naked capitalism

Anonymous says:

From the same BBC video series,
Pet fox Vixen shares flat with family
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/7898259.stm

dearieme says:

And also at the Beeb

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/7889698.stm

cian says:

Billmon’s back! Wonderful.

Anonymous says:

Well, here’s some praise: great piece by Buiter. Very interesting, but is there any chance of it happening?

lambert strether says:

Apparently, some people can’t hear Billmon’s riff on Joseph Heller’s Catch 22. I wonder what passage is causing some readers to stick their fingers in their ears and chant “la la la”?

Could it be this one:

“”"
[I]t would literally be easier to square a circle, or maybe invent a perpetual motion machine, than to devise a plan that a.) lifts Big Sh*tpile off the balance sheets of the banks, while at the same time leaving them b.) solvent and c.) in the hands of private investors, without d.) constituting a flat-out transfer of wealth from taxpayers to bank shareholders.
“”"

Or this one:
“”"
Bottom line: great big chunks of Big Sh*tpile aren’t “impaired,” or “illiquid,” or “distressed,” they’re worthless, now and forever – unless the peak real estate values of the bubble can miraculously be restored and a whole bunch of deceased LBOs can be raised from the tomb.
“”"

Or this comment, on President Kerensky and his team:
“”"
One of the things that creeps me out about the political system’s response to the crisis so far – the insolvency of the banking system in particular – are the increasingly desperate attempts to maintain a phony façade of free markets and private enterprise, in an economy now utterly dependent on the federal safety net. I totally expected that from Hank Paulson and the Cheney Administration, but is Obama’s financial team really pressed from exactly the same Wall Street mold?
“”"

I guess what I’m saying, really, is that a lot of the really smart and financially knowledgeable people who read this blog should pay attention to what Billmon, and people like him, are saying, because Billmon is expressing the views of a lot of people, some of whose thinking is a bit cruder. Eh? And the post is, surely, not so poorly written that it’s not worth a read — which I hope the extracts from it show.

DoctoRx says:

Agree w K T Cat and Anon 10:35. Billmon’s rant juvenile. After all the extra insights he said he obtained from detailed study, all he can do is analogize to Catch-22, and tell us what we all know re the evils of CDOs. A little editing, Billmon, would go a long way.

And re the alleged evils of the Republicans only: Clinton pushed for the repeal of Glass-Steagall. His crowning achievement: Take that, FDR! And a Democratic Congress railroaded the TARP bailout through with no hearings, having ignored the financial crisis at least as much as the White House and the Fed did. And why didn’t they investigate corruption in Iraq?

Yves: If you are half as partisan as Billmon, that would be disappointing. The current problems go much deeper than can be blamed on one wing of the Establishment or the other.

William Mitchell says:

“While Rome Burns” shows how P/E ratio influences long-term returns. Correct, but more dramatically shown with a scatter plot — see mine from 1995, using the same data source as Harrison’s:
http://www.incomeprofiles.com/articles/?id=12

lineup32 says:

Difficult for many to get beyond their political leaning or belief in the American Dream machine, maybe they need a new draft and send them off to some far and distant land to protect the interest of the free here at home, soon they would get the message.

donna says:

It’s just a jump to the left…

Richard says:

OOPS! Fixed last sentence.

The links to CounterPunch and AlterNet are a big disappointment. These are nut sites. Didn’t the “Bush Confesses to Oval Office Alcohol Relapses” book ad give you a clue Yves?

fresno dan says:

From Clusterstock:
LOSS: $126,417
Lucky Peter Chernin avoided getting caught in the market meltdown last fall thanks to his pitifully small News Corp. stake of 10,465 shares. Consequently, even though the company’s share price fell significantly, its COO barely saw a change in his stock portfolio.

Uh, I just got my 401k, and thats about what I LOST. BUT I don’t make nearly as much!!! Arrrrrgh!!!

Anonymous says:

Notwithstanding Hudson’s sentence about debt ratios, Hudson’s piece was one of the best I read all year. Thanks, Yves. Please, everyone, read that article. If you don’t think you’re being sold down the river to the oligarchs, you’re in denial.

Anonymous says:

I think that cat was thrown. I can’t see else how it could have adopted such a pose.

He’s got a look of somber resignation on his face, as if to say

‘yep, they’re throwing me into the snow-drift again!’

alex black says:

What’s up with these two points in the Bilmon aritcle? -
On the Obama/Geithner Public/Private plan – “what kind of market is this? One that only a banker could love – especially a REPUBLICAN banker” Huh? Which party is Obama in?

Or my favorite – “Could it be that Obama is beholden to the same Wall Street interests as Bush? Maybe it’s better to not think about that question”

Pure Daily Kos. Pure crap. Most if its readers probably came away thinking “I STILL don’t understand this, but he sounds smart and hates Republicans, so I know I must be brilliant for hating Republicans too.”

