At my old English boarding school, we had a sporting saying that one should "tackle the ball and not the man." I carried on echoing this sort of unexamined nonsense for quite some time—in fact, until the New Hampshire primary of 1992, when it hit me very forcibly that the "personality" of one of the candidates was itself an "issue." On "the issues" in these closing weeks, there really isn't a very sharp or highly noticeable distinction to be made between the two nominees, and their "debates" have been cramped and boring affairs as a result. But the difference in character and temperament has become plainer by the day, and there is no decent way of avoiding the fact. - Will DeLuca
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Via Kate Wellings commentary at Weedon comes this delightful skewering of Hank Paulson's understanding of the housing, market and credit crisis much earlier in its development:
"In short, any jot of credibility that the Secretary may have had surely cannot withstand this inarguable evidence of aberrant thinking; the inconsistency alone is staggering. These quips run the full gamut from puerile denial to deliberate understatement to bald-faced demagoguery, right on down to yesterday's call for patience. Suffocated by his unabashed, unprincipled and incessant manure-spreading, I honestly wonder how the heck it is that we are not on the WH lawn . right this instant . pitchforks in hand. - Will DeLuca
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Broadcasts of Political Debates That Include Live Audience Feedback Can Influence What You're Thinking -- Hecklers Can, Too - Will DeLuca
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"As Seneca, the Roman Stoic who advised treating the body “somewhat strictly,” wrote in a letter: “Avoid whatever is approved of by the mob, and things that are the gift of chance. Whenever circumstance brings some welcome thing your way, stop in suspicion and alarm ...They are snares. ... we think these things are ours when in fact it is we who are caught. That track leads to precipices; life on that giddy level ends in a fall.”" - Will DeLuca
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"What I am seeing reminds me too much of another destructive period in American history. Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are sowing the seeds of hatred and division, and there is no need for this hostility in our political discourse. George Wallace never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who were simply trying to exercise their constitutional rights. Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed on Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama... - Will DeLuca
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Remember the Rule of Holes: When you find yourself in one, the first thing to do is to stop digging.
Right now we're in one of the deepest economic holes anyone has ever seen. And what we need to do is to stop making things worse by continuing to over-rely on financial markets and financial institutions that have proven to be incapable of performing their core missions - Will DeLuca
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"Barack Obama spoke to a crowd of approximately 8,500 in Dayton's Fifth Third (Eighth?) Field for 40 minutes, and immediately launched into a detailed discussion of the economy. Titled the "American Jobs Tour Rally," Obama managed the subtle stagecraft of physically morphing from a suit-coated politician to a coatless, sleeves-rolled-up problem-solver.
Palin's rally featured the more impressive entrance, with giant video screens showing the crowd the slowly turning campaign bus as it approached the cavernous inside venue. Finally, the fog machines hit high blast, the huge blue curtain parted, and the bus drove right inside the hall. As "Eye of the Tiger" blasted over the loudspeakers, Palin bounded on stage to a full-throated roar. It was some pretty sweet stagecraft, (even if had Obama tried it he'd have been ridiculed for behaving as a "celebrity")." - Will DeLuca
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"There is, and must be, recognition of the essential role that free and competitive financial markets play in a vigorous, innovative economic system. There needs to be understanding, in that context, that financial ups and downs -- and financial crises -- will be inevitable, even with responsible economic policies and sensible regulation. But never again should so much economic damage be risked by a financial structure so fragile, so overextended, so opaque as that of recent years." - Will DeLuca
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I found this piece to be relevant to every day people (like myself). Even if by profession I'm not a VC or Angel, aren't our lives ventures? - Mona N.
Relevant to every day people, and what's more, for all the crassness and realism, has an unspoken sense of upbeat flowing through it. I really like this post. - Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins
"Here’s the portrait that emerged: Kashkari is smart, dutiful, detail-oriented, and takes orders well. In the parlance of investment banking, he is a good “execution guy”: He leaves strategy to the bigwigs. But if you give him a project, he will prioritize, delegate and finish it.
