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Vaguery + public-policy   281

When privatisation doesn't work | George Irvin | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
"In short, arguments favouring private over public provision are not just theoretically flawed, but typically favour the few at the expense of the many. The pendulum has swung too far to the right: it's time to stand up for public provision."
public-policy  healthcare  politics  privatization  corporatism 
8 weeks ago by Vaguery
Share Books | berfrois
"Libraries are a recognition that scholarship and culture are more than the business of creating and consuming. They are a human conversation, and libraries provide common ground where that conversation can take place and be remembered. By taking aim at the right for the public to maintain this conversation and its memory, publishers have shown us what we have to lose. It’s time we resisted the outsourcing of our common heritage by occupying the library."
Occupy  libraries  intellectual-property  open-access  public-policy  activism 
9 weeks ago by Vaguery
Welcome to Middle-Class Poverty— Does Anybody Know the Way Out? - Sara Horowitz - Business - The Atlantic
"The short-term way to level the playing field is to update the New Deal so it includes and addresses the current workforce. We need to accept that many people don't work full-time for an employer and that "jobs" no longer mean just W-2 employees, as Douglas Rushkoff explained. Richard Cass, a self-employed technical and business consultant and Freelancers Union member, also puts it well: "Government programs that promote small business generally focus on companies with scores of employees and millions of dollars in annual revenue, which is short-sighted." That has immediate implications for our economic and job policies.

But to really bring a thriving middle class back to life, we need a dramatic shift in thinking, institutions, and assumptions. The role of policy should be to foster newer, more self-sustaining systems that follow this new mutualist paradigm. In the long run, our institutions need to move away from regarding the office as the center of a person's economic life, from business as the provider of benefits, and from government as the provider of social supports. The middle class does not have to be built by focusing on individual wealth. Instead, we can build stable markets and societies where people make a living, communities flourish, and businesses survive -- and not at the expense of others. It's not utopian -- it's a necessity if we want a successful middle class again."
coworking  freelancers  economic-crisis  public-policy  government  revolution 
september 2011 by Vaguery
The Copyright Lobby Absolutely Loves Child Pornography | TorrentFreak
"The conclusion is as unpleasant as it is inevitable. The copyright industry lobby is actively trying to hide egregious crimes against children, obviously not because they care about the children, but because the resulting censorship mechanism can be a benefit to their business if they manage to broaden the censorship in the next stage. All this in defense of their lucrative monopoly that starves the public of culture."
copyright  intellectual-property  corporatism  public-policy  pornography  freedom-of-expression  filtering 
july 2011 by Vaguery
Towards a Theory of Corporate and Financial Sector Solidarity | Rortybomb
"Speculation: There’s a critique of the regulators and key decision makers during the crisis that invokes cultural capital and the idea that regulators are socialized with Wall Street in a way that it is difficult for them to exercise any type of power over them, to see their interests in conflict. I wonder if the same is true for the corporate sector. As the firm goes global, and as the white-collar workforce is broken by computerization and globalization, more and more elite corporate positions will be filled by those leaving Wall Street. (Has this already happened? Data/Studies?) If so, you’ll see an even more lucrative revolving door between corporate elites and financial elites. As such, any natural checks to financial sector power coming from the corporate market space is less likely to happen."
its-the-unnatural-checks-that-will-be-interesting  banking  financial-crisis  public-policy  regulation  corporatism  financialzation  social-networks  cultural-assumptions 
july 2011 by Vaguery
The Fed Bails Out the Banks...Again - Credit Slips
"The lesson here is that if we want serious regulation of banks, we can't trust it to be done by bank regulators. We've seen the Fed and the OCC time and time again bend over backwards to let the banks out of statutory requirements. We've seen this with inaction (HOEPA regs), with aggressive preemption (and OCC is back to its old tricks...).

And this isn't just in the realm of consumer finance. This is also in the safety and soundness area. I'm not talking about stretched interpretations of section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act. I'm talking about affiliate transaction rules and Prompt Corrective Action, cornerstones of the safety-and-soundness regime. Saule Omarova has a great paper that shows how the Fed granted affiliate transaction waivers like a drunken sailor during the financial crisis.  Those were rules that went back to 1932-33 as part of Glass-Steagal.  

