The Rolling Stones are going back into the studio

By Richard K. Barry

Whenever I hear snarky comments about aging rock and rollers, I have to wonder what these critics expect. What's the difference how old they are if they still want to make music and are capable of getting it done. I don't even care if Mick Jagger wants to strut around on stage like a peacock at almost 70. Good for him. It's as if some people think playing rock and roll after a certain age is a crime against nature.

Hey kiddies, guess what else your parents and grandparents are still doing.

So Ronnie Woods says the Rolling Stones will be meeting in a recording studio later this month "to just throw some ideas around." Sounds like a great life.

There's only one alternative to getting older, and that's not getting older. Go for it lads!




(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

Hillary Clinton will not be at the Democratic National Convention

By Richard K. Barry

Not that I ever thought about it, but, according to an article appearing in the Observer of Charlotte, N.C., the site of the Democratic National Convention, Hillary Clinton is prohibited by law from attending the event.

The Observer points out that "various federal statutes and the State Department's ethical guidelines will keep Secretary Clinton in Washington."

Philippe Reines, spokesman for the Secretary of State told the Observer in an email that “Given her current position, she will not be attending, consistent with her not engaging in any political activity whatsoever."

And Clinton isn’t the only Cabinet member expected to skip the Charlotte gathering. Federal statute also precludes the attorney general and the secretary of Defense from attending political gatherings, including national party conventions, Reines said. 

“I can’t think of one (of those office-holders) from the modern era who has attended,” he said. 

Michael Bitzer, a political scientist at Catawba College in Salisbury, also doesn’t expect to see Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner in town. 

“The Big Four,” he calls these non-partisan appointees. “While they are political appointees, they are in a class by themselves,” he said. “They are representatives of institutions that are oftentimes seen as apolitical.”

It's just one of those little civics lessons you don't think about until someone mentions it. Now we know. If you were wondering, Bill will be there.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

Michael Bitzer, a political scientist at Catawba College in Salisbury, also doesn’t expect to see Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner in town.

“The Big Four,” he calls these non-partisan appointees. “While they are political appointees, they are in a class by themselves,” he said. “They are representatives of institutions that are oftentimes seen as apolitical.”

And among that quartet, Secretary of State Clinton is maybe in an even higher class.

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2012/04/06/3156959/hillary-clinton-citing-her-above.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2012/04/06/3156959/hillary-clinton-citing-her-above.html#storylink=cpy

To Market, To Market

 

By Carl

 

It often amuses me what rationales people come up with when a market moves in one direction or another.

 

To-wit: an analyst in England makes a positive comment about the banking industry, and glory be! the FTSE jumps up.

 

The comments specifically addressed this broker's belief...a broker, mind you, not a government official...that central banks around the world will address the lagging economy with stimulus packages.

 

Gee, thanks for pointing that out, Captain Obvious! A central tenet to Keynesian economics gets reitertated in the national press and markets suddenly facepalm and go "Now why didn't I think of that?"

 

Sharight.

 

I've spoken all along about the ruthless and brutal efficiency in which markets work: since the major players use software packages to discern exploitable areas of the market-- and many of these software packages can now account for some emotional context-- this market jump makes absolutely no sense, at least based on this fuzzy rationalization.

 

So there's two alternatives: analysts are blowing smoke up our collective asses because they don't know why a sector filled with underperforming firms is spiking, or they're covering up for something else.

 

If they don't know, then they should probably shut up, but here's the thing: Analysts are paid to know.

 

They used to be paid to find out, but it turned out that wasn't nearly as cost-effective as having them pick up a press release and parrot it. See, I worked as an analyst (not stock, but I did analyze public companies) and we were paid a very nice salary to ask questions. We could look at a balance sheet and a profit-and-loss statement and begin to understand the deviations from the norm, and ask why this was happening.

 

And the rules were simple, too: FASB regulations made our job that much easier, it was all in black and white, and there were very few gray areas to hide stuff in.

 

The landscape shifted. As with journalism, science, education, and mortgages, what used to be pretty transparent became mystical and unknowable. And people became afraid to do their jobs, not because they weren't good at it anymore, but because they had been perceived as unreliable and basically just thorns in the side of society.

