Farewell Blogger... you were a good ship!

This is to announce that the Mojowire has moved... we are now at the mojowire on typepad. Yeah, you may see some ads, and you might even think of clicking through them if there's something there of interest you see... but it will still be the same mojowire you have come to know and love (or perhaps fear and loathe).

So come on over and join us at our new digs; and never fear, the old archive will be here on blogger as long as blogger is around and we aren't using up too much space with our thread.

Thanks for a good run blogger... but it's graduation day!

mojo sends

Tea Baggers in a Nut Shell

His Rudeness does it again:

"The purpose of the Tea Party movement is individualism gone mad, which means "If you fuck off and leave us alone, government, with our god, our guns, our high fructose corn syrup, our Facebook, our shitty jobs and wages, you can go about your business." The Tea Party's "success" is just a clever exploitation of our American nihilism, a march into oblivion, or wheeled into it unawares as we gaze at our Blackberrys assuring us that every little fart of a thought is important. The election of Barack Obama is beginning to seem less like an urgent call to change than the huffing effort of a fat guy forced to call 911 because his kitchen's ablaze because of an exploded microwave burrito. "Oh, the fire's out? Can I get that burnt burrito? Because The Biggest Loser's about to come on."

Pretty much says it all... wish I'd written it...

mojo sends

*fzzt* Hey *crackle* Is Thing On?

Wireheads! Your attention please.

It has come to the attention of senior management at their oar stations and the editorial monkeys that there has not been much happening on this blog of late, other than the occasional sage ramblings of one Hebisner Feniktorod, a known degenerate peacenik and social malcontent.

There are going to be some fairly radical changes here within the next 30 days. I mean, screw it, am I a writer or not? And if so... then it is time to stop wallowing in lameness ... and ellipses and take this to the next level.

The potential for crashing, burning, humiliating defeat and the cratering of my already fragile self-esteem is truly high. But I don't seem to be doing anything else at the moment... so

Stand by to stand by, while we get ready to kick this pig!

mojo sends

Ignorance? You're soaking in it..

You have to just love this story:

Michael Lewis, the celebrated author of "The Big Short," claims that about 40 or 50 House Republicans skipped a December hearing by Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke to spend three hours with him talking about the financial crisis. And the lawmakers, who are members of the House Republican book club, were stunningly uninformed about major elements of the crisis, says Lewis, during a recent conversation with Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter:

This book club event occurred in December 2009, close to a year and half since Bear Stearns and Lehman blew up.

The only part of this story I find a bit credulous is the use of the word "shockingly". Why would anyone be shocked that the Republican caucus in the house is uninformed? What exactly do they appear informed about? Did the health care debate provide any evidence that the House GOP had any policy depth?. Not that I saw. The ease by which the President dispatched them in that Caucas Q&A should have dispelled any doubts about their ignorance.

I do have some sympathy for this argument though:

At first, several dozen of the lawmakers told Lewis that they were going to leave early to attend the Bernanke hearing but they stayed because "they said, 'We never learn anything from him [Bernanke], he never explains anything to us'," according to Lewis.

A prerequisite for the job of Fed Chairman is the ability to speak in an arcane language so opaque that no one outside the world of economics and finance could possibly figure out what he was saying with any precision. The real joke is that Bernanke makes a conscious effort to be more clear than Greenspan, the Jedi Master of Federal Reserve doublespeak. Of course, even if he used plain English devoid of financial economic jargon, none of the GOP members would understand him anyway. They know so little policy other than "Capitalism good, Socialism bad" that even rudimentary discussions about these topics goes over their heads.

One of the underlying issues here is that the Congressional Republicans outsource policy expertise to the relevant lobbying groups they ally with. So in this case, banking and finance lobbyists are their main sources of information. No doubt as soon as they got back to their offices and placed a call to those lobbyists to demand answers, they were offered a tidal wave of outright lies and nonsense that probably boiled down to "liberals, socialism, liberal media, Hitler, Stalin, blah, blah, blah.". No doubt to the relief of those representatives so outraged by the book club meeting.

The other issue is that many of them are outright ideologues who could care less about the nuances of financial regulation since they have completely bought into a world view that this crisis was caused by government regulations like the Community Reinvestment Act or New Deal era agencies like the FDIC. I guarantee you that last part is widely believed in conservative business circles. You really cannot make stuff like this up.

But this story tells you all you need to know about Tea baggers and the current state of the GOP. They not only are ignorant of these issues, they are proud of it. Anyone who knows anything has to hide it from his or her constituents and colleagues. Only effete liberal commies care about this hippie stuff. I have no doubt that a book club meeting about Hitlers hatred of Socialists and the Nazi regimes campaign to wipe them out would be equally shocking to them.

