Oh. Look. James Pethokoukis is making shit up again. Why people with track records like this are given any attention is beyond me.
Free Markets Solve Everything
The world is a vampire
We are ruled by sociopathic ‘tweens (via):
A few days earlier I had been forwarded a memo written by the hedge fund chief Tom Barrack to his underlings at Colony Capital. In it, he described a “personal breakthrough” he had made as a result of reading the Twilight books. “I feel renewed and refreshed, having gotten out of my comfort zone and experiencing something so totally out of my normal realm,” he wrote.
[…..]“Gang,” Mr Barrack starts.
It goes on to describe how after “an agonisingly tough couple of weeks” he took some “yacht time” and chanced upon his daughter’s copy of Twilight. “I don’t get it … but I feel it. Taking the agenda-less time to absorb a point of view that I had ignored while loved ones around me relished it was an oasis for my soul.”
There are long musings on love, on anticipation and vampires, allowing him to draw the following conclusion for his team: “It is hard for us to dream … it is time for all of us … to spend more time outside the strict arithmetic cadence of our business … we must really find the ‘moment’ …”
The part of corporate culture I understand the least is love of soul-searching mass emails, motivational talks from Tony Robbins Tom Friedman, and the like. What’s up with it? Could one of you explain it?
Gross Indifference
Kthug points out the shocking fact that no one seems to care about unemployment:
Not long ago, anyone predicting that one in six American workers would soon be unemployed or underemployed, and that the average unemployed worker would have been jobless for 35 weeks, would have been dismissed as outlandishly pessimistic — in part because if anything like that happened, policy makers would surely be pulling out all the stops on behalf of job creation.
But now it has happened, and what do we see?
First, we see Congress sitting on its hands, with Republicans and conservative Democrats refusing to spend anything to create jobs, and unwilling even to mitigate the suffering of the jobless.
We’re told that we can’t afford to help the unemployed — that we must get budget deficits down immediately or the “bond vigilantes” will send U.S. borrowing costs sky-high. Some of us have tried to point out that those bond vigilantes are, as far as anyone can tell, figments of the deficit hawks’ imagination — far from fleeing U.S. debt, investors have been buying it eagerly, driving interest rates to historic lows. But the fearmongers are unmoved: fighting deficits, they insist, must take priority over everything else — everything else, that is, except tax cuts for the rich, which must be extended, no matter how much red ink they create.
And about those bond vigilantes:
In the WSJ, Gregory Zuckerman has a report on all the big name investors who are now positioned to bet on deflation. Among the big names: Bill Gross, David Tepper, and GMO LLC.
But this isn’t that surprising, given that the “Big D” has been all the rage of late, reaching a fever pitch last week when St. Louis Fed president James Bullard dropped his big paper on the subject.
What’s interesting is that it wasn’t all that long ago when all the cool kids were betting on inflation. Paolo Pellegrini — John Paulson’s old hand — has been warning about inflation for awhile, and at least not long ago was short Treasuries, arguing that the massive funding needs of the US would necessitate more printing and higher interest rates. Whoops.
It’s almost like our government is set up to cater to a narrow brand of special interests and preserving the wealth and status of the select few.
Vouchers solve everything
“Voucher” is one of those cool words, like “quantum” and “mobile”, that just makes everything better:
David Brooks columns are often difficult to grasp hold of, but I want to flag this accurate-but-misleading account of how Paul Ryan’s “budget roadmap” achieves large reductions in entitlement spending: “On the welfare-state side, he’d sweep away most subsidies to the middle and upper classes, like the tax exemption on employee health plans. He’d essentially voucherize federal benefits, like health care and Social Security, and increase federal subsidies for people down the income scale.”
Since Social Security is just checks mailed out by the government I don’t even know what voucherizing it would mean.
I think vouchers are fine, as long they are implemented in a Burkean way so as not to disrupt the complex adaptive system of the marketplace of ideas.
