Things I Fail to Blog About
Jun. 2nd, 2011 04:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutI have numerous starts for blog posts on subjects I want to comment on. The entries wind all over the place before getting near the point I want to make and I ultimately post them my-eyes-only. So I'm going to give up and just bloviate.
(1) The conservative bloggers responsible for "Weinergate" are going to regret it. It's really obvious that Weiner didn't post that picture. It will probably eventually become painfully clear who did post that picture. There's lots of time for all this to shake out before the election. It will only serve to make Weiner look like a class act for being such a sport about it, and it will make it incredibly hard for any real scandal involving a Democrat or progressive candidate or issue that might show up between now and Election Day 2012 to get much traction. Also, old skool journalism looks really stupid in this kind of incident: the two-sides-to-every-story is hopelessly inadequate to conveying what's really going on here and is too obviously exploitable by bad actors, and there is an alternative: actual investigation. A lot of people _say_ that newspapers used to do real investigation, but I think that probably happened before 1990.
[ETA: Wow. Confession time:
http://www.cnn.com/2011/POLITICS/06/06/new.york.weiner/
Looks like Breitbart and company got smeared undeservedly.]
(2) Goldman Sachs is in seriously deep shit. I'm not exactly sure why their previously bullet-proof existence has become so problematic lately. It's not that they're doing worse things; it's that it's apparently no longer possible to divert all prosecutorial attention.
(3) It's going to take 1-3 more rounds of speculative amplification of price swings before we're prepared to keep margin requirements "permanently" "higher" (quotes are to indicate "for suitable definitions of"). But I'm starting to believe that it will really happen. Previously, the debate was between, "it's all the fault of speculation!" vs. "speculators don't really do anything except improve liquidity". Now, the voices saying, "you do realize they add 25% or so to volatile price swings, right?" are finally getting some traction. Not a lot, but a little. We're slow to learn, but we often _do_ learn. Eventually.
(1) The conservative bloggers responsible for "Weinergate" are going to regret it. It's really obvious that Weiner didn't post that picture. It will probably eventually become painfully clear who did post that picture. There's lots of time for all this to shake out before the election. It will only serve to make Weiner look like a class act for being such a sport about it, and it will make it incredibly hard for any real scandal involving a Democrat or progressive candidate or issue that might show up between now and Election Day 2012 to get much traction. Also, old skool journalism looks really stupid in this kind of incident: the two-sides-to-every-story is hopelessly inadequate to conveying what's really going on here and is too obviously exploitable by bad actors, and there is an alternative: actual investigation. A lot of people _say_ that newspapers used to do real investigation, but I think that probably happened before 1990.
[ETA: Wow. Confession time:
http://www.cnn.com/2011/POLITICS/06/06/new.york.weiner/
Looks like Breitbart and company got smeared undeservedly.]
(2) Goldman Sachs is in seriously deep shit. I'm not exactly sure why their previously bullet-proof existence has become so problematic lately. It's not that they're doing worse things; it's that it's apparently no longer possible to divert all prosecutorial attention.
(3) It's going to take 1-3 more rounds of speculative amplification of price swings before we're prepared to keep margin requirements "permanently" "higher" (quotes are to indicate "for suitable definitions of"). But I'm starting to believe that it will really happen. Previously, the debate was between, "it's all the fault of speculation!" vs. "speculators don't really do anything except improve liquidity". Now, the voices saying, "you do realize they add 25% or so to volatile price swings, right?" are finally getting some traction. Not a lot, but a little. We're slow to learn, but we often _do_ learn. Eventually.