We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
“If it [naked short selling] lowers share prices, that is because companies were overvalued. If the companies get into trouble as a consequence, that is because they were bad companies, not good ones. Bad companies deserve to be punished for being bad companies, so that capital can be better allocated elsewhere. (And yes, I am talking about the benefits of making it easy to take short positions *in general* rather than talking about the naked/covered distinction, which is a technical issue that I don’t actually think matters much. It may actually be better to discourage this and instead encourage people to take short positions via derivatives markets, which they can easily do). The truth is that we have had massive capital misallocation in recent decades. Capital has been far too cheap, and much investment has gone to all kinds of stupid places where it cannot generate a genuine economic return. Many companies have believed that they were good companies when in fact all they were doing was milking the fact that they had an unrealistically cheap cost of capital. For the last five years or so, this state of affairs has been ending, which is horribly painful. It would be over quickly if more people (politician, homeowners, and stakeholders in companies doing useless thing) would actually get it into their stupid heads that it has to end.”
Our own Michael Jennings, whose comment on my post of yesterday was too good to leave in the associated thread. I suspect this DVD, The Wall Street Conspiracy, will soon be heading for the trash can. I am wary of any “documentary” that starts from the premise that people in financial markets are like Bond villains destroying profitable firms in ways that make no sense even for the supposed “villains” in the case. For me, the key issue is transparency: if you are shorting a stock in a firm or whatever, and your counterparty is fully consenting to the transaction and you both understand the risks and don’t expect to get bailed out, then such activity should be put in the same category, IMHO, as off-piste skiing – risky but not criminal and certainly not fraudulent.
“Yelling “fire” in a crowded theater is a terrible thing to do — unless there’s a fire.”
Thomas Dolan, Barron’s. He was writing about a wonderful financial market practice – sometimes legal, sometimes not – known as “naked short-selling”. His article explains what that means. I got interested after getting a DVD in the mail, called The Wall Street Conspiracy, that reckons that this practice was responsible for destroying many an honest business. Sounds a bit like Michael Moore, but I will give it a view to see if it stacks up or is a pile of crap. One quick thought: the idea of selling something you don’t own or haven’t even borrowed yet does sound awfully close to outright fraud, like insuring a house against fire if you don’t even own the house. Or like fractional reserve banking……….Aaarrgggghhh…
Stanley Fish is rightly getting a lot of heat in the internet for his brazen assertion that it is okay to adopt double standards in terms of the kind of language used to describe women so long as the person using such terms holds the “right” views and is, in some more general sense, on the side of the intellectual “good guys”.
David Henderson, over at EconBlog, has what I think is the most devastating take-down of this character, all the more devastating for doing so in measured tones. The associated comment thread is well worth reading also.
“Might is right”. For heaven’s sake.
Former Samizdata contributor and full-time Tea Party/libertarian rabble-rouser Andrew Ian Dodge has been endorsed by the Libertarian Party of Maine for his independent US Senate run.
Libertarian Party of Maine Chairman, Shawn Levasseur spoke on Dodge’s change in party affiliation, “Andrew has been a long time friend of the LP in Maine. So when the news broke that he was leaving the Republican party, and would be petitioning to get directly onto the November ballot, we asked him to run as a Libertarian. He has often described himself as a libertarian. The only difference now is that he’s now capitalizing the ‘L’.””
Maine is an odd state that goes against the logic that only two parties matter in US politics. Maine, like Vermont, is perfectly happy to elect independents to high office.
Not content to just run for office he continues to publish his writing, despite being banned by his campaign from blogging. Andrew and his wife Kim just published Drifting into Oblivion about his, so far, successful battle against colon cancer.
The irony is that he will be 5 years free of cancer on election day in early November.
Good luck mate!
It can’t be a lot of fun working for Goldman Sachs these days (unless you are still making big dollops of money, that is). A former employee has, famously, come out with a fairly spectacular rant about his old firm. Some might regard this as a sign of speaking truth to power, others might say that if this man really felt as he did, he perhaps could have quit the Wall Street giant earlier than he did. It adds to the gaiety of nations. Even the Daily Mash website has got into the act. (I love that site). And Michael Bloomberg – good businessman, not-so-great NYC Mayor – has come to Goldman’s defence.
But while the Goldmans of this world, with their privileged access to central bank funds, bailouts, political pull and so on, represent that form of crony capitalism that has even normally friendly pro-market people up in arms, there are, maybe, signs that new banking businesses are being formed. Over at the Cobden Centre, Steve Baker MP has a nice piece contrasting the Goldman Sachs affair and the launch of a new bank.
In the meantime, my only caveat about all this piling on at the expense of Goldman Sachs is to point out that it is only one of a number of Western banks that have enjoyed the privileges of our quasi-statist monetary order. Goldmans may be a powerful, well connected institution, but it is hardly the only one of its kind.