And remember Prompt Corrective Action? That was a response to all of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board's screw ups during the S&L crisis (Who you say? There's a reason the FHLBB doesn't exist any more...). PCA is clear of a bunch of tripwires as you can get. The whole point was to make sure that the bank regulators regulated, not coddled. But Bernanke announced that he was suspending PCA for the banks during the financial crisis. Only after the stress tests cleared the big banks did PCA get applied to the small banks, and with a vengance. What a sorry state of the world we live in where the bank regulators are the last people we can trust to actually regulate the banks. "
bankers-should-start-avoiding-lampposts-right-about-now  public-policy  legislation  financial-crisis  banking  corporatism 
july 2011 by Vaguery
It's Back: WIPO Broadcasting Treaty Returns From The Grave | Electronic Frontier Foundation
"Granting broadcasters and cablecasters intellectual property rights that apply independently of copyright in the programs being broadcast, together with legally enforceable technological protection measures, raises concerns for access to public domain works. These measures would add complexity to copyright clearance regimes for creators of podcasts and documentary films, and interfere with consumers’ ability to make home recordings permitted under national copyright laws. Granting broadcasters and cablecasters exclusive rights to authorize retransmissions of broadcasts over the Internet will harm competition and innovation by allowing broadcasters and cablecasters to control the types of devices that can receive transmissions. It will also create new liability risks for Internet intermediaries that retransmit information on the Internet."
public-domain  intellectual-property  public-policy  law  corporatism 
july 2011 by Vaguery
Eurozine - Bad for artists? - Leonhard Dobusch On digitization, remuneration and copyright
"According to recent research, it is not illegal copying that is threatening the livelihood of artists, as record companies tell us, but an inequality built into the existing copyright system itself. Leonhard Dobusch on why, in a winner-takes-all culture, stronger copyright protection only benefits the few."
intellectual-property  copyright  public-policy  unexpected-consequences 
july 2011 by Vaguery
Daily Kos: Michele Bachmann rejects the whole of conservative economic theory in one typed sentence
"What to make of all this? First of all, it means that Michele Bachmann is a Keynesian. No, Michele, not a Kenyan: a Keynesian, an adherent to an economic theory loathed by conservatives but recognized as common sense by most others, and which supposes the need for government policy interventions in otherwise free markets. This very nearly makes Bachmann a Communist, according to her own party: luckily, Tea Party conservatives can count on the remarkable vapidity of their supporters in order to dodge such sticky political contradictions."
culture-clash  conservatism  worldview  economics  public-policy  all-words-are-water 
july 2011 by Vaguery
OCC Gives Banks Another Blow Job « naked capitalism
Mr Levin said: “It is past time for the president to nominate new leadership at the OCC to protect American families and businesses from the excesses of Wall Street.”
financial-crisis  public-policy  bankers-should-start-avoiding-lampposts-right-about-now 
june 2011 by Vaguery
Our Wasteful Health Care System - NYTimes.com
"The other key thing to pay attention to is who this marketing campaign was targeted at: key decisionmakers at providers and insurance companies. Those are the people who decide whether medical procedures get ordered. It’s not patients. Patients aren’t going to experience a loss of freedom or satisfaction because an expert reviewer at the Independant Payment Advisory Board makes the call as to whether a procedure is medically beneficial, rather than the corresponding bureaucrat at their insurance provider or at the for-profit clinic they’re attending."
medical-culture  corporatism  public-policy  insurance  healthcare  marketing 
june 2011 by Vaguery
Calculated Risk: The Excess Vacant Housing Supply
"It is no surprise that Florida has the largest number of excess vacant units and that Nevada has the largest percentage of excess vacant units. What might be a surprise to some is that California is below the U.S. average."
financial-crisis  real-estate  housing-bubble  public-policy 
june 2011 by Vaguery
The Fatal Pivot - NYTimes.com
"Future historians will look back at this, and marvel. Of course, it’s just part of the broader story of how bad economic ideas — the very ideas that were proved wrong by the crisis, and continue to be proved wrong by subsequent events — have come to dominate the discourse."
public-policy  economic-crisis  economics  budget-deficit  politics 
june 2011 by Vaguery
Schumpeter: Rules for fools | The Economist
"…Florida’s legislature recently debated a bill to remove licensing requirements from 20 occupations, including hair-braiding, interior design and teaching ballroom-dancing. For a while it looked as if the bill would sail through: Florida has been a centre of tea-party agitation and both chambers have Republican majorities. But the people who care most about this issue—the cartels of incumbents—lobbied the loudest. One predicted that unlicensed designers would use fabrics that might spread disease and cause 88,000 deaths a year. Another suggested, even more alarmingly, that clashing colour schemes might adversely affect “salivation”. In the early hours of May 7th the bill was defeated. If Republican majorities cannot pluck up the courage to challenge a cartel of interior designers when Florida’s unemployment rate is more than 10%, what hope has America? The Licence Raj may be here to stay."
regulation  via:arsyed  disintermediation-targets  direct-action-targets  license-raj  public-policy  credentialing 
june 2011 by Vaguery
Cryptocurrency is here to stay. The case for an alternative taxing system » OWNI.eu, News, Augmented
"Cryptocurrency is coming. It could be Bitcoin, it could be something else, it could be a new trading framework that incorporates many cryptocurrencies. The important thing is that in a decade’s time, governments will have lost the ability to look into their citizens’ wealth and income.

This, in turn, means that no taxation or welfare can be based on wealth or income.

I argue that the proper way to tackle this problem from an information policy perspective is to shift the taxation base entirely to consumption and therefore shift all income tax to VAT. To keep taxation progressive, and to keep welfare systems functional, you will also need to combine it with a basic unconditional income for every citizen that amounts to some level of minimum sustenance."
economics  disintermediation  currency  markets  public-policy 
may 2011 by Vaguery
The Unwisdom of Elites - NYTimes.com
"Does any of this matter? Why should we be concerned about the effort to shift the blame for bad policies onto the general public?

One answer is simple accountability. People who advocated budget-busting policies during the Bush years shouldn’t be allowed to pass themselves off as deficit hawks; people who praised Ireland as a role model shouldn’t be giving lectures on responsible government.

But the larger answer, I’d argue, is that by making up stories about our current predicament that absolve the people who put us here there, we cut off any chance to learn from the crisis. We need to place the blame where it belongs, to chasten our policy elites. Otherwise, they’ll do even more damage in the years ahead."
financial-crisis  macroeconomics  public-policy  Bushism  conservatism 
may 2011 by Vaguery
Poor Mojo's Newswire: Krugman: Seniors, Guns, and Money
"Anyway, the truth is that older Americans really should fear Republican budget ideas — and not just because of that plan to dismantle Medicare. Given the realities of the federal budget, a party insisting that tax increases of any kind are off the table — as John Boehner, the speaker of the House, says they are — is, necessarily, a party demanding savage cuts in programs that serve older Americans.

To explain why, let me answer a rhetorical question posed by Professor John Taylor of Stanford University in a recent op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal. He asked, “If government agencies and programs functioned with 19% to 20% of G.D.P. in 2007” — that is, just before the Great Recession — “why is it so hard for them to function with that percentage in 2021?”

