I see it as Doug sees it. This week's Economist has the most incoherent
leader I have ever seen in twenty years of reading that journal. I'm
not an economist, but I do know my way around my mother tongue, and in
essence they're saying, "Don't cap executive salaries because this is
our best talent...that, yes, got us into this mess." Huh? "They might
move offshore." Well, hey, don't let the door hit you in the backside.
Last night at the theater by chance I sat next to somebody who, it
turned out, was an old Morgan Stanley guy from way back. He told us
he'd pulled everything out of the market 16 months ago. "Anybody could
see this coming." Not if you're twelve years old at heart and can't
believe bad things can ever happen to wonderful, Master-of-the-Universe
you.
On Oct 1, 2008, at 12:41 PM, Douglas Roberts wrote:
Mathew:
The Time article I referred to had nothing to do with modeling; it
described the reality of how the money was lost.
Follow the money. Average Joes and Janes are not the holders of the
other side of complicated, over-the-counter derivatives contracts.
Rather, hedge funds are the main holders. The bailout will involve a
transfer of wealth — from the American people to financial
institutions engaging in reckless speculation — that will be the
greatest in history.
In essence, the large, institutional mortgage financial institutions
used their mortgage assets as a stake against which they leveraged
(bought on margin) to play in the volitile financial derivatives
market.
Everybody knows how cool it is to buy on margin when the market is
going up.
Now everybody also understands how uncool it is to be caught with your
pants down after having bet the ranch, leveraged to the hilt, only see
the market suddenly tank.
Stupid, stupid, stupid! And now our political leaders want to bail
out those reckless, foolish fund managers and their bosses.
--Doug
--
Doug Roberts, RTI International
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
505-455-7333 - Office
505-670-8195 - Cell
On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 10:27 AM, Matthew Francisco
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Doug,
I think it's a poor move to use a model--did the Officers use a model
for their article in Time?--to fix blame with such confidence
especially when the thing to blame is a vague collective identity.
Granted, sometimes it seems that such fixing is needed because we
need
to reaffirm our own group identifications especially if they are
under
attack or ignored and more so if we are in political season. The
point of Buchanan's article, I think, is that models are good at
generating alternative narratives about causation in systems where no
single person or group of people can ever know 'the system' and the
experts and stakeholders all see the system in different ways, with
different stories about how the system works. I think a more
ambitious goal for modeling these systems is bringing together or
overlaying (integrating?) these local stories into a sort of
meta-narrative.
Matt
On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 8:44 AM, Douglas Roberts
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On another mailing list that I frequent, there is a small core of
> Republicans who *insist* that is was the DemoCRAPS[sic] who caused
our
> current economic crisis.
>
> I sent the following message to them yesterday, after finding the
nice,
> short informative article in Time (link below). I find that it is
sometime
> necessary to use small words when dealing with political zealots.
>
> Astonishingly, it was not the DemoCRAPS[sic] who were the cause of
our
> current financial fuck-up. Read this short article to discover
who is
> really to blame.
>
> Can you say, "Risky derivatives trading"? Can you say,
"Irresponsible
> hedge fund management"?
>
> I knew you could.
>
>
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1845209,00.html?
cnn=yes
>
>
> Me, I'm an independent.
>
> --Doug
>
> --
> Doug Roberts, RTI International
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 505-455-7333 - Office
> 505-670-8195 - Cell
>
> On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 9:29 AM, glen e. p. ropella
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/01/opinion/01buchanan.html?
_r=3&ref=opinion&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
>>
>> --
>> glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846, http://tempusdictum.com
>>
>>
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>
>
>
>
>
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============================================================
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