Links

You heard me. Links.

• Derivatives Ninja, Startling Revelations About Banks’ Prop Trading Activities: Exclusive Details Lawmakers Don’t Want You to Know . . .. Did you know that loans were risky? RWCG readers did since I broke this story way back when.
• I’m not quite sure who William Black is but I have noticed that he doesn’t quite know what he’s talking about, for example when he says stuff like
  

  Paul Volcker urged the administration and Congress to bar any entity that received federal deposit insurance from investing in financial derivatives. The Dodd-Frank Act did so in a provision called “the Volcker rule.”

  thereby submitting the 4,376th definition/rephrasing of what the Volcker rule supposedly does. Mr. Black if the Volcker rule merely prohibits (non-hedging) use of ‘derivatives’ does this mean a bank could take a flyer on $billions of stocks & bonds (which aren’t derivatives, by most definitions) just to see what happens?

• PostLibertarian, The Privatization of Outer Space.
• Tangotiger, Rooting for laundry
• Yet another weird SF fan, Why There’s Intrusive Government in America
• Paul Waldman asks the all-important question “Does running a successful private equity firm mean you’ll be a successful president?”. He claims that Mitt Romney’s answer to that is (and he quotes) “Yes, because running a successful private equity firm means you know how to create jobs”, although I could not confirm that quote with a secondary source at press time. Anyway, as my readers know, my answer to the Waldman Question is a resounding No, it doesn’t ‘mean’ that. Nor, incidentally, does being an ex-junkie social-climbing affirmative action-coddled ‘community organizer’ with a mysterious/checkered young adulthood ‘mean’ you’ll be a successful president. Now what have we learned? Anything? For crying out loud, are we really going to be conducting the entire Presidential race on a 5th-grade debate level like this?
• Jeffrey Snider, JP Morgan’s London Whale and Tolerable Imperfection. Thoughts near the end on the potential damage caused by risk models mirror my own.
• Kids Prefer Cheese answers “If you were the supreme ruler of the USA, what would be the top 5 things you would do?”
• Arnold Kling, The Energy Loan Scandal as a Non-story. I still eagerly await the howls of outrage from our progressive reformers at the fact that with these energy ‘loans’, so much taxpayer money was put at risk, and lost, for private gain. Shouldn’t there be a ‘Volcker Rule’ for the Energy Department etc.? If not why not? As always, I await the surely-forthcoming intellectually-consistent response from my esteemed progressive counterparts.

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