#5
The covert collaboration of the MSM just became overt subversion of the Republic. Half the dentists in the country will cancel their subscriptions. Newsweak will have to replace their tag line, All Desntist, All the Time. Clift and Fineman need to get their resumes on the street. It's a money pit. The losses will be money diverted from Jane's re-election campaign. Good news all around.
#6
Outside of true believers (and dental patients), who reads it? True believers already get the joke, dental patients wish for Sports Illustrated.
Jane probably wants him tested for dementia.
#7
"Public trust" or not, if I was a vendor to Newsweak, I would be putting them on COD and hoping to get whatever money they owed paid back before the three month deadline.
Reading the article, Harman got Newsweak because he offered to fewest layoffs. WTF? This wasn't about rescuing a publication. This was about playing up to a buncha writers who really think they have this public trust that transcends the money side of the operation.
Expect to see Newsweak heading for bankruptcy next year.
HT to HotAir. I disagree with Hitchens on various things (see: atheism), but when he's right, he cuts like a knife
Posted by: Frank G ||
08/03/2010 08:20 ||
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#1
Hitch gets into high gear when his subject combines extreme stupidity and superstition with great influence, prestige or power: members of the House of Windsor, Mikey Moore, Hugo... This is Hitch in fine form-- "an awkwardness descended on the conversation":
As [Chavez's] tirade against evil America mounted, Sean Penn broke in to say that surely Chávez would be happy to see the arrest of Osama Bin Laden.
I was hugely impressed by the way that the boss scorned this overture. He essentially doubted the existence of al-Qaida, let alone reports of its attacks on the enemy to the north. "I don't know anything about Osama Bin Laden that doesn't come to me through the filter of the West and its propaganda." To this, Penn replied that surely Bin Laden had provided quite a number of his very own broadcasts and videos. I was again impressed by the way that Chávez rejected this proffered lucid-interval lifeline. All of this so-called evidence, too, was a mere product of imperialist television. After all, "there is film of the Americans landing on the moon," he scoffed. "Does that mean the moon shot really happened? In the film, the Yanqui flag is flying straight out. So, is there wind on the moon?" As Chávez beamed with triumph at this logic, an awkwardness descended on my comrades, and on the conversation.
Chávez, in other words, is very close to the climactic moment when he will announce that he is a poached egg and that he requires a very large piece of buttered toast so that he can lie down and take a soothing nap.
#5
I can`t decide whether he is guessing the weight, offering it to some heathen god or returning it to the fishmonger with a demand for something fresher.
Posted by: Grunter in Lima ||
08/03/2010 14:23 Comments ||
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#6
or "slices like an effin' hammer", as the case may be...
Economist Raghuram Rajan of U. Chicago Rajan offers a bold and convincing diagnosis of how a screw-up in the regulation of poor peoples mortgages in one country has brought the world to the brink of economic disaster, where it teeters still. He goes beyond the proximate causes of the problem the subprimes and derivatives and trade imbalances and the like. The ultimate cause, Rajan convincingly argues, is a widening of economic inequality that American politicians of both parties found politically intolerable, and chose to fix by turning the credit market into an under-the-table welfare state.
Rajan is describing not the moral problems of capitalism but the political problems. The median American is losing ground. And while people at the 90th percentile have never had it so good, Americans in the 10th percentile have endured a punishing economy for about a third of a century now. Their problems become particularly acute during recessions. For reasons that are not fully clear, recessions have changed in nature in the last 20 years. Historically, Western economies returned to full employment within a few months of hitting a recessions trough. Losing a job was a calamity, but a calamity of short duration. Since 1992, however, all recoveries have been "jobless recoveries" in the 2001 recession, it took more than 38 months for the economy to return to full employment.
And, as Rajan puts it with some understatement, "the United States is singularly unprepared for jobless recoveries." This is only partly because the United States has a weaker welfare state than other industrialized countries. It is also because the American safety net - in which government provides fewer health and retirement benefits but incentivizes employers to fill the gap winds up placing all of a persons eggs in the basket of his job. Lose your job and you lose not only your income but also your (and your childrens) health insurance and possibly (as in several scandalous recent cases) your pension.
Under such circumstances, any recession with the slightest perceptible effect on the public will end political careers by the score. And recessions are, alas, inevitable. The result, under both Democratic and Republican leadership, has been reckless government extension of credit. As a remedy for downturns, this has two political advantages. First, it does not bother conservatives as much as handouts do. Second, "easy credit has large, positive, immediate, and widely distributed benefits, whereas the costs all lie in the future. It has a payoff structure that is precisely the one desired by politicians, which is why so many countries have succumbed to its lure." You might say that the financial crisis reflects the emergence of the off-balance-sheet liabilities the human costs of deindustrialization.
#1
This article begs the question of whether or not banks require regulation by governments. They most certainly do. Krugman himself lost his credibility before the current crisis by his failure to predict it (I did, and I am no candidate for the Nobel Prize in anything.)
#3
High ratios of house price to earnings are a sign of economic failure.
Keeping housing prices high (=maintaining a high ratio of house prices to earnings) has been the official goal of the White House & Congress going back several administrations. Apparently they are bent on economic failure.
