Flying today, and tied up the rest of the day and pretty much all Tuesday. May be back to normal programming Wed. Have some excellent guest posts lined up if I don’t get to weigh in.
Flap-run reveals flight evolution BBC
The Energy Landscape of 2041 Michael Klare, TomDispatch
Nazi link to thalidomide disaster Herald Sun (hat tip reader Skippy)
Maybe Greek MPs would be right to say No Wolfgang Munchau, Financial Times
Nine Reasons Why Spain Is Not Different Ed Harrison
An unlikely hero battling India’s corruption Independent (hat tip reader May S)
China’s Shadow Banking Looks a Lot Like Sub Prime Alt-A Market EconoMonitor (hat tip Richard Smith)
Wisconsin Judge Said to Have Attacked Colleague New York Times (hat tip reader Skippy)
The desert heat melts Arizona home prices – Phoenix home prices now back to late 1990s levels while state tax collection drop to 1998 levels. The second lost decade in the desert. Think360 (hat tip reader furzy mouse)
Fed Seen Buying $25 Billion a Month in Treasuries After QE2 Comes to End Bloomberg (hat tip reader Hubert). This is not news per se, the Fed had indicated it was using the proceeds from mortgage principal repayments to buy Treasuries.
Debt Hamstrings Recovery Wall Street Journal. The Journal figured this out now?
Too Big to Fail or Too Big to Change Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation (hat tip Richard Smith)
Less economics, more leadership MacroBusiness (hat tip reader Hubert)
The Busts Keep Getting Bigger: Why? Paul Krugman and Robin Wells, New York Review of Books
Antidote du jour:
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“The second lost decade in the desert.”
IOW, the regional economy is slowly starting to head back toward what would be a sane level for a desert?
As a kid, I was surrounded by cotton fields near Dobson Ranch, Mesa, AZ.
Skippy…It all better now, its a golf course…delusional…snicker.
In “The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century”, James Howard Kunstler notes that the natural carrying capacity of Phoenix’ human population is around somewhere around 800. When air conditioning falters, comparisons in the linked article to Detroit may be grossly unfair to Detroit. At least one can grow food in Detroit without dwindling Colorado River water or groundwater.
Many new cash investors are now discovering they’ve caught a falling knife, blade down. Next up: commercial real estate collapse. Not pretty.
Mr Terpstra;
Anecdotally, commercial construction is already starting to collapse. The overhang of empty strip malls and half occupied office blocks is expanding as units previously ‘in the pipeline’ get bridge funding to build out in a desperate race to snag the few tenents still in the market, and thus avoid outright bankruptcy. Ugly indeed, as, like the analysis of Spains present crisis in another blog post points out, absent strong domestic demand, export growth is the remaining solution to the imbalance. Look to see unemployment grow in the short to medium term as construction employment and its support services wither along with construction in the commercial as well as the home sectors. The only viable sector left to stimulate construction and attendant sectors is public infrastructure repair and improvement. Given the obduracy of the political class today, even that proven out method has little chance of gaining traction.
Xlnt comments. I see Las Vegas in the same boat: a ghost town in a few short decades.
Re: Krugman and Wells:
This (Independent) question (RSA) has (Seattle PI) already (EPW) been (IMF) answered. More money floating around and more savings that people feel need to be “profitably reinvested”, plus a relative dearth growth opportunities available (given the volume of credit floating around in the system) leads to systemic instability, because people start to invest in all kinds of things that aren’t even remotely safe to invest in.
So when they note:
They are only saying that they are either incapable of reading, or unwilling to consider answers given by someone who does not share their ideological leanings, or their penchant for reductionist analysis.
Re: Krugman and Wells:
This (Independent) question (RSA) has (Seattle PI) already (EPW) been (IMF) answered. More money floating around and more savings that people feel need to be “profitably reinvested”, plus a relative dearth growth opportunities available (given the volume of credit floating around in the system) leads to systemic instability, because people start to invest in all kinds of things that aren’t even remotely safe to invest in.
So when they note:
They are only saying that they are either incapable of reading, or unwilling to consider answers given by someone who does not share their ideological leanings, or their penchant for reductionist analysis.
The Busts Keep Getting Bigger: Why?