Yves Smith says:

On the “Check the Numbers” piece, I agree wholeheartedly that the examples chosen for recrimination were liberal causes. However, that does not make his general point less valid. Researchers on the right and left are refusing to disclose data. This means the polity is constructing policy on the social sciences version of junk science.

Since the right has had much more sway over economics/finance policy (doubters need to check blogs among top economists on “heterodox economics” about a year and a half ago; if you argue with me without doing your homework, I will be able to tell you are doctrinnaire idiots) they are far more vulnerable to the charge of doctoring the data than the left, hence the “best defense is a good offense” approach in the piece.

The fact that the debate has been successfully framed by the right starting in the Reagan/Thatcher era, and even more so in the 1990s, puts any contrarian/skeptic in the left camp by default. I suggest readers differentiate between ideologues and skeptics.

alex black says:

Yves –

Sorry to upset you. I have no idea who Bilmon is, but plenty of exposure to Daily Kos and its readership/commentators – I used to work for the Obama campaign, and would insert talking points into every blog imaginable, and anytime I stopped to read Daily Kos, I literally felt ill at the level of hate-talk there. Worse than Limbaugh. Enough to make me almost start rooting for McCain, even while I was working for Obama.

So when reading Bilmon’s piece, my first thought was “yeah, yeah, yeah, we already know all this…” and then I ran across the usual Republican bashing that seems to be required on Daily Kos, but it was an utter cognitive disconnect – maybe it WAS a subtle point, saying that Obama/Geithner were playing Bush/Paulson, part II, but then why didn’t Bilmon just say that, loud and clear. I read in bold letters the usual Republicans-are-evil, and then read him explicitly say that it would be a bad thing to spend any time pondering whether or not Obama was beholden to the same special interests that Bush and Paulson had catered to. Maybe you read this as a subtle damnation of Obama and Geithner – I read it as the usual Daily Kos – “nothing Obama can do is bad, if it looks bad we must be mistaken” along with a gratuitous slap-down of Republicans, who weren’t the one’s who drafted the Obama Geithner Public/Private partnership.

If it was a subtle criticism, judging by the comments I read after the article, the subtlety flew right over the heads of the Daily Kos readers. No one standing up to say “Obama is acting like Bush!” Just more Republican bashing – more echo chamber echo.

If he intended to criticize Obama’s catering to Wall Street, he failed to convey that to his audience. He dodged it, and instead turned the readers’ heads squarely in the direction that they all seem to be already frozen in at Daily Kos – Republicans evil. If he was criticizing Obama/Geithner, why didn’t he do it clearly and firmly? Why was his biggest slam on the Republicans, who didn’t draw up the plan he was criticizing?

But I respect you, so I’ll retract and give him the benefit of the doubt – this article was a damning indictment of Obama’s planned give-away to Wall Street, but designed to subversively get published on a blog that won’t print anything unless it blames all evils on Republicans.

But if he thinks his subversion will actually get the readers there to think it through and come to agree with his subtle conclusions that Obama is acting like a tool for Wall Street, I fear he’s vastly overrating the openmindedness and intelligence of the audience there. But I wish him luck!

Anonymous says:

I don’t blame Yves for being disappointed at her readers. Ignoring who is Billmon, one of the very best writers (and thinkers) of the internets… If you don’t like to get to him through Daily Kos, you can always go through “Moon of Alabama”. Or you can check the archives of the “Whiskey Bar” here:

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Jan-06-1.html

Strongly recommended for anyone that wants to perfect their education.

Anonymous says:

Yves, I am a physicist by training and one of the ways I make by living is by criticizing computer models. What you want from the authors of a report is a full, clear statement of their assumptions and the underlying equations that they are solving. A data dump (the term of art for what these people are demanding) is an enormous imposition on the authors and useless for any critic who isn’t lavishly funded by a wealthy interest group.

Anon (6:19)

Anonymous says:

Yves, you’re suffering from the same problem that most interesting financial sites suffers from sooner or later…There are just alot of right wing kooks that thinks they know money, just…because they do. They made the Housing Bubble Blog comments unreadable, severely degraded the quality of the comments at Calculated Risk and so forth. Immigrant bashing gets to be a pretty good symptom of when the comments are starting to go bad.

It just gets really stupid when pretend libertarian republicans pretend that they aren’t partisan and then trash someone like Billmon who, frankly, is one of those people who knows what he is talking about. His posts on the Spanish Civil War drastically influenced me.

The really *big* point I’d like to make is that Billmon was one of the first major bloggers to really do in-depth analysis on the financial system and its illogic circa 2004-2005. An early Calculated Risk, really.

-shah8