Combat! - Page 290 of 406 - A blog by Dan Brooks

Pelosi prepares for amazing thought experiment

By Dan Brooks in Republican Candidates December 6, 2011 4 Comments

Here’s one for those ready to play the Feud: between Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich, whom do you think Americans dislike more? Both are future former heads of the most reviled body in the United States government. Both are perceived as dishonest hacks—Pelosi in service to an increasingly demonized Democratic establishment and Gingrich in service to, well, Gingrich. Both appeared in a global warming commercial that each frankly acknowledges was bad for Gingrich, for the strangely agreed-upon reason that people hate Nancy Pelosi. Perhaps most importantly, both know what Newt Gingrich did in 1996. Her tenure on the House ethics committee that investigated him has left Pelosi with privileged information, which she is now promising/threatening to reveal “when the time is right.” From a PR standpoint, this is like Saddam Hussein inviting everybody to watch him hit Osama Bin Laden with nerve gas.

Newt Gingrich and “fundamental” everything

By Dan Brooks in Republican Candidates December 5, 2011 4 Comments

Newt Gingrich continues his lifelong metamorphosis into Bobby "The Brain" Heenan.

Newt Gingrich is a hyperbolist. When he says that child labor laws are “stupid” and articulates a plan for poor children to work half the day as janitors in their own schools, it’s not the right direction for America’s future—it’s “exactly the right direction for America’s future.” Mitt Romney changing his support for individual mandates isn’t just flip-flopping; he’s adopting “radically different positions.” Radically different! Remember when Rom-bot was like, “our plans to reduce the deficit should not rest on increasing revenues” and then, six months later, he was like “abolish the money system! kill all humans!” Neither do I. As an ironist, I consider the hyperbolist a dangerous jerk, for much the same reason that certain science fiction fans will get really angry when you ask them about Star Wars. Hyperbole is irony with no referent in truth. A man who thinks everything is “profoundly” or “truly” or “actually” what it is prefers the feeling of ideas to their content. You can learn a lot about such a man from which intensifier he likes best, and for Newt Gingrich, that intensifier is “fundamentally.” Props to John for the link.

Friday links! You did what? edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links, Uncategorized December 2, 2011 3 Comments

A rare photo of Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke not loaning half the GDP at .01%

I am willing to accept a modicum of secrecy in my US government. If the pillars of our democracy rest on a certain amount of secret alien dissection and Chinese cyberwar, I’ll go along. But one of those pillars is consent of the governed, and I cannot consent to stuff I don’t know about. A little-r republican system—in which people vote or don’t vote for various representatives based partly on what they do in office—does not work when we’re not sure what our government is doing. Call me Judy Garland, but I also believe that our elected leaders behave a little more scrupulously when they know the American people are watching. Secrecy protects Them from Us, and I personally am a longtime subscriber to the adage that government should fear the people and not the other way around. It’s Friday, as far as we know, and today’s link roundup is full of stories about things we should have known about earlier. Frankly, it’s harrowing. But before we get started, I think you need to watch this video.

Citigroup’s disappearing plutonomy report

By Dan Brooks in Class Warfare December 1, 2011 8 Comments

Former Citigroup CFA and coiner of "plutonomy" Ajay Kapur

In my surprisingly arduous attempt to find 2007 revenue figures for Citigroup yesterday, I ran across something called the plutonomy report. Back in 2005, Ajay Kapur—then CFA of Citigroup—produced this industry note describing investor and consumer behavior in economies where a very small portion of the population controls a very large portion of national wealth. He called such economies plutonomies. “The world is dividing into two blocs,” Kapur writes—“the plutonomy and the rest.” He lists the United States, Canada, Australia and the UK among the plutonomy nations and puts continental Europe and Japan “in the egalitarian bloc.” Here in plutonomy country, “the rich absorb a disproportionate chunk of the economy” and therefore hold primary influence over aggregate indicators like savings rates, account deficits, consumer spending, et cetera. In 2006, Kapur produced a follow-up to the first plutonomy report, in which he argues that plutonomy countries,

have seen the rich take an increasing share of income and wealth over the last 20 years, to the extent that the rich now dominate income, wealth and spending in these countries…the tech whizzes who own the pipes and distribution, the lawyers and bankers who intermediate globalization and productivity, the CEOs who lead the charge in converting globalization and technology to increase the profit share of the economy at the expense of labor, all contribute to plutonomy.

It’s a controversial argument, especially from a bank that defrauded consumer investors to enrich itself and a billionaire hedge fund manager the following year. People would probably get angry about it, except the second plutonomy report has been steadily disappearing from the interent since it leaked.

Judge blocks “pocket change” Citibank settlement

By Dan Brooks in corporatocracy November 30, 2011 9 Comments

Manhattan district court judge Jed S. Rakoff, speaking at an unknown location

Possibly as an aftereffect of his symbiosis with the Beard of Reason, federal district court judge Jed Rakoff has blocked a settlement between the SEC and Citibank on the grounds that he has no way of determining whether the agreement was “fair, reasonable, adequate and in the public interest.” The answers to his questions are define “fair,” not really and nope. At issue in the case is whether the banking giant committed fraud when it assembled a $1 billion mortgage fund from high-risk loans that it then sold to clients, even as it shorted* the fund in its own investments. The SEC alleges that Citibank failed to inform investors that the mortgages in the fund had been deliberately selected to fail. As it often does, the federal enforcement agency agreed to let Citibank settle the case without admitting or denying any fault. Judge Rakoff, however, does not play that.