 

Indeed, entire industries (I'm looking at you, Mergers & Acquisitions) grew up around strategies devised to throw analysts off the scent. We ended up having to play catch up on the one hand while explaining to our clients how we had been fooled so badly (if you've ever wondered what a mortality and morbidity hearing at a hospital is like, just sit in on a bad debt meeting.)

 

When a person becomes scared to do his or her job, he's going to take the path of least resistance, which is precisely what the crooks want you to do. Why should I take a computer and try to work out a program that discards the grotesqueries of a financial statement to bring it back to a level I can understand in a glance when I can just rely on the public statements of the CEO and the imprimatur of the CPA?

 

(In case you were wondering why Sarbanes-Oxley is an important law, that's why in a nutshell: if the CEO is going to lie, he ought to be held accountable.)

 

Indeed, that's precisely what started happening and why I got out of analysis: we found we could duck a lot of questions by pointing to the statements and saying "And all the analysis we could come up with did not dispute his claims."

 

Of course it didn't! It couldn't!

 

We didn't know, because we couldn't know, which is what is going on in market analysis now. Worse, we knew we couldn't know, so we also knew we were passing on a load of horseshit but damned if you'd find anyone who'd own up to that.

 

Which is also what's going on in market analysis today.

 

Why? Now you're asking the right question...

 

I guess it comes down to this: there are two markets. There's the market you and I can invest in, through mutual funds and stock ownership and our 401ks and IRAs, and then there's the smart money market.

 

When an analyst throws out an excuse wrapped in a reason like this asshat did, you can bet your bottom dollar someone has worked out a scheme to make money off it. My best guess is short the banks now, and wait for the pop from this jerk's message to wear off to turn a profit, or worse, bet on the put derivatives and really clean up without risking a thing.

 

The analyst knows he's talking thru his hat, but if he says nothing, he looks stupid and loses the faith of his clientele (odd thing that: admitting you don't know is penalized higher than taking a guess and getting it wildly wrong.) He's strung between a rock and a hard place, and either way loses. This way just hurts his bonus less.

 

The really damnable thing about it is, if half as much energy was put into working out a program that truly analyzed the complexities of a financial statement and parsed out and distilled the right questions to ask, the world (at least the rest of us) would be better off and smart money could still make a decent and fair profit.

 

But, you know, there are still crumbs left on the table...

 

(crossposted to Simply Left Behind)

Rick Santorum throws in the towel

By Richard K. Barry

We all saw it coming, so there's no sense feigning surprise. By the time he got around to announcing the inevitable in his speech, everyone knew what to expect. Some of the words went like this:

We made a decision over the weekend, that while this presidential race for us is over, for me, and we will suspend our campaign today, we are not done fighting.

He made the announcement at a campaign stop in Pennsylvania after a weekend of tending to his 3-year old daughter, Bella, who had been hospitalized with pneumonia. 

Whatever one thinks of Rick Santorum, and I'm not a big fan, I can image this has been an emotionally draining time for him all around and it wasn't surprising that he was quite emotional at the press conference. He noted that his daughter was making great progress and home after the weekend in the hospital. Terrific news.

The rest of his final moment in the brightest sun was fairly unremarkable, though he made no mention of Romney in his 12-minute speech nor did he, obviously, take the opportunity to say that he would be endorsing Romney, his party's de facto nominee. Maybe that was a little bit churlish. 

But let's give credit where credit is due. Santorum came from no where to give Mitt Romney a bit of a scare. Mostly that was about Romney's weakness, but Santorum did show himself to have some strength when he wasn't being a bat-shit crazy social conservative. If there had been any way Santorum could have presented himself solely as the "grandson of an Italian immigrant coal miner," as he liked to say, or as a meat-and-potatoes middle-America kind of guy, without all the preachy baggage that made people so afraid of him, things might have been different. 

As the New York Times wrote:

Mr. Santorum’s candidacy benefited from the comparison to Mr. Romney as the Republican candidates appealed to a conservative segment of the Republican Party during the primary process. Mr. Santorum regularly mocked Mr. Romney as a flip-flopper on social and conservative issues who could not be trusted. 

That helped Mr. Santorum win several Southern primaries in which evangelical voters and Tea Party supporters dominated the primary electorate. 