And then they would quickly tune into the Beck program to be brought back into the fold with another Beckian flowchart detailing the relationship between Saul Alinsky and Hitler and how Woodrow Wilson caused World War II.

This is the smartest piece on Afghanistan military and political issues that I've read in recent memory. There are many memorable paragraphs, such as this one:

Meanwhile, Obama's broader strategic argument must not be lost. He has grasped that the foreign policy of the president should not consist in a series of extravagant, brief, Manichaean battles, driven by exaggerated fears, grandiloquent promises, and fragile edifices of doctrine. Instead the foreign policy of a great power should be the responsible exercise of limited power and knowledge in concurrent situations of radical uncertainty. Obama, we may hope, will develop this elusive insight. And then it might become possible to find the right places in which to deploy the wealth, the courage, and the political capital of the United States. We might hope in South Asia, for example, for a lighter involvement in Afghanistan but a much greater focus on Kashmir.[*]

(emphasis mine)

Uhhh..What??

Mike Konzcal tells us about the new Teabagging meme: FDIC is the devil.

Visiting home for the holidays, it’s amazing to me how certain groups of friends, who I mostly considered in the generic Republicans/conservatives camp, have been wading deeper into the Ron Paul territory. “Abolish the Fed” is one thing, but what surprised me the most was when I was at a Christmas party several people mentioned, fairly out of nowhere, how bad FDIC is for the economy. I think they thought that regular depositors could have done a better job vetting financial institutions than major sophisticated shareholders. When I tried to point out how if there wasn’t FDIC and millions of savings accounts were getting wiped out in ordinary bank runs we’d almost certainly have a wave of turn-of-the-last-century style violence that is hard for us to even imagine now – think bomb throwing anarchist violence – they seemed to be ok with that.

FDIC is actually saving our asses right now by liquidating bad banks and keeping nervous market players from stuffing their money under a mattress. Runs on bank were common before FDIC and the Fed were established, and they created financial havoc. It was a financial panic and run on banks in 1908 that precipitated the creation of the Fed. When's the last we had an actual bank run like that?
Anyone??

Since before the creation of the FDIC, morons.

Seriously, this is where we are now? People are arguing, in all seriousness, that the same people who maxed our their credit cards, took high interest variable loans to purchase houses and used them as credit cards, are the same people who are going to study arcane bank financials to forecast who is more solvent. Is the biggest economic problem we have that we have too many financially savvy people working at the gas stations and McDonalds of this country being held back from joining the billionare club because of FDIC and CRA?

ZOMG!

Moral Hazard?

Megan McCardle, yes that Megan McCardle, actually gets close to something important in a recent post about moral hazard in economic terms.

I go to a lot of pro-market think tank events where one speaker or another blames the financial crisis and the current recession on moral hazard, as well as basically everything else that has gone wrong in the last sixty years. I'm afraid I don't see it. The sticking point for me is twofold. The first is that we had crises before there was moral hazard--really, really dreadful crises, crises far worse than the one we're having now. I just don't see how you can look at the 1930s and name the FDIC as the decade's biggest financial problem. Or this decade's biggest financial problem. The closest our era came to a really devastating financial crash along the lines of the 1929-1933 period was in the total unguaranteed institutional money market funds.

Bingo! Nice job Megan. It's not often a bona fide Kool Aid Drinker manages to spit enough out of their grill to think outside their box. Keep going, you are almost there...

Nor do I find the central story of how the FDIC induced this moral hazard very compelling. Supposedly, ordinary depositors don't bother to check the soundness of their banks because they don't actually have skin in the game. Anyone making this argument cannot have met many ordinary depositors. If you stripped away my mother's FDIC protection, she wouldn't do any better of a job at evaluating Citigroup's finances. Moreover, this theory simply cannot explain the waves of bank failures that happened before 1934--failures in which the depositors neither expected, nor received, bailouts. Bankers still got overconfident, lent too much, and then went out of business. If you read contemporary accounts like the Benjamin Roth diary I recommended the other day, it's very clear that even when the shareholders and depositors were prominent local businesspeople with a lot of skin in the game and a pretty intimate knowledge of the bank's circumstances, they were still unable to foresee the trouble the banks got into.

She hits on an important idea that needs to be explored about what can we reasonably expect a regular citizen without a PhD in economics to understand about banks, markets, and what their best course of action in any given financial choice is, but we'll get back to that. This quote raises another important question, why didn't the bankers and regulators and everyone else figure out what was going to happen?

