it’s a bit worse) define a lot of our discourse. Al Gore said he invented the internet! The Clinton people took the “W” keys off the type writer! And this isn’t the first time Levitt/Dubner have gone in for an anecdotal whopper — Felix Salmon busted them peddling the “Shithead” urban legend in their last book.
The great thing about anecdotes is when you get busted on them, you can just say “who cares?” even if your entire methodology is built on anecdotes. I’m not saying that Freakonomics’ entire methodology is built on anecdotes, but David Brooks’ work (for example) is and his snotty, arrogant reply to Sasha Issenberg’s fact check of a Brooks Atlantic piece illustrates this perfectly:
I called Brooks to see if I was misreading his work. I told him about my trip to Franklin County, and the ease with which I was able to spend $20 on a meal. He laughed. “I didn’t see it when I was there, but it’s true, you can get a nice meal at the Mercersburg Inn,” he said. I said it was just as easy at Red Lobster. “That was partially to make a point that if Red Lobster is your upper end … ” he replied, his voice trailing away. “That was partially tongue-in-cheek, but Id id have several mini-dinners there, and I never topped $20.”
[…..]“What I try to do is describe the character of places, and hopefully things will ring true to people,” Brooks explained. “In most cases, I think the way I describe it does ring true, and in some places it doesn’t ring true. If you were describing a person, you would try to grasp the essential character and in some way capture them in a few words. And if you do it as a joke, there’s a pang of recognition.”
The dishonesty of all this is amazing. Brooks eats at a few chain restaurants in lieu of doing actual research; and then when he can’t milk enough meaning out of the baby-back ribs and Jack Daniels chicken, he just starts making things up. What Levitt/Dubner do, I’m afraid, isn’t so different. Levitt admits he does “economics of pimping” type stuff because it’s so difficult to get ahead going traditional research. And then, not content with that, he has to lie in order to sex up his already lightweight, sexed up book.
It’s pathetic.
Why would hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam risk his $1.5 billion fortune for $20 million in illegal gains? said Peter Cohan in DailyFinance. He probably didn’t; it’s more likely that Rajaratnam—arrested for insider trading—and his $3.7 billion fund, Galleon, earned most of their 20 percent annual returns through cheating, with the help of Rajaratnam’s co-defendants from Intel, IBM, McKinsey, and New Castle Partners
What’s notable about this case, said Gwen Robinson in the Financial Times, is the government’s “unprecedented—and extensive—use of wiretaps and other gum-shoe methods,” as if investors were “mobsters.” Embarrassed by the Bernie Madoff fraud, securities investigators are pulling out all the stops to show “they mean business.”
Predictably, the Wall Street Journal is upset about the prosecution:
The U.S. attorney’s implication is that Wall Street ought to watch out because prosecutors are now treating hedge funds like the mafia. This will play well politically given the public’s anti-Wall Street mood, yet probable cause to justify the wiretaps seems to have been provided thanks to the oldest method in law enforcement—a so far unidentified informant who once worked at Galleon.
If super-geniuses like Raj Rajaratnam go Galt and stop their insider trading for fear of being imprisoned, imagine what will happen to the economy.
This is reserved for only happy news. Period.