The Culture of Cannibalism in US Politics: The Triumph of The Cyclop’s Values Over Democratic Citizenship

{The first essay in this series introduced a model I created to explain the cycle of corruption that plagues US politics. This essay looks into the roots of this corruption. It takes a long time to get to the payoff. Further, the conclusion is somewhat ex nihilo if you have not read [...]

Common Sense and the sensus communis: anatomy of an American pressure cooker

Gay-Lussac
The pressure of a fixed mass and fixed volume of a gas is directly proportional to the gas’s temperature.
This relationship is known as the Gay-Lussac’s Law and a pressure cooker is an example of the law in practice. Cooking under pressure creates the possibility of cooking with high temperature liquids because the boiling point of [...]

Friday Morning News

Good morning Conflucians! Today is September 11, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of focus on that grim anniversary in the major newspapers. The New York Times has a couple of articles. The first is about fears that never materialized:
Remembering a future that many feared
So much has been said and [...]

This creek smells funny. How did we get here?

Imagine you were rowing your boat gently down the stream and one of the oars got caught in the hatch. What would happen? Logic suggests that the current would slowly move you downstream as you spun the boat in circles.
O.K. Rowboats don’t have hatches, but Orrin Hatch is a creature and a feature [...]

Geithner and Summers: Economic Disaster Deja Vu

Timothy Geithner’s profanity-laced rant against Sheila Bair and Mary Shapiro for their rational, reality-based concerns about increasing the power of Federal Reserve Bank, as opposed to increasing oversight of the system, should elicit a kind of déjà vu because the scenario has been played before. (Note: Increasing oversight does not mean policy disclosure.)
In 1997-8, Brooksley [...]

It’s the Jobs Stupid!!!!

Here’s a trajectory for POTUS to chew on from the recently released statistics on Industrial Production and Capacity. This is a key indicator of an economy’s well being.   It’s down again. There’s something about Obama’s use of the words “right trajectory” on Anderson Cooper the other night that makes me think he should [...]

He’s No FDR

With the release of financial regulation reform and healthcare reform that has Wall Street breaking open the bubbly, I just want to join the chorus of highly skeptical economists.  The tune of the last few days is hard to miss.  Take this piece from the NY Time’s Dealbook as an example:  Only a Hint of [...]

Dismal Economists: Getting Real on those Green Shoots

I’ve been concerned about the lack of real evidence for the administration’s green shoot hypothesis. It seems that I’m not the only one. A new Wall Street Journal Poll shows that Americans are increasingly ‘wary’ of the deficit and Obama’s economic intervention as Obama’s poll number’s slip.
But the poll suggests Mr. Obama [...]

Blaming a Generation

One outrage after another. Obama’s recent defense of DOMA leaves a bad taste in the mouth. I won’t continue, I may start to blub again if I do, and I don’t feel like being smug anyway. Claiming that banning Gay Marriage is good for the federal budget, and then invoking incest and pedophilia does not [...]

Did Hank Paulson Use TARP as a “Ruse” to Rescue Citigroup?

Be sure you’re sitting down before you read this, Okay? Barry Rithholtz speculates in his forthcoming book, Bailout Nation that the entire multi-trillion dollar boondoggle was
a giant ruse, a Hank Paulson engineered scam to cover up the simple fact that CitiGroup (C) was teetering on the brink of implosion. A loan just [...]