The central problem(s) we're dealing with right now seem to me to be, first, that asset/credit markets are sometimes subject to bad feedback loops which cause bubbles and crashes, and that the regulators cannot entirely forestall these, because the regulators are getting the same bad information from the feedback loop. And second, that to figure out what is going on in the banking system, we have to ask the bankers, who are going to tell us things that work to the advantage of the bankers. And third, that when new financial assets emerge, we don't fully understand the risks, and we tend to thereby get ourselves in trouble. Moral hazard seems like a distant fourth.

Good job Megan, I'll take it from here. What we might want to add to that paragraph is that one of the solutions to the problem of bad feedback loops that captures all the participants is to limit the systemic risk so that even if we make a bad call, we don't melt down our financial system. That is essentially what New Deal reforms to banking and markets did. As the Krugmanator put it, it made "Banking boring." Now, I don't think we can put that genie back in the bottle, but we can certainly put limits on the ability of lenders of all kinds to leverage themselves, force them to keep more capital in reserve, and make them disclose to regulators and investors all the relevant info. That's the minimum in my view, but its not hard to do. Megan, being the good University of Chicago graduate she is, will not be able to force such blasphemous thoughts through her keyboard onto the page, so I'm doing it for her.

This whole government intervention did it" argument stems in part from Milton Friedmans and Anna Scwartz's book "A Monetary History of the United States", where they argued that it was the Fed who monkeyfraked the economy in 1929-30 by raising rates and lowering the money supply. (true as far it goes) And that also the best way to deal with these downturns is to use monetary policy, which has been done since the 70's and seems to mostly work. Unfortunately, when you are already juicing the economy by keeping interest rates very low and one of these market blowups happen, you hit the zero bound pretty quick. Pulling out your Keynes playbook and blowing the dust off of it to run the Fiscal Policy Wildcat is what is really hard for many of these EMH fanatics to swallow.

Now, I think what Megan argues is true in that players in markets and the regulators get caught up on the feedback loop and don't see the apocalypse until the whole marketplace gets sucked into the abyss. Thomas Kuhn called this way of interpreting information a paradigm, and thus were a thousand awful business plan Power Point presentations born. But it is certainly true that once you buy into a conceptual framework, forever will it dominate your destiny until something drastic happens to shift the paradigm. Like, for example, a huge insurance company engaging in a global ponzi scheme and almost taking the entire financial system down with it.

I would go further and say that while Megan and people on the other side of the Great Divide like Tabbibi or academics like Krugman get close to portions of this, I think they miss the forest for the trees. I see the cause of the financial crash of 2008 as ideological. A free market ideology derived from the Efficient Market Hypothesis and a cultural brain tumor called Ayn Rand(insert your favorite cause here). And put in place and policed by a consortium of media, academic, business, and government group think that is almost Trotskyite in it's fervor to sell the beauty that are unregulated free markets and demonize anyone that wants to make them less insecure and destructive to regular people at the expense of quarterly profits and GDP.

So while I think its fair to point out the failures of the Obama economic squad, or to get worked up over banker salaries, I think that is ultimately spinning our wheels. We need to tear down the ideological construct and replace it with something that values economic growth, entrepreneurship and markets, but recognizes their limits, recognizes the role of the democratic institutions to intervene in markets, and remember that economic growth is only useful insofar as it elevates the human condition, not as fulfillment of biblical prophecy or to validate a particular economic thinker or school of thought.

Now I think Megan, at least in this piece, is sincere in her effort to grapple with what are uncomfortable questions for someone as far down the libertarian rabbit hole as she usually is. But the truth is that most of the people that are pimping the ideas that the Community Reinvestment Act is responsible for this horrible mess because of its liberal hippie meddling and forcing banks to lend white people money to non white people who then turned around and bought McMansions on credit and theen spent government money on guns, Malt liquor, and crack ho's they rented from Huggy bear the pimp are cynical douchebags who should not be taken seriously and probably should be frog marched into a rocket and launched into the Oort cloud to mine ice crystals and UnObtainum for the Trade Federation.

But I'm a DFH, so what do I know?

Just Not Feeling It

I've got such a long list of things that are pissing me off lately, that I can't even begin to make progress on narrowing down the field of what to rant about. If I covered everything that's currently getting up my nose, I'd be blogging full time until the end of the year. So, screw that. Instead, here, read this fresh horror. That's only the tippy top of a huge pile of steaming crap.