Upon first hearing there was some baulout plan coming out of the White House, I jokingly asked if we were going to use our armed forces to prevent creditors from collecting. In reality, any plan will require the use our soft and hard power to collect on the public debt: So is all this magic? [...]
this is what happens when the world’s most powerful country elects willful idiots into office, again and again, drunk on its own wealth and power: World leaders expressed concern at the effect of the US vote. “It will have a big impact on the US economy, and it will also greatly affect the global economy,” [...]
there is a part of the u.s. government that helps control the complex machine that is the u.s. economy. that part of the u.s. government is missing. let’s see if the rest of the machine is able to operate without it.
John Cassidy on Soros on our current systemic failure: Outside the idealized world of Lucas’s theory, knowledge is imperfect, people stick to wrongheaded ideas, and there is no agreed version of how the economy works. In these circumstances, Soros rightly points out, economic expectations, even biased ones, can help to determine economic fundamentals. As in: [...]
Paul Krugman: How did we get to this point? It’s the culmination of many past betrayals. First of all, we have the Republican Study Committee blowing things up with a complete nonsense proposal — solving the crisis with a holiday on capital gains taxes. How is that possible? Well, if a party runs on economic [...]
In the Valley of Elah is an incredible movie. Long, heart wrenching, polemical, at times sentimental but very well acted and structured. We need a hundred more like it and better.
Digby: This is what all the politicians are pussyfooting around right now. Both presidential candidates are on the populist field but they are playing different games. They don’t yet know how to gauge the public mood. But I think when facing these kinds of major crises, politicians shouldn’t try top hard to guess the public [...]
Glenn Greenwald is not feeling it: What is more intrinsically corrupt than allowing people to engage in high-reward/no-risk capitalism — where they reaped tens of millions of dollars and more every year while their reckless gambles were paying off only to then have the Government shift their losses to the citizenry at large once their [...]
I guess the plan is to use the U.S. armed forces to deter creditors from collecting.
I just heard part of Terri Gross’ interview with Maher Arar, the Canadian who was kidnapped by the U.S. (our public servants) and dropped off in Jordan / Syria to be tortured on allegations that he was an al Qaeda agent. If I were a television executive in search of a sensational story to grip [...]
Wow: More than a billion AIG shares changed hands, a record for the company that was also nearly 30 times the daily average activity so far this year. The AIG activity represented about 12% of all volume in New York Stock Exchange-listed names, which saw an overall record for a second straight day, with 9.3 [...]
Nassim Nicholas Taleb channels Socrates to disparage (now obviously flawed) financial models and the abuse of statistics in general: Go to a bookstore, and look at the business shelves: you will find plenty of books telling you how to make your first million, or your first quarter-billion, etc. You will not be likely to find [...]
It’s almost good enough for a bumper sticker: “If we have to protect against bank runs by providing deposit insurance, we also have to regulate capital, reserves, and so on to limit the resulting moral hazard.”
The final graph of an epic article: Outside the public eye, Fed officials had acquired much more information since March about the interconnections and cross-exposure to risk among Wall Street investment banks, hedge funds and traders in the vast market for credit-default swaps and other derivatives. In the end, both Wall Street and the Fed [...]
this is one of the most compact representations of our financial crisis I’ve come across: it’s over a year old. i’m sorry i hadn’t seen it until now. (Thanks, Ron.)
I just wrote the below in an email to a friend and realized it’s the umpteenth time I write some (though usually abridged) version of this list. So, for posterity: here are some of our favorite places to eat in San Francisco (and Berkeley).
Caché has tremendous potential, mostly because it is so well executed. But that potential is wasted on a weak premise and lazy plotting. Writer-director Haneke broaches a terrifying and important subject – France’s immense debt to its colonial subjects, abroad and at home – but laying the blame at the feet of a six year-old is a [...]
michel de broin: superficial keywords: consciousness, man-in-the-natural-world