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Current or Currently Old Issues:
Jim Henley's blog has always had a green background. I guess that makes him the Andrew Sullivan before Andrew Sullivan was Andrew Sullivan.
:: posted by buermann @ 2009-06-22 00:58:26 CST |
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:: posted by buermann @ 2009-06-01 18:59:24 CST |
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:: posted by buermann @ 2009-06-01 17:23:34 CST |
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The film critic for the NRO suspects that if Dan Brown wrote conspiracy fiction about Islam instead of the Catholic Church that "no publisher would touch him". I suspect the film critic for the NRO is correct: publishers - for instance the publisher of the NRO - have a clear preference for libels and slurs represented as factual criticism, rather than fantasy literature that is sold from the section of the book store clearly labeled "LIES".
:: posted by buermann @ 2009-05-19 13:04:59 CST |
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speaking of the sacrosanct and inviolable law of fungible senior debt contracts:
If you look at this economic stress index map at the county level you'll notice some dark brown rust spots (representing the greatest economic fallout since 2008) jutting out of the middle of relatively calm seas across the midwest and great plains. Buffalo county, South Dakota. Clearwater county, Minnesota. Doniphan county, Kansas. While Taney County, MO - home to Branson, the broadway of country music and all around tourist trap - is getting nailed pretty bad, for whatever reason the worst hit areas happen to be Indian reservations.
:: posted by buermann @ 2009-05-19 09:22:12 CST |
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:: posted by buermann @ 2009-05-17 18:55:26 CST |
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been there, done that:
Pictures of tortured ragheads will undermine battlefield moral by stripping soldiers of their sense of unique accomplishment. The loss of that adventuresome atmosphere and wide-eyed expectation puts the entire mission in jeopardy.
:: posted by buermann @ 2009-05-14 12:30:20 CST |
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it would be just awful if we were to further inflame anti-American opinion:
Just think of these million refugees the O'ministration has suddenly added to Pakistan's internally displaced population as America's next fanclub.
:: posted by buermann @ 2009-05-14 12:11:20 CST |
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"The Home Value Misperception Index" is a wonderful idea. We need more of these.
It's amazing how resilient people's expectations are in the face of ongoing, seemingly bottomless disaster.
:: posted by buermann @ 2009-05-14 10:47:25 CST |
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the O'ministration of torture:
I'm glad thwarting terrorist acts against us and our allies is still lower on the list of our priorities than the important task of covering up the previous administration's crimes. These mixed signals make me feel much safer.
:: posted by buermann @ 2009-05-12 14:10:45 CST |
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wake me up when an argument actually occurs:
It's pretty funny that a guy who struck it rich overbilling state and federal healthcare plans is running the GOP's campaign against nationalized healthcare. Who in this government supports a cost cutting, economically efficient single-payer system? Bernie Sanders is about it, no? The GOP has aligned an unstoppable coalition against the otherwise unstoppable juggernaut of Bernie Sanders' socialism, they've even got the rest of the Democratic Party signed on.
I don't remember anymore what Obama's plan was during the campaign. Now it's voluntary cost cutting measures I guess. I still remember when that was George W. Bush's solution for cutting industrial pollution.
:: posted by buermann @ 2009-05-11 07:35:24 CST |
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glad we waited:
This is really impressive, the initial "stress test" on Citigroup discovered a capital requirement 700% higher than the final price for continued indifference from regulators while we pretend they can grow their way out of their bad debt. The 50% average reduction across the board isn't even evenly applied, without even considering the basis predictions of sunny weather the results contain zero information.
update: oh boy
US banks have been given government assurances they will be allowed to raise less than the $74.6bn in equity mandated by stress tests if earnings over the next six months outstrip regulators’ forecasts, bankers said.
:: posted by buermann @ 2009-05-09 18:05:39 CST |
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clearly i missed some other financial crises:
It's all just 1982 or 1991 again, no need to worry, no option arms a'gonna slap you innadaface.
:: posted by buermann @ 2009-05-09 03:02:33 CST |
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you've changed:
What the fuck is wrong with conservatives in this country? They mock good mustard but they don't think there's anything at all wrong with cooking precious, precious cow medium well?
It's a sin against even the lowliest ground chuck to go past medium. When I was a boy conservatives could recognize beef abuse. They're not the right wingers I grew up with anymore.
