links for 2009-09-30

• Banks eye way out of hell to salvation – FT
  But the biggest form of state support for the US banking sector is arguably its simplest. Near-zero interest rates allow banks to make a killing the old-fashioned way: borrowing at low rates and lending at much higher ones. Judging by the Federal Reserve’s utterances and the sickly state of the real economy, that giant prop will remain in place for the foreseeable future.
  (tags: banking finance bailout government regulation incentives moral_hazard support lending capitalism future)
• Washington and Wall Street Pay – On Point with Tom Ashbrook
  Wall Street took home astounding pay packages before the economy crashed last fall, and the aftermath was disaster. Critics as big and sober as former Fed chair Paul Volker say crazy pay helped drive the risk that drove the meltdown.

  Now, from the G20 to Congress to the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department, there are calls for some limits on the hyper Wall Street pay that helped crash — some say corrupt — the economy.

  Will it happen? Will the mega-bonuses be reined in? How? And how much?

  (tags: wall_street morgenson compensation incentives finance crisis government regulation greed power corruption oversight)
• Multitasking Minds – On Point with Tom Ashbrook
  Americans love to be horrified by multitasking. Well, some Americans.

  For many younger Americans, it’s just life. Especially “media multitasking.” Phoning, texting, reading, tweeting, with a movie on the laptop, a video chat in the corner, IM on the side. And — God forbid — maybe driving, too.

  A new study out of Stanford seems to confirm the worst fears about multitasking — that in the midst of all the “multi,” nothing gets done well. This hour, we’ll talk with an author of that study — and with two twenty-somethings who say it’s just life.

  (tags: recommended radio multitasking attention young generation psychology brain shallowness)

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links for 2009-09-29

• Jonathan Haidt on how our moral roots skew our reasoning
  We engage in moral thinking not to find the truth, but to find arguments that support our intuitive judgments, so that we can defend ourselves if challenged. The crucial insight here comes from psychologist Tom Gilovich at Cornell, who says that when we want to believe a proposition, we ask, "Can I believe it?" — and we look only for evidence that the proposition might be true. If we find a single piece of evidence then we're done. We stop. We have a reason we can trot out to support our belief. But if we don't want to believe a proposition, we ask, "Must I believe it?" — and we look for an escape hatch, a single reason why maybe, just maybe, the proposition is false.
  (tags: morality psychology argument emotion judgement reason truth politics bias logic republican extremism partisanship)

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links for 2009-09-28

• Lunch with the FT: Rory Stewart
  Since arriving at Harvard in June last year, he has been consultant to several members of Barack Obama’s administration, including Hillary Clinton, and is a member of Richard Holbrooke’s special committee for Afghanistan and Pakistan policy. “I do a lot of work with policymakers, but how much effect am I having?” he asks, pronging a mussel out of its shell.

  “It’s like they’re coming in and saying to you, ‘I’m going to drive my car off a cliff. Should I or should I not wear a seatbelt?’ And you say, ‘I don’t think you should drive your car off the cliff.’ And they say, ‘No, no, that bit’s already been decided – the question is whether to wear a seatbelt.’ And you say, ‘Well, you might as well wear a seatbelt.’ And then they say, ‘We’ve consulted with policy expert Rory Stewart and he says …’”

  (tags: rory_stewart afghanistan politics interview foreign_policy policy middle_east terrorism pakistan)
• A 'Shattered' Republican Party? : NPR
  When radical extremists sought to cleanse society of sin and evil, what they really desired was the cleansing of their souls. Fromm's understanding of the psychological character of authoritarianism was not only penetrating but also prophetic. He described how submission to the authority of a higher power to escape the complexities of personal freedom would lead not to order and harmony but ultimately to destructiveness. Movements that evangelized among the crisis-stricken and desperate, promising redemption through a holy crusade, ultimately assumed the dysfunctional characteristics of their followers. After sowing destruction all around it, Fromm predicted that such a movement would turn on itself. Dramatic self-immolation was the inevitable fate of movements composed of conflicted individuals who sought above all the destruction of their blemished selves.
  (tags: politics republican conservative extremism mccarthy hate history usa paranoia conspiracy)

