So who's going to be the next SCOTUS? Let's ask the markets. If the last two years have taught us nothing, it's that they're infallible.
http://www.intrade.com/jsp/intrade/contractSearch/index.jsp?query=supreme+court
Kagan and Wood are tied in the lead. I'd be quite surprised if Kagan gets it. She's still got plenty of time left to serve as SG, where she will obviously be groomed for the next opening. I think the same can be said of Harold Koh, incidentally, although he seems to be in line behind her. Here is the thoery why I feel one might expect him to appoint Kagan:
He knew that Souter was going to retire early in his administration before we did. Koh is actually his SG pick, he just wanted to put on a show and paint Republicans into a corner by getting them to confirm (for SG) and say nice things about Kagan. Not only that, but Kagan, being an academic, might have had some time to take point on some of the first-day Bush rollbacks. She arrives at work in January, having spent the prior semester preparing for this job with an amount of free time that a sitting federal judge simply could not.
Underlying this theory, of course, is the premise that Kagan is just so amazingly brilliant as to warrant this orchestrated catapult onto the scene. Maybe she is, I have no idea, although I trust Obama's judgment on it.
Specter's theatrical party switch may have had something to do with it, too, and the anticipated dynamics of Senate confirmation. I should ponder that.
But, I think strangely that everything may be exactly how it seems. I think it will ultimately come down to a West Wing battle for who is going to do the most for the cause, both by power of her mind and of her character. Sotomayor is 54, Wood is 58. I think age is a wash, except perhaps as it would make either of them unlikely to have as strong a chance 3 years hence, if it takes that long. I think Obama, as a U Chicago academic, is going to feel a real connection to Wood. I should probably read more of their opinions, but I've just had my first break from work in about a month, and I'm enjoying it.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
In which I laugh hysterically
So, allegedly, the Car Czar had some choice words for the hedge funds that are trying to juice their returns on Chrysler's prepetition bank debt that they bought for pennies on the dollar:
I have to say, I'm very impressed with the Obama administration thus far in their ability to lock down this particular element of the economic crisis.
If I were a potential hedge fund investor, an important question that I would be asking all funds in the course of due diligence would be "Do you currently and would you ever invest in positions that are substantially adverse to the US government, such as in failed banks or auto manufacturers?" Hopefully there won't be too many more such situations, but as an investor, you probably want to stay the hell away.
I laughed for a good two minutes when I read that. More commentary, albeit with varying degrees of sympathy for the investor class, here and here. I like that the "non-TARP lenders" (distressed HFs) are realizing that the syndication agent for the bank debt that they bought owes the government billions, and is therefore unlikely to fuck with them.
Who the fuck do you think you're dealing with? We'll have the IRS audit your fund. Every one of your employees. Your investors. Then we will have the Securities and Exchange Commission rip through your books looking for anything and everything and nothing we find to destroy you with.
I have to say, I'm very impressed with the Obama administration thus far in their ability to lock down this particular element of the economic crisis.
If I were a potential hedge fund investor, an important question that I would be asking all funds in the course of due diligence would be "Do you currently and would you ever invest in positions that are substantially adverse to the US government, such as in failed banks or auto manufacturers?" Hopefully there won't be too many more such situations, but as an investor, you probably want to stay the hell away.
Monday, May 4, 2009
In which internet people are ridiculous
So, I've been writing about serious stuff, I guess, because I get riled up by something and don't feel entitled to subject any of my friends to it -- it's not that they wouldn't listen, it just feels burdensome to demand they read an article to discuss it at 3 in the afternoon when most of them are at work.
Anyways, I'm looking for a place to stay in LA this summer, and holy shit is mankind a mess.
First of all, check out this place. Yes, $1000 a month for the GARAGE in a house. I guess if it gets stuffy, you can just push the button and OPEN THE WALL. And it comes with a photo album of its current WeHo occupants. Fabulous! Hey guys, The Broken Hearts Club was 9 years ago. Get a new shtik.
As an aside, I always find it odd when people who I don't consider attractive want to be actors; I used to run into that a lot in New York, back before law school, when I went out. You might think I'm bitchy, but I think it's just realistic. I'm not the one trying to convince people to pay $1000 a month to live in a garage with a ping-pong table, or that I'm a natural blond. NB: The world can only have so many Steve Buscemi's.
This one really caught my eye. Free breakfast daily? Fuck yes! Then I said, no, no, no.
Then I thought, hey, this looks good. Guest house, the hills, good price, nice pool. Oh, and nudity. I need to be comfortable hanging out nude. I am, I guess. Just not with my landlord, yknow, kinda awk. I mean, what if I was late with the rent? Wait a minute. I think I've seen this movie...
Then there's this. I guess I'm a "gaymale," and I suppose it's good that the 65 year old "caucasion" landlady is supportive of transgender rights, but I just can't shake the feeling that some lady in Van Nuys is taking this whole Bea Arthur thing really, really hard.
PS: I only looked through three pages of ads and yet I have managed to gaze sufficiently long at Craigslist that it has gazed back into me.