:: posted by buermann @ 2009-05-07 17:44:57 CST |
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and let's not forget to apportion some of the blame on the advocacy of one of the nation's most highly respected jurists:
Isn't it a little weird for a guy who until a year ago was unable to qualify the success of the deregulatory movement to turn around and put the unqualified blame for a deregulatory disaster on the regulators?
POSNER: let's place the blame where it belongs. Not on the bankers, who are not responsible for assuring economic stability, but on the government officials who had that responsibility and failed to discharge it. ...
And let's not forget to apportion some of the blame to the influential economists who assured us that there could never be another depression.
"Influential economists", among whom we must include "the bankers" on whom none of the blame belongs who were spending gazillions on weakening the regulators on whom the blame belongs because they were weak... OK, I guess the key to understanding the apportionment of blame for economic crises is that while it is dynamic and productive, it is not inherently stable.
:: posted by buermann @ 2009-05-07 11:15:19 CST |
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Turns out AIG bonuses were 400% larger than previously reported:
that makes the total bonus size we now know about 454 million dollars. These bonuses are effectively transaction costs on taxpayers' covering 69.835 billion dollars (plus another 100 billion from the fed) in AIG's insurance fraud on the banks' real estate holdings.
The newly quadrupled bonus number now makes the transaction cost on redistributing that money to the banks an astronomical 2.6% fee, a 150+% higher transaction overhead than that provided by, say, the social security administration, and 30% higher than the transaction fees of the plastic monopoly.
Prior to quadrupling the reported rate one could defend the AIG bailout on the merits that at least it was a relatively inexpensive way to mail out the welfare checks to wealthy bankers, but I think some small iota of outrage may now be justified.
This will now become my mindless talking point when discussing the relative merits between boring, programmatic government bureaucracies, rent-seeking market agents, and the ultra-efficient giants of free market financial capitalism.
:: posted by buermann @ 2009-05-07 10:15:21 CST |
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:: posted by buermann @ 2009-05-07 09:41:42 CST |
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maybe we could do a brain transplant on geithner:
Everything Sheila Bair says seems to run counter to the marching orders she executes:
To truly address the risks posed by systemically important institutions, it will be necessary to utilize mechanisms that once again impose market discipline on these institutions and their activities. For this reason, improvements in the supervision of systemically important entities must be coupled with disincentives for growth and complexity, as well as a credible and efficient structure that permits the resolution of these entities if they fail while protecting taxpayers from exposure.
This, being perfectly sensible nevermind nigh-infinitely right, is exactly the opposite of what she's agreed to do under the PPIP.
At first I was having a lot of cognitive dissonance over the idea that the one economically competent individual among Obama's economic advisers was appointed by George W. Bush (and we exclude Volcker and Bernstein as they are two competent economists who were blasted off into the non-advisory kuiper belt of the administration months before anybody was sworn in), but I have come upon a cock-eyed tinhat hypothesis that resolves my inner psychic turmoil:
Almost all of the too-big-to-fail financial institutions had, by various means, managed to put themselves under the regulatory jurisdiction of non-FDIC financial regulators, the OTS being the crowd favorite. The Bush administration, continuing the proud work of his predecessors, appointed industry insider lackeys to head these regulatory agencies, slashed their budgets, discombobulated the enforcement framework, and eviscerated their staffs. The only institution left barely-competent at the end was the FDIC, and for a simple reason: the FDIC wasn't regulating the TBTF firms, but their SETF competition. Because there's nothing like a competent regulator to keep the competition in their place, there was industry support for keeping the FDIC strong enough to keep small banks in their place, without making it so strong that it could threaten the financial oligarchy.
:: posted by buermann @ 2009-05-06 14:25:52 CST |
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we are the ghost of all internet traditions future:
This is tasteless, but the inevitable outcome of this brave woman's fairly incredible story is that her name will become a new internet tradition, such as "We should connie culp the hedge fund managers." As in, a verb, to shoot in the face, and then give a new face.
:: posted by buermann @ 2009-05-06 10:43:27 CST |
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:: posted by buermann @ 2009-05-06 10:02:58 CST |
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:: posted by buermann @ 2009-05-05 20:40:41 CST |
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behavioral economists would no doubt have much to add on the matter of what it is we cannot afford to go without:
The last time I noticed anybody at all making this point was Dan Hind's Jump! You Fuckers! Hind first made it some two years ago, to give you some idea of the interim involved.