#4
The credit bubble was the response by BOTH parties to 1) the increase in inequality that attends a winner-take-all information technology economy, and 2) the extreme increase in economic insecurity affecting American families that are now vulnerable to highly volatile jobs, housing and stock markets.
U Chicago prof. Raghuram Rajan deserves to be much better known. In Christopher Caldwell's excellent Weekly Standard profile, he nails it:
Rajan offers a bold and convincing diagnosis of how a screw-up in the regulation of poor peoples mortgages in one country has brought the world to the brink of economic disaster, where it teeters still. He goes beyond the proximate causes of the problemthe subprimes and derivatives and trade imbalances and the like. The ultimate cause, Rajan convincingly argues, is a widening of economic inequality that American politicians of both parties found politically intolerable, and chose to fix by turning the credit market into an under-the-table welfare state.
...as Rajan puts it with some understatement, "the United States is singularly unprepared for jobless recoveries." This is only partly because the United States has a weaker welfare state than other industrialized countries. It is also because the American safety netin which government provides fewer health and retirement benefits but incentivizes employers to fill the gapwinds up placing all of a persons eggs in the basket of his job. Lose your job and you lose not only your income but also your (and your childrens) health insurance and possibly (as in several scandalous recent cases) your pension.
Under such circumstances, any recession with the slightest perceptible effect on the public will end political careers by the score. And recessions are, alas, inevitable. The result, under both Democratic and Republican leadership, has been reckless government extension of credit.
As a remedy for downturns, this has two political advantages. First, it does not bother conservatives as much as handouts do. Second, "easy credit has large, positive, immediate, and widely distributed benefits, whereas the costs all lie in the future. It has a payoff structure that is precisely the one desired by politicians, which is why so many countries have succumbed to its lure."
#5
a screw-up in the regulation of poor people's mortgages in one country has brought the world to the brink of economic disaster
If it was just the poor people's mortgages we would have a minor problem. It was the whole mindset of 'can't lose at real estate' buyers and 'bad loans won't be MY problem' lenders. And the dishonesty of the entire system that allowed - encouraged - them.
#6
Also, they thought they could move entire physical industries overseas but that they'll still be able to make money in the finance industry _anyway_. They think that even though everyone else will be unable to pay their bills, they'll still be able to get blood from the turnip, after all, they wrote the "blood from the turnip" clause in the contract. Never mind that it doesn't mean you'll _actually be able to get blood from the turnip_ when the government shuts down drilling in the Gulf, or irrigation in the Central Valley. Turnips themselves may be in short supply.
#7
#1 This article begs the question of whether or not banks require regulation by governments. They most certainly do.
Regulation should serve to protect individuals and organizations either from direct criminal action, or those actions/inactions that indirectly cause harm (ie. negligence on the part of the responsible party). This applies to all entities regulated by government (be it a bank, a coal company, a t-shirt vendor, etc.). Regulation should not exist to control the marketplace through theoretical models, or to pick winners and losers based on ideology, preference, or political gain. It is not the role of government to decide who will be successful; it is their role to protect the citizenry and sovereignty of this country. Do banks require regulation? Of course they do. The question is to what end are they being regulated?
#8
A bigger question regarding bank regulation is, what are you going to do about regulatory capture, so that the regulations are going to achieve something instead of making it worse?
All the storm we went through in 2007 and 2008, remember, was after Sarbannes/Oxley went through so we wouldn't have this sort of stuff happen anymore. It cost a lot, but we still have these sorts of accidents anyway.
#9
we still have these sorts of accidents anyway
Snow Thing, are you sure they're accidents? Seems like a lot of connected people got quite wealthy from them.
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
08/03/2010 16:26 Comments ||
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#11
This article begs the question of whether or not banks require regulation by governments. They most certainly do.
Not. It was regulation by government that exacerbated this mess. The investment banks should never have been allowed to lever their capital 30-40 x whcih they were by the Fed. It is regulation by the government that allows people to ignore the risks their bank takes by insuring deposits. It was regulation by the government that allowed ratings to be paid for by the seller rather than the purchaser of securities. And it was regulation by the government that killed the IPO market and technology innovation. Regulation initially promises to remove risk and provide security. But this is only a charade. Regulation hides risk until it reveals the emperor has no clothes. With catastrophic consequences for all. Because there is risk in the world and it cannot be regulated.
By July, Krugman had lost his "Battle of the Blog." On July 23, Latrina commented, "Who is this Sean from Florida? He takes everything that [the] Professor [says] and shreds it, piece by piece. He shouldn't be allowed to post his comments on this blog since he seems to be winning all the debates. We progressives need to stick together and embellish our talking points without someone from the outside pointing out fallacies in our ideology."
I assume that's sarcasm, but it's the Times, so who knows.
What, then, are we to make of a recent survey for the Al Arabiya television network finding that a staggering 71 percent of the Arabic respondents have no interest in the Palestinian-Israeli peace talks? That low? The Paleos are the scorned of the Arab world.
"This is an alarming indicator," lamented Saleh Qallab, a columnist for the pan-Arab newspaper Al Sharq al Awsat. "The Arabs, people and regimes alike, have always been as interested in the peace process, its developments and particulars, as they were committed to the Palestinian cause itself." ...or not.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