Anyways, I'm looking for a place to stay in LA this summer, and holy shit is mankind a mess.
First of all, check out this place. Yes, $1000 a month for the GARAGE in a house. I guess if it gets stuffy, you can just push the button and OPEN THE WALL. And it comes with a photo album of its current WeHo occupants. Fabulous! Hey guys, The Broken Hearts Club was 9 years ago. Get a new shtik.
As an aside, I always find it odd when people who I don't consider attractive want to be actors; I used to run into that a lot in New York, back before law school, when I went out. You might think I'm bitchy, but I think it's just realistic. I'm not the one trying to convince people to pay $1000 a month to live in a garage with a ping-pong table, or that I'm a natural blond. NB: The world can only have so many Steve Buscemi's.
This one really caught my eye. Free breakfast daily? Fuck yes! Then I said, no, no, no.
Then I thought, hey, this looks good. Guest house, the hills, good price, nice pool. Oh, and nudity. I need to be comfortable hanging out nude. I am, I guess. Just not with my landlord, yknow, kinda awk. I mean, what if I was late with the rent? Wait a minute. I think I've seen this movie...
Then there's this. I guess I'm a "gaymale," and I suppose it's good that the 65 year old "caucasion" landlady is supportive of transgender rights, but I just can't shake the feeling that some lady in Van Nuys is taking this whole Bea Arthur thing really, really hard.
PS: I only looked through three pages of ads and yet I have managed to gaze sufficiently long at Craigslist that it has gazed back into me.
Chrysler and 1129(b)
So, I just finished my Bankruptcy and Reorganization exam, but tired as I am of bankruptcy, I'm annoyed by all the freeper types ranting about rule of law, not least of which is apparently this guy in the comments here. The relevant statutory provisions are in 11 USC 1129.
Section 1129(a) is a list of 16 bases that any successful reorganization plan has to touch in order to be confirmed. The relevant one is #7:
Them's the rules. Speculators who are considering playing games with GM would be well advised to think twice.
Section 1129(a) is a list of 16 bases that any successful reorganization plan has to touch in order to be confirmed. The relevant one is #7:
(7) With respect to each impaired class of claims or interests—
Yes, right there. As long as Speculative McRentseekers can't argue that they would receive more from a liquidation, then they lose. Raise your hand if you think that Chrysler, if liquidated, would be worth anything at all. Their factories wouldn't be worth the energy it would take to melt them down and sell them for scrap.(ii) will receive or retain under the plan on account of such claim or interest property of a value, as of the effective date of the plan, that is not less than the amount that such holder would so receive or retain if the debtor were liquidated under chapter 7 of this title on such date; or
Them's the rules. Speculators who are considering playing games with GM would be well advised to think twice.
People Who Work at TNR May Have Extra Chromosomes
According to anonymous sources, Jeffrey Rosen may have Downs Syndrome. I haven't talked to enough of them to have any idea whether he, in fact, has Downs Syndrome, nor have I done any research to address the question, but I'm pretty sure it merits a couple thousand words at five cents each. Please make your check payable to cash, thanks.
While I think it's appropriate for people to pile on to this guy for being a douchebag and crypto-bigot, I have to wonder whether he would have a point if you conceded it. Namely, the Supreme Court is about power, and Clarence Thomas' moronic silence has just as much of a vote as Scalia's prickish eloquence.
I think there's an idea, perhaps put into our collective heads by an episode of West Wing, that a Justice can write a dissenting opinion or a nuanced concurrence that is so brilliant and forceful that thinkers for decades will have to reckon with its power. I have definitely read two such opinions as a law student that I'll mention here.
The first is McCleskey v. Kemp, a death penalty case where the court said, just because 80% of the people executed in the State of Georgia are black, and they're 5x as likely to be executed if they kill a white person than another black person, doesn't mean the death penalty is a violation of equal protection as it is administred. Garbage. Justice Stevens wrote an inspired dissent, and you know what? 25 years later, not a damn thing has changed.
The second is Eldred v. Ashcroft, a copyright case that said the phrase "limited times" in the Constitution's IP clause just means any duration less than infinity, so it's perfectly okay if Disney pays Congress to give them 170 year copyrights. Justice Breyer, standing alone, pointed out that the present value of that 170th year is approximately nil, and the loss to society from preventing these works from entering the public domain is significant, and we should read some teeth into these words. But even if his dissent is adopted into law 20 years down the road, what is the present value of the positive social change it creates? Right.
I guess what I'm saying is, I think progressives should be concerned first with having a reliable vote on issues that matter: executive privilege, search and seizure in the face of new technology, equal protection, and reproductive freedom. To the extent politics are an issue, people should be concerned that getting that person confirmed is successful. If her personal story makes it that much easier, then great.
While I think it's appropriate for people to pile on to this guy for being a douchebag and crypto-bigot, I have to wonder whether he would have a point if you conceded it. Namely, the Supreme Court is about power, and Clarence Thomas' moronic silence has just as much of a vote as Scalia's prickish eloquence.