That there is a structural imbalance between demand for low-risk savings and affordable credit (c.f. Krugman, "we have an incipient excess supply of savings even at a zero interest rate", which kind of makes one point but not the other) due to the combination of a stagnant median wage and rising income inequality has not been stressed enough, but maybe I'm just reading the wrong people.
If low wage workers cannot afford interest payments on whatever credit it is they need then high wage workers won't have the risk-adverse savings they need. This gets back, perhaps indirectly, to the explanation of this crisis made so well in The Giant Pool of Money: there is a massive glut of savings causing successive asset bubbles as it cascades to quality, turns it to shit, and pours downhill towards lower and lower returns.
Furthermore, at least in the context of the OECD, if low wage workers can't afford to pay down the principal high wage workers will inevitably have to pay to keep them from starving in the streets. That whole plan* about drowning the baby in the bathwater was never going to work until everybody was starving in the streets, and once everybody was starving in the streets it would fail, either by creating a new baby to drown or there being nobody left unimportant enough to rip off.
There is a large set of inoffensive public policy solutions that would shift earnings to high school graduates and drop outs at the expense of higher income workers and capital. Were it any mystery my preference for expanded basic labor rights might be worth noting. The important point is that it is in my own long term interests to see my high income stagnate so that the security and return on my and everybody else's savings improves, and any high income worker who differs is being economically irrational, if perfectly human.
This becomes a few orders of magnitude more true if you happen to have been working for a bonus on Wall Street and decided to take up a new career path in professionally whining to the New York Times about how the government isn't paying you enough to keep you from leaving your firm for a low income job hawking life insurance, twiddling your thumbs on a jumbo-mortgage estate that's underwater, or a short lived career trying to raid the firm you just left.
* Somewhere along the line I've picked up the notion that Norquist had advocated - back in the 80s in a weird justification for the Reagan deficits - racking up deficit spending on things Grover Norquist likes in order to force long-term structural cuts in welfare, social insurance, et. al. spending Grover Norquist doesn't like. I'm not sure where that notion comes from and can't verify it now beyond some successes under the Clinton Administration, which throws this whole grain of quipping under a shadow of suspicion. I have faint memories of that argument from my conservative talk-radio years as an unskilled teenage laborer, and an even fainter memory of somehow agreeing with it. But memory is a tricky thing, and I didn't have a blog then so that I could point you to that argument now. The early 1990s were clearly a plague infested dark age for mankind.
:: posted by buermann @ 2009-05-04 22:39:35 CST |
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but that explains a lot:
I had no idea that the US has had a 25% import tariff on trucks, going back to 1962 to block German VWs in retaliation over a European chicken tariff.
update: I should say something about what it explains: it helps explain the recalcitrance of US automakers to build more fuel-efficient cars and their opposition to higher gas taxes and global warming mitigation. Long before energy independence, let alone climate change, became ostensible public policy goals an industrial policy was set upon that incentivized the domestic production and marketing of absurd monstrosities that violated oft-enumerated public interests. Unsurprisingly the beneficiaries found valuable domestic niche markets and defended - nyet, expanded! - their government-protected turf, and eventually that comfortable sucking sound at the public teat turned into a hummer with teeth. Unless our relationships are periodically reevaluated we just end up fucking ourselves.
:: posted by buermann @ 2009-05-04 18:38:48 CST |
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looking the gift-horse in the mouth:
I find it interesting that the same people screaming about the budget deficit are simultaneously demanding that the government's $13 billion issued to Chrysler get wiped out and go further in hock covering every last red cent of the $7 billion in secured debt. Deficits don't matter so long as we're engaging in crypto-feudalism, I guess.
Chapter 11 says senior creditors are obligated at least the liquidation value, but the hypothetical liquidation value of an un-liquidated firm undergoing reorganization would seem to be whatever the hell the bankruptcy judge says it is. The administration offered - at taxpayer expense - $2 billion, which is coincidentally the same number Chrysler claims is its liquidation value. That's probably a lowballed figure for the firesale auction of Chrysler's $37 billion in book valued assets (against some $50 billion in debts), but with the national interests the administration will argue are at stake there's every reason to expect the judge to go with a lowballed figure.