Mr. Taylor thought he was making the case for not increasing spending. But if you know anything about the federal budget, you know that there’s a very good answer to his question — an answer that clearly demonstrates just how extremist that no-tax-increase pledge really is. For here’s the quick-and-dirty summary of what the federal government does: It’s a giant insurance company, mainly serving older people, that also has an army. "
public-policy  Republicans  financial-crisis  social-safety-net 
may 2011 by Vaguery
Debt Arithmetic and Expansionary Policy: Paul Krugman Vastly Understates His Case - Grasping Reality with a Flexible Trunk
"Yet I find none of the classical, semi-classical, new classical, or neoclassical economists who believe in optimizing growth models stepping forward and saying: "Because r < g right now, what we really need is more government spending and an expanded government debt."

It is very odd..."
economics  economic-crisis  public-policy  taxes  oligarchy-in-action 
may 2011 by Vaguery
Economist's View: "Eight Facts about Social Security"
"Social Security’s 75-year shortfall is manageable. In fact, it’d be almost completely erased by applying the payroll tax to income over $106,000. Source (PDF)."
public-policy  conservatism  Republicans  Social-Security  economics 
may 2011 by Vaguery
What can the movie Bridesmaids tell us about the Recession and Keynesian Economics? | Rortybomb
"Annie’s character in Bridesmaids feels like the timing and progression of her life has gone into a ditch. That the next step in her baking career happened to coincide with the collapse of the mass securitization of bad debt and an over-the-counter credit derivative protection market is really bad luck. But it shouldn’t mean that her ability to launch a new business, to exercise and refine her talents and skills and have her employment give her a proper sense of self and purpose, should be ruined indefinitely. Full employment is the friend of new business owners. It would be great if either of our political parties would emphasize that in a time of 9% unemployment."
public-policy  economics  economic-development  Keynesianism  unemployment 
may 2011 by Vaguery
Paul Ryan, Republicans, And Generational Politics | The New Republic
"The Ryan plan, in other words, delivers to the older generation exactly what they’ve had all their lives—secure and predictable benefits—and to the next generation, more of what they’ve known—insecurity and risk. It’s hardly the first generational fight the GOP has started. The previous one was just last fall, when they campaigned for Medicare, and against the $500 billion in cuts (mostly by getting rid of the overgenerous subsidies to private insurers in an experimental program) passed as part of the Affordable Care Act. With an off-year electorate that was overwhelmingly older, they could put all their bets on the older side, knowing that seniors would see little benefit from the Affordable Care Act and were naturally worried about any change to the health system they enjoyed."
via:poormojo  conservatism  cultural-dynamics  culture-war  Republicans  public-policy 
may 2011 by Vaguery
The War on Sharing [Infographic] - ReadWriteCloud
"With Box, the customers are businesses for the most part. That is a key difference to other challenges by the RIAA. And It sets up a conflict between service providers and their clients who now face a determined media industry with a historic interest in litigation to protect its copyrights."
RIAA  copyright  sharing  corporatism  public-policy  intellectual-property  reintermediation 
may 2011 by Vaguery
Taibbi: “US Politics – Reality Show Sponsored by Wall Street” « naked capitalism
"Taibbi discusses the lack of financial reform and failure to prosecute Wall Street…"
financial-crisis  public-policy  economics  bankers-should-start-avoiding-lampposts-right-about-now 
may 2011 by Vaguery
Raghuram Rajan on Delineating the Role of Government « naked capitalism
"In this interview, Rajan, who famously told Greenspan at his last Jackson Hole conference that recent changes in financial services industry policy had increased risk, takes on the question of the role of government. He contends that economists have neglected this issue due to overspecialization."
interview  financial-crisis  public-policy  economics 
may 2011 by Vaguery
A Strong Dollar Isn’t Always a Good Thing - Economic View - NYTimes.com
"In practice, all that “the exchange rate is the purview of the Treasury” means is that no official other the Treasury secretary is supposed to talk about it (and even he isn’t supposed to say very much). That strikes me as a shame. Perhaps if government officials could talk about the exchange rate forthrightly, there would be more understanding of the issues and more rational policy discussions.

Such discussions would start with some basic economics. The desire to trade with other countries or invest in them is what gives rise to the market for foreign exchange. You need euros to travel in Spain or to buy a German government bond, so you need a way to exchange currencies."
economics  financial-crisis  public-policy  worldviews  disintermediation-targets 
may 2011 by Vaguery
Economist's View: Labor Market Policy in the Great Recession
"The positive lesson for the US is that we have a lot of scope to give employers incentives to cut hours rather than jobs, including improving and expanding "work-sharing" (part-time unemployment benefit) programs as well as implementing new direct tax credits to firms that expand paid time off (paid sick days, paid family leave, paid vacations, and other measures).

