When I talk about things that I hope are hit by meteors, I sometimes forget to mention the Aspen Ideas Festival. That’s an oversight on my part. Steve Clemons has some solid coverage of VSPs (David Gergen, Niall Ferguson, Mort Zuckerman) fear-mongering about debt (I couldn’t make it very far through this clip but what I saw was pretty awful):
I don’t know if this is snark or what but I like it:
As Niall Ferguson was racing out — mouthing from the stage to Pom and Fiji Water entrepreneur Lynda Resnick that he just couldn’t do dinner with her and Barbra Streisand that night — to get to London to give a talk at St. Paul’s Cathedral titled “‘Men, Money and Morality: How Can Trust in Banking Be Restored”, I asked him whether he had any concern about a 1937 redux.
Hunter Gathers
The comments at TPM are hilarious. ‘This isn’t your father’s recession’ and ‘small businesses are being choked’ etc., etc. Niall Ferguson and the rest of the middle aged Crackers on that panel want austerity measures because they are already rich, and will do anything to make themselves richer. Hookers and blow aren’t cheap, you know.
DougJ
@Hunter Gathers:
You’re right, the commnents there are nuts.
Legalize
Christ. I can tell by looking that I don’t want to click anything that will make that video clip actually play.
Chris
Public hangings might be a good start. :-)
Seriously, this is where I just don’t get bankers. They don’t seem to realize that good regulation helps them. The NYSE became the biggest stock market in the world not through technology, but through the fact that it was seen as the fairest (least rigged). They are now losing this reputation, thanks in part to the rather blatant market-rigging known as High Frequency Trading. (The HFT guys move the price of a stock or commodity by posting a “flash order” of a large number of shares at a price above or below the last trade, getting someone to bite at that price, then removing the large flash order before any real trading occurs, replacing it with a tiny order to cause the price to change. The entire problem itself is fairly complicated and boring and involves the so-called “dark pools” as well, but at the fundamental level, it boils down to trying to profit by withholding information. This is the same sort of thing a used car dealer does when he sells you a car that he knows is a lemon. Eventually, these guys are going to have the same reputation as used car dealers.)
Comrade Kevin
I saw Niall Ferguson on Bill Maher’s show once, and that was enough for me to know that I should ignore him in the future.
tamied
Chris @4. The problem with that is you’re assuming that long-term rewards would be enough. They plan to make as much as possible in the short-term and fuck the future.
Warren Terra
No reference to Fiji Water should pass without a link to Mother Jones’s expose last year of its awful practices.
El Cid
Niall’s such a douche, and he’s absolutely full of shit on these points.
slippy
@El Cid:
It’s hard to see why wealthy people would know anything about economics.
They mostly have benefited from exceptions to the rule.
gypsy howell
@Warren Terra:
I used to work for Lynda Resnick. Good times… good times…
One of her little dogs was found drowned in her swimming pool in Beverly Hills. Word around the office was that it committed suicide.
El Cid
@slippy: Particularly those who get the most fame and fortune by saying things pleasing and flattering to the uppermost classes.
Jon H
Resnick is another who needs to be hit by a meteor.
NonyNony
@Chris:
They don’t care.
They are all about short-term profits for themselves. They don’t care about short-term profits for the bank, let alone long-term profits. They care about themselves and that’s it. They don’t care about society, they don’t care about the economy, they don’t care about the bank. They care about how much they can grab and whether they’re going to get caught or not.
Once you know that, it all falls into place. Regulation is bad because it constrains the ways the corporate pirates can extract money from the system. Bank CEOs are basically highly paid mercenaries – you’re paying them to run the place, but they don’t have any long-term interest in it beyond their stock. Which they plan to sell at a high price because fuck, who gets money from dividends these days?
The people who should be demanding better regulation are the investors. And in general they are demanding better regulation, but they also are in it for the short term because, again, see above regarding “dividends” and “who the fuck”. But the pirates that sit in the executive chairs are looking out for themselves and that’s it. Anyone who doesn’t realize this as rule number one of modern American capitalism needs to look back over the last, oh, let’s say 30 years and see if they can argue against it. I certainly can’t – it was one of my metaphorical “come to Jesus” moments that drove me out of libertarianism and into the pinko commie socialist that I am today.
Think “Reacher Gilt” from the Pratchett novel “Going Postal” and you have a good model for how our modern corporate CEO as self-interested mercenary model works. That’s what almost all of them are like – no concern for anyone but themselves and no interest in the longterm health and welfare of the company, let alone of the economy at large.
Sly
I’m assuming the Aspen Ideas Festival is for people who think they should headline at TED but who are completely devoid of any creative thinking.
Mike G
The Aspen Ideas Festival: for people who have no ideas, but like the idea of ideas.
Ash Can
I’ve been trying to figure out just what the purpose of the Aspen Ideas Festival is, anyway. Is it really anything other than a supply-side-economics fan convention? Does it have fan art, fan writing, and Meet the Chicago-School Professors panels?
The Dangerman
Speaking of Aspen, Monday, IIRC, was the anniversary of the “death” of Ken Lay. I hope there’s a hell and he’s on a slow rotisserie as I type. I place “death” in quotes as some don’t think he is dead; I suspect that he is, indeed, goners, but it was either a suicide or he was killed. Heart attack my ass.
As a Californian, I have a problem with all things Enron; those fuckers not only raped us blind, but they were, at some nonzero level, behind Schwarzenegger becoming governor. The fuck that kept on fucking the State as they tried to position Arnie to run for President (after changing the rules on birth location, of course). FUCKERS!
As you’ll recall, Enron was THE story of the Summer of 2001; then 9/11 happened and it wasn’t top story any longer. Enron would have brought down Bush, but … fuck, fuck, fuckety, fuck.
