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I knew what a mule skinner was	5 votes - 38 %
I did not know what a mule skinner was	6 votes - 46 %
-	1 vote - 7 %
I knew what a road agent was	4 votes - 30 %
I did not know what a road agent was	6 votes - 46 %
-	1 vote - 7 %
Limited Liability for corporations is good	6 votes - 46 %
Limited Liability for corporations is bad	3 votes - 23 %
-	1 vote - 7 %
Limited Liability for corporations is a big deal	2 votes - 15 %
Limited Liability for corporations is not a big deal	6 votes - 46 %

13 Total Votes

Your right to a nose ends at my fist | 18 comments (18 topical, 0 hidden) | Trackback

Derek Jarman by nebbish (4.00 / 1) #1 Fri May 02, 2008 at 05:36:40 AM EST

I've yet to see one of his films that isn't hilariously pretentious, though I quite like Jubilee. Funny how things turn out - it seems his real legacy will be his amazing Dungeness garden.

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It's political correctness gone mad!

I think that's really interesting by lm (4.00 / 1) #2 Fri May 02, 2008 at 09:55:59 AM EST

Persaud essentially defines a good bank in terms of the failure of the financial markets. If I understand him, his beef isn't with regulation so much as the transformation of banking from a set of personal relationships to just another market commodity.

There is no more degenerate kind of state than that in which the richest are supposed to be the best.
Cicero, The Republic

It's more like competing theories of the market by Scrymarch (4.00 / 1) #12 Sat May 03, 2008 at 12:11:19 AM EST

One explanation holds that markets are efficient simply through the volume of transparent actors, and emphasises all information being freely available to all participants.

Another explanation suggests that markets are successful because it is a mechanism which pools the tacit / private knowledge of participants. Er, I think this is what Hayek is getting at with his "catallaxy" term but I haven't really read him properly, getting around to it someday.

It's interesting that he advocates going back to old school retail banking though. In Australia there was a big move away from that after the financial deregulation in the 80s, risk models were centralised and a lot of discretion to lend was taken away from eg branch managers.
_{The Political Science Department of the University of Woolloomooloo}
[ Parent ]

most of my economic education is neoclassical by lm (4.00 / 1) #13 Sat May 03, 2008 at 09:43:35 AM EST

So I wouldn't really recognize a competing vision of the market.

The other thing that struck me that I didn't mention is that while he says that the problems he sees are due to regulation, they seem to me to have cropped up, at least in the US, as the result of deregulation. The only way I can see to make sense out of that is to assume that he's referring to internal regulations to the bank rather than external regulations imposed by the government.

There is no more degenerate kind of state than that in which the richest are supposed to be the best.
Cicero, The Republic
[ Parent ]

You might find it worthwhile by TheophileEscargot (2.00 / 0) #14 Sat May 03, 2008 at 10:11:20 AM EST

Subscribing to a couple of the right-wing econoblogs, just to get their perspective.

One thing I think they have a point about (here, more) is that the banks have actually done worse than the hedge funds, despite being more tightly regulated. Therefore they suggest regulation is not the answer.

The more extreme market fundamentalist explanation, which I've considered too daft to be worth mentioning, is that the sub-prime crisis is all the fault of the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act. They allege this forced the banks to give mortgages to bad-risk borrowers. Hence the whole thing is the fault of big government intervention, and less regulation is the answer.

I haven't seen any convincing explanation of why it took 30 years for this to have ill-effects, and how banks in completely different countries were compelled to take on these bad-risk debts.

Personally I don't see much reason to think existing regulation has had much of an impact at all, positive or negative. It's a global crisis that has crossed several regulatory regimes, just as the boom before it did.
--
"Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise." -- Bertrand Russell
[ Parent ]

If my time were unlimited I would do that by lm (4.00 / 1) #15 Sat May 03, 2008 at 03:21:28 PM EST

My own theory is that the present meltdown is mostly a function of banks not doing proper due diligence. On the one hand investment banks were investing in mortgage backed securities that they didn't really understand. On the other hand mortgage companies were making loans to individuals whom the underwriters knew couldn't pay those loans back. The latter was exacerbated by money being so cheap which led mortgage banks to calculate that if everyone who was likely to default did default, they could simply borrow more money at dirt cheap. The former was exacerbated by the apparently unwillingness of shareholders to hold their top executives and board members accountable.

Regulation certainly could have helped with regards to the lending. I don't know that it would have helped with the due diligence.

There is no more degenerate kind of state than that in which the richest are supposed to be the best.
Cicero, The Republic
[ Parent ]

Bananas in the attic by TheophileEscargot (2.00 / 0) #16 Sat May 03, 2008 at 04:00:53 PM EST

One of the econoblogs had a "bananas in the attic" analogy for cheap money.

Suppose the government subsidizes bananas. So, you buy a load of bananas and stick them in your attic. Unfortunately, you buy so many that the weight collapses the attic floor. Is that your fault or the government's?

I don't really see the "money so cheap if everyone defaults they can just borrow more money" thing though. Even if you borrow more, you've still lost money and will have to pay it back. Other explanations would be "if everybody defaults the government's going to bail us out", or "the property market is always going to rise so we can just reclaim the mortgaged houses and get the money back".
--
"Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise." -- Bertrand Russell
[ Parent ]

: I would mostly agree with that analogy by lm (4.00 / 1) #17 Sat May 03, 2008 at 07:07:55 PM EST

The government, in this case, is an enabler. Sure, the banks could have made bad loans up to a point and then stopped. But they didn't stop. The reason that they didn't stop is that they assumed that they were going to be able to keep cheaply borrowing money. But then they couldn't borrow anymore.
The government isn't directly involved in that anymore than a bloke giving a pound to a alcoholic beggar is guilty of that beggar going to get drunk. But the government is an enabler in this scenario. By turning a blind eye, they helped create the circumstances that let the bubble inflate to the proportions that it did before it burst.
There is no more degenerate kind of state than that in which the richest are supposed to be the best.
Cicero, The Republic
[ Parent ]

They mean government regulations by Scrymarch (4.00 / 1) #18 Sun May 04, 2008 at 01:35:45 AM EST

Financial deregulation also involved new sets of regulations to replace the old. I believe he's talking about the value-vs-market price ideas behind eg the Basel accords.