The negative lesson is that focusing on supply-side issues such as training, education, and improved job-matching for the unemployed --as much sense as they make in the long run-- is not likely to get us very far when the economy is at 9 percent unemployment. Denmark does far more than we could ever hope to accomplish along these lines and the unemployment there almost doubled between 2007 and 2010."
unemployment  public-policy  economic-crisis  government  history-is-a-feature-not-a-bug 
may 2011 by Vaguery
Measuring Social Value (August 5, 2010) | Stanford Social Innovation Review
"We started by scanning existing social value metrics, such as the ones described in the table “10 Ways to Measure Social Value” on page 41. We found hundreds of competing tools, of which foundations and NGOs generally use one set, governments another, and academics yet another. In addition to discovering this segmentation, our survey suggested two more reasons why so few metrics guide real decisions. First, most metrics assume that value is objective, and therefore discoverable through analysis. Yet as most modern economists now agree, value is not an objective fact. Instead, value emerges from the interaction of supply and demand, and ultimately reflects what people or organizations are willing to pay. Because so few of the tools reflect this, they are inevitably misaligned with an organization’s strategic and operational priorities."
public-policy  social-entrepreneurship  decision-making  benchmarking  it's-more-complicated-than-you-think  pragmatism 
august 2010 by Vaguery
How did Weather Data Get Opened? - A Healthy Information Diet - InfoVegan.com
"Weather data didn’t come to be because of an Open Government Directive. It wasn’t created because of a White House mandate. Government did not release the data and then enterprising people built companies on top of it. It’s more accurate to make the argument that we have a national weather service because of one man’s deep desire to keep his job and to get promoted to colonel in the Army. It could be a vast network of lobbyists to help that man get promoted, or the vast network of lobbyists from shipping companies trying to get access to data already being created. Or it could be that it was just pretty obvious that access to weather data would save lives."
weather  open-access  data-analysis  big-data-will-lead-to-big-inference  public-policy  marketing 
august 2010 by Vaguery
Pimco’s Crescenzi Gets Award for Artless Candor « naked capitalism
"We tried a variant of this program starting in 2002 with a more solid economy and we are still trying to recover from how that movie ended. Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. And since the financial sector profited so handsomely from this exercise the last time around, they have every reason to encourage this insanity."
public-policy  financial-crisis  bankers-should-start-avoiding-lampposts-right-about-now 
august 2010 by Vaguery
Getting Ugly on the Commercial Real Estate Front « naked capitalism
"It wasn’t all that long ago that the media and banking industry commentators would worry about the coming train wreck in commercial real estate. But peculiarly, that topic has more or less receded from view. It appears the public has only so much interest in banking stories, and the frenzied coverage of financial services non-reform plus eurozone sovereign debt woes, which are really eurozone bank woes, took center stage."
commercial-real-estate  financial-crisis  economics  public-policy  business-development 
august 2010 by Vaguery
[1007.0461] How simple regulations can greatly reduce inequality
"Many models of market dynamics make use of the idea of wealth exchanges among economic agents. A simple analogy compares the wealth in a society with the energy in a physical system, and the trade between agents to the energy exchange between molecules during collisions. However, while in physical systems the equipartition of energy is valid, in most exchange models for economic markets the system converges to a very unequal "condensed" state, where one or a few agents concentrate all the wealth of the society and the wide majority of agents shares zero or a very tiny fraction of the wealth. Here we present an exchange model where the goal is not only to avoid condensation but also to reduce the inequality; to carry out this objective the choice of interacting agents is not at random, but follows an extremal dynamics regulated by the wealth of the agent.…"
economics  agent-based  public-policy  capitalism  regulation 
july 2010 by Vaguery
slacktivist: Rendering unto Krugman
"I'm not an economist, but we've got five applicants for every single job opening. If you tell me that the best response to that situation is to lay off hundreds of thousands of teachers, I will not accept that this means that you're smarter and more expert than I am. I will instead conclude -- regardless of your prestige or position or years of study -- that you're a moral imbecile. And knowing what I know about your inability to make moral judgments I will have no reason to trust you to make complicated macroeconomic ones."
via:cshalizi  financial-crisis  economics  austerity-is-not-for-everybody-(ever)  unemployment  worklife  macroeconomics  public-policy 
june 2010 by Vaguery
BP Spill Size Estimates Keep Growing - Along With Potential Costs -- Seeking Alpha
Ideally, investors should be watchdogs of a sort as well, not slaves to boardspeak. "BP may face criminal charges based on their own internal documents. This would amplify any BP civil liabilities."
corporatism  oilspill  investment  public-policy  cleanup 
june 2010 by Vaguery
Economist's View: Where Will the Good Jobs Come From?
"But even if we substantially improve education, it won't fully solve the problem. There will still be a need for quality jobs that are not all that dependent upon knowledge based skills. However, it's harder to imagine an emerging set of industries that will provide the large number of quality jobs that we need to replace those lost from industries in decline."
financial-crisis  economics  unemployment  worklife  public-policy  Depression2.0 
june 2010 by Vaguery
Is The Next Great Depression Avoidable? -- Seeking Alpha
