trying to single handedly
“figure out”

the dynamics of The house market

With its supporting devil market for house lots

Only reinforces the hubris of artisan observers

like p krugman

Trying to model as hedid last year

the crude oil markets

Which are

An even more devilish affair then house lots…maybe

Real commodity and asset markets
in their many assorted flavors

require manhattan like projects to simulate

and i mean one market one manhattan project

This is a synthetic process
Not analytic

Even if the utilized analytics need to be sound

Real product markets are all open form processes

even Ten thousand artisan economist wizards
are useless for this task

just like ten thousand black smiths
each in her shop

Can't produce

a 727 

market modeling is a like product to a 727
and that's what's up here

unless some large and powerfully funded

over arching organtization

Plans monitors assigns tasks co ordinates the flow of assembly parts etc etc etc the result will be thumb to the wind forecasting

One man wizard outfits
are of no practical value

In their splendidly ignorant impotent isolation

Posted by js paine at 08:13 PM

“Penalize the officers of the corporation. Require the payment of fines out of funds set aside for the payment of “bonuses” and other, theoretically discretionary “compensation”. Require corporations to write five-year clawback into all labor compensation in excess, say, of $100,000 per annum, and then use clawback to pay fines.”

exactly
escrow the bulk of top mangements compensation

subject to a long payout and release program

btw
the rentier class and their fund shepards

seem as indiffrent to the top boys

ten percent of the cream

as any contented corrupt unorganized multitude

would be

so enter uncle

well i say if uncle has to make it happen
then the present dominanat system

with its zillion petty “security holders”

and it's

concomitant maybe “causing”

privately “held” but “public”

for profit corporations

are part of our economic deep future's integument

not its seed

Posted by js paine at 08:11 PM

the meme here is liquidate the rentier class
ie those passively and as a collectivity

holding societie's securities

—even if they actively trade them between each other

and acquire

the increments to the existing society wide consolidated portfolio —

buy em out as opposed to liquidate okay softee

i'll still buy in to the program

if uncle swaps all other outstanding securities for one security say a tips

or maybe in addition some untold zillions

in time dated maturity tips

the point
they the rentier class

today can serve no social function

or set of functions

as equitably or efficiently

as a fully socialized

perhaps de centralized

but in any case ultimatly unitary

society wide fund

could serve

Posted by js paine at 08:04 PM

“The good things are degraded when they move from a gift economy to a money economy”

pious anarcho …horse feathers

i have great synmpathy for gift economy fantasias

but the last 10 k years of human social development were not just one damn rip off configuration after another

my beloved gosplan's first five year plan
with its physical balance approach and its products exchange

was about as updated

as the inca state system

after that it and its clones and mutates

only survived by the grace of their crypto market transactions

fortunately/regrettably/inevitably
erhaps

its greatest single human product deng xiao ping

put my favorite “off shoot “

the one with chinese characteristics

out of its misery

perhaps the correct way

perhaps not

th whole 70 year exercise was a discovery of
just how profound was our ignorance

of Clio's secrets

“the socially real is socially rational”

but realities rationality

is not all that obvious

since the fucker is always morphing …eh ???

exchange presents ??

if so then we already do
the question becomes why is it not the main basis of our social exchanges

i'll refer you to the incomplete record we have built
of our last ten thousand years of social development

maybe among all that u may
discover a necessary causal chain

i can only point to it all

and with a leap of conviction

find it suifficient evidence to uphold the conjecture

” even commodity production might be a necessary stage we have yet learned by our trial actions

to sublate “

answer to all that

Posted by js paine at 08:02 PM

” A Social Security fund that invested in capitalism instead of buying Treasuries that must be paid back by future taxpayers.”

taxpayers
as opposed to extracted from workers and shoppers

oh that's right taxes are manadatory shopping and job work are not

we're free to choose

my take knock off the above a billion prtivate wealth and create a social fund out of it
might make sense but i doubt it would of necessity alter anything “basic” about corporate capitalism

i'd rather socializ out of existence the raft of petty portfolio holdings and create a national security fund able to stabilize employment optimize social investment absorb portfolio loses etc etc

all too complex to render here in any way other then tedious..