Easy peasy! Because every time there is a bust, People Who Know like Krugman call for policy relaxation of all kinds to forestall another Great Depression, meaning that the speculative behaviour that caused the bust is less discouraged than it naturally would be, while the prudent, who survive the bust in relatively good shape, get to pay for the bailout. The result is what I call “cumulative, double-sided, cultural, moral hazard”.
RebelEconomist said: “…People Who Know like Krugman call for policy relaxation of all kinds to forestall another Great Depression…”
Yea right. As if calls for “policy relaxation” never come from the right-hand side of the aisle.
Conservatism, liberalism and Marxism are three very different ideologies. But none of the seminal figures of the three—-Jesus Christ, Adam Smith, and Karl Marx—-articulated the goal of raping and plundering the masses. Quite the opposite, the original goal, common of all three, was to restrain these nefarious activities.
But all three ideologies got turned on their head. All three, in their current perverse manifestations, are used to give moral and intellectual cover for the abuse of elite power. All three are used to justify stealing from, raping and plundering the masses by the elites. Or in the words of Andrew M. Lobaczewski, all three have become “masking” ideologies, with little or no resemblance to the originals. As Lobaczewski goes on to explain:
As long as we keep using methods of comprehending this pathological phenomenon, which apply certain political doctrines whose contents are heterogeneous with regard to its true nature, we will not be able to identify the cause and properties of the disease. A prepared ideology will be able to cloak the essential qualities from the minds of scientists, politicians, and common people. In such a state of affairs, we will never elaborate any causatively active methods which could stifle the phenomenon’s pathological self-reproduction or its expansionist external influences. Ignoti nulla cuatio morbid!
▬Andrew M. Lobaczewski, Political Ponerology: A Science of the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes
It probably has something to do with our “animal spirits”. Either too manic or too depressive. Not the proper mix of meth and Xanax in the water supply.
Could be Ben B’s Global Glut of Savings, tho that makes it hard to figure why Ben became the World’s Biggest Saver once taking the reins at the Federal Reserve.
Partial List of “No Way!” candidates:
Massive growth of Shadow Banking
Fake CDS keeping interest rates artificially low
Decline of underwriting standards
Massive use of leverage
Massive use of short term repos
Using CDS to make tier 2 capital count as tier 1 capital in the eye(s) of regulators
Regulatory capture
Massive trade imbalances from developed world to developing world, and the associated outsourcing of real production and jobs.
Reliance on growing public and private debt to fuel GDP growth, but incomes and tax receipts didn’t keep up.
I’ve probably missed a few things. But it’s a start.
This is a restult of supply-side, trickle-down, unbridled cronyism/militarism run amok. Although an establishment economist, in all fairness, Krugman has never been a champion of unchecked deregulation, corporate welfare, or bailouts.
Since the original sin in the Garden, man has been fascinated with becoming filthy rich without working.
Re: Maybe Greek MPs would be right to say No
Munchau’s analysis takes for granted that information generated by the ‘free’ market price system is good and true. This is an assumption which asserts ‘debt = bad, profit = good’. But how can we be sure this relationship exists if we don’t believe in the invisible hand? How can we believe information generated by money-flows and profit-loss accounting if externalities are allowed to dominate as they currently do? Do we understand cost and profit at all? Where’s the good info? I suggest it’s in the planet’s ecosystems, which tell us that the market, via the invisible hand, is not working to their benefit. If they fail, we fail. Hence our system is the problem.
So while I agree that the Greeks should say no, that is only the beginning of the story.
Re: Debt Hamstrings Recovery:
If money is debt (which it is), then “Money Hamstrings the Economy” is an equally true headline. Needless to say this is something of a conundrum for modern economics! Nevertheless, while we remain culturally glued to the thinking that money-based assessments of national and corporate profit and loss are good and true, we are going to be stuck in this crumbling fantasy far longer than is good for us. To survive we must learn how to systemically prioritize the health of the planet’s ecosystems, before we can begin to talk of sustainable surplus, of profit, of debt. Sadly we seem to be very far away from that day.
A better title would’ve been deleveraging hamstrings economy. But if they’d written that, even my grandmother would’ve laughed at them for stating the obvious.