I think there's an idea, perhaps put into our collective heads by an episode of West Wing, that a Justice can write a dissenting opinion or a nuanced concurrence that is so brilliant and forceful that thinkers for decades will have to reckon with its power. I have definitely read two such opinions as a law student that I'll mention here.
The first is McCleskey v. Kemp, a death penalty case where the court said, just because 80% of the people executed in the State of Georgia are black, and they're 5x as likely to be executed if they kill a white person than another black person, doesn't mean the death penalty is a violation of equal protection as it is administred. Garbage. Justice Stevens wrote an inspired dissent, and you know what? 25 years later, not a damn thing has changed.
The second is Eldred v. Ashcroft, a copyright case that said the phrase "limited times" in the Constitution's IP clause just means any duration less than infinity, so it's perfectly okay if Disney pays Congress to give them 170 year copyrights. Justice Breyer, standing alone, pointed out that the present value of that 170th year is approximately nil, and the loss to society from preventing these works from entering the public domain is significant, and we should read some teeth into these words. But even if his dissent is adopted into law 20 years down the road, what is the present value of the positive social change it creates? Right.
I guess what I'm saying is, I think progressives should be concerned first with having a reliable vote on issues that matter: executive privilege, search and seizure in the face of new technology, equal protection, and reproductive freedom. To the extent politics are an issue, people should be concerned that getting that person confirmed is successful. If her personal story makes it that much easier, then great.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Econ with Angry Sprinkles
Yglesias recommends this piece by a Barry Eichengreen, a PoliSci/Econ prof at Berkeley. It's way tl;dr (unless you like to get annoyed by academics), but the takeaway is that economists and the government were under the sway of "cognitive regulatory capture" that contributed to the bubble. It's exactly the sort of thing that you'd expect a tenured professor to write, who discusses calculating VaR on 1970s punchcards.
Ph.D. economists did just fine, and not because the academic job market is cushy and they were invited to give guest lectures to industry at "ski-slope retreats." Many of them predicted this state of affairs, like this guy, and many of them were hired by prominent hedge funds over the past decade. Yeah, the whole financial industry has taken it on the chin over the past year or so, but if you recognize that the entire boom/bust cycle goes back several years, HedgeFundLand is still way, way ahead. They didn't hire no fools.
I think the correct mode of analysis is at the micro-institutional level. People who have worked on Wall St. know who risk managers are. They're the guys who are lucky to make $80,000 a year who are charged with overseeing the trades of millionaires. The good ones make the switch to the "front office" where they have a shot at making their millions, and the mediocre-to-bad ones climb the backoffice hierarchy according to the Peter Principle. How much oversight do you expect out of these guys? How do you create authority? How do you de-allocate funds from a manager who just had two blockbuster years in a row because his product was hot when you know his performance will revert to the mean?
If you zoom out to a national level, the problem becomes even more apparent: an under-funded SEC paying people $60,000 a year to understand innovative-yet-fishy derivative transactions, an FDIC that stopped charging insurance premiums because it went 2.5 years without a bank failure, all orchestrated by a bunch of congresscritters who spend most of their time on the phones trying to raise a few thousand dollars a day so they can get re-elected. Eichengreen would seemingly have you believe that the oversight was supposed to come from the Econ departments at our nation's leading universities. I'm not sure who he thinks was asking George Akerlof or Robert Engle about the political and economic policy issues of the past 8 years that have lead to this debacle, but perhaps it's more charitable to interpret his article as a suggestion that we start doing so.
Ph.D. economists did just fine, and not because the academic job market is cushy and they were invited to give guest lectures to industry at "ski-slope retreats." Many of them predicted this state of affairs, like this guy, and many of them were hired by prominent hedge funds over the past decade. Yeah, the whole financial industry has taken it on the chin over the past year or so, but if you recognize that the entire boom/bust cycle goes back several years, HedgeFundLand is still way, way ahead. They didn't hire no fools.
I think the correct mode of analysis is at the micro-institutional level. People who have worked on Wall St. know who risk managers are. They're the guys who are lucky to make $80,000 a year who are charged with overseeing the trades of millionaires. The good ones make the switch to the "front office" where they have a shot at making their millions, and the mediocre-to-bad ones climb the backoffice hierarchy according to the Peter Principle. How much oversight do you expect out of these guys? How do you create authority? How do you de-allocate funds from a manager who just had two blockbuster years in a row because his product was hot when you know his performance will revert to the mean?
If you zoom out to a national level, the problem becomes even more apparent: an under-funded SEC paying people $60,000 a year to understand innovative-yet-fishy derivative transactions, an FDIC that stopped charging insurance premiums because it went 2.5 years without a bank failure, all orchestrated by a bunch of congresscritters who spend most of their time on the phones trying to raise a few thousand dollars a day so they can get re-elected. Eichengreen would seemingly have you believe that the oversight was supposed to come from the Econ departments at our nation's leading universities. I'm not sure who he thinks was asking George Akerlof or Robert Engle about the political and economic policy issues of the past 8 years that have lead to this debacle, but perhaps it's more charitable to interpret his article as a suggestion that we start doing so.
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