I’m not sure I know how to react to the news today that the House of Representative defeated the bill giving Treasury the ability to purchase mis-priced assets from the banking system.
As the market collapsed, $1.1 trillion was destroyed in falling share values held by Americans. That is much more than the $700 billion that Treasury requested. So we no longer have the $700 billion, and we lost another $400 billion. I can't think of a better definition of "stupid"...
Are Americans worthy of being saved?
During this financial crisis I have been wandering the halls of academia, blog space and the business world and I'm shocked by our people's lack of comprehension about what is going on in the economy. The misperceptions about the current banking crisis, its seriousness, the implications, and potential solutions defy understanding. There are times when I just shake my head.
I have found that the groups of incomprehension fall into four camps...
As a follow on to my last post, and in the spirit of more regulation is good (the protest cry from the streets these days following Wall Street's crisis), here are two ideas where we might be able to do more with less:
Fedealize insurance regulation, and adopt principles based accounting.
As quaint as state insurance regulation is, and as well intentioned as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) was, its time for both to go. This is such a no brainer that it will never get done...
An angry and probably jealous nation is getting ready to make some big mistakes in financial industry regualtion.
Given that the media has been driven into a psychotic incoherent rage, first over the popularity of Sara Palin, and then by the incomprehensibility of a credit crunch that they really don’t understand but are absolutely convinced was done deliberately by people richer than they, to this there will be only one tolerable response: Criminalize more behavior.
The results will not be good...
Their relevance in decline, aging tie-dyed protesters take on the so far unseen plans for The New School's expansion. "We will stop them at any cost, whatever it is that they might be doing!"
The irony is luscious ...
A Post-postmodernist writer, fighting to catch up with his art after serving time as a capitalist oppressor of the people
Doug Barone retired from corporate life after 20 years in the finance industry, and is fooling everyone into thinking he is a writer. Having been a corporate strategist, finance executive and IT executive, he’s found almost nothing of use to him from those years except the zany people and crazy stories that no one in their right mind could have made up.
He has a B.A. from St. Lawrence University, and a graduate degree from Loyola. He’s studied with Sharon Mesmer, Sidney Offit, Josh Gaylord and Justus Rosenberg in The New School’s writing program, and since 2009, in Pulitzer Prize winner Phil Schultz’s Writers Studio. In 2010 he was selected to attend the New York State Writers Institute at Skidmore at the masters level, where he studied with Rick Moody. Somewhere along the way he learned to write about himself in the third person.
His work, his prose fiction, is focused on power, its entanglement with emotional fulfillment, the impact of institutional concentrations of authority, the ontological-deontological tension of existence in a post-postmodern world, one filled with ideas re-emerging as vastly powerful things, even in the simple acts of everyday life, and the creation of long periodic sentences to explain it all.
Sometimes his work allows just a bit of the mystical to cross over into reality, breaking the barriers of perception, heightening a sense of the possible.
Since this is all antithetical to the held narrative of our time, he fully expects to be pilloried by the academic left as well as the religious right, and looks forward to every lashing.
They’re not the pirates, we are
John Renesch runs a thoughtful blog over at The Global Dialogue Center.
His recent post was called "Wall Street Skull and Crossbones". I took issue with his emotional characterization of bankers as pirates.
He wrote: "Their sole purpose is to make a profit, and to do so with the least amount of capital as possible."
John: You say that like it's a bad thing...