Anyway, the article is hopeless as usual:
Leaving aside the idiotic nature of the idea that the great moderation was in any way healthy or sustainable, I wonder what the purpose of that paragraph is. In the subsequent ones he notes that bond market access is just fine, and that the interest rates (yield or cost, depending on perspective) are lower than ever, so it’s not like more borrowing is impossible. But the author still feels he has to note this, first.
Toby,
In his latest film Adam Curtis draws a bead on your underlying assumption, which is that ecological systems are sustainable. Adam Curtis – All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace – Ep 1/3 – Love and Power,Ep 2/3, Ep 3/3
Curtis not only gives the history of where that idea of sustainablility came from, but also points out that it is identical to the theory that underlies neoclassical economics. According to neoclassical economics, macroeconomic systems reach an equilibrium which is sustainable. Likewise, the ecological theory goes, ecological systems reach can equilibrium which is sustainable.
Curtis argues that both theories have been demonstrated to be false, that neither economic nor ecological systems reach an equilibrium, that they are both inherently unstable, and both are in constant upheaval and readjustment.
Hi DownSouth,
Nothing is sustainable in the sense of permanent equilibrium, indeed I believe there is no such a thing as equilibrium for living systems. From my brief forays into systems theory, that has been clear to me for a while; I believe the expression for living systems is in fact “far from equilibrium.” So when I use or imply ‘sustainability’ I don’t mean some static permanence, some ideal Eden, but a reactive and dynamic series of adjustments to ever-changing circumstances. It is precisely the ossification of institutions that troubles me, and it is precisely their seeming systemic need to freeze the status quo as is we need, in my opinion, to be dealing with.
A while back I commented here at NC that science is going to have to embrace uncertainty; the above is (roughly) what I had in mind. And while it is true that ‘sustainability’ is a term which can be deployed in multiple ways, considering matters such as carrying capacity and the coping-rhythms of various ecosystems, as well as steady state growth, is hardly unwise. Yes, one day the sun will explode, and no, nothing lasts forever, and as I often say, change is the only constant, nevertheless, from a human perspective, our ongoing survival is probably our main concern. We now live in a way and at a pace which destroys the ecosystems which support us, yet we know how not to (at least as opposed to the aggressive manner we are ‘husbanding’ them now). Choosing to live ‘sustainably’ does not presuppose a desire for human immortality, it suggests rather a desire to live in a wiser and more lasting relationship with the planet which birthed us.
Good points. It is odd that this point about systems has be spelled out in such detail (and so often).
Yes, long story short: Some choices are wiser than others.
Of course the trick is to decide from whose perspective we should judge the “wiser” part.
Me today? Me in 20 years? My descendants? You today? You in 20 years? Your descendants? Someone else? Some other group?
My head hurts.
Thank you for your sarcasm AJ. I know you love me really.
In the long run, we’re all dead. And yet we do tinker, don’t we. We can’t stop ourselves. And things change without our help anyway. Institutions established to deal with some set of problems in a particular way become anachronisms, adjustments become ‘necessary’ if we want X to carry on. Sometimes events overrun us, sometimes we can make timely adjustments. When large adjustments are required, it seems we most often fail, for cultural reasons, to be able to adjust deeply enough. Deep change is seen as a kind of death. I believe we are at such a juncture now.
This isn’t about the detail of me at twenty or you at forty, though heaven knows there are more than enough details to handle. My head hurts too (you’ll not be surprised to hear). Regardless of the impossibility of ‘knowing’ everything — as homo economicus is supposed to in Perfect Competition — we’re going to tinker anyway, accumulate experience, create new problems, adjust and not adjust, and be confronted with choices. I’m just adding my voice to the mix in the wisest way I know, fully cognizant of the fact that I’m just a tiny cog in that infamous machine.
I just watched the first two episodes, and doubt that I will watch the third; the first two were too one-sided. The systems theory I read about rejects the idea of equilibrium. Self-organization is not mutually exclusive with constant change. Indeed everything is self-organizing, even hierarchies; to suggest otherwise is to assert the opposite, which is control from above, which begets an infinite regress. Self-organization includes failure, collapse, decay, growth in its many forms, all are part and parcel of that ever-shifting process.
And communes must always fail because hierarchies emerged from the mess of those experiments!? That’s a final judgment on egalitarianism!? Twenty-somethings raised in hierarchies try out for the first time in their lives to set up an egalitarian society, inevitably fail, and this is supposed to suggest that egalitarian society is impossible!?
