Volcker Rule implementation timeline
5 July 2010 at 17:48
Archive
Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category
Pitching the counterinsurgency
26 April 2010 at 12:11
From today’s paper, the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan reduced to meaningless chartjunk:
As if Edward Tufte’s diagnosis of the state of our verbal and statistical reasoning in the era of PowerPoint — “Power corrupts; PowerPoint corrupts absolutely” — needed any confirmation.
Make sentences, not bullet points.
March for America
22 March 2010 at 19:47
Marching for comprehensive immigration reform with 200,000 happy flag-wavers, Washington, D.C., 21 March 2010. Over by the Capitol, a much smaller crowd of angry white people raged against health care reform, opposed to the passage of time, afraid of the America spread out before them.
Into the dustbin of history
22 April 2009 at 10:53
Jim Manzi steps off The Corner and says something truly original about the “effectiveness” debate, an evolutionary argument way smarter than the kind of evidence-free, Saddam-has-WMDs ranting one usually hears in that blighted neighborhood:
Let’s assume arguendo that torture works in the tactical sense that I believe has been used so far in this debate; that is, that one can gain useful information reliably in at least some subset of situations through torture that could not otherwise be obtained. Further, assume that we don’t care about morality per se, only winning: defeating our enemies militarily, and achieving a materially advantaged life for the citizens of the United States. It seems to me that the real question is whether torture works strategically; that is, is the U.S. better able to achieve these objectives by conducting systematic torture as a matter of policy, or by refusing to do this? Given that human society is complex, it’s not clear that tactical efficacy implies strategic efficacy.
When you ask the question this way, one obvious point stands out: we keep beating the torturing nations. The regimes in the modern world that have used systematic torture and directly threatened the survival of the United States — Nazi Germany, WWII-era Japan, and the Soviet Union — have been annihilated, while we are the world’s leading nation. The list of other torturing nations governed by regimes that would like to do us serious harm, but lack the capacity for this kind of challenge because they are economically underdeveloped (an interesting observation in itself), are not places that most people reading this blog would ever want to live as a typical resident. They have won no competition worth winning. The classically liberal nations of Western Europe, North America, and the Pacific that led the move away from systematic government-sponsored torture are the world’s winners.
Now, correlation is not causality. Said differently, we might have done even better in WWII and the Cold War had we also engaged in systematic torture as a matter of policy. Further, one could argue that the world is different now: that because of the nature of our enemies, or because of technological developments or whatever, that torture is now strategically advantageous. But I think the burden of proof is on those who would make these arguments, given that they call for overturning what has been an important element of American identity for so many years and through so many conflicts.
Could it be that when Darwinian competition occurs at the level of national systems, “survival of the fittest” means “survival of the most civilized”?
Ideology as metaphor
23 March 2009 at 8:09
Geithner re-announces his public-private plan for toxic assets. Leaving aside the boring details, the plan amounts to what?
• corporate statism
• crony capitalism
• lemon socialism
• Groucho Marxism
The answer, of course, is … all of the above.
Generation Jindal
25 February 2009 at 15:06
Nate Silver, live-blogging last night’s Republican response to Obama, as delivered by Bobby “Kenneth the Page” Jindal:
If it sounds like Jindal is targeting his speech to a room full of fourth graders, that’s because he is. They might be the next people to actually vote for Republicans again.
(h/t Matt, as ever)
Crony capitalist of the week
22 February 2009 at 18:14
The dean of the bank M&A bar speaks to the Financial Times:
“If the phrase ‘height of stupidity’ has any meaning, it would be shown if they nationalise a US bank,” said Rodgin Cohen, chairman of law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, who has advised on many of the past year’s biggest bank rescue deals and recapitalisations.
Mr Cohen stressed that the nationalisation of a large global bank had never been tested and the unintended repercussions of such a move could be severe, particularly in relation to any of the bank’s foreign subsidiaries. He favours a plan that would infuse banks with more capital and extract bad assets from their balance sheets as quickly as possible, to boost confidence in the institutions.
“Given time, these institutions have enormous earnings capacity,” he said. “If you start to take out these bad assets, we’ll start to see confidence rebuilt. It can turn around, and it will turn around.”
And when it does turn around, we want to make sure our guys are still in charge so they can privatize the gains and share them with us.
Looks like the rent-seekers have found their mouthpiece.
Free beer!
13 February 2009 at 12:53
Roubini says that if we don’t like the sound of nationalization, we should call it “receivership” instead.
Calculated Risk suggests “pre-privatization” for a slight shift in emphasis.
Yglesias goes all in:
I say we go further and call it “awesome capitalist cowboys” just to ensure that everything’s really in tune with American cultural norms. Everyone loves cowboys!
Oh, what the hell — call it a “tax cut” and let slip the stress-testers. Raise up the Resolution Trust Corporation. Party like it’s 1989.
(h/t Matt for the linguistic trend-spotting)
Rotten tomatoes for TARP II
11 February 2009 at 11:15
Martin Wolf writes in today’s Financial Times:
The new plan seems to make sense if and only if the principal problem is illiquidity. Offering guarantees and buying some portion of the toxic assets, while limiting new capital injections to less than the $350bn left in the Tarp, cannot deal with the insolvency problem identified by informed observers. Indeed, any toxic asset purchase or guarantee programme must be an ineffective, inefficient and inequitable way to rescue inadequately capitalised financial institutions: ineffective, because the government must buy vast amounts of doubtful assets at excessive prices or provide over-generous guarantees, to render insolvent banks solvent; inefficient, because big capital injections or conversion of debt into equity are better ways to recapitalise banks; and inequitable, because big subsidies would go to failed institutions and private buyers of bad assets.
Why then is the administration making what appears to be a blunder? It may be that it is hoping for the best. But it also seems it has set itself the wrong question. It has not asked what needs to be done to be sure of a solution. It has asked itself, instead, what is the best it can do given three arbitrary, self-imposed constraints: no nationalisation; no losses for bondholders; and no more money from Congress. Yet why does a new administration, confronting a huge crisis, not try to change the terms of debate? This timidity is depressing. Trying to make up for this mistake by imposing pettifogging conditions on assisted institutions is more likely to compound the error than to reduce it.