But Mr. Santorum also cast himself as the true economic conservative who understood the needs of the middle class. His campaign attacked Mr. Romney, a multimillionaire, as out of touch with the needs and interests of regular working Americans. 

Most take-aways on the relative success of the Santorum candidacy are fairly obvious, but maybe just to make the point, I will say this. We knew, coming out of the mid-term elections, that the Tea Party movement and other right-wing radicals would work hard to assert their influence on the GOP nomination process. They had some success in 2010, and they wanted more. We knew that whoever won, no matter how relatively moderate he or she wanted to be, the eventual nominee would be drawn to the far right to placate the activist hard-right, most vocal, wing of the party. 

We didn't know what the vehicle would be for pulling the party and the nomination process in that direction.   Few probably saw Rick Santorum as that vehicle, but that's the way it worked out. Again, to give him his due, he ended up being a pretty effective voice for that particular fringe. All things considered, he probably was the best of the rest when it came to articulating the new radicalism of the Republican Party. I don't know that this is a compliment, but there it is. 

Now that he's out, now that Romney's path to the nomination is more or less unimpeded, the only question remaining is, how quickly will Romney be able to move back to the centre to capture the necessary independent voters to compete in the general election, how effective will his Etch-A-Sketch candidacy be from here on out?

Santorum pulled Romney a long way over to the right and for that President Obama owes a great debt to the former Senator from Pennsylvania. 

Make no mistake, though, Rick Santorum has rejuvenated a political career that had been in the crapper. He's a player now amongst social conservatives in America in a way that he never was before. Maybe his support base going forward is even bigger than that. Oh, joy. 

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

This day in history - April 10, 1866: The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) is founded

By Richard K. Barry

Henry Bergh

The ASPCA was founded in 1866 in New York City by Henry Bergh. It followed the creation of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) in the UK in 1824.

Issues discussed by Bergh at the time included cockfighting and the horrors of slaughterhouses. As the Wiki indicates:

By the time of Bergh's death in 1888, 37 out of the 38 states in the union enacted anti-cruelty laws that were enforced by the ASPCA. Early goals of ASPCA focused on efforts for horses and livestock, since at the time they were used for a number of activities. Starting at the turn of the 20th century, small animals like cats and dogs became more of a focus for members of ASPCA.

According to the organization's website, regarding its mandate today:

The ASPCA is the nation’s premiere humane organization, providing local and national leadership in three key areas: caring for pet parents and pets, providing positive outcomes for at-risk animals and serving victims of animal cruelty.

Just because I wouldn't want to be unkind to Mitt Romney, I won't ask whether or not his membership is current. Maybe it is.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

Mass. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren is bringing in the cash

By Richard K. Barry

According to The Washington Post, former Obama administration official Elizabeth Warren raised $6.9 million the first quarter of 2012 in her contest with Massachusetts Republican Sen. Scott Brown. That's a lot of money, which about doubles what the incumbent brought in over the same period.

As the Post writes:

Even though Warren has been in the campaign for less than seven months, she has already raised $15.8 million and has about $11 million cash on hand. 

That’s still less than Brown, who raised $3.4 million in the first quarter and had $15 million in the bank as of March 31, but given how quickly Warren is raising money, she should close that gap by Election Day.

They also point out that, despite an agreement between the two candidates that discourages outside groups from taking part in their campaigns, their race promises to be the most expensive Senate race of the year and possibly the most expensive ever. 

That title belongs to the Hillary Clinton/Rick Lazio campaign in New York in 2000, when the two combined to raise and spent $70 million.

As for how the Warren/Brown match-up is going, at least according to the polls, a recent Boston Globe survey found the candidates pretty much in a dead heat.  As the Globe story states:

With a long seven months to go before Election Day, the survey shows Brown with 37 percent of the vote and Warren with 35 percent, while 26 percent said they are undecided. That amounts to a statistical tie, as the telephone poll of 544 randomly selected likely voters, taken March 21-27, has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.2 percentage points.

And finally, as if this were not obvious:

“This is a wide open race,’’ said Andrew E. Smith, the director of the University of New Hampshire’s Survey Center, which conducted the poll. “Both candidates are generally well liked. Unless something dramatic happens, this will go down to the wire.’’