"If countries like Germany start to have issues selling their treasury bonds, how long will it take before it impacts the global bond market? It shouldn’t take long. That’s why Europe cannot afford the same quantitative easing as the U.S. has done in the last year. Thus, the Greece Crisis is not well contained yet. Is the Great Depression Avoidable?"
financial-crisis  Depression2.0  finance  public-policy  economics  woops 
june 2010 by Vaguery
Robert Reich (Why Obama Should Put BP Under Temporary Receivership)
"If the government can take over giant global insurer AIG and the auto giant General Motors and replace their CEOs, in order to keep them financially solvent, it should be able to put BP’s north American operations into temporary receivership in order to stop one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history."
financial-crisis  oilspill  BP  intervention  government  public-policy  accountability  corporatism 
june 2010 by Vaguery
Economist's View: "Why Obama Should Put BP Under Temporary Receivership"
"No matter who is technically in control of the company, i.e. receivership or not, the one thing that is needed is for the government to have the authority it needs to force the company to fully disclose all the information it has about the leak, and about how to stop it. It also needs to be able to force the company to take particular actions to stop the leak even if the actions demand so many resources it results in the company going bankrupt.…"
oilspill  BP  government  oversight  punishment  economics  public-policy  corporatism 
june 2010 by Vaguery
BP: The Mother of All Egregious Violators -- Seeking Alpha
"Are "willful and flagrant violation" of safety and "intentional disregard" of safety criminal acts? Can they be criminal only if someone is injured or dies? These are questions that need to be addressed."
corporatism  law  responsibility  public-policy  BP  oil-and-gas  oilspill 
june 2010 by Vaguery
Common-place: Hard Facts for Hard Times
"What, then, is the status of the crisis/knowledge nexus today, especially in light of an ascendant neo-liberalism that criticizes the earlier notions of social justice and obligation? Crisis continues to be capitalism's mode of operation. According to Naomi Klein's recent "disaster capitalism" argument, emergencies around the globe, including natural catastrophes, are now used to impose radical free-market policies. As for knowledge, government- and business-produced information is omnipresent and effortlessly accessible. Expert culture is thriving.…"
history  public-policy  public-discourse  19C 
june 2010 by Vaguery
Naive Thinking About Sovereign Risk -- Seeking Alpha
"The folks at CreditSuisse have created a new figure making this point by re-ranking sovereigns according to credit risk based on this multifactor model. The upshot is that China, Germany, Switzerland, the U.S., Australia, Japan, and Canada lead the way in terms of least sovereign credit risk. Agree or disagree with the absolute levels from the model, the point stands that naive models of sovereign risk are mostly fodder for idiotic headline writers, not helpful standalone measures for assessing real risk."
it's-more-complicated-than-you-think  economics  debt  deficit  public-policy  government  the-idea-of-debt-raises-the-question-of-boundaries 
june 2010 by Vaguery
Economist's View: Fed Watch: A Good Crisis, Wasted
"Where does this all leave us? The rest of the world is intent on pursuing a begger thy neighbor strategy, with the US being the neighbor. I suspect US policymakers will eventually relent; it will be the only choice left. All we can do now is sit back and wait for the inevitable explosion in the US trade deficit, waiting idly by for the next crisis and the "chance" to bring some sanity to the global financial architecture."
public-policy  financial-crisis  economics  globalism  nationalism  banking  deficit 
june 2010 by Vaguery
Economist's View: "Stunning Overbuilding"
"I am listening to a presentation at the Homer Hoyt meetings on the condo meltdown in South Florida. Developers planned on building 95,000 units in the city of Miami between 2002 and 2007. In the 2000 census, the whole city had 163,000 units."
economics  financial-crisis  bubbles  public-policy  real-estate  marketing-as-dangerous-contagious-failure 
may 2010 by Vaguery
Economist's View: "The Orthodox Loss of Faith"
"Good financial regulation and supervision are important in their own right. A good financial system will better serve the interests of borrowers and lenders. It will create benefits on the supply side. And financial crises will almost certainly cause demand to fall. But just because something causes demand to fall doesn't mean monetary and fiscal policy can't work. The whole point of Keynesian policy was that when (not if) something did cause demand to fall, monetary or fiscal policy could and should be used to increase it back again."
economics  financial-crisis  public-policy  government  macroeconomics 
may 2010 by Vaguery
The Monkey Cage: Visualizing World Peace
"As many of you likely know, the World Bank has opened up its World Development Indicators Data for everyone to play with. Matthew Russell has thrown together a nice simple tool to generate visualizations of the data. Fun stuff."
public-policy  datasets  visualization  world-bank  sociology  metrics 
may 2010 by Vaguery
Economist's View: "Politicians Ignore Keynes at their Peril"
"Unfortunately, our political leaders don't give a damn about mundane issues such as unemployment and economic growth. It is far easier for them to bandy about silly cliches about fiscal responsibility and generational equity, even though the policies they are pushing are 180 degrees at odds with anything that will help our children or grandchildren. Their main concern is pushing policies that keep the financial industry happy. And 10 million unemployed never bothered anyone at Goldman Sachs, just as Fabulous Fabio."
economics  financial-crisis  public-policy  Keynes  inflation  deficit  politics  bankers-should-start-avoiding-lampposts-right-about-now 
may 2010 by Vaguery
Tax the Hell Out of Wall Street and Give it to Main Street « blog maverick
"If the NYSE, Nasdaq, Amex and OTC are trading 2 Billion shares a day or more , like today, thats $ 500 Million Dollars PER DAY. If there are 260 trading days a year. Thats about 130 Billion dollars a year. If volumes drop because of the tax. It is still 10s of Billions of dollars per year.