I respected “The Century of the Self”, but this latest effort fails on too many levels for me to want to continue with it.
Hm. That sounds like it’s little more than a restatement of Michels’s ‘iron law of oligarchy’.
Re:..”Nine reasons why Spain is not different..” by Ed Harrison.
In reason nine he notes the widening spread between the German and Spanish 10 year bonds and that the Spanish bond closed Friday at 5.68 %, a record.
This morning the 10 year Spanish bond has shot past 5.7%.
This means the interest rate is very close to the rate paid by the Irish in their ‘bailout’ package .
Very shortly ,if trends continue,it will be more attractive for Spain to enter the ESFS if it wants to pay lower borrowing costs than Ireland , a country effectively deemed insolvent by the markets.
The title of the WSJ piece is a reminder by a similar Simon Johnson piece of a few days ago on both the need for and impossibility of reducing the debt-to-GDP ratio.
What’s the problem here? What to do?
Here’s clue: you can’t get a dollar of “P” in GDP without more than a dollar of debt.
http://www.businessinsider.com/diminishing-marginal-producitivity-of-debt-2010-3
The manifestation of the end of debt-money takes on many eye-of-the-beholder perspectives. It remains the ultimate reality with which we must all, eventually, come to grips.
The problem isn’t debt per se, but the debt-based nature of the global monetary system and all post-Bretton Woods national monetary system, Euro-zone MU participants included.
No debt = no money.
Ponder that a moment.
There will be only one solution after the tea-baggers and progressive economic intelligentsia fire meaningless volleys across the political divide.
That solution is the end of the debt-money system. All else is a downhill slide from here. That one pro-peace Congressman from Cleveland has already proposed the solution and it is awaiting your discovery.
http://www.monetary.org/hr6550bill.pdf
Please have a read, and let’s change the subject of our national dialogue.
Yes, it’s debt-free Greenbacks.
There’s a documentary called The Secret of Oz that delves into the idea of debt-free money that’s definitely worth a peek.
The Indian power brokers have already started action to marginalize Anna Hazare:
http://the-diplomat.com/indian-decade/2011/06/24/anna-hazare-under-fire/
http://the-diplomat.com/indian-decade/2011/06/21/gandhi-outfoxing-hazare/
Of course one can still hope and pray for the Lokpal bill to pass but then we know how Elizabeth Warren and her agency are doing in the USA. Same story, different country.
Cash-starved performers hit Vegas streets for tips http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110627/ap_on_en_ot/us_vegas_street_performers
The Las Vegas Strip is teeming with Spidermen, Elmos and Elvis Presleys of all waistlines.
Nevada’s woeful economy has inspired dozens of jobless and under-employed men and women to dress up like celebrities, movie characters and cartoon heroes in pursuit of a buck. In the past year, fat and fit Elvises, as well as would-be Homer Simpsons, Mad Hatters, and Batmen, have set up shop on bustling sidewalks across this city of vice and excess, offering tourists the chance to pose for a snapshot with someone who kind of looks famous. …
“It helps pay the bills, and it lets them go home with a memory they love,” said Luis Reyes, an underemployed electrician who poses with tourists in downtown Las Vegas as KISS frontman Gene Simmons.
Reyes, 48, began his sidewalk tribute to Simmons in November after, to his surprise and frustration, his move from San Francisco to Las Vegas put him no closer to full-time employment. His homemade costume includes a studded codpiece, high-heel boots designed to look like angry dragons and a pair of leather black wings. He hopes to parlay his street hustle into a paid gig as a celebrity impersonator.
Re: “Maybe Greek MPs would be right to say No” Wolfgang Munchau, Financial Times
• Manchau said: “The first priority of German, Dutch and Finnish politicians has been to reduce the costs of the programme as much as possible.”
Here, let me fix that for Manchau:
“The first priority of German, Dutch and Finnish politicians has been to appeal to us-versus-them thinking so as to mask the transfer as much of the costs of the programme from the banks and bondholders to the taxpayers as possible.”
Greek politicans also belong in that line-up.
• Manchau said: “EU political masters are economics officials and their ideological supply-siders.”