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links for 2009-09-27

• Matt Latimer, Struck 'Speech-Less' By The D.C. Noise : NPR
  Latimer says the speeches "got so bad at some point, that we were basically just giving the president information to satisfy him." He describes writing a speech that Bush delivered at a base near a pipeline in Alaska: "At one point, we were saying something to the effect of, 'You are near a pipeline. Oil comes from pipelines. Oil comes from the ground.' "
  (tags: speech writing bush radio interview npr politics partisanship rove)

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links for 2009-09-25

• Ahmadinejad: 'No One Goes To Prison For No Reason' : NPR
  Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad talks with Steve Inskeep about the country's disputed presidential elections in June. Following demonstrations, protesters were rounded up and put in prison. Ahmadinejad says no one is in jail for opposing his re-election. He says security forces who tortured prisoners "may lose their jobs."
  (tags: ahmadinejad iran president interview npr radio election protests prison torture rights civilians accountability deception)
• Road to the Future ~ Overview | Blueprint America
  Over the next 40 years, America’s population will grow by more than an estimated 130 million people – most will settle in or near the country’s major population centers. At the same time, an unprecedented multi-billion dollar public works investment has just been made by the federal government to rebuild both the weakened economy and stressed national infrastructure. And, Congress is about to consider a transportation bill that will determine the course of the nation’s highways and transit for years to come.

  Blueprint America: Road to the Future, an original documentary part of a PBS multi-platform series on the country’s aging and changing infrastructure, examines the choices we can make as the country invests in its infrastructure, and how they can affect the way we live.

  (tags: denver colorado documentary tv sprawl cities urban planning growth infrastructure transportation pollution)
• Inskeep Discusses Ahmadinejad Interview : NPR
  Diplomats from many nations walked out Wednesday when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made his speech to the U.N. General Assembly. On more than one occasion, Ahmadinejad has questioned whether the Holocaust happened. NPR's Steve Inskeep spoke to the Iranian president. Inskeep discusses the interview.
  (tags: npr radio ahmadinejad iran interview holocaust president hate middle_east un)

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links for 2009-09-23

• Why Are These Men Laughing? – Ron Suskind
  "Don't you understand?" he says, his voice rising. "We got into the White House and forfeited the game. You're supposed to stand for something . . . to generate sound ideas, support them with real evidence, and present them to Congress and the people. We didn't do any of that. We just danced this way and that on minute political calculations and whatever was needed for a few paragraphs of a speech."
  (tags: suskind bush white_house rove politics partisanship campaign policy government republican conservative recommended washington cynicism)
• Bush from the Inside – Bruce Bartlett
  One of the things that Latimer talks a lot about is the importance of the president's mood, which appears to have gyrated wildly. Apparently, the best way to get on his good side was to pretend to be stupid so that Bush would seem like a genius by figuring out some simple point for himself. Latimer says that national security adviser Stephen Hadley was very good at doing this:
  (tags: Bruce_Bartlett bush personality hubris president white_house stupidity ignorance politics)
• But Who Is Watching the Regulators? – Gretchen Morgenson
  “We’ve got a very comfortable equilibrium here where Wall Street praises the authorities and the authorities give Wall Street more or less what it wants and they hope that the public really doesn’t understand the depth of the cynicism involved,” Mr. Kane said in an interview. “You keep reading about how wonderful it is that we didn’t have a Great Depression. Well, if they can sell that point of view, then nothing will change.”
  (tags: cynicism wall_street regulation government oversight corruption morgenson proposal power finance banking responsibility)
• Where Are We Again? (Pre-G20 Pittsburgh summit) « The Baseline Scenario
  Financial markets have stabilized – people believe that the US and West European governments will not allow big financial institutions to fail. We have effectively nationalized any banking system losses, but we’ll let bank executives enjoy the full benefits of the upside. How much shareholders participate remains to be seen; there will be no effective reining in of insider compensation (my version; Joe Nocera’s view). Small and medium-sized banks, however, will continue to fail as problems in commercial real estate continue to mount.
  (tags: economics world crisis recovery government regulation incentives banking moral_hazard power)
• Wall St., A Year After the Meltdown – On Point with Tom Ashbrook
  One year ago this week, Wall Street was coming down, and taking the American economy with it. AIG, Merrill Lynch in free fall. Giant banks wobbling. Lehman Brothers, allowed to collapse.

