Tag: wall street
Shock the Monkey Electric Boogaloo
Excluding bear markets: the rite of the thought criminal. Nice year splits!
Asked and Answered department. From the same document:
The belief that bear markets favor active management is a myth. A majority of active funds in eight of the nine domestic equity style boxes were outperformed by indices in the negative markets of 2008. The bear market of 2000 to 2002 showed similar outcomes.
Reading: it’s fundamental.
Shock the Monkey
As for index funds, your trained monkey hasn’t eaten in 10 years of net negative S&P 500-indexed returns. The monkey is dead. Just because we enjoyed 30 years of average 8-12% returns doesn’t mean they’re guaranteed by god or country. Active management of capital drives a capitalist society forward – index funds are merely dumb piles of loot for the theoretical man in the business suit to the far right to squeeze when necessary.
(via tart-tart)
Do you mean these ten years?
I’m sure the monkey actually gave his life trying to protect the bonuses. At all costs and whatever the outcome.
HFT demonstrably does not provide liquidity unless the market is going up and has market-wrecking implications. This is to say nothing about the advantages it gives institutional traders over non-HFT firms or individuals.
unsolicitedanalysis
reblogging nonolet
This strikes me as the critical truth of the recent craziness, and one that I’ve not heard uttered by anyone at any level of the MSM, who were almost universally still peddling various demonstrably false interpretations.
tl;dr: We are fucked
reblogging nonolet
This strikes me as the critical truth of the recent craziness, and one that I’ve not heard uttered by anyone at any level of the MSM, who were almost universally still peddling various demonstrably false interpretations.
tl;dr: We are fucked
That was surreal. Guys, what I just saw in there made me realize, we have got to win. It was crazy in there.
Maybe I shouldn’t be president, but [McCain] definitely shouldn’t be.
Barack Obama, as reported by Jonathan Alter, reacting to the pre-election meeting with Hank Paulson, McCain, various members of Congress, and then-president Bush
Two Choices
Mitch McConnell reports that he’s “heartened to hear that bipartisan talks have resumed in earnest” and, in response, Harry Reid says “I’m happy to hear my counterpart, my friend, Senator McConnell talk about the need for more negotiations. We don’t stand in the way of that.”
Now they’ll just repair to the negotiating table and make some laws! Finally, everyone will stop with the brazen lies about the financial reforms package! Truly it is a new day!
Or not.
Honestly, how many fucking times does this have to happen? The GOP as currently constituted is against it. “It” being anything the Democrat wants to do. Period. They love the idea of “negotiations.” It extends the sausage-making indefinitely. The American people hate the sausage-making. Anything that avoids bringing the bill to the floor in a decisive manner is a win for the GOP. This is why they keep on with the “back to the drawing board” jibber jabber. They want everything back at the drawing board. Forever.
Make them vote against the bill. No compromises, no negotiations, no changes, no fixes. Make them vote against the bill. To do that, you’ll also need to make them filibuster the bill. To do that, you’ll need to make them talk 24/7 about filibustering the bill. That is how you hurt the GOP. Make them stand up there and talk about the need to save Wall Street from scary scary regulations when all they ever did to us was drive the global fucking economy into the ditch and are aiming to do so again, posthaste. Make them talk, if necessary from now until the 2010 midterms. That, or they file a vote against cloture and we try again. More talking about how great Wall Street art. Two choices, no waiting.
The issue is, who pays when banks make a bad decision — the banks or the taxyapers? Republicans want the taxpayers on the hook. They support business as usual on Wall Street, which means having taxpayers bail out the banks, rather than holding the banks accountable for their own mistakes.
Chris Van Hollen, chief of the DCCC, getting perilously close to useful.
Resolution 9
Mark Warner (D-Va.) discusses the early talking points surrounding the financial reform package:
If you haven’t spent time with these issues,“ Warner sighed, "it’s easy to pop off with sound-bite solutions that don’t work.”
Indeed it is. And that’s exactly what the GOP plans to do. And they’re already doing it; they have likely already won the framing war. Compare and contrast these statements from GOP fucktard in chief, Mitch McConnell
“We cannot allow endless taxpayer-funded bailouts for big Wall Street banks. And that’s why we must not pass the financial reform bill that’s about to hit the floor.”
-and-
“[The Dodd bill] gives the government a new backdoor mechanism for propping up failing or failed institutions…. We won’t solve this problem until the biggest banks are allowed to fail.”
with these (all from Warner):
“It appears that the Republican leader either doesn’t understand or chooses not to understand the basic underlying premise of what this bill puts in place.”