Let me fix that one for Manchau too:
“EU political masters are economics officials who will parrot any ideology that serves their end goal, which is to provide moral and intellectual for the rape and plunder of the European masses by the European elite.”
• Manchau said: “Mr Samaras needs to explain how Greece can fund itself when no outside finance is available. What is his strategy?”
Samaras doesn’t have to explain anything at this point.
The patient is in the emergency room, bleeding to death on the operating table. The first and foremost objective at this point is to stop the bleeding. Essentially what Manchau is demanding is that Samaras predict what will happen in the future in a complex system with literally millions of individual and collective actors.
Stop the bleeding first, and address the other issues one by one as they arise.
Why the busts get bigger?
Krugman and Wells bemoan vignettes in the discussion and illumination of the economic crisis, that in the book reviewed, is on going since the 1970s and has been scaling upward in costs and lives ruined. They are the counterpoint to the Biz school narrative that productivity has simply gone upwards because capital is rationally allocated to its best and highest use, and all of society has benefited by their economic standards of measure. Of course the problem, not only with the militant right wing, but their mealy mouth critics, like Krugman and Wells, is that they both present a one dimensional view of the social order.
Here is a sampling of his most damning rhetoric in the review:”There are a lot of villains in this story—so many that by the end of the book we were, frankly, suffering from a bit of outrage fatigue. But why have villains triumphed so repeatedly?”
This is a Nobel Prize winner writing in the NY Review of Books. He is discussing the devastating social transformation of financial chaos and factors leading up to the repeated busts. He is fatigued by villains? Villains are in Harry Potter books, villains populate Grimm’s Fairy Tales. You would think that all of the ferocity that can be mustered in the intellectual epicenter of American culture would exceed that of a trade association PR flak denouncing tooth decay rampant among tweeners. And it is not that the book seems to be wanting, it is at least providing a historical perspective that is necessary and maybe even sufficient to understand the current financial crisis. What K&W seems to be sighing over is the lack of a theoretical discussion, or at least a survey of devastating histograms showing quantitative images that don’t lie.
Sociology, political science and economics are the 3 main disciplines of the social sciences, that taken together, begin to provide a rational explanation and theoretical understanding of valid knowledge about our social order. Krugman relies on only one, and hints obliquely at other causes, forces as he likes to say, Southern reactionary politics forming coalitions to undo the New Deal legislation that specifically reined in financial services as a profit center of American business, allowing it to function as a utilitarian enabler of capitalism, and not the engine.
What we see in his review, is so typical, even of political favorites of the social welfare state, that there never seems to be a honest intellectual discussion of the underlying power structure of America, and that until it completely dismantled or passes away, there will be more of the same, boom, bust, government intervention to preserve the endless pursuit of profits, the ceaseless accumulation of capital and ever increasing rates of return.
It is the expansion of markets in replacing any previous social relationships with money earning roles as labor, re branded as the consuming middle class, keeping real decision out of the hands of the citizenry, so wealth can continue to accumulate, power and privilege continue to be maintained, and all of it only given official sanction to be discussed in the narrowest of economic terms and analysis.
At least Krugman does not indulge in the mystification of power and policy by claiming a financial coup de tat has overtaken the government. The earlier bailouts simply serve to show, what everyone can see clearly without having to read between the lines. It does not matter how well or how poorly the economy performs, those in power with privilege will not be displaced, because of overwhelming political dominance that has the state, the culture and the economic system stacked in their favor. They do not lose money, they do lose prestige, they do lose the power connections to influence the mechanism of the state in their favor most of the time. Everyone else does. The the very definition of power is to hold onto all the above even the face of failure or organized opposition.
They are not villains, they are NOT simply deregulated, they are the ongoing set of people who control the terms of power, politics, money and failure, that is, not just banks are too big to fail, the capitalist ruling class is too powerful to fail, and they go on and on in different decades, under different circumstances, always rich, always in control of their lives at the expense of the state, the corporations, or the people who work for them.
The Great Green Wall of the Sahara: Inside the Fight to Stop a Desert’s Sprawl http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2079753,00.html#ixzz1QUU62ryA
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/jun/26/michael-gove-teachers-unions-militant-strike
Alternative headline: ‘Tony Blair is a disgusting reptile’:
“On Sunday, the former prime minister Tony Blair urged unions to “engage with the process of change”.
