Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Be a wild strawberry.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

The gop is a fucking disgrace.

Radicalized white males who support Trump are pitching a tent in the abyss.

White supremacy is terrorism.

The snowflake in chief appeared visibly frustrated when questioned by a reporter about egg prices.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Our messy unity will be our strength.

It’s a good piece. click on over. but then come back!!

Dear Washington Post, you are the darkness now.

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

The line between political reporting and fan fiction continues to blur.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.”

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Fear and negativity are contagious, but so is courage!

I would gladly pay you tuesday for a hamburger today.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

“Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.”

Stay strong, because they are weak.

You are here: Home / Archives for 2009

Archives for 2009

Mission Accomplished

by | 70 Comments

This post is in: ,

A game of connect the dots for you all.

The Politico internal memo from a little bit back:

Stories need to be both interesting and illuminating–we don’t have the luxury of running stories folks won’t click on or spend several minutes with in the paper.

a) Would this be a “most e-mailed” story?

b) Would I read this story if I hadn’t written it?

c) Would my mother read this story?

d) Will a blogger be inspired to post on this story?

e) Might an investor buy or sell a stock based on this story?

f) Would a specialist learn something from this story?

g) Will my competitors be forced to follow this?

IN MOST CASES, THE ANSWER WILL BE “YES” TO SEVERAL OF THESE QUESTIONS IF THIS IS A STRONG POLITICO STORY. If you are not certain that several of these are “yes,” you can reframe your reporting and analysis so people will say, “POLITICO is reporting…” or “The way POLITICO put it is…”

If your friends or source are buzzing about something related in any way to public affairs, don’t ask yourself WHETHER it’s a Politico story. Ask yourself HOW you can make it a Politico story, to capture built-in traffic and mindshare.

What the Politico took away from the expansive 60 Minutes interview:

His remarks came in a“60 Minutes” interview in which he was pressed by Steve Kroft for laughing and chuckling several times while discussing the perilous state of the world’s economy.

“You’re sitting here. And you’re— you are laughing. You are laughing about some of these problems. Are people going to look at this and say, ‘I mean, he’s sitting there just making jokes about money—’ How do you deal with— I mean: explain. . .” Kroft asked at one point.

“Are you punch-drunk?” Kroft said.

“No, no. There’s gotta be a little gallows humor to get you through the day,” Obama said, with a laugh.

The blogospheric reaction:

The most read section at the Politico this morning:

Mission Accomplished.

If you watched the 60 Minutes interview and you think the most important part of it was the “punch drunk” portion, you are part of the problem.

Mission AccomplishedPost + Comments (70)

My Main Question

by | 124 Comments

This post is in: 

I’ve seen this sort of thing talked about at a few places, but my big question for right now is how this plan from Geithner is going to impact all the regional banks and players who didn’t play fast and loose.

And is there any movement to regulate all these areas that were heretofore unregulated? Yesterday on GPS, Spitzer seemed to claim there was no need for new regulations, which I found rather astonishing:

ZAKARIA: Was the regulation — was the regulatory regime in place strong enough? And I’m thinking particularly of the New York Fed, which was headed by Tim Geithner, of the SEC?

Where do you see the flaw having been over the last few years?

SPITZER: Here’s my answer to that. The regulatory system was structurally flawed, but that’s not why this happened.

After the last round of scandals — Enron, et al. — we passed Sarbanes-Oxley. And we said, aha, we’ve solved the problem. Now we have another set of scandals.

There are enough laws, enough regulations on the books for smart, aggressive regulators and prosecutors to make all the cases. What was missing was judgment. And you can’t legislate judgment. You can’t regulate judgment. Either the people who are the regulators will walk into a bank and say “Your leverage is too great. We are going to take actions to pull it back,” or “This type of investment is flawed,” or they won’t. You can’t pass a law that says, you must use sound judgment.

Bubbles have been there through history, through over-regulation and under-regulation. This is a question of judgment and of failure of judgment.

When I was attorney general, people said, “Oh, you’re using this crazy little statute,” the Martin Act in New York, “to bring all these cases.” The Martin Act had a simple anti-fraud provision. That’s all we used.

The federal government has exponentially more regulatory power than we did. What was lacking was the judgment, the tenacity, the desire to rein in a financial system that was spiraling out of control.

I sort of almost have the attitude and feeling that what is going to happen is going to happen, and there is not much we can do about it. What concerns me is that we at the very least try to stop this from happening again.

