Re: My ideas on the "crisis"

RichL wrote:
Les Cargill <lcargill@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
RichL wrote:
Claude V. Lucas <claudel@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <GZedndlhP_0L6VTUnZ2dnUVZ_vOdnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
DGDevin <dgdevin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
RichL wrote:

Of course, anyone who *is* ain't gonna tell a communist
ratbag like you about it.
Don't you all just love it when Willie gets into his Usenet
Blowhard mode.

You lost, baby, etc. etc.
As the bitter memory fades of his confident predictions about the
Great Denver Riot of '08 collapsing into comedy, he's itching to
try out his forecasting powers again. So now we're supposed to
believe that the reason people are buying up handgun ammo isn't
because they're worried a new wave of gun control legislation will
make purchasing it more difficult, but because they're thinking of
of battling the Occupation Forces (also known as the elected govt.
of the U.S.) as another of Willy's predictions--O'Bunny buyer's
remorse--sweeps the nation. You can almost seem him crouching in
his bunker, six-shooter on his hip, camo bandana tied around his
head, just waiting for the EPA Swat Team to come and seize his
stash of lead solder, he'll show 'em! Grrrrrr!


This will probably translate to "Maaa. He's helping Willie!!!"
but I visited my friendly local gunshow a couple of weekends
ago and aside from the annoying sight of half the cars in the
parking lot having out of state (coughCalicough) plates, there
were a few notable differences in this event, and I've been
going to gunshows for 30 years.

First of all, the ammo sellers were close to sold out of all
the common "defensive" calibers in both pistol & rifle.
I got the last three boxes of .45 ACP 230Gr Hydrashok in
the entire place as far as I could tell, and this was
midway through the first day. The ammo guy I bought from
said the entire 40 foot trailer they brought would be
gone by the end of the first day. In addition to that,
there were between two & three hundred people standing
in line to do paperwork, presumably to purchase a firearm.

The second thing I noticed was a change in atmosphere.
Gunshows have been getting to be progressively (heh)
less fun over the years but this one seemed to me as
I wandered around and listened to conversations that
probably were none of my business was attended by a
far larger percentage of pissed off people than any
I've been to before. While there was a bit of chatter
and a booth or two collecting petitions about pending
legal changes real or imagined it also seemed to
me that not only were some people angry with the
new Government and/or whatever it might or might
not do but there was a strange combination of anger
coupled with feelings of desperation that seemed
to be directed at nothing in particular or perhaps
at everything in general that made me uneasy enough
to make it a short visit.

Please note that I am trying to present the above
travelogue with a minimum of editorializing and I'm
not endorsing or advocating anything I may or may
not have overheard.

I *did* learn a new word, as well:

"Obamunist"
OK, I won't take your post as "helping Willie"...except for the very
last part ;-)

I can understand some of this. Jimmy Carter called it
"malaise"...and he got *** upon for it. The thing with Jimmy is,
even if you believe that, you can't say it.

It's not surprising. The economy is in the shitter. I think most
people agree with that, and we all have our differing suspicions as
to why. We'll never agree, but the real problem is that we don't
really *know* why, even those who think they do. So we're all
pretty antsy, and when it comes down to it we really don't know who
to blame.

I suspect everybody knows why. They just don't like
to think about it. It's all like a game to keep us from
having to ... I dunno, hunter-gather. It goes awry. But
it's worth it.

Personally, I'm old enough so I'm not concerned what happens to me so
much. I'm much more concerned about my kids, one of whom is married
with a young son and another of whom is about to get married. So far
all four of them are OK job wise. But still, you've gotta wonder
where things are going to end up.

They'll bounce back, once people get bored with there being a
downturn. This does not mean things will be the same after.

None of this is *real*, beyond what happens to people who
lose things because of unemployment. This is all like
superposition of particles - people make educated guesses,
but they depend on the wave function collapsing to find
out the real value. But markets are not just self-referential,
they are self-aware. So....

I can see where that uncertainty and lack of knowing who to blame,
and seeing that turn into blaming everything and everyone, could
freak you out, especially at a gun show. The thing is, blaming
everyone doesn't help a damned thing.

"Knowing who to blame" is interesting, but it's not productive.

"We has met the enemy, and He is Us" - Walt Kelly, "Pogo."

We live in a system of hacks, hacks on the hacks and a really
large number of layers of hacks on that. It works *fairly* well,
but.... we don't have much experimental data. So people have
to use something more like ideology.