At that, the longer the "dissenting non-TARP senior creditors" keep this in bankruptcy court the smaller the ultimate return on their pending claims could become. Operating loans provided to a firm in Chapter 11 take super-seniority and subordinate the pre-bankruptcy secured creditors. To keep Chrysler a going concern the government has been providing them almost $2 billion a month. At that rate the senior creditors could be wiped out completely against the lowballed liquidation value by June, and their entire $7 billion dollar secured claim against Chrysler subordinated by the government's super-senior DIP by August.
I would expect that they'll get the 30 cents on the dollar from tax payers they were offered in the first place - which, if you picked up the bond at 15 cents like Chrysler debt was selling for on the secondary market, is a pretty handsome handout for the trouble - but there's no legal reason they why should end up with anything at all by the time this is over, and they should be praising the administration for being such accommodating tools for the oligarchy.
:: posted by buermann @ 2009-05-04 14:54:14 CST |
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Kansas City Fed president Thomas Hoenig says banks too big to fail should be allowed to fail. Like everybody else who isn't in the Treasury Department.
:: posted by buermann @ 2009-05-03 18:55:54 CST |
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but what will happen to the dollar when it's no longer backed by nuclear armageddon?:
A little while back President Obama seemed to have made a pledge to honor US obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to reciprocate nuclear arms reductions by other nations, and said he was willing to go all the way down to zero. As we're rather a ways behind on that obligation I can only hope he was suggesting he would play catch-up, rather than making plans to give countries that aren't building nuclear weapons a list of demands to destroy weapons they never built, and then invading them when they fail to meet our demands.
On the other hand, like Bush's pledge to put a man on mars, I don't get the feeling that anybody is taking Obama's happy talk about a nuclear-free world very seriously. If nothing else what passes for our public intellectual class should be excited by the budgetary ramifications of disarmament: $31 billion is spent each year to maintain and secure a nuclear arsenal of almost 5,400 nuclear weapons, which is a lot of money to anybody but an insolvent bank.
If I could be bothered to look I expect I'd find a lot of gnashing of teeth over the loss our life-annihilating deterrent, so I'm glad the National Security Archives has published some of the original users manuals explaining how many nukes we could ever possibly need:
William Burr: In early 1960, when Eisenhower's budget director Maurice Stans was told that the U.S. Navy's Polaris missile-launching submarines could "destroy 232 targets, which was sufficient to destroy all of Russia," he asked defense officials, "If POLARIS could do this job, why did we need other ... ICBMs, SAC aircraft, and overseas bases?" According to Stans, the answer "he had received ... [was] that was someone else's problem."
These days we have 14 Ohio class submarines each armed with 24 Trident II submarine launched ballistic missiles, enough, simple math says, to nuke 336 targets and destroy all of whatever the fuck we want. The other 5,064 nukes remain somebody else's problem: taxpayers'.
:: posted by buermann @ 2009-05-01 21:54:18 CST |
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the ddt ban is still genocidal:
an update on how the DDT ban that doesn't actually exist continues it's librul enviro-wacko rampage against all human life.
:: posted by buermann @ 2009-05-01 14:38:48 CST |
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simple falsifications for wrong predictions:
After a long argument with somebody about the constitutionality of having a class of crimes defined by a motivation of "hate", and some nonsense about how it violates the equal protection clause, a simple prediction was made, to wit: "only crimes against gays will be looked at for extra punishment".
I offer you the FBI's Hate Crime Statistics for 2004, Table 1, in which you will discover 22 known-offenders who got extra punishment for Anti-Heterosexual Bias Motivation.
:: posted by buermann @ 2009-05-01 09:51:24 CST |
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I hope Halperin is right that "white men need not apply" for Souter's vacany. After that bunch of pervy wrinkled up gray hairs utterly debased the highest court in the land in their attempt to justify strip searching teenage girls for their over-the-counter headache medicine, it becomes perfectly clear to me that a great deal of both age and sex discrimination in favor of a qualified young woman is absolutely necessary to restore the barest level of dignity to the SCOTUS.
:: posted by buermann @ 2009-05-01 09:42:40 CST |
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:: posted by buermann @ 2009-05-01 00:15:25 CST |
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