“Resolution will be so painful for any company. No rational management team would ever choose resolution. It means shareholders wiped out. Management wiped out. Your firm is going away. At least in bankruptcy, there was some chance that some of your equity would’ve been retained and you could come out in some form on the other side of the process. The resolution that [GOP Sen Bob] Corker and I have tried to create means the death of the company. The institution is gone.
Sen. Richard Shelby, the ranking Republican on the Banking Committee, refers to the resolution authority as:
a "slush fund”
-and-
“the mere existence of this [slush] fund will make it all too easy to choose a bailout over bankruptcy.”
Warner counters:
“Again, it’s either that they don’t understand or they choose not to understand. There’s nobody in the financial sector who believes this. They’d laugh at the proposition that $50 billion is enough to get you through the resolution process if a couple of firms go down. What we’ve heard time and again is that the challenge in a crisis is to buy enough time to keep the lights on for a few days till you get the FDIC in here. You could make it smaller. Corker and I spoke about $25 billion. But this is funded by the industry.”
“And here’s the hypocrisy of the Republican leader’s comments, I can guarantee you that if there had not been some pre-funding, the critique would’ve been: ‘Look at these guys! They’ve left the taxpayers exposed! What’s going to keep the lights on for these few days? It’s going to be Treasury funds or Federal Reserve funds. The taxpayer will be exposed!’ ”
You are goddamned right they would. But that’s not the point. As usual, the Democrat has a nuanced, sober take on the way forward. The GOP has a short, meaningless slogan that offers no policy insight or suggestion whatever. It’s just "go die in the streets” pointed at their corporate paymasters. Of course, both parties know such an event would never be allowed to transpire, so all’s well.
What the Democrat should be saying:
The GOP wants to help these fatcats to the punchbowl. Again
The GOP is lining the pockets of the bankers and guaranteeing future bailouts
Why is the GOP against prosecuting the worst of the Wall Street offenses? Why do they want to perpetuate the boom/bust cycle that benefits only the richest few?
And etc… Rest assured you’ll hear none of those in the run-up to 2010. Attempts at financial reform will fail. The next economic meltdown will happen sooner rather than later and find an American government that’s financially unable to do anything about it. Depression II will make the current recession seem like the good old days. And will be blamed on Obama. Wait and see.
Re-conciliation
File under “Great Fucking Idea” from Ezra Klein:
Democrats could scrap the legislation and start over in the reconciliation process. But not to re-create the whole bill. If you go that route, you admit the whole thing seemed too opaque and complex and compromised. You also admit the limitations of the reconciliation process. So you make it real simple: Medicare buy-in between 50 and 65. Medicaid expands up to 200 percent of poverty with the federal government funding the whole of the expansion. Revenue comes from a surtax on the wealthy.
[…]
If health-care reform that preserves the private market is too complex and requires too many dirty deals with the existing industries, then cut both out. But get it done. Democrats have a couple of different options for passing health-care reform this year. But not passing health-care reform should not be seen as one of them.
And that’s it. Harry Reid walks out to the podium (with Nancy Pelosi maintaining a stately distance, naturally) and says: Fuck all y’all below the age of 50. Move to Massachusetts if you’re so fucking concerned with your fucking lack of health coverage. Go die in the streets and see if we fucking care. Rest assured: we do not fucking care. Not anymore. Coverage is for closers only. It’s the American Dream!
Instead, the Democrat will most likely commence to explaining why 50 votes can’t even be mustered even for this little change and the Democrat should sit quietly in a corner somewhere, execute only GOP-sourced initiatives discussed only using GOP talking-points and rhetorical frames, and otherwise do absolutely nothing between now and the 2010 midterms. Whatever you do, don’t rock the boat.
Don’t, under any circumstances, swing for the fences on bank and Wall Street reforms, jobs packages, and other such heady initiatives that force would the GOP to go along or (the vastly more likely possibility) just shut the whole government down for the next 8 months giving you, the Democrat, 24/7 talking points about how the GOP just loves them some Banksters and hates, hates, hates the common man and his/her ability to get a job. Whatever you do, don’t allow a Medicare buy-in such as the quoted paragraph suggests, because then you might have to repeatedly pummel your GOP opponents with why, exactly, are they so afraid of adding a little competition into the market. Why, exactly, they are so beholden to the concept of care costing 4-5x what it would cost in any other Western nation while delivering a fraction of the benefit with regard to outcome, as measured almost any way you want to look. Whatever you do, 59 vote majority, don’t start doing things. That way lies destruction.
Lemkin 