Rowan Williams won’t be missed. (H/T Guido Fawkes).
“During the ’08 campaign, the same media that reported breathlessly about an old used tanning bed I purchased to get some sun during the dark Alaskan winter, couldn’t be bothered to investigate Barack Obama’s associations, statements or even his voting record as a state senator.”
– Sarah Palin. It continues to amaze me how, whatever one thinks of her views, she is portrayed by a large chunk of our MSM as stupid or crazy. Really?
I get emails occasionally from readers. This one interested me:
“I am a student at the University of Southern California’s M.A. program in occupational therapy. In 2010 our national organization, the American Occupational Therapy Association (AOTA), included Social Justice in our code of ethics. About 12 states incorporate by reference AOTA’s code of ethics as part of their licensing requirements, meaning that getting an occupational therapy license and keeping it requires adherence to social justice, which is a set of political values and a political agenda that is today associated with those who are termed left, liberal, or progressive. For example, the code of ethics states that we are to advocate for social justice, which requires an equitable distribution of resources to all individuals and groups. Professors also use the requirement as an excuse to teach “social justice activities” in class.”
Interesting. The email continues:
“This is actually a trend in all the health sciences today. My hope is that this trend can be stopped as it normalizes setting political litmus tests to practice a profession. In 2015 AOTA votes again on the contents of its code of ethics and I will be submitting a motion to remove the social justice requirement. I am working now to educate members on this issue before the 2015 vote.”
“One of the things that makes this a hard road to travel is that if I tell a health science student that social justice is a highly political concept used today to promote a left/liberal/progressive agenda, they easily shrug it off because of the way in which the material is presented to them. They are simply told things like, “social justice is about fairness in receiving society’s resources” or something equally bland and nice-sounding.”
The correspondent, by the name of A.D, asked me to sign a statement with others opposing this. As a Brit, I am not sure whether any signature of support from me would be valid but I am happy to lend my voice to this issue. As the late FA Hayek famously pointed out, “social justice” is one of those question-begging terms that takes as given such ideas as the presumption in favour of equal distribution of wealth by some sort of “distributor”. It is not a neutral term – ideas of socialism and state ownership are baked into it. And while “justice” is a word that might mean something, “social justice” is very different.
I wish this gentleman success. You can visit his website here. And he has a related item with a large number of comments here.
Of course, a number of governments, including the late, unlamented one of Tony Blair, were prepared to hold their noses and do business with the now very dead former dictator of Libya, but this story about an alleged £42 million campaign contribution to Nicolas Sarkzoy in 2007, if true, would surely be the end of the diminutive president of France.
Excerpt:
“The “terms” for handing over the money were agreed in a meeting between the two men in Libya two years before Mr Sarkozy’s election, documents published by a French investigative website suggest.A memo obtained by the Mediapart site and handed to a judge alleges that the meeting on Oct 6, 2005 resulted in “campaign financing” of “NS [Nicolas Sarkozy]” being “totally paid”. At the time Mr Sarkozy was France’s interior minister with well-documented ambitions to succeed Jacques Chirac. Political financing laws ban candidates from receiving cash payments above €7,500 (£6,300) but Mediapart claims that €50”‰million mentioned in the memo were laundered through bank accounts in Panama and Switzerland.”
Of course, given the range of poisonous collectivists running for the job of French president, it is very much the case of “none of the above” if I were a citizen of that country and thinking about voting in the upcoming French elections this year.
The founder of the X-Prize (well known around these parts due to events such as the space ventures side of things) now wants to launch a prize for people with good ideas on how to sort out education. (H/T, Instapundit). I can suggest two quick ideas:
Give the prize immediately to Professor James Tooley.
Or, Give it to me, as I have this brilliant idea – just get the state out of education, full stop.
Simple, really.
You have to hand it to this government in the UK. Having watched at how the US has demonstrated the foolishness of distorting the housing market in sub-prime mortgages, and hence encouraging a huge “moral hazard” problem, the UK is, according to a report, going to back hundreds of thousands of home loans in measures to be announced in the 21 March budget.
One grows weary. The shoulders sag. It becomes more difficult to think of a smart-arse piece of satire when confronted with the latest cretinous idea to come out of David Cameron’s limited mind, or from the minds of his colleagues.
Over dinner a few weeks ago, Brian Micklethwait and I agreed that Cameron is not, in fact, all that bright, apart, perhaps, from having a sort of superficial, feral cunning.
In a few days’ time, I am seeing friends and the theme of the evening meal is that all the food is going to follow Roman recipes. No, I don’t mean the kind of thing you order in a restaurant now, I mean the sort of food that Marcus Aurelius might have eaten. Or as described in this book about the Romans by Ferdinand Mount.
Togas, I am told, are required.
Okay, time for all those Animal House comments.
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