He told the BBC’s Politics Show that the unions “have got to modernise” and added: “The thing about the trade unions is that they too have got to modernise. I said this constantly when I was leader and they used to think that meant I was anti-union. I’m not. I’m in favour of strong trade unions – I think it’s great. But you’ve got to understand today how fast the world is changing. “What you’ve always got to be careful of – particularly with public sector unions – is you don’t become ‘small c’ conservatives.””
Hey Tony, the world had more than a few tastes of your version of modernisation, we didn’t like it. That’s why the public kicked your ass out and threw things at you. You scumbag.
Nobody could accuse Tony Blair of settling for ‘small c’ Conservatism.
You might want to add a link to today’s story in The American Banker “Trustees Pulled into Loan Put-Back War,” about how the Knights of Columbus are suing BoNY, which is the trustee for two RMBS that the Knights invested in. Their real target is BofA, and this lawsuit is designed to force BoNY to release damaging loan files to the plaintiffs. This strategy might finally give investors legal traction in pursuing violations of PSA reps and warranties and forcing mortgage put-backs to the Wall Street banks, including BofA. Also look for NY and DE Attorneys General to get access to these documents in order to pursue their investigations into whether the required loan docs are in the vaults of the RMBS trustees in New York. This is about to get real interesting.
AJE has a good “Listening Post” Episode. In the first segment, Samah El Shahat describes mainstream economists as ignoring and obfuscating non-orthodox economic narratives (i.e. those not supported by the IMF): Greece: Is the media part of the problem?
Privatization of public education not looking so hot after all:
http://www.npr.org/2011/06/27/137444337/what-happens-when-charter-schools-fail?ft=1&f=1001
In case you missed it:
Charter school CEO is charged with stealing money students collected for TOYS FOR TOTS. TOYS FOR FREAKING TOTS.
Yes, I do believe he is the Grinch.
Current, Currency, Travelers, & Investment
So, I get into town with X number of wave segments / economic gears left to build. By the time I get across town, I already know which are required locally and of those which will result in the most effective use of my time. I am looking at the number of churches per capita, etc, etc (passive), and I set down a pack of smokes to see how long it takes each class to steal them (active), etc, etc. What I want to know is the level of control exerted and how it is enforced, which delivers classic symptoms of gear/circulation failure.
No matter where I go, somebody “thinks” it’s a good idea to employ me as a dishwasher or something, “thinking” that the accounting profit is in their best interest. If you look, you see that the majority equate control with power, assuming a surplus of labor, and the control they seek is a function of their homogeneous filter, how they were bred to think.
Every person in that town has a filter-related problem, but most seek to capture a solution in a win-lose container/battery, for continuous use, ensuring that they lose regardless, because economies with greater circulation/current/power overwhelm them. Because they travel in a dc circle created for the purpose, they cannot see that the planet and universe are presenting increasingly difficult problem demands, faster and faster, as capitalism reaches its population saturation point.
The majority needs a new form of government that rewards a quantum increase in productive participation, while it waits for its self-interested representatives to solve the problem, throwing its wealth, its heritage, out the window for oil, and sells its children out for IOUS, extending and pretending, becoming relatively more ignorant with each passing day. The reptiles are starving, but they poisoned the sheep with inbreeding to increase efficient productivity, and all the doctor has to offer is another pill / addiction to speed up the process.
At the beginning, your algorithm solves small problems for people randomly, to identify the local characteristics of intelligent, win-win critters, which will eliminate your costs in exchange for solving their problems. In short order, you fall off Caesar’s radar, because the minions can’t see past immediate self-gratification in the positive feedback loop of their contrived history, which repeats in a self-fulfilling prophesy. That’s the nature of a homogeneous viral filter. It chokes itself to death with increasingly efficient resistor replication in a parallel circuit of parallel circuits.
Efficient investors bet to take advantage of growth in the filters, by ensuring a market for products that reinforce the feedback loop. Effective investors bet the viruses will consume themselves to death, following the thread of development as it comes out of the looking glass, Caesar twists it for use, the viruses consume themselves, and the next section is added. Investment return is all about timing, aggregate returns on risks over times. The effective investor only appears to be taking large (dumb) risks, to the homogenous filters.
