The stock market says "sequestration will not happen."

According to Jim Cramer on "Meet the Press" this morning:

I do think that the stock market itself is saying this isn’t going to happen. The defense index on Wednesday, it is all-time high. That says sequestration will not happen. The fact that the stock market is doing well despite the fact the gasoline prices are much higher, that’s hurting the consumer, payroll tax holiday goes away, that’s hurting the consumer. Again says that maybe something is not-- not drastic. Nothing drastic will come of this. Even despite the scare-- scare tactics, government by freak out. How right is that? I still feel pretty good.

"The European cap-and-trade system has slid into near meaninglessness as Germany bickers on the sidelines."

"Hopes that the election in Lower Saxony might resolve the high-level bickering were misguided. Now Europe's carbon market has hit a new low."

Energy-heavy industries and coal-dependent countries like Poland argue against market intervention in the [European Emissions Trading System (ETS)] while noting that higher carbon prices leads to higher energy costs that result in a burden on businesses while European economies remain weak. The arguments against intervention may be working, as Germany -- which also harbors deep concerns about the burden cap-and-trade could have on industry -- continues to stall, and the ETS remains mostly useless. A failure on backloading would likely drop carbon credits to a level only slightly above penny stocks.

"This should be the final wake-up call," said EU Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard, according to wire reports. "Something has to be done urgently...."

(Via Instapundit.)

"The anti-fragile is beyond the resilient or robust."

"The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the anti-fragile gets better and better." On that theory:

1. Build cities that won’t just withstand super storms, but gain from them....

2. Let banks fail and abandon economic stabilization practices....

3. Eat like a caveman....

4. Workout like an Olympian. Sleep like a college kid....

5. Be a doer not a thinker....

The author... points to the idea that rich countries have high levels of education and literacy. Therefore, there’s the belief that education leads to wealth, when actually the opposite occurs—countries get rich, and then they get educated. Since studies show that education does not equal GDP, to be anti-fragile, first have skills, and then obtain formal education.

An example given is, “The merchant profession has lots of variance. A dentist has very little.” Although parents want a life of stability for their children, Taleb’s theory would put the odds of success on the merchant in an unpredictable world. “College insulates students from downsides,” he says, “but also prevents brilliance.”

In terms of theory, doing is convex and study is concave. Taleb asks, “Can you study chemistry for a formula for the perfect hummus?” In cooking you can get a big gain from an error (adding lemon or garlic) but you only find out by trial-and-error.

Taleb’s philosophy is also hopeful about our country's mediocre global math and science scores, which he believes, “don’t capture the effectiveness of our citizens on the world,” because we are a country of risk-takers and entrepreneurs.

Here's the book: "Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder," by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (who, according to the linked article is "a notorious jerk." Well, he's got his own way of talking, which I love. (Just bought the book, too.)

ACLU to sue Morgan Stanley for making "predatory" loans to black people.

The NYT reports:

[T]he lawsuit claims, the bank went beyond the traditional role of an investment bank by requiring that the mortgage company churn out the wildly profitable loans that came with “dangerous” characteristics....

Rubbie McCoy, one of the five named plaintiffs in the lawsuit, took out a loan from New Century in 2006 with an adjustable rate starting at 12.14 percent, which could not fall below 10.75 percent. It came with “excessive fees and costs,” the suit said.

Ms. McCoy, a single mother, said she could not afford the payments, but the broker told her to “fudge” her income, the suit says. Now, she is fighting to save the Detroit home that she shares with her four children.

“Having a house was a way to keep my kids grounded,” Ms. McCoy said....

A NYT headline: "Mitt Romney Says, 'I Am The Confidence Fairy!''"

But Romney never said "I Am The Confidence Fairy!" There's some other Romney quote — some dull thing about economics — and then Paul Krugman says: "In effect, Romney was saying, 'I am the confidence fairy!'"

Krugman really, really wants Romney to lose. So, presumably, does the NYT. I don't have a problem with an opinion writer paraphrasing somebody's quote like that. It's the use of quotation marks in the headline that's wrong.