The only other thing worth mentioning is how successful President Obama and Mitt Romney are going to be in bringing their supporters to the polls in Massachusetts - Romney's home state, on the one hand, and a traditionally liberal state, on the other. Down to the wire indeed.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

Not-So-Free Speech

 

By Carl

 

I'm struck by the diversity of comments here with regards to an interview given by the new Miami Marlins manager, Ozzie Guillen.

 

Guillen committed the nearly unpardonable sin of having kind words to say about Fidel Castro and Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez.

 

A little background. The Miami Marlins baseball team opened a new stadium this season, right smack in the heart of Little Havana, la communidad el Norte for Cuban refugees. This casts an intriguing light on what Guillen said, for it's the older Cuban-Americans who have a problem with it, while later generations are more "Who's Castro?"

 

I could parse and dissect this difference, but let me sum it up by saying there could possibly have been a bit of calculation in Guillen's comments, trying to drum up some audience for the Marlins, who not only spent an enormous sum of money for the stadium (some of which was highly questionable funding) but also shelled out the better part of the GDP of a small nation for new players, mostly Latino.

 

Nonetheless, once Guillen realized what he had said had created an huge backlash in the community, he apologized for saying it. Needless to say, it's also an election year (Miami mayor), and this ruckus has infiltrated into the election.

 

Guillen is scheduled to hold a press conference this morning and is expected to repeat his apology and possibly expand on it.

 

Here's the thing: it's a free country and Guillen had every right to say what he said. However, Guillen also works for a private corporation, which limits what he can say without repercussion. And there's the nub of the question.

 

Should politics be kept out of sport and sport kept out of politics? It seems logical, and yet, it rarely happens because of the money involved. After all, no one builds a major league stadium through completely private funding. Usually there are tax breaks involved or loan guarantees.

 

Similarly, given the popularity of sports, no politician in his right mind isn't going to exploit a team's fan base for the sake of identifying with the team and scoring a few cheap votes. You saw it all the time when Rudy Giuliani was mayor of New York. He would constantly be shown in his front row seat at Yankee games, and God help anybody who got between Giuliani and a camera when the Yankees would win a title.

 

If Guillen worked for, say Wal-mart, he likely would have been called down to HQ and either fired outright or demoted, or apologized and had it accepted. No one would have batted an eye, no outcry would have occured and things would have moved on. Business was taken care of.

 

But here we have a different, more nuanced situation: Guillen de facto works for a quasi-public entity. Major league baseball is exempt from certain laws with respect to monopoly practices, and under those auspices, receive political scrutiny far beyond what any other industry would get.

 

How else do you explain Congress getting involved in a drug scandal?

 

In this capacity and as a public figure, Guillen has influence beyond the domain of his clubhouse.

 

Generally, sports figures stay away from politics. It's bad for contract negotiations, which is also why you see players setting up charities for kids with cancer or who are poor. And remember, Cassius Clay spent time in jail after he changed his name to Muhammad Ali and refused the draft for Vietnam as a conscietious objector.

 

It has happened, however, where ballplayers have gotten involved in making political statements and paid no price: in the 1960s, black players would express support for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Some ballplayers even protested the Vietnam War (Tom Seaver, one of the greatest pitchers ever, springs to mind). 

 

Hell, Castro was scouted for baseball when he was a kid!

 

Guillen should pay no price, either. He's apologized, but I don't think he needed to. If Guillen is to pay a price, if we are to clearly remove politics from sports (which might not be a bad thing, but right now, is not a necessary thing), then Tim Thomas should be forced to remove his helmet while playing for the Boston Bruins. He paid no official price for refusing to meet with President Obama, either. If Guillen is punished, then so should Tim Thomas.

 

My suspicion, however, is that we want the right kind of politics (in all senses) from our athletes, which is even stupider. If we're going to claim Tim Thomas has the right to wear a Teabagger symbol on his helmet, then fairness-- a doctrine America was built on-- demands that Guillen be allowed to speak out, or tattoo a hammer-and-sickle on his arm, or whatever else.

 

For if we're going to have "politics for me, but none for thee," then this country is in very grave danger.

 

(crossposted to Simply Left Behind)