It’s not how much monopoly accounting money you play with at the table; it’s how low the cost is to get in and what you take away, while the casino algorithm cameras watch at all times, giving the operators a false sense of information advantage, “thinking” that their box is bigger and better, because the historical probabilities favor their position. Caesar loses every time, so the only recourse is to rewrite History, and the TBTF segment of the process repeats itself.
Developers are not sitting in ivory towers, brainstorming in boardrooms, writing plans on the back of business cards, and implementing them in a garages. What kind of idiot thinks that 7 billion people can be fed, clothed, and housed with a process like that? The demographics of independent farmers and the energy technology cost structures driving big cities tell the tale.
You cannot swim out to a tsunami. You need a wave to throw you into a wave into a wave. It’s only a simple part of the surfing a tsunami problem, but take a look at that NatGas ping again. It should give you a few ideas. To the kid developer, the markets are just another video game. For them, Caesar is just a counterweight, and the people that pay tribute get what they get, IOUs in a TBTF, birth and death model, ponzi entitlement system. You want to be forming the curvature long before the tsunami hits, or betting on those intelligent enough to do so.
Architects are born, not chosen. Their conductivity depends upon the population’s representatives, but go ahead and analyze History to prove me wrong. The chamber is well beyond top dead center, so you might want to get the hell out of there instead. It’s about creation on the event horizon (effectiveness), not backwards engineering on the return stroke (efficiency).
She started paying me straight time for overtime hours when she got the word from the Family Law computers. I said something. The next week, she paid me straight time for overtime and shorted me 8 hours. Stimulus and response. Once I have two points on a line, I can expect the third point with certainty. Critters just can’t help themselves, because they are programmed not to accept sunk cost, which ensures gravity.
So, I build the gears that these towns desperately need. If they treat me well, I leave the gear behind. If not, I put it in the closet with all the rest. If you have different gases in a cylinder, what is the pressure on the lower gas as the upper gas approaches ignition? How do you completely combust a solid without physically touching it? How do you expel the gases?
The border patrol up here is acting like the mafia. Crack me up.
in a suburb of New Orleans, a mayor stole the Toys for Tots money. so this isn’t new. received a slap on the hand. Louisiana politics, we re elected David Vitter, Prostitute john.
welcome to America and power
From: Too Big to Fail or Too Big to Change
“…the investing public has grown increasingly frustrated with the lack of criminal prosecutions of, and absence of truly significant fines levied against, the senior executives and companies responsible for igniting the subprime meltdown…
The relative lack of prosecutions stemming from the financial meltdown stands in sharp contrast to the government’s response to past corporate malfeasance. The criminal cases arising from the Savings and Loan scandals of the 1980s and 1990s, where some of the biggest kingpins—including Charles Keating of Lincoln Savings & Loan and roughly 3,800 other bankers—were thrown behind bars, as well as the Enron and WorldCom accounting debacles in the early 2000s where Jeffrey Skilling, Kenneth Lay and Bernard Ebbers were jailed, demonstrated that executives would be held accountable for their crimes.”
I agree with most of what’s said in the article. Maybe the investing public is frustrated but I question whether the same can be said for the general public. Other than blogs like this, I have not experienced any significant level of anger among people regarding the perpetrators who were the cause of the financial crisis. Wish I could say otherwise.
In private conversations, when the issue is raised, the standard response always seems to be resignation that nothing can or will be done. Even the authors of the post have all but thrown in the towel; concluding that the level of regulatory capture has become so pervasive that any hope for justice has become totally dependent upon the potential success of private litigation.
Where I totally disagree with them is their perception that there was a significant prosecution of cases that arose as a result of the massive frauds of the late 1990’s. They site Skilling, Lay & Ebbers as examples of “executives held accountable”. Oh yeah? Who else was prosecuted? Fastow? These frauds were massive. There must have been hundreds if not thousands of people in a spectrum of roles who participated in or enabled the perps to continue deceive. IMO, this lack of prosecution of the millennium frauds set the stage for the current crisis.
Time to fix things, these folks should be pursued, assuming statute of limitations have not been tolled. We need positive prosecutorial momentum to be generated that can then be carried forward into the pursuit of the current criminal insititutional activities. Please continue to question why these people are not already being investigated. We just can’t afford to continue to let it slide.