And the use of the word "fairy" demands some attention. I understand that Krugman is using the word in the sense of the tooth fairy — a magical creature. But the word is also a homophobic epithet. If a Republican had used equivalent language against a Democrat, we would hear criticism, so let me provide the criticism in this turnabout.

And by the way, creating confidence isn't like changing a tooth into money. The supposedly fairy-like power Romney claimed was to inspire optimism about the economy. Compare that to Obama's "this was the moment" speech, given at the point of accepting his party's nomination in 2008. At that moment, he proclaimed, "the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal... we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth... we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves, and our highest ideals."

If we're going to ridicule presidential candidates asserting magical — godlike — powers, that was the ultimate.

And that was 4 years ago. Many moments ago. How are we doing with "our highest ideals"? How did Obama do remaking this great nation? Is this the reflection of our very best selves? These are the real questions, not some inconsequential remark Romney made about optimism at a fundraiser.

Now, Krugman thinks he has a very funny point about economics, which is that the stock market is up, even though Romney's looking less likely to win according to Intrade. And what Romney said — what that "quote" in the headline paraphrased —was:

If it looks like I’m going to win, the markets will be happy. If it looks like the president’s going to win, the markets should not be terribly happy. It depends of course which markets you’re talking about, which types of commodities and so forth, but my own view is that if we win on November 6th, there will be a great deal of optimism about the future of this country. We’ll see capital come back and we’ll see — without actually doing anything — we’ll actually get a boost in the economy.

We're deprived of the text of the question he's responding to. But we can see that Romney inserts a qualification about "which markets you’re talking about, which types of commodities," before moving on to a generic statement about "optimism about the future" and "a boost in the economy." I'm not a Nobel-prize winning economist, but I can see that Romney is making a decision not to get into saying something complicated, and that there are different types of markets and some go up when others go down. But if you want to talk about the stock market, isn't that where people put extra money that they aren't investing in expanding their own businesses in a way that might produce more commodities and increase employment?

Fairy forbid that the economics expert would actually explain some economics now and then. Why bother when there's one more thing about Romney that's supposedly soooo hilarious? It seems we've all turned into idiots.... here in this remade great nation that reflects our very best selves.

Is this your very best self, Mr. Krugman? Is this your very best newspaper, New York Times?

"Dow erases 2012 gains after 'terrible' jobs report."

"Jittery investors flee stocks."

"Thinking outside the box may solve problems in the real world."

"But in the political realm, creative noodling will get you cast into the outer darkness. No matter which way you lean, The Machinery requires cogs, not cognizance."

Kathleen Parker, talking about Cory Booker.

"Investors File Suit Against Facebook, Underwriters."

"The suit follows reports Tuesday that analysts at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. cut their revenue forecasts on Facebook amid the investor roadshow, a change that wasn't widely disseminated."

"How Big a Pop for Facebook's IPO?"

23 cents.

"Bank of America... sending letters to thousands of homeowners... offering to forgive a portion of the principal balance on their mortgages by an average of $150,000 each."

The idea is to "turn mortgages headed for possible foreclosure into long-term performing loans."

You have to be "at least 60 days behind on payments as of the end of January," so too bad for you if you missed the deadline on... missing deadlines. It's now too late to be too late. A new meaning for the phrase it got late early.

Greg Smith is leaving Goldman Sachs because it "makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off."

He writes, in a NYT op-ed:

Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as “muppets,” sometimes over internal e-mail. Even after the S.E.C., Fabulous Fab, Abacus, God’s work, Carl Levin, Vampire Squids? No humility? I mean, come on. Integrity? It is eroding. I don’t know of any illegal behavior, but will people push the envelope and pitch lucrative and complicated products to clients even if they are not the simplest investments or the ones most directly aligned with the client’s goals? Absolutely. Every day, in fact.

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the junior analyst sitting quietly in the corner of the room hearing about “muppets,” “ripping eyeballs out” and “getting paid” doesn’t exactly turn into a model citizen.

Here's a follow-up article in the NYT:

Mr. Smith’s criticism, much more than stories about bonuses or brickbats from the likes of Occupy Wall Street, could be especially painful for Wall Street now.