Also, Sullivan notes that Krugman is about as caustic towards Obama these days as he was towards Bush. I read several right-wing blogs over the weekend who seemed shocked to hear Krugman criticize “the One,” and I just had to laugh. Krugman has never been in the tank for Obama, was a Clinton supporter, and took shots at Obama all through the primary and basically was of the opinion that the choice was between Obama where there was some hope and the lost cause that was McCain/Palin. In other words, there wasn’t a choice at all. Hardly a ringing endorsement of Obama, and even Obama’s budget was met with a luke-warm endorsement from Krugman.

It remains amusing to me that all these guys hate Krugman, but seem to have no idea what he thinks.

*** Update ***

I stand corrected. Krugman saw some flaws in the budget, but overall said it was very good. It was the stimulus package he savaged at every opportunity. Regardless, the point remains. Krugman has been anything but in the tank for Obama.

My Main QuestionPost + Comments (124)

Free Economics Advice, Worth Every Penny

by | 70 Comments

This post is in: ,

Some random thoughts on the state of the econopocalypse.

First, Kevin Drum responded to those who panned Tim Geithner’s decision to basically pay banks whatever they want for crappy mortgage assets.

This is all true, but it’s a little too glib. After all, if markets can overvalue assets on the way up — and obviously they can — then they can also undervalue them on the way down. There’s a pretty good chance that the toxic waste in question really is worth more than the market is currently willing to pay for it.

Speaking of glib, as much as I normally love Drum his point here essentially boils down to postmodernism. How can we know that mortgage-based derivative securities don’t have some hidden value? How can we know that derivative securities are not themselves a linguistic construct with no more transferable meaning than a flying, numenous being of spaghetti and sauce? I suppose at gunpoint I would admit that any number of scenarios are theoretically possible.

That said, every real indicator suggests that the best mortgage securities will pay off at pennies on the dollar and much of the rest are a rounding mistake away from worthless. One of the magical characteristics of these securities is the extent to which their value evaporates in a market where home values fail to grow. Taxpayers will almost certainly take a bath on any plan that guarantees private buyers against losses or employs some other clever but functionally equivalent bailout scheme.

If we get past the moral hazard aspect of insulating major firms from their own bad decisions (note: not ready to do that), I still do not understand why anyone regards a plan based on gauzy wishful thinking as more “serious” than the Swedish nationalize-sell-return to work approach. Snark at sites like Atrios about Tim Geithner’s martini pals sounds more credible when this is the best plan he can offer.

On a related note, Ben Bernanke.

Finally, an important element of addressing the too-big-to-fail problem is the development of an improved resolution regime in the United States that permits the orderly resolution of a systemically important nonbank financial firm. We have such a regime for insured depository institutions, but it is clear we need something similar for systemically important nonbank financial entities. Improved resolution procedures for these firms would help reduce the too-big-to-fail problem by giving the government the option of safely winding down a systemically important firm rather than keeping it operating.

To rephrase shorter and less charitably, the current and future Fed Chair takes “too big to fail” non-bank institutions as a given and wonders how government might change itself to better serve them. Does that strike anybody else as precisely the wrong perspective? There is no reason why the government should make a habit of saving investment firms like Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch. If we’re going to nationalize risk then we might as well nationalize the gain and call ourselves Soviets.

Contra Bernanke, the normal person perspective would ask how we can structure the financial industry so that an awfully run firm can fail (that is the “free market”, kids) without opening the seventh f*cking seal. The idea that government needs to figure out how to accommodate too-big-to-fail cowboy firms is, to put it mildly, batshit crazy. Government needs to ‘wind down’ over-leveraged firms until they’re not too big to fail any more. If there’s any free time after they manage that, government next needs to find a safe place to stash any moron who still thinks otherwise before said moron goes Galt with the department budget or staples his dick to the wall.

***Update***

Maybe my reaction to Ben Bernanke misinterpreted his point. It’s possible, I’m pretty sleep deprived and only mostly sober. If his point is that the government needs a strategy to wind down too-big-to-fail (TBTF) cowboy firms until such an entity does not exist any more, then selah.

However, even giving Bernanke the most positive spin I still think that he sees the issue wrong. The problem is not that the government doesn’t have a plan to wind down failed TBTF’s; the problem is that such firms exist at all. As soon as we acknowledge that a firm can’t fail without dragging the country with it we give the firm blackmail power over the national economy. We need a new round of antitrust-type laws that trigger as soon as a firm gets big enough. Ideally we can split up [Update: or de-leverage or whatever] a group like AIG before its failure turns entire zip codes into weedy forbidden zones.

Free Economics Advice, Worth Every PennyPost + Comments (70)