why wouldn’t they have?

In an excellent oral history of the Bush administration, a hole that reveals yet more holes:

November 1, 2001 A presidential executive order exempts presidents, vice presidents, and their designees from provisions of the 1978 Presidential Records Act and permits unclassified archived materials to be kept sealed in perpetuity, rather than being released after 12 years, as the law allows.

Robert Dallek, presidential biographer: I’ve testified twice before the House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee, protesting this executive order. Now, there are two constraints that operate in relation to all executive materials. One is that if you’re going to violate someone’s privacy you are constrained from releasing the material. A much bigger issue is one of national security, and that’s what causes years to go by before many, many documents are released. So those are the two constraints.

But broadening this—and not only in relation to the president, but in relation to the vice president—reflects, I think, the Cheney proposition that the Watergate crisis put too many limitations on executive power.

And so we now have the issue of what sort of documentary record we’re going to find. I mean, this is a separate issue, I guess, but will they have sanitized the records?

people

2009, meet 1979

Skaters Jump in as Foreclosures Drain the Pool

Some skateboarders use realty tracking sites like realquest.com and realtor.com to find foreclosed houses with pools, while others trawl through satellite images from Google Earth. On the Web site skateandannoy.com, where skaters trade tips about how to find and drain abandoned pools, one poster wrote about the current economic malaise. “God bless Greenspan,” the post read, “patron saint of pool skatin’.”

(Thanks, Max!)

dogtown circa 1979
California circa 1979.

work

frenzy

The New York Times:

WaMu’s retail mortgage office in Downey, Calif., specialized in selling option ARMs to Latino customers who spoke little English and depended on advice from real estate brokers, according to a former sales agent who requested anonymity because he was still in the mortgage business.

According to that agent, WaMu turned real estate agents into a pipeline for loan applications by enabling them to collect “referral fees” for clients who became WaMu borrowers.

Buyers were typically oblivious to agents’ fees, the agent said, and agents rarely explained the loan terms.

“Their Realtor was their trusted friend,” the agent said. “The Realtors would sell them on a minimum payment, and that was an outright lie.”

people

hysteria

Juan Williams gets on the mic. His pitch rises. He begins by invoking the incoming president then picks up steam, listing parties looking to exploit the financial crisis. Then, he simply states large numbers. He closes by citing, once again, the incoming president.

He would tie the special interests to the president-elect, not with arguments but by his inflection and by association. It’s brazen and pathetic. He’s got no game.

people

secular religions

Martin Wolf via Paul Krugman:

The third and most important lesson is that one should not treat the economy as a morality tale. In the 1930s, two opposing ideological visions were on offer: the Austrian; and the socialist. The Austrians – Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek – argued that a purging of the excesses of the 1920s was required. Socialists argued that socialism needed to replace failed capitalism, outright. These views were grounded in alternative secular religions: the former in the view that individual self-seeking behaviour guaranteed a stable economic order; the latter in the idea that the identical motivation could lead only to exploitation, instability and crisis.

Keynes’s genius – a very English one – was to insist we should approach an economic system not as a morality play but as a technical challenge. He wished to preserve as much liberty as possible, while recognising that the minimum state was unacceptable to a democratic society with an urbanised economy. He wished to preserve a market economy, without believing that laisser faire makes everything for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

This same moralistic debate is with us, once again. Contemporary “liquidationists” insist that a collapse would lead to rebirth of a purified economy. Their leftwing opponents argue that the era of markets is over. And even I wish to see the punishment of financial alchemists who claimed that ever more debt turns economic lead into gold.