FWIW, “The Smartest People In The Room” is available on You Tube (in several parts). Some from the Right complain it is too strident in its attack on the Free Market; they can all go pound sand up their ass, too.
Shit, I need a drink.
MarkJ
Really, why anyone listens to these guys or thinks of them as “deep thinkers” is beyond me. Is Ferguson really the best Harvard Business School can do? We’ve disincentivized work in this country? When did that happen?
He seems to think we’re slouching toward a European socialist state, but taxes are the lowest they’ve been since the Truman administration, and I can’t remember the last time we actually made welfare or unemployment benefits more generous. Yes, we have extended our relatively meagre unemployment benefits for those who have been unemployed longer than the standard benefit period, but the benefits themselves have not increased in value. Which means the incentive to work is about the same as it was under Clinton and Bush, and probably Bush 1 and Reagan. What a pathetic excuse for a “Business” professor at our leading academic institution.
jwb
@The Dangerman: “Shit, I need a drink.”
Yes, at least part of the strategy by these folks is to use their control of the media channels to drive everyone else to despair.
Chris
@tamied, @NonyNony: d’oh, of course. It’s the same thing as always: you can either farm the economy, or strip-mine it. One is sustainable, the other gets you rich fast.
(I’m an investor, have been for several decades, and I really want the regulators to do their job. Many of the things the strip-miners are doing now are already illegal, and most of the rest are sufficiently borderline that the SEC could do something about it quickly.)
Arclite
I’m completely annoyed by the hypocrisy of conservatives who complain about running up the national debt on the one hand, but
1. Have no problem running up the debt to go to further unnecessary wars.
2. Have no problem making it as easy as possible for credit card companies to lure people to get as much credit as they like and run it up as much as they want.
Alex S.
Meh… these people are chasing the money they invested in China, Iraq and Afghanistan, and the money they only had on paper during a time of a housing bubble.
Lately, I’m getting a lot free access to the Wall Street Journal and I am really getting a frightening vibe out of it, because I get the impression that a majority of the “ideas” of the business world are a part of class-warfare. For example, the easiest way to stimulate the economy and to alleviate the budget situation would be to create some inflation. It would weaken the dollar and cheapen exports. It would also be easier to repay debt. But this is not allowed to happen because it would also lead to a redistribution of wealth.
It seems to me that some people are even willing to risk another recession because it suits either their political, or their financial goals.
demimondian
The best part of all this? If the Congress wanted to do something about the deficit, then the best thing that it could do would be…nothing.
Letting the Bush Tax Cuts expire would eliminate almost half of the deficit instantly. Letting Obama wind down the the occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq would eliminate half of the rest. Time itself would take care of the last bit, since it’s almost all related to TARP or other recession-fighting measures.
Somehow, though, I don’t think that the osculating onanists of the overclass would welcome that proposal. I can’t understand why.
BombIranForChrist
Is Ferguson still pushing the flat tax as a way to get us out of the mess we are in? Thank goodness they have festivals like this, because I have never heard anyone mention a flat tax before.
Zifnab
@The Dangerman:
I always thought he was sipping Tiki drinks in the Caymens and living out the rest of his days from a numbered bank account. That whole, “I’m dead – you can’t sue me – my wife keeps the money” thing was staggeringly convenient.
And Enron wasn’t going to bring down anybody, because everybody had a hand in the pot. The good ole boys of Enron were very good about spreading it around.
Now, the recession that resulted from Enron and World Comm and the like – that might have brought down Bush. 9/11 was damn fortunate for the Repubs, because they got to blame all the economic woes on terrorism. Fortunately, shitty conservative foreign policy rode to the rescue when shitty conservative economic policy was kicking them all in the teeth.
slippy
@demimondian:
Dude, I think if Congress starts talking about extending the Bush tax cuts, Middle Class America should set up a HOWL.
demimondian
@slippy: I expect that the cat food commission will carefully avoid pointing out that many of its “revenue enhancement proposals” are actually reinstatements of large portions of those tax cuts, disguised as tax increases.
Anya
What ideas? I haven’t heard Niall Ferguson say anything original since Obama took office — unless you consider comparing the President to Felix the Cat a creative idea.
Joel
Is Lynda Resnick going to take a shit on Niall Ferguson’s back?
DonkeyKong
Shouldn’t they rename Aspen the “Soylent Green Festival”
The Dangerman
@Zifnab:
Just to be clear, I didn’t mean that Bush would have been impeached; I meant he would have lost in 2004 (which he probably did, but don’t get me started on Ohio – plus, Kerry losing brought us Obama and I’m an Obot).
Yup; those fuckers were evil.
Didn’t I read that Skilling got some of his convictions overturned by the USSC recently? I’m shocked, of course.
Alex S.
@demimondian:
Yeah, I once made a (admittedly, very rough) calculation and came up with a deficit of $200-300 billion at the end of Obama’s term (after the withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, with HCR in effect, Bush tax cuts expired along with some other tax cuts caused by the recession). I think the best way to get rid of this is to cut the military budget, and then to have the economy growing again.
gypsy howell
I knew Huffington Post was a goner when Lynda Resnick started posting there.
gypsy howell
@Mike G:
It’s like Huffington Post Summer Camp
Rob
I gotta say: the only member of this trifecta that didn’t make me want to scream was David Gergen, which does NOT happen often. He actually did a decent job of “moderating”; I guess I just can’t stand him on CNN, when his opinions come out.
slugger
I am very interested in what the smart money thinks about U.S. government debt.
Let’s check the yield on Treasuries: 10 year note pays less than 3%; 30 year note pays less than 4%.
Surely this means that the big investors think that U.S. government debt is pretty dang safe if they are willing to lend money to Obama for 3.95% over the next thirty years.