I am so freakin jealous I didn't think of being a stand up economist!

Apparently THE Stand up Economist.



And no, I wasn't smart enough to find him from his letter to the editor of The Economist:

SIR – Having used my PhD in economics as a stepping stone to the more reputable field of stand-up comedy, it would be easy for me to spend all my time mocking macroeconomists. Consider, for example, that the current head of the Congressional Budget Office co-wrote a paper a few years back titled “Can Financial Innovation Help to Explain the Reduced Volatility of Economic Activity?”.

Yoram Bauman
Seattle

I found him from his challenge to Obama's famous economist Austan Goolsbee.

Damn it! I wonder if the world is big enough for two stand up economists?

Comedian who is Prez of Chamber of Commerce chats with Ratigan

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

This is the same org who is fighting against health care reform and who are losing members due to their stance on climate change denial.

Wonder what will happen first - millions more losing health care, global catastrophe due to climate change or the Chamber of Commerce becoming irrelevant if they stay the course.

Would you rather live in a creative or distributive society?

From nakedcapitalism.com, some excerpts:

Quelle horreur, some smart people are starting to question whether banking serves a redeeming social function.
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Successful societies maximise the creative and minimise the distributive. Societies where everyone can only achieve gains at the expense of others are by definition impoverished. They are also usually intensely violent.
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Even what the great investors do belongs at the distributive end of the spectrum. The genius of the great speculative investors is to see what others do not, or to see it earlier. That’s all. This is a skill…I am not convinced, though, of the social worth of such a skill, still less of the wisdom of encouraging society’s brightest and the best to try to perfect it.

This distinction between creative and distributive goes some way to explaining why the financial sector has become so large in relation to GDP – and why those working in it get paid so much. Even when a certain sort of financial activity is purely distributive, the returns to the winning parties are so enormous that the activity is immensely seductive – and the professionals who appear to be responsible for securing these gains are highly sought after and highly rewarded….

An insightful comment at the link:

There is something CRUCIAL missing from this analysis. The importance of LEVERAGE and LIMITED LIABILITY being combined, particularly in hedge funds. That is the real rort, and it is hidden away from view. Hedge funds enable huge gambles to be made, with a limited downside. And of course all those bets become self-fulfilling as credit expands.

Why people will be homeless before they are bailed out by people we bailed out

From the Wall Street Journal:

The $1.7 trillion mortgage securitization market is still a mess, despite (or in part because of) the Federal Reserve's $700 billion splurge into the market. But another reason may be Treasury's decision to undermine private mortgage-backed securities (MBS) contracts.

BlackRock Inc. Chairman Laurence Fink went so far recently as to call this "one of the biggest issues facing American capitalism." He's worried that to protect banks from billions of dollars more in writedowns on bad second liens (a.k.a., home-equity loans), Treasury is trashing private contracts. "There is modification going on protecting our banks, protecting their balance sheets" and "I'm just very worried about it."

Ah, yes. The law. Contract law in this case. Who knew there'd be a downside to transferring risk to someone's balance sheet [by securitization]? How could you possibly have thought there would be clear contract law in place to allow for worst case scenarios?

So the circle we're trapped in is, we had to bail out the banks so they wouldn't bring down the economy. But - they can't use our money that bailed them out to help bail you out since current contract law won't let them.

Facebook tracks millions of users to find out the Gross National Happiness

From their link at Facebook:

The graph contains several metrics. The first, GNH represents our measure of Gross National Happiness. The other two, Positivity and Negativity, represent the two components of GNH: The extent to which words used on that day were positive and negative. Gross National Happiness is the difference between the positivity and negativity scores, though they are interesting to view on their own.

From NYTimes article:

The idea, one that is generally accepted in social psychology, is that word choice can reveal a person’s mood.

Banks argue for keeping stuff off their balance sheets

Ever wonder why your credit report shows every little slight detail about you, but banks and corporations don't have to account for various items on their balance sheet - even when they are publicly traded companies?

From Reuters:

"If you get off-balance sheet treatment, that provides a more efficient use of your balance sheet and has been the foundation of the structured finance market. Bringing it back on balance sheet would have an impact on all your various financial ratios," said Mike Kagawa, portfolio manager at Payden & Rygel.

Duh, really?! And that transparency is bad?

The article continues:

Industry experts said the accounting changes threaten to setback the huge strides made by the Fed's emergency loan program, the Term Asset-Backed Securites Loan Facility, known as TALF, launched earlier this year.

Through the program, the Fed was able to bolster consumer lending and reopen the securitization market for consumer ABS, nearly shutdown by a deep credit crisis in 2008. The program also drove the high costs of funding dramatically lower.

In case you forgot, TALF is the $1T, note the T, program the Federal Reserve is using to bail out the dealers of the program... I'm sorry, I mean the companies who securitize loans to keep it functioning.

In other words, the market imploded, without the Federal Reserve's $1T it would not be working and "the banks" want to keep the accounting the same.