Thats real money for the US Treasury. Thats also an annual payment towards the next time Wall Street screws up and we have a black swan event that no one planned on."
financial-crisis  public-policy  modest-proposals-that-make-sense  taxes  economics  do-it 
may 2010 by Vaguery
Economist's View: "Estate Tax: Leave it Alone"
"There is no huge constituency worried about the estate tax--just the wealthy few whose estates might be subject to some taxation. But apparently Sens. Kyl, Baucus, Grassley and Lincoln are working to include a "bipartisan" proposal in the small business tax bill that they hope to put through Congress. Odds are it will cut the estate tax rate and increase the exemption amount, making the wealthy even less likely to pay any estate tax. ..."
financial-crisis  public-policy  class-wars  government  taxes  lobbyists  rich-people-count-extra 
may 2010 by Vaguery
A “Modest Proposal” for Capital Market Reform: Close Down Rule 144A » New Deal 2.0
"While some of the anti-fraud remedies of the securities laws still apply in 144A transactions, these have been watered down in recent years by Congressional action and judicial interpretation. In a series of opinions authored first by Justice Powell and then by Justice Kennedy, the Supreme Court has steadily scaled back the scope of the securities laws. Opinions by Justice Kennedy, in particular, limited the impact of anti-fraud protections as well as the ability of investors to sue gatekeepers who play a significant role in preparing offerings."
financial-crisis  regulation  public-policy  trading  legislation  loopholes  bankers-should-start-avoiding-lampposts-right-about-now 
may 2010 by Vaguery
Wall Street Lobbyists' View of Financial System Reform | Angry Bear
"Now folks, it's pretty revealing when lobbyists have become so accustomed to their privileged access and backroom dealings with politicians --as went on in regards to Cheney's energy discussions, and each of the Bush tax cuts drawn up by a secretive group of GOP without any sunlight (or bipartisansip), for example, and too much with the health care bill as well--that they don't even bother to hide their scorn for the public's views and their hopes for getting that back room deal to go their way. No wonder Wall Street honchos have been so brazenly arrogant about their "entitlement" to bonuses, their rights to continue proprietary trading and hedge funds and derivatives desks--"doing God's work" says Goldman CEO Blankfein--when they are merely running a casino market to strip as much gold off suckers as possible with their "financial innovations" like synthetic CDOs that made the market many times more volatile than "real" securitizations…"
financial-crisis  regulation  public-policy  trading  bushism  lobbyists  lawyers  government  bankers-should-start-avoiding-lampposts-right-about-now 
may 2010 by Vaguery
VIDEO: Unusual Selloff 30 Min Ahead Of Crash? - The Consumerist
"Might there be more to last week's crash than a "fat fingered" trade, or someone mistakenly entering a "billion" instead of a "million?" An online stock trader has a video showing an unusual spike in trading volume, followed by a very quick sell-off, by funds at large investment firms BlackRock and Vanguard and some other funds 30 to 15 minutes before the big crash. Prescience? Watch the video, check the logs, and decide for yourself."
trading  financial-engineering  market-timing  public-policy  transparency-in-action  complex-systems  influence 
may 2010 by Vaguery
Economist's View: "Automatic Stabilizers Work, Always and Everywhere"
"Unless we get better legislators, and a couple of hundred years of history says not to count on that, enhancing the automatic stabilizers may be our best bet going forward. There's considerable empirical evidence showing that they work, including this new evidence that automatic stabilizers work "always and everywhere"…"
financial-crisis  finance  public-policy  regulation 
may 2010 by Vaguery
NASDAQ's '60%' Rule: Arbitrary and Suspicious -- Seeking Alpha
"It clearly looks as if the NASDAQ was trying to protect the interests of some institutions which lost large sums of money during Thursday’s collapse. These institutions likely did not have safeguards in place to deal with a lack of bidders. When their automated market orders hit the market in the absence of bidders, transactions were done at ridiculously low prices. But as NASDAQ has noted, there was no failure of their systems."
financial-crisis  trading  NASDAQ  public-policy  liquidity  institutional-investing  markets-as-clubs 
may 2010 by Vaguery
The Monkey Cage: Why Don't They Just Let the Greeks Default?
"So when France and Germany make sure that Greece can pay its debt, they are also rescuing, well, France and Germany. Also makes it clear exactly how contagion could work in practice."
financial-crisis  globalism  economics  public-policy  stock-and-flow  money  bankers-should-start-avoiding-lampposts-right-about-now 
may 2010 by Vaguery
Economist's View: "Deficit Hawkery's Harsh Impact on Education"
"It is a mantra of the deficit hawks that they are working to ensure their children and grandchildren will one day have the same opportunities that they have had. But right now, in real time, those same children and grandchildren are having those opportunities taken away. ..."
education  public-policy  financial-crisis  politics  conservatism-by-rote  economics 
may 2010 by Vaguery
Potential Derivative Loophole #1: Trading Facility « Rortybomb
"A “trading facility,” as defined under the U.S. Commodity Exchange Act, prohibits phone transactions, which is how swaps have been traded for three decades…Lincoln’s bill does create a framework for swaps to be traded competitively based on price, service and technology options, said Christopher Giancarlo, chairman of the Wholesale Markets Brokers’ Association Americas."
financial-crisis  legislation  public-policy  law-is-programming 
may 2010 by Vaguery
Ezra Klein - The uppers vs. the ultras
"Lower Uppers are doctors, accountants, engineers and lawyers. At companies they're mostly people above the rank of vice president and below the CEO. Their comrades include well-fed members of the media (and even part-time Post columnists who earn their livings as consultants). They include government officials -- and, yes, SEC lawyers -- who didn't make or inherit fortunes before entering public service. Lower Uppers are professionals who by dint of education, hard work and good luck are living better than 99 percent of anyone who has ever walked the planet. They're also people who can't help but notice how many people with credentials much like their own seem to be living in the kind of Gatsby-like splendor they'll never enjoy."
follow-the-what?  economics  public-policy  reform  class-wars  class-civil-wars  conscience-of-the-king 
april 2010 by Vaguery
zenpundit.com » Blog Archive » Epistemology is More Important than Politics
"Ignorance is nothing to be ashamed of because we are all, in varying degrees, ignorant about many things. The important choice as individuals and as a society is adopting an epistemology of rational-scientific-empiricism that, if steadily applied, allows us to chip away at our ignorance and become aware of our errors and solve problems. On the other hand, adopting a posture of belligerent, stubborn, defense of our own ignorance by evading facts, logic and the conclusions drawn from the evidence of experience is the road to certain disaster."
public-policy  ignorance  anti-intellectualism  science  science-policy  TED 
april 2010 by Vaguery
Economist's View: "Caveat Emptor Is Not a Business Plan"
"What is striking is that caveat emptor arises as a legal principle mainly because of the tangle the courts would get into if they tried to enforce a more ambitious standard of right and wrong.
Chief Justice Marshall’s logic surely applies with even greater force to modern deals between investment banks and sophisticated qualified investors, both of which will be simultaneously working on many deals, each involving sensitive proprietary information."
public-policy  financial-crisis  caveat-emptor  law  regulation  business-model  bankers-should-start-avoiding-lampposts-right-about-now 
april 2010 by Vaguery
Tax brackets over the past century
"Through most of the century, brackets were much closer to a continuous scale. There was a big shift in thought though in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was elected president. The brackets became much more distinct. The idea has more or less stuck over the past two decades."
taxes  visualization  public-policy  transparency  graphics 
april 2010 by Vaguery
Economist's View: "The Two Issues to Watch on Financial Reform"
