links for 2010-05-31

• Obama Is From Mars, Wall Street Is From Venus – New York Magazine
  “The majority of Wall Street thinks, ‘Hey, you lent us money. We did a trade. We paid you back. When you had me down, you could have crushed me, you could have done whatever you wanted. You didn’t do it! So stop your bitching and stop telling me I owe you, because I already paid you everything! The fact that I’m making money now is because I’m smarter than you!’ I think that’s where you’ve got this massive disconnect. In simple human terms, the government is saying, ‘I saved your life, and all you did was thank me once. You should be calling me every day: Thank you. Thank you.’ The guy who saved the life expects more. And the guy whose life is saved says, ‘I already thanked you!’ ”
  (tags: obama wall_street banking recommended finance crisis power geithner bailout moral_hazard economics politics greed regulation)

Read Full Post »

links for 2010-05-29

• Obama Versus the Corporations – Paul Krugman
  Many Obama supporters have been disappointed by what they see as the administration’s mildness on regulatory issues — its embrace of limited financial reform that doesn’t break up the biggest banks, its support for offshore drilling, and so on. Yet corporate interests are balking at even modest changes from the permissiveness of the Bush era.

  From the outside, this rage against regulation seems bizarre. I mean, what did they expect? The financial industry, in particular, ran wild under deregulation, eventually bringing on a crisis that has left 15 million Americans unemployed, and required large-scale taxpayer-financed bailouts to avoid an even worse outcome. Did Wall Street expect to emerge from all that without facing some new restrictions? Apparently it did.

  (tags: krugman obama corporation corruption politics taxes regulation wall_street crisis power)

Read Full Post »

links for 2010-05-15

• Elementary Worldly Wisdom – Charlie Munger
  You've got to have models in your head. And you've got to array your experience—both vicarious and direct—on this latticework of models. You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life. You've got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head.

  What are the models? Well, the first rule is that you've got to have multiple models—because if you just have one or two that you're using, the nature of human psychology is such that you'll torture reality so that it fits your models, or at least you'll think it does. You become the equivalent of a chiropractor who, of course, is the great boob in medicine.

  (tags: charlie_munger wisdom life speech education mathematics model business lessons civilization history advice learning)

Read Full Post »

links for 2010-05-13

• Sex and Drugs and the Spill – Paul Krugman
  What really needs to change is our whole attitude toward government. For the troubles at Interior weren’t unique: they were part of a broader pattern that includes the failure of banking regulation and the transformation of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a much-admired organization during the Clinton years, into a cruel joke. And the common theme in all these stories is the degradation of effective government by antigovernment ideology.
  (tags: krugman government regulation disaster fema oil spill ideology banking crisis)

Read Full Post »

links for 2010-05-09

• Europe's Web of Debt – Graphic – NYTimes.com
  Banks and governments in these five shaky economies owe each other many billions of euros — converted here to dollars — and have even larger debts to Britain, France and Germany. Arrow widths are proportional to debt amounts.
  (tags: infographic debt eu europe euro government economics)
• Root Canal Politics – Thomas Friedman
  After 65 years in which politics in the West was, mostly, about giving things away to voters, it’s now going to be, mostly, about taking things away. Goodbye Tooth Fairy politics, hello Root Canal politics.
  (tags: thomas_friedman politics economics debt government generation greece crisis finance spending entitlements election uk austerity europe)

Read Full Post »