Wall Street, of course, has always sought profits — but if greed were to be countenanced, it should be long-term greed, not short-term greed, in the words of Gus Levy, who led Goldman Sachs in the 1960s and ’70s. With long-term greed, money was made with clients, not from them. 

"A burbled value of $100 billion would price [Facebook] at an earnings multiple of 100 to one."

"Fast-growing Apple is currently valued at 13 to one. Google is valued at 20 to one. Facebook isn't LinkedIn or eToys or even Google."

Like a bank, it must care about its dignity and an image for stability because of its intimate relationship of trust with its 845 million members, who know their unparalleled cache of personal information is about to turn Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg into a billionaire 24 times over.

So far, Mr. Zuckerberg and colleagues have been more cautious in exploiting customer data than they get credit for. But let us be frank: There is no way the company can grow into such a gargantuan market value by adding even hundreds of millions of new members if it continues to extract only $1 in profit per year per user.

ADDED: In evaluating the worth of Facebook, can we take their judgment in interior design into account?



That is Facebook's own photo, so they are not ashamed to go out into the world looking like that. Disturbing! Those paper lanterns projecting out into the doorway or stuck back behind a trashcan and a rolling chair. The diagonal stripes on the carpet and continuing — miniaturized and de-diagonalized — on one wall. The horrid clock as the only thing hanging on the wall. I couldn't work in an environment like that, and yet the 2 individuals sitting on that crappy brown sectional couch are both billionaires. And they are billionaires in the business of creating something that will occupy the visual field of hundreds of millions of human beings. Something is terribly wrong!

"Mr. Zuckerberg had been reluctant to push forward with an IPO."

R"People familiar with his thinking said he has been fearful of the damage an IPO could do to the company's culture. He wants employees focused on making great products, not the stock price...."

Connecting Occupy Wall Street to the Penn State scandal.

Here's a new Bloggingheads video I did with Glenn Loury, who's an economics professor at Brown. We talk about Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Occupy Wall Street, and Penn State. A big topic is shame — they call this the "Special Shame Edition" — and I want to highlight something Glenn says about Occupy Wall Street and a way that I connect his insight to the Penn State story.

In the first clip, Glenn is saying that the OWS protesters have made him feel uneasy as a member of the economics profession — the "alchemists" who whipped up all these complex financial devices.



The economists benefit amongst themselves, lauding each other for their great works, and the protesters hold up a different mirror, in which the economist can see shame.

Later in the diavlog, we're talking about the Penn State scandal, and I'm puzzling over how so many men — honorable men — could operate together to suppress their own awareness of the evil they harbored within, and I perceive a similarity in they way they closed ranks and functioned as a self-regarding, self-promoting group:

***

Here's the movie Glenn mentions in the first clip: "Inside Job."

Quizzing the Occupy Wall Street protesters about who's really in bed with the bankers.

Evan Coyne Maloney, via Instapundit.

"The Greek government was plunged into chaos on Tuesday and faced an imminent collapse..."

"... as lawmakers rebelled against Prime Minister George Papandreou’s surprise call for a popular referendum on a new debt deal with Greece’s foreign lenders."

Writing with dashes.

Do you like dashes? I do. There are certain ways of using dashes that I particularly admire. Rather than try to explain what I like so much, I'll give you an example. This is from the Charles Dickens novel, "Bleak House." The narrator is encountering the mother of a child who has just fallen down a flight of stairs.

Mrs. Jellyby, whose face reflected none of the uneasiness which we could not help showing in our own faces as the dear child's head recorded its passage with a bump on every stair — Richard afterwards said he counted seven, besides one for the landing — received us with perfect equanimity.

Doesn't that sentence make you feel like diagramming it... just for fun?

I like sentences like that — I think — because I like conversational side roads especially when they get you back to the main road. That relates to the way I feel about blogging. For example, the reason I was out there in Project Gutenberg searching for "Africa" on a webpage that contained the entire text of what is — in paperback — a 544-page book is that — like everyone else who checked Memeorandum today — I got waylaid by a NY Post story titled "Florida banker's wife left family to join Wall Street protesters."