"We will be safe so long as the present crisis is fresh in our minds and caution is the order of the day in the financial marketplace, but it won't be too long until we forget and that's when the danger begins.…"
financial-crisis  economics  public-policy  law 
april 2010 by Vaguery
Why Derivatives Caused Financial Crisis -- Seeking Alpha
"In plain terms, derivatives are THE cause of the Financial Crisis. They are behind EVERY failure/ default that has occurred thus far. The fact that virtually no one is willing to address this issue or include it in the discussion of how to insure we don’t have a Second Round of the Crisis only confirms the fact that no one has a clue how to resolve this situation."
finance  financial-crisis  derivatives  banking  regulation  public-policy  economics  bankers-should-start-avoiding-lampposts-right-about-now 
april 2010 by Vaguery
Ezra Klein - How financial innovation causes financial crises
"Then something bad happens. The new product shows its flaws. And precisely because no one really understands it, the market cracks. Investors all run away at once, as they don't really have the tools to assess the situation. Where lack of knowledge about the product originally drove demand, now it accelerates flight."
financial-crisis  finance  bankers-should-start-avoiding-lampposts-right-about-now  derivatives  public-policy  regulation 
april 2010 by Vaguery
Economist's View: Paul Krugman: Georgia on My Mind
"What’s striking about the contrast between the Texas story and Georgia’s debacle is that it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the issues that have dominated debates about banking reform. For example, many observers have blamed complex financial derivatives for the crisis. But Georgia banks blew themselves up with old-fashioned loans gone bad."
financial-crisis  cultural-assumptions  cultural-norms  lending  diversity  public-policy 
april 2010 by Vaguery
Economic Views - a Thought Brought About by Yves Smith's (Excellent Book) Econned | Angry Bear
"Personally, if I believed in Republican/Austrian School/Libertarian, I'd either be putting a heck of a lot of time and effort into explaining why the results don't apply, or, if I could not come up with a home run explanation, I'd give up my views.…The fact that members of these dogmas don't know or care that reality doesn't fit their beliefs makes me a bit leery of other things they believe in as well. And yet, Republican/Austrian School/Libertarian is now the dominant paradigm. Even most Democrats believe cutting taxes, for instance increases growth - they just feel that even so, in most cases, the non-growth related benefits of keeping taxes higher (say, to pay for certain programs) makes it worth not cutting taxes in many instances."
economics  models-and-modes  public-policy  mythology  decision-making  empirical-economics-it-ain't 
april 2010 by Vaguery
Looting Main Street : Rolling Stone
'…These guys aren't number-crunching whizzes making smart investments; what they do is find suckers in some municipal-finance department, corner them in complex lose-lose deals and flay them alive. In a complete subversion of free-market principles, they take no risk, score deals based on political influence rather than competition, keep consumers in the dark — and walk away with big money. "It's not high finance," says Taylor, the former bond regulator. "It's low finance." And even if the regulators manage to catch up with them billions of dollars later, the banks just pay a small fine and move on to the next scam. This isn't capitalism. It's nomadic thievery."'
financial-crisis  banking  finance  regulation  public-policy  barony  crime  bankers-should-start-avoiding-lampposts-right-about-now 
april 2010 by Vaguery
Ezra Klein - Too big to fail in two dimensions
"Here's why I don't think of "too big" as a myth for resolving a firm. In my mind, the farther you are from the origin in that graph, the harder it is for the government to detect problems and properly deter large firms under resolution authority. (This is why I draw our "safe" resolution as a circle, instead of a square.) Holding for a liquidity risk, the larger the firm, the more vicious the effects of having a shadow banking run on the rest of the financial sector and on the real economy. It is possible that the green circle here will be cast out far, and that size and pressures of campaign donations won't play a major part. But why take the chance?"
multiobjective-optimization  economics  public-policy  financial-crisis  legislation  regulation 
april 2010 by Vaguery
interfluidity » Capital can’t be measured
"So, for large complex financials, capital cannot be measured precisely enough to distinguish conservatively solvent from insolvent banks, and capital positions are always optimistically padded. Given these facts, and I think they are facts, even “hard” capital and leverage restraints are unlikely to prevent misbehavior. Can anything be done about this? Are we doomed to some post-modern quantum mechanical nightmare wherein “Schrödinger’s Banks” are simultaneously alive and dead until some politically-shaped measurement by a regulator forces a collapse of the superposition of states into hunky-doriness?"
financial-crisis  public-policy  regulation  accounting  banking  derivatives  models  sustainability 
april 2010 by Vaguery
[1003.6087] "How many zombies do you know?" Using indirect survey methods to measure alien attacks and outbreaks of the undead
"We originally wrote this article in Word, but then we converted it to Latex to make it look more like science."
statistics  epidemiology  public-policy  SCIENCE  polling  social-sciences  go-for-the-header 
april 2010 by Vaguery
Congressional Audit Shows That EnergyStar Label May Be Meaningless - The Consumerist
"In a nine-month study, four fictitious companies invented by the accountability office also sought EnergyStar status for some conventional devices like dehumidifiers and heat pump models that existed only on paper. The fake companies submitted data indicating that the models consumed 20 percent less energy than even the most efficient ones on the market. Yet those applications were mostly approved without a challenge or even questions, the report said."
energy-efficiency  energy-star  regulation  public-policy  standard-setting-play  marketing 
march 2010 by Vaguery
Sprawl and preferences « The Reality-Based Community
"People who say they like living in the suburbs are not expecting to pay a lot of what it really costs to do it. Furthermore, a lot of them are having second thoughts: the fastest-growing demographic in Manhattan is now children: people who can afford to live anywhere they want are increasingly deciding that a real city is the best place to raise a family.…"
cull-the-cars  suburbs  city-planning  social-norms  public-policy  habits  why-do-economists-never-hear-Dewey-on-habit? 
march 2010 by Vaguery
Entering a New Mercantilist Era? « naked capitalism
"Yves here. The end game of lending too much money is creditor losses. The better path is to accept writedowns and restructurings, for the lenders to take their lumps. The record of past financial crises is clear on this matter. Even though it leads a larger initial economic downturn, its duration is comparatively short. Even though US policymakers refuse to listen, the Japanese are strongly of the view that their prolonged slump is mainly the result of the failure to write down bad loans and recapitalize its banks, rather than insufficient fiscal and monetary stimulus. And a deflationary spiral produces the same result, creditor losses, in this case via default, with more damage to the economy and higher costs of repairing the financial system."
financial-crisis  economics  macroeconomics  public-policy  trade  international-policy  regionalism  nationalism  game-theory 
march 2010 by Vaguery
Growing Gap Between Government and Private Sector Benefits -- Seeking Alpha
"Yowza! Somewhere in 2004, the world changed, and we didn’t realize it. Employers in the private sector put a lid on the cost of benefits (which includes healthcare, retirement, vacation, and supplemental pay of all sorts). Meanwhile the cost of benefits in state and local govt jobs just kept rising, with barely any break, both before and after the financial bust. This is not good."
financial-crisis  economics  benefits  classes  visualization  government  public-policy  capitalism 
march 2010 by Vaguery
Calculated Risk: Previous Business Cycle: "Bad by any measure"
"The 1946-49 period isn't surprising since there was a flood of workers from the military (keeping income down), but people had significant savings from WWII when income far outpaced consumption. Of course, in the recent period, consumption was higher than income primarily because of mortgage equity extraction (The Home ATM).