I agree with what you said downthread about due diligence though.
_{The Political Science Department of the University of Woolloomooloo}
[ Parent ]

Genre exploration. by Billy Goat (4.00 / 1) #3 Fri May 02, 2008 at 10:03:01 AM EST

Not to cast aspersions on True Grit or Warlock, both are great books, but isn't this like getting to know fantasy or sci-fi by reading only those mainstream authors who dabbled in it?

Portis wrote only one western - the rest of his were what I guess you'd call "mainstream" novels. Hall wrote a loose trilogy of westerns. He's otherwise known for a novel about professional skiing and a historical who-dunnit series in which Ambrose Bierce is the detective.

Seems to me that you're putting yourself, unintentionally of course, in the position of those folks who don't read sci-fi unless it is given the "mainstream" stamp of approval and comes from an author who has already got credit in the contemporary literature world.

Perhaps the problem comes from a tension in the idea of "genre classic." Is something a genre classic because it so exemplifies the genre? Or is it a classic because it stands out (and is actually not really a representation of the genre as it is typically practiced)?

heh heh by Merekat (4.00 / 1) #4 Fri May 02, 2008 at 10:10:11 AM EST

Mr. Escargot is so prolific a reader, he'd read the ingredients on the back of a cornflake packet, it that was all that was available;)

[ Parent ]

: Been there by Vulch (4.00 / 1) #6 Fri May 02, 2008 at 01:16:53 PM EST

Done that
Got the box
Wot, throw away reading matter?

[ Parent ]
: I prefer my literature more experimental. by Billy Goat (4.00 / 3) #10 Fri May 02, 2008 at 02:18:21 PM EST

The ingredient list on my package of cornflakes reads:
"Why do human hands smell of death? niacinamide, sodium ascorbate, loathing, salt, we eat eat eat but remain unsatisfied, vitamin B12, high fructose corn syrup, glass and contempt, malt flavoring, riboflavin, when will ever stop raining? BHT is added to preserve quality."

[ Parent ]

Well, I've asked both Metafilter and HuSi about it by TheophileEscargot (2.00 / 0) #7 Fri May 02, 2008 at 01:21:58 PM EST

What books do you suggest?

I read True Grit beforehand though: that was what started me off on the Quest for the Classics of Genre in the first place.

I might try Louis L'Amour at some point. Nobody seems to have a clear idea of which of his books stand out though.
--
"Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise." -- Bertrand Russell
[ Parent ]

It came off as criticism . . . by Billy Goat (4.00 / 1) #8 Fri May 02, 2008 at 02:02:07 PM EST

And I apologize for that. I guess I was more curious about what the "goal" was (other than to read good stuff). I was just mulling the question over aloud.

Asking for stand-outs will get you better reads, but give you a skewed sense of the genre as a whole. On the other hand, just diving in means you're going to have to wade through an awful lot of crappy stuff. You don't want to read garbage, right? But you also said that you were looking for stuff outside the mainstream. Both Portis and Hall are pretty mainstream figures.

Still, since this isn't for you PhD or anything like that, it would seem your strategy, which should lead you to better, if potentially atypical, books is the smarter approach.

As for L'Amour, the Western genre's equivalent of (in size, if not quality) to Balzac's La Comedie humaine is L'Amour's "Sackett" novels - a cycle of 17 novels covering members of the Sackett clan (they appear in many of his other novels too - they're the glue that holds his fictional world together). They're not all winners, but they form the core of his contribution to the genre. You can find a full list of Sackett books (and guest appearances) on wikipedia.

[ Parent ]

: Thanks! by TheophileEscargot (2.00 / 0) #11 Fri May 02, 2008 at 02:27:03 PM EST

I'll keep an eye out for the Sacketts. I've stuck Sackett's Land (the first chronologically) in my Amazon basket, but I've got a big to-read stack at the moment so it might be a while.
--
"Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise." -- Bertrand Russell
[ Parent ]

The green eyed monster by ucblockhead (4.00 / 1) #5 Fri May 02, 2008 at 12:29:27 PM EST

Why I really care is that Microsoft is vacuuming up way too many programmers. Between Microsoft, with their shady recruiters making unethical exploding offers to unsuspecting college students, and Google (you're on my radar) paying untenable salaries to kids with more ultimate frisbee experience than Python, whose main job will be to play foosball in the googleplex and walk around trying to get someone...anyone...to come see the demo code they've just written with their "20% time," doing some kind of, let me guess, cloud-based synchronization... between Microsoft and Google the starting salary for a smart CS grad is inching dangerously close to six figures...

Article translation: I'm angry because my personnel costs are skyrocketing.
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_{ウセーバラケダ}

: he can try recruiting in Phx by cam (4.00 / 1) #9 Fri May 02, 2008 at 02:08:58 PM EST

rather than in SF or NY. Other companies are doing it, including Google.
cam
Freedom, liberty, equity and an Australian Republic
[ Parent ]

Your right to a nose ends at my fist | 18 comments (18 topical, 0 hidden) | Trackback


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