A married mother of four from Florida ditched her family to become part of the raggedy mob in Zuccotti Park -- keeping the park clean by day and keeping herself warm at night with the help of a young waiter from Brooklyn.

“I’m not planning on going home,” an unapologetic Stacey Hessler, 38, told The Post yesterday.

“I have no idea what the future holds, but I’m here indefinitely. Forever,” said Hessler, whose home in DeLand sits 911 miles from the tarp she’s been sleeping under.

Hessler — who ironically is married to a banker — arrived 12 days ago and planned to stay for a week, but changed her plans after cozying up to some like-minded radicals, including Rami Shamir, 30, a waiter at a French bistro in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.

Hey, check the dashes: "— who ironically is married to a banker —." Ironic? Or not ironic at all? It's just what you'd expect if you were reading a novel about a woman married to a banker. Stacey Hessler immediately called to mind Mrs. Jellyby. Remember Mrs. Jellyby? She's a minor character in "Bleak House." Here's a summary/spoiler:

[Mrs. Jellyby] resolutely devotes every waking hour to the “Borrioboola-Gha venture.” The reader never discovers the details of the endeavor except that it involves the settlement of impoverished Britons among African natives with the goal of supporting themselves through coffee growing.

Mrs. Jellyby is convinced that no other undertaking in life is so worthwhile, or would solve so many problems at a stroke. Dickens’s interest is not in the project, however, but rather in Mrs. Jellyby, who is so wedded to her work that she has no time for her several children, with the exception of Caddy, a daughter she has conscripted as her secretary. Ink-spattered Caddy puts in nearly as many hours as her mother in the daily task of answering letters and sending out literature about Borrioboola-Gha.

Caddy, however, has come to hate the very word “Africa” or any word that has the remotest suggestion of causes. For her, causes simply mean the ruin of family life. Mrs. Jellyby’s husband eventually becomes suicidal and, though surviving despair, is last seen in the book with his head resting despondently on a wall.

In the book’s postscript, we discover that the Borrioboola-Gha project failed after the local king sold the project’s volunteers into slavery in order to buy rum. Mrs. Jellyby quickly found another cause to occupy her time, “a mission with more correspondence than the old one,” thus providing a happy ending for a permanent campaigner.

Like a sentence with well-deployed dashes, it all comes together in the end.

"Uh, officer... Leave those kids alone... I want them to vote for me."

A juxtaposition at Drudge right now, linking to a Financial Times article titled "Obama extends support for protesters." Excerpt:

On Sunday, Mr Obama honoured Martin Luther King at a dedication to a new memorial on National Mall in Washington. Referring to protests that have spread from Wall Street to London, Rome and elsewhere, Mr Obama said: “Dr King would want us to challenge the excesses of Wall Street without demonising those who work there.” Mr Obama had previously said the protests “express the frustration” of ordinary Americans with the financial sector.

So that's what counts as "more support"? It sounds to me as though he's undermining the message of the protesters who are demonizing the Wall Street crowd. Of course, he's got lots of friends among the demons, but he wants the protest kids to feel like they're his friends too. If only they would see how we all need each other, then peace will guide the planets, and love will steer the stars.

Anti-Semitism at the Occupy Wall Street protests?

Power Line, with a video clip, says:

Given the extraordinary media attention that was paid to fictitious claims of racism at Tea Party rallies, it is amusing to see the press avert its eyes from repeated incidents of anti-Semitism at Occupy Wall Street protests, even as Democratic politicians endorse the “movement” almost unanimously and without qualification.

Instapundit says:

In a movement attacking “greedy bankers” and “the 1%”? Inconceivable!

This makes me want to bring up something I wrote after I saw Michael Moore's movie "Capitalism" back in 2009:

I think Moore is seriously motivated by Christianity. He says he is (and has been since he was a boy). And he presented various priests, Biblical quotations, and movie footage from "Jesus of Nazareth" to make the argument that Christianity requires socialism. With this theme, I found it unsettling that in attacking the banking system, Moore presented quite a parade of Jewish names and faces. He never says the word "Jewish," but I think the anti-Semitic theme is there. We receive long lectures about how capitalism is inconsistent with Christianity, followed a heavy-handed array of — it's up to you to see that they are — Jewish villains.