The previous business cycle was "bad by any measure"."
financial-crisis  economics  data  not-learning-from-data  macroeconomics  public-policy  what-gets-modeled-gets-done 
march 2010 by Vaguery
Dr. Michelson Supports Patent Reform - Patent Law Blog (Patently-O)
"I strongly implore you on behalf of myself, independent inventors like me, and for the good of our country to support the patent reform legislation before you. And if upon reflection you recognize how truly vital the Patent Office is to the future of our country then I would ask you to do more and to consider the issue of “revenue diversion”.

The U.S.P.T.O. is unique in American government in that it costs the taxpayer nothing while providing the best dollar for dollar value in the intellectual property industry. The U.S.P.T.O. should have the authority to set its fees so that they are appropriate to the services provided and “in the aggregate” sufficient to fully optimize the functioning of that office, and to reasonably budget for the capital expenditures that will be required in the future for it to continue to do so."
patents  patent-reform  public-policy  government  law  reform  Congrefs-fucks 
march 2010 by Vaguery
The Reason So Many People Are Unemployed (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)
"The biggest reason this is possible is because nobody realizes it. If it was conventional wisdom that a bunch of unelected bankers looking out for rich people were the reason everyone was out of work, politicians would be forced to explain to angry voters why we had this crazy system and might actually consider doing something about it. But, incredibly, it just seems like nobody has any idea. Voters don’t realize it, politicians don’t understand it, journalists don’t cover it. And, in fact, they’re so far from having any idea that it’s really difficult to explain it to them. When you say a bunch of unelected bankers are the reason there are no jobs, they just look at you like you’re crazy. I’ve just spent a page or two explaining it and you still probably think I’m crazy. But it’s true! This isn’t some Ron Paul-type crackpot idea; this is mainstream economics, from Paul Krugman to the head of George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors."
financial-crisis  economics  Keynes  macroeconomics  public-policy  bankers-should-start-avoiding-lampposts-right-about-now  via:cshalizi 
march 2010 by Vaguery
Ask your doctor if moral hazard is right for you : Lawyers, Guns & Money
"About ten years ago I attended an event hosted by a couple of medical academics. It was a concert at a pretty big auditorium in Denver, and the invitees were almost all participants in the academics’ prostate cancer research trials (I was there for other reasons). This was before I had begun to study the pharmaceutical industry’s role in the obesity panic, and I remember thinking at the time, who is paying for all this? (The event was on a scale that must have cost well into six figures). That’s not a question I would ask today."
medicine  public-policy  clinical-trials  diagnosis  monopoly-and-trust-sittin'-in-a-tree  publish-doctors'-morbidity-stats 
march 2010 by Vaguery
YouTube - Billionaires vs. Brooklyn's Best Bar: Eminent Domain Abuse & The Atlantic Yards Project
eminent-domain  public-policy  corporatism  protest  localism  community  community-activism  development  developers 
march 2010 by Vaguery
Economist's View: "Bail Out Our Schools"
"Bailing out the financial system, but not bailing out schools in financial trouble because of the crisis, is unconscionable…"
education  financial-crisis  public-policy  bailout  schools  burning-your-seedcorn 
march 2010 by Vaguery
Downsizing for density | Rethink Detroit
"Rightsizing will not “shunt” development to the exurban fringe. That’s what’s happening already. Most of the neighborhoods we’re discussing haven’t seen significant investment since the 1950s. If nothing is done, they will continue to deteriorate and the exurban fringe will continue to grow. If they can once again be made dense and sustainable, in part through consolidation, Detroit might have a fighting chance to compete against suburban neighborhoods by providing a safe, viable urban alternative."
detroit  city-planning  public-policy  government  futurism  economics  arguments 
march 2010 by Vaguery
Calculated Risk: Graphs: Duration of Unemployment
"What really makes the current period stand out is the number of people (and percent) that have been unemployed for 27 weeks or more. In the early '80s, the 27 weeks or more unemployed peaked at 2.9 million or 2.6% of the civilian labor force.

In January, there were 6.3 million people unemployed for 27 weeks or more, or 4.1% of the labor force. The number declined slightly in February, but this is much higher than earlier periods."
unemployment  financial-crisis  visualization  public-policy  government  transformation 
march 2010 by Vaguery
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