I don’t want to go to Chelsea’s
I believe that Bill Clinton was an excellent president, that we were lucky to have him, and that there are thousands of gazillionaires who are less deserving of their wealth than he is. Furthermore, I don’t want to hear another of Cokie’s stories about how Tip O’Neill got married in a hand-me-down tux and had the reception in the parish rec room.
All of that said, I too find it disturbing how quickly former political leaders become fabulously wealthy (Counterpunch via James Wolcott):
Before we attend to the poor political judgment of such an extravagant affair during times of economic distress, let us wonder aloud where a poor boy who became governor of Arkansas and president of the United States got such a fortune that he can blow $3,000,000 on a wedding.
The American people did not take up a collection to reward him for his service to them. Where did the money come from? Who was he really serving during his eight years in office?
How did Tony Blair and his wife, Cherrie, end up with an annual income of ten million pounds (approximately $15 million dollars) as soon as he left office? Who was Blair really serving?
These are not polite questions, and they are infrequently asked.
In the article on the death of the American middle-class John cited, Ed Luce writes:
Then there are those, such as Paul Krugman, The New York Times columnist and Nobel prize winner, who blame it on politics….
The incomes of the super-wealthy have skyrocketed while those of the middle-class have stagnated. Meanwhile, many political (and media) elites have joined the ranks of the super-wealthy. Coincidence?
Update. The $3 million figure may be garbage. I still agree with the main point of the Counterpunch piece, though.
It Was Nice While It Lasted
The Financial Times performs a post-mortem on the American middle class:
The slow economic strangulation of the Freemans and millions of other middle-class Americans started long before the Great Recession, which merely exacerbated the “personal recession” that ordinary Americans had been suffering for years. Dubbed “median wage stagnation” by economists, the annual incomes of the bottom 90 per cent of US families have been essentially flat since 1973 – having risen by only 10 per cent in real terms over the past 37 years. That means most Americans have been treading water for more than a generation. Over the same period the incomes of the top 1 per cent have tripled. In 1973, chief executives were on average paid 26 times the median income. Now the multiple is above 300.
The trend has only been getting stronger. Most economists see the Great Stagnation as a structural problem – meaning it is immune to the business cycle. In the last expansion, which started in January 2002 and ended in December 2007, the median US household income dropped by $2,000 – the first ever instance where most Americans were worse off at the end of a cycle than at the start. Worse is that the long era of stagnating incomes has been accompanied by something profoundly un-American: declining income mobility.
Alexis de Tocqueville, the great French chronicler of early America, was once misquoted as having said: “America is the best country in the world to be poor.” That is no longer the case. Nowadays in America, you have a smaller chance of swapping your lower income bracket for a higher one than in almost any other developed economy – even Britain on some measures. To invert the classic Horatio Alger stories, in today’s America if you are born in rags, you are likelier to stay in rags than in almost any corner of old Europe.
I don’t see anything changing any time soon. And you really need to click the link and read the whole piece.
(via memeorandum)
No One Could Have Predicted
Time to take seafood off the menu:
Scientists have found signs of an oil-and-dispersant mix under the shells of tiny blue crab larvae in the Gulf of Mexico, the first clear indication that the unprecedented use of dispersants in the BP oil spill has broken up the oil into toxic droplets so tiny that they can easily enter the foodchain.
Marine biologists started finding orange blobs under the translucent shells of crab larvae in May, and have continued to find them “in almost all” of the larvae they collect, all the way from Grand Isle, Louisiana, to Pensacola, Fla. — more than 300 miles of coastline — said Harriet Perry, a biologist with the University of Southern Mississippi’s Gulf Coast Research Laboratory.
And now, a team of researchers from Tulane University using infrared spectrometry to determine the chemical makeup of the blobs has detected the signature for Corexit, the dispersant BP used so widely in the Deepwater Horizon
“It does appear that there is a Corexit sort of fingerprint in the blob samples that we ran,” Erin Gray, a Tulane biologist, told the Huffington Post Thursday. Two independent tests are being run to confirm those findings, “so don’t say that we’re 100 percent sure yet,” Gray said.
Hoocoodanode!