Am I wrong to see Moore as an anti-Semite? I don't know, but the movie worked as anti-Semitic propaganda. I had to struggle to fight off the idea the movie seemed to want to plant in my head.

And, unsurprisingly, "Michael Moore is giddy over Occupy Wall Street."

ADDED: I see that the blog I don't link to has linked to this post and caused a commenter to say:

I don’t, can’t, won’t, and woulnd’t, read Althouse – even on pain of death.

But I’d bet that as much as she screams about anti-Semitism here, and in Michael Moore’s films, she was lustilly cheering the anti-Semitic parts of Mel Gibsons snuff film about Jesus.

Beautiful. Smear me. Don't even check to see what I wrote about "The Passion of the Christ." I'll Google it for you (though apparently you'll never read this). There's this, from January 11, 2005:

Michael Moore and Mel Gibson have more mutual admiration than you might think:

Asked if he had seen Mr. Gibson's film, Mr. Moore lighted up.

"I saw it twice," Mr. Moore said. "It's a very powerful film. I'm a practicing Catholic. My film might have been called 'The Compassion of the Christ,' though. The great thing about this country is the diversity of voices. When we limit the voices, we cease being a free society."

When Mr. Gibson walked to the press room lectern, he and Mr. Moore seemed delighted to meet each other.

"I feel a strange kinship with Michael," Mr. Gibson said. "They're trying to pit us against each other in the press, but it's a hologram. They really have got nothing to do with one another. It's just some kind of device, some left-right. He makes some salient points. There was some very expert, elliptical editing going on. However, what the hell are we doing in Iraq? No one can explain to me in a reasonable manner that I can accept why we're there, why we went there, and why we're still there."

Oh! It's Michael Moore again. Isn't that funny?!

But I'm looking for stuff about "The Passion." There's this on March 15, 2004 (a couple months after I started blogging:

Read "Hollywood Rethinking Faith Films After 'Passion'" in today's NYT...

The movie's box-office success has been chewed over in studio staff meetings and at pricey watering holes all over Hollywood, echoed in interviews with numerous executives in the last week. In marketing departments the film is regarded as pure genius; its director, Mel Gibson, is credited with stoking a controversy that yanked the film from the margins of the culture to center stage, presenting it as a must-see.

If only someone had filmed that. I would pay to see the edited footage of those meetings! "Chewing over" the popularity of the crucifixion! "Pure genius" to "stoke a controversy" about anti-semitism as a publicity stunt! What else could we do that would be like that??

And on July 31, 2006:

Mel Gibson, you are discredited forever.

... A lot of [my commenters] are defending Gibson and complaining that people are criticizing him because he's considered right wing. I note that doesn't explain my position, which has nothing to do with his politics, whatever they're supposed to be....  Gibson...  has revealed something loathsome about his mind that affects our interpretation of the works of art that sprang from that mind. In particular, it changes "The Passion of the Christ," which had to be defended at the time of its release from charges that it is anti-Semitic.

And December 5, 2006:

If "Apocalypto" is a great work of art, I want Mel Gibson to get full credit for it. Am I taking back what I said last summer, in a post titled "Mel Gibson, you are discredited forever"? Not really. The point there was that what we know about the artist's mind belongs in our interpretation of his work. For that reason, what we learned about him had a very damaging effect on the meaning "The Passion of the Christ," which had already aroused suspicions of anti-Semitism. 

And, for the record, I've never seen the movie "The Passion of the Christ," which came out before this blog started.

Obama goes ultra-bland on Occupy Wall Street.

Transcript:

I think it expresses the frustrations that the American people feel that we had the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, huge collateral damage all throughout the country, all across Main Street, and yet you're still seeing some of the same folks who acted irresponsibly trying to fight efforts to crack down on abusive practices that got us into this problem in the first place.

So yes, I think people are frustrated and the protesters are giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works.

So... the protesters? They are, indeed, protesting. They're expressing themselves... mmm hmmm. Could you be any more noncommittal?

And then throw in a bunch of the usual phrases like "got us into this problem in the first place."