  Americans lost jobs and dreams and years of savings. Everyone swore the system had to change.

  One year later, Wall Street’s survivors are very much back in business. Big pay, big risks — and surprisingly little change in regulation and oversight.

  Could it all happen again? Yes, says my guest today, and it could be worse.

  (tags: radio simon_johnson economics finance power regulation recommended crisis incentives government banking moral_hazard wall_street bailout lessons)
• Asian Journey; Looking Up an Old Love On the Streets of Vietnam – The New York Times
  THE Vietnamese wax poetic about pho, assigning it a central and unifying place in their culture. Duong Thu Huong, a novelist, rhapsodized about walking the streets, inhaling the soup's subtle perfume as it rises from the stockpots. Huu Ngoc, a social historian, sees it as a symbol of the national fight for self-determination: even in the darkest times, when the wars against the French and Americans were going badly, the Vietnamese were always free to express themselves by making and eating pho, their own culinary creation.
  (tags: pho soup vietnam food cuisine culture travel eating)

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links for 2009-09-22

• The Real Banker Boondoggle | The New Republic
  What is inarguable is the special treatment that bankers received. It wasn't just that jobs were preserved or that annual bonuses continued to be paid. It was that, unlike every employee of every company that goes bankrupt for reasons related to its own position or general industrial conditions, the bankers had their equity preserved by the government's rescue efforts–whereas, say, the bailouts of GM and Chrysler left nothing for their shareholders.
  (tags: banking greed ethics morality bonuses compensation wall_street privilege government regulation finance crisis recommended equity)
• Flare | Apps | Job Voyager
  This visualization shows stacked time series of reported occupations in the United States Labor Force from 1850-2000. The data has been normalized: for each census year, the percentage of the polled labor force in each occupation is shown. The data is originally from the United States Census Bureau and was provided by the University of Minnesota Population Center (ipums.org).
  (tags: jobs history visualization graph usa labor trends)
• 'Too Big to Fail’ Is Dangerous, in Finance and Health Care – Tyler Cowen
  For years now, many businesses and individuals in the United States have been relying on the power of government, rather than competition in the marketplace, to increase their wealth. This is politicization of the economy. It made the financial crisis much worse, and the trend is accelerating.
  (tags: tyler_cowen economics tbtf banking incentives government regulation oligarchy finance business bailout crisis power politics risk moral_hazard)
• Irving Kristol's Other Journey | The New Republic
  Two years later, Kristol would assert that defending the American way of life against foreign and domestic enemies required that citizens develop a "religious attachment" to their country. In future years he would go even further, to claim that modern conservatism should be based on a synthesis of religion, nationalism, and economic growth–and that Republicans should give up their resistance to the transformation of their party into an explicitly religious organization–all for the sake of banishing liberalism, now flatly described as the "enemy," from American political life.
  (tags: kristol history usa neoconservative conservative foreign_policy activism intellectual religion extremism politics partisanship)
• Peking Over Our Shoulder | Noam Scheiber | The New Republic
  For decades, while the United States has prodded China on any number of internal issues, the reverse has rarely been true, except for the vaguest exhortations. The notion that we might take advice from a developing country–even one as large and rapidly industrializing as China–would have been a blow to our self-image, at least if it weren't so laughable. Within a few short years, though, Washington has come face to face with a daunting new reality: Not only are the Chinese raising questions about our domestic policies, but we suddenly have to listen. "The U.S. had all the answers once upon a time," says a senior administration official. "But China's not the apprentice anymore."
  (tags: recommended china usa economics politics foreign_policy debt treasury trade investment geithner saving)
• Remembering Irving Kristol | Capital Gains and Games
  In the years since, it became clear that Kristol's decision was wrong. There is still a need for serious conservative social science research that has no other publication outlet. Commentary is now just a highbrow version of National Review, which is just a glossy version of Human Events, which has become a slightly less hysterical version of nutty websites like WorldNetDaily. The Wall Street Journal editorial page and the Weekly Standard, founded by Kristol's son Bill, just parrot the Republican Party line of the day.
  (tags: Bruce_Bartlett kristol neoconservative legacy conservative politics journal magazine intellectual history partisanship)
• Matthew Yglesias » The Irving Kristol Legacy
  Among the core social scientists around The Public Interest there were no economists…. This explains my own rather cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit and other monetary or fiscal problems. The task, as I saw it, was to create a new majority, which evidently would mean a conservative majority, which came to mean, in turn, a Republican majority – so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government…
  (tags: kristol yglesias graph debt deficit gdp economics usa history budget fiscal responsibility conservative legacy)