Now I think you're getting someplace. That's a good analogy, I think.
The large number of hacks is really important, I think, as well as the
fact that they've been instituted over centuries. When something that
was hacked relatively recently starts to go awry, we have some semblance
of an idea of how to go about fixing it. But when it's really old stuff
that starts to mess itself up, we're sort of lost. We install new OS's
on top of the old "legacy" stuff. The new OS depends on the old stuff
in ways that are mysteries to us.

This suggests a possible solution, at least for some of the problems.
Start uninstalling. Go back to the point before Glass-Steagall was
repealed, since that seems to be the source of a lot of it. Let banks
do banking, let insurance companies sell insurance, if for no other
reason that it's a lot easier to keep track of what they're doing under
those conditions. Then reconstruct from that point onward.


I have seen very good people say Glass-Steagall wouldn't have
made that much difference. The patterns of failures do not seem
even correlated with deposit nor iBank status.

As an example of what's going on now, who is supposed to be regulating
AIG? Turns out, it's the Office of Thrift Supervision, which was set up
in response to the S&L crisis in the late '80s. Their charter is to
regulate savings and loans. So why are they in charge of looking after
AIG? Because they marched into the state of Delaware and registered
themselves as an S&L.


Good question. "Why" is because nobody likes a party pooper. It's
like some baseball player taking steroids... jeez, look at his
stats - he's a monster.

Now OTS has *one* regulator who's considered an expert on insurance.
That's right, one guy. One individual.

Something doesn't wash here.



Well.. we depend on a lot of folklore, ideology. Because, again,
we don't really *know*.

I've done a lot of software maintenance, and... it's a
lot like this thing. You never get enough resources to
really *fix* it..... and some "fixes" are like the
French Revolution.... nasty business....

Yeah, understood.
I think one key to retaining sanity is gobbling up as much info as
possible about what's going on, from the left, the right, the center,
wherever.
Lord, no. Well - *real* info, sure, but... there's not a
lot of that.

But if you don't know where the wheat is you can't separate it from the
chaff without plowing through everything. There's a grain of truth in
all of these sources, at some point you have to use your own head in the
process and try to extract a self-consistent "truth".


Sure. You do, but you can't help but add your own color to it. Hey,
you're the guy who's published peer-reviewed articles.

I can tell you I'm not too thrilled about what I'm hearing in
the past couple of days about our Treasury Secretary's "solution".
It sounds like the taxpayers are the patsies at a high-stakes poker
game,
Nah. The treasury is not the taxpayers. If a startup issues more
stock, it doesn't make the principals have more money. Just
more liability. But the liability isn't a solid mass, it
wears over time.

It's, uh, a public-goods based hedge fund.... the public good
being confidence in the markets....

I suppoose so, I just find it a bit perplexing that the private entities
that Treasury's attempting to recruit aren't being put at much risk,

That is because the Gummint is trying to reduce the value of the risk
premium to make the spice flow again. Ooops, we hit a
pole in the filter.... had a divide by zero...

and
in terms of potential real gain, there's a lot there for them and not
much for us.

On just those transactions, sure. But you and I depend rather
heavily on those flows for what we wanna do.

In the example I read about recently, they're talking
about the private entity putting up 6% of the cost to suck up the toxic
assets and being entitled to 50% of whatever profit results. Do the
math as to where that leaves us.


Oh yeah. But... in a way, the "climate" of our very hybrid system is
set by government, and they are the only ones who can "fix" it.

If you read Hayek, you know this is a fool's errrand ( nobody
can out-crazy the market ) but for political and social
reasons, we still have to have jiggery-pokery. And, arguably,
for sound economic reasons, too.

honestly. But I'm gonna keep reading, and if it comes to it I'll
write my Congressman and Senators. I've done that in the past, and
I've actually gotten good responses from them, and I'd like to think
I've helped change their minds on an occasion or two.
That's kind of amazing. Good for you.

Despite the notorious exceptions (Agnew, Mandel, ...), Maryland has a
deserved reputation as a "good government" state. Maybe the proximity
to DC makes them more accessible to the voters. I've gotten detailed
responses to my past inquiries to Sen. Mikulski (granted, it was
probably a staffer who responded, but that's ok) with detailed,
personalized responses to my detailed queries. And I have a relatively
recently elected Congresswoman (defeated a long-time do nothing from the
same party in the primary) who seems bound and determined to put the
voters first.



That's pretty cool.

--
Les Cargill
.

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