Yet Keynes would have insisted that such approaches are foolish. Markets are neither infallible nor dispensable. They are indeed the underpinnings of a productive economy and individual freedom. But they can also go seriously awry and so must be managed with care.

ideas

the gift-wrapping department at Harrods

A Financial Times editorial:

The humbling of the financial sector should put an end to a bonus culture that rewards recklessness. It should also bring to a close the two decades in which investment banking and its associated industries have absorbed disproportionate numbers of skilled graduates. From now on, those who wish to package expensive products that they do not fully understand can work at the gift-wrapping department in Harrods. As for those of real talent, we can but hope to see some of them seek careers in research, teaching, healthcare and even manufacturing – the sector whose economic contribution is so often overshadowed by financial services.

ideas

how much money for nothing

Paul Krugman:

In recent years the finance sector accounted for 8 percent of America’s G.D.P., up from less than 5 percent a generation earlier. If that extra 3 percent was money for nothing — and it probably was — we’re talking about $400 billion a year in waste, fraud and abuse.

people

signalling

Markets need trust as much as they do liquidity. If Bush and Cheney aren’t perceived as being clean, how much confidence can investors have in their reforms?

The Rap on Bush and Cheney, Bill Saporito, July 14, 2002.

What they inspired, we now know, was a crime spree.

people

holey the firm

Just watched the depressing, almost cynical There Will Be Blood. Hard not to think of it in context of Madoff and Dreier and Lehman, et al. The money for nothing crowd.

From blubber to barrels. Fortunes made out of the richness of the earth and the poverty of men. Centuries of taking out without putting anything back in. To do well while doing good is sustainable. To redefine “doing good” as “doing well” is not. The prosperity theology made explicit in recent years leads neither to wealth nor God.

Rousseau:

Then only, when the voice of duty takes the place of physical impulses and right of appetite, does man, who so far had considered only himself, find that he is forced to act on different principles, and to consult his reason before listening to his inclinations. Although, in this state, he deprives himself of some advantages which he got from nature, he gains in return others so great, his faculties are so stimulated and developed, his ideas so extended, his feelings so ennobled, and his whole soul so uplifted that, did not the abuses of this new condition often degrade him below that which he left, he would be bound to bless continually the happy moment which took him from it for ever, and, instead of a stupid and unimaginative animal, made him an intelligent being and a man.

work

the why

Josh Marshall speculates on the Republican senators’ tactical reasoning:

Senate Republicans are following this course for three key reasons — first is payback against a major industrial union; second is payback against states like Michigan and Ohio who have been moving away from the GOP; third is the desire to advantage Japanese auto manufacturers who disproportionately do business in their southern states.

The first is obvious, the second is plausible but I don’t think he’s right about the third or, if he is, the Republican senators have gone renegade. The Japanese firms depend on an industrial base that requires the participation of the American manufacturers. If the American firms collapse and that base shrinks dramatically so too will the margins that the Japanese firms rely upon.

ideas

unambiguous

The U.S. Senate is the most powerful legislative body in the nation if the not the world. One hundred American senators are entrusted with protecting and advancing the liberty and prosperity of hundreds of millions.

So what do the most powerful Republican politicians of our time choose to do at this time of almost incomprehensible economic insecurity? They commit an act of sabotage.

people

embarrassing little explosions of unreality

Michael Lewis from the same piece as the previous quote:

And if the law ever declared formally that Jonathan Lebed didn’t break it, the S.E.C. would be faced with an impossible situation: millions of small investors plugging their portfolios with abandon, becoming in essence professional financial analysts, generating embarrassing little explosions of unreality in every corner of the capital markets.

people

child’s play

Jonathan Lebed, age 14, circa 2000:

”People who trade stocks, trade based on what they feel will move and they can trade for profit. Nobody makes investment decisions based on reading financial filings. Whether a company is making millions or losing millions, it has no impact on the price of the stock. Whether it is analysts, brokers, advisors, Internet traders, or the companies, everybody is manipulating the market. If it wasn’t for everybody manipulating the market, there wouldn’t be a stock market at all.”

people

home team

I just heard a memory from 20 years ago: a gymnasium filled with teenage boys chanting “Regis! Regis! Regis!” for the home team.

people