These people report he has an amiable manner and is a good, intent listener. He doesn’t make waves and never dominates a discussion; he thinks before he speaks and he lets people express themselves. He is particularly good at presenting complicated ideas and leading team projects that depend on gaining cooperation from others. Those include the Sunrayce project to build a solar car as well as his work on the space telescope. “Neel is just plain good, with a high standard of ethics,” said Dr. Surinder Bhardwaj, a Hindu community priest who is a close family friend to the Kashkaris in Ohio. “This is a responsibility that requires the interest of the nation as a whole, and requires a very strong base of morality, which he has." - Will DeLuca
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The Fed's report released Thursday said commercial banks averaged a record $75 billion in daily borrowing over the past week. That surpassed the old record—a daily average of $44.5 billion—logged in the previous week. On Wednesday alone, $98 billion was drawn, an all-time high.
For the week ending Wednesday, investment firms drew $134 billion. That was down from a record $147.7 billion in the previous week. This category was broadened last week to include any loans that were made to the U.S. and London-based broker-dealer subsidiaries of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch. - Will DeLuca
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There is no numerically specific definition of a stock market crash, but a double-digit percentage fall over five minutes qualifies in FT Alphaville’s book. - Will DeLuca
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"What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect." - Will DeLuca
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They conclude that the “terror effect” was enough to put Likud over the top in 1988 and in 1996.
To state what’s obvious to me, but apparently not to a majority of voters, what you’re see here is the dysfunctional codependence of competing nationalisms. Terrorist attacks lead to right-wing political policies that lead to repressive policies that lead to more terrorist attacks. This is good for violence-friendly leaders on both sides of the green line but makes both the Israeli and the Palestinian populations worse off than they would have been had the Palestinians eschewed violence and the Israelis elected dovish politicians. It’s particularly maddening to see how this played out in 1996 which was a real turning-point election. - Will DeLuca
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"The name Vertigo was chosen to represent the “fear of leaping into the unknown” being felt by the clients, a collaboration of Australian wine industry heavyweights Peter Leske, David Lemire and Jason Quinn.
An uneasy feeling of falling was visually created, with the letter ‘O’ of the word ‘Vertigo’ literally leaping off the main label as a separate piece.
Both the label and the wine are receiving great applause just weeks after its initial release." - Will DeLuca
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"For more than a decade, the former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has fiercely objected whenever derivatives have come under scrutiny in Congress or on Wall Street. “What we have found over the years in the marketplace is that derivatives have been an extraordinarily useful vehicle to transfer risk from those who shouldn’t be taking it to those who are willing to and are capable of doing so,” Mr. Greenspan told the Senate Banking Committee in 2003. “We think it would be a mistake” to more deeply regulate the contracts, he added." - Will DeLuca
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BANKING CRISIS: Economist and longtime collaborator with Milton Friedman, Annie J Schwartz argues that Federal intervention in the markets - from the Great Crash to today - is both dangerous and anti-capitalism....In this classic tome of American economic history, Friedman and Schwartz lay the blame for the Great Depression squarely at the doorstep of the Federal Reserve by arguing that, at the point of acute crisis, its tight policies caused the failure of more than 40 per cent of banks in the US and led to massive deflation.
At the very moment when capital should have flowed into the economy, they argue, the Fed staunched it and by its policies unleashed instead the pervasive suffering that followed. - Will DeLuca
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And the other thing that does separate Obama from just a pure intellectual: he has tremendous powers of social perception. And this is why he's a politician, not an academic. A couple of years ago, I was writing columns attacking the Republican congress for spending too much money. And I throw in a few sentences attacking the Democrats to make myself feel better. And one morning I get an email from Obama saying, 'David, if you wanna attack us, fine, but you're only throwing in those sentences to make yourself feel better.' And it was a perfect description of what was going through my mind. And everybody who knows Obama all have these stories to tell about his capacity for social perception. - Will DeLuca
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