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links for 2009-09-20

• Have a Nice Day – Thomas Friedman
  Here is what is indisputable: The world is on track to add another 2.5 billion people by 2050, and many will be aspiring to live American-like, high-energy lifestyles. In such a world, renewable energy — where the variable cost of your fuel, sun or wind, is zero — will be in huge demand.

  China now understands that. It no longer believes it can pollute its way to prosperity because it would choke to death. That is the most important shift in the world in the last 18 months. China has decided that clean-tech is going to be the next great global industry and is now creating a massive domestic market for solar and wind, which will give it a great export platform.

  (tags: thomas_friedman globalization china green energy solar jobs future usa industry economics innovation technology)
• High-Five Nation – David Brooks
  When you look from today back to 1945, you are looking into a different cultural epoch, across a sort of narcissism line. Humility, the sense that nobody is that different from anybody else, was a large part of the culture then.
  (tags: narcissism culture ego decorum behavior society wwii war usa david_brooks humility individualism recommended history modesty)

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links for 2009-09-19

• Dear President Bush, – Andrew Sullivan – The Atlantic
  Americans want, and need, to move on from the debate over torture in Iraq and Afghanistan and close this tragic chapter in our nation’s history. Prosecuting those responsible could tear apart a country at war. Instead, the best way to confront the crimes of the past is for the man who authorized them to take full responsibility. An open letter to President George W. Bush.
  (tags: bush war iraq torture president usa detainees cheney geneva guantanamo andrew_sullivan responsibility recommended reputation terrorism interrogation security)
• S.E.C. Settlement With Bank Over Merrill Bonuses Is Rejected – NYTimes.com
  Judge Rakoff refused to approve a $33 million deal that would have settled a lawsuit filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission against the Bank of America. The lawsuit alleged that the bank failed to adequately disclose the bonuses that were paid by Merrill before the merger, which was completed in January at regulators’ behest as Merrill foundered.

  He accused the S.E.C. of failing in its role as Wall Street’s top cop by going too easy on one of the biggest banks it regulates. And he accused executives of the Bank of America of failing to take responsibility for actions that blindsided its shareholders and the taxpayers who bailed out the bank at the height of the crisis.

  (tags: settlements trials justice wall_street judge bonuses merril_lynch bofa banking merger crisis sec oversight regulation lying)

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links for 2009-09-17

• Obama And The Ghost Of Louis Brandeis – Simon Johnson
  The only thing that will make a different is regulation. This is the lesson of the 1930s in the U.S.–the regulations imposed at that time created a financial sector that did not impede growth after World War II; basic intermediation (connecting savers and borrowers) worked fine and destabilizing frenzies were avoided. During this period, the financial sector came up with venture capital, ATMs, and credit cards–arguably the three most important financial innovations of the past 100 years, and much more helpful of real innovation than anything you’ve seen since 1980.
  (tags: obama brandeis simon_johnson greed regulation finance lessons crisis history economics)

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