in short

the rentier class could be surgically removed from our system without noticeable loss

great fortunes are a residual we could trim off of course
but not the heart of our privatized social capital

Posted by: paine | Link to comment | Jun 10, 2009 at 07:47 AM

paine says…
“There are some things that money should not buy and one of them is Democracy.”

do u really think corporations can only play a decisive roll in the “direction” of society

by being the major donor and lobby class ???

show me a state system somewhere today n
that has all these nader esque reforms you suggest

and i'll show you a homeland still safe for predatory corporations

in today's world

an open liberal pluralistic righteous

multi party

electoral representative democratic society

will always lead to corporate hegemony

so long as “public” corporations

similar to the ones

our present systems harbor and husband

continue to exist

that goes for u too sweden

“cynicism is self-fulfulling”
i agree

and then i submit this

the social restructuring we're groping for
is far more radical then certain offerings

found in comments here

its not cynical to say that won't work as hoped …is it ???

reforms that step towards a sustainably better society fine
but steps that lead in circles

circles of better => less better => worse

not so fine

i support naderism because
i figure we need to discover

what are progressive illusions

and what are not

often we'll discover a pot of lead at the end

of any particular pwog rainbow

but the less of these lead pot hunts

we go on the better right ??

so if the lead pot is a known lead pot

it's not cynicism to point it out

my guideline if it exists in sweden its corporation compatible and prolly subject
to very discouraging scale effects

Posted by: paine | Link to comment | Jun 10, 2009 at 08:57 AM

paine says…
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE 60s???

excellent question
my generation of middle class amerikan youths

was as anti commerce anti corporate

anti material gain

as any in our brief history

look where we are now ???

its like diet and exercise
lots of back sliding

my guide

hey the reform must be even resistent to back slides
cause we are class by class toally depraved

call it class calvinism

our oversouls are depraved we can not justify our class
by its momentary spate of good works good thoughts good vibrations

Posted by: paine | Link to comment | Jun 10, 2009 at 09:02 AM

paine says…
“the marginal utility of money is very different for different people. “

reason is now a fabian

“A society with no private ownership (like the American Indians) focused on stewardship and the common good”

tribals war on each other ferociously

…
“I claim that it is capitalism that is going to have to be replaced. “

it will my friend ….some day

“It is a mistake to associate capitalism with the use of markets.A market-based system tells you nothing about who owns the means of production, or whether there are profits… All it tells you is that a specific kind of interchange process is used to distribute goods.”

exactly

using these words so imprecisely
adds to both

plausibility and incoherence of the discourse

and even if these two attributes

are not often acknowleged

they remain very much a comfort

and therefore endemic no… prevelant

among

the thundering herd of independent civic thinkers

Profit motives and high ceo comp

Are only a problem

If they are dynamically ineffective total social cost reducers when compared to some secular monastic system like a university or mutualist association etc

In the health sector itself the questiom remains open …perhaps

However

In the area of financial provision and payment there is no controversy

Monopoly monopsony

Will be more dynamically effective reducing and controling

total transaction and admin cost

A legal regulated private monopoly
Paying its stockholders dividends out of surplus

Better then a gub authority like medicare ?

That is an open question too

As is maybe the possibly even better system
two or three legal outfits sharing a oligopsony oligopoly

Like the gse fanny and fred

Posted by js paine at 08:01 PM

“Cap and trade is not going to get the clunker off the road. It requires regulations, fines and emissions checks to get the clunker off the road.”

wildly wrong

the cap and trade applied to utlities and chemical plants will have precisely analagous effects
ie get the clinkers off first and fore most

cars in their millions may indeed require
other methods then emission measurements

though i cop could prolly get handed a device able to create probable cause or what every for a pull over inspection ticket

tradeable car emission warrents

is not out of the question if loosely applied

income effects etc would need off sets
getting the program rolling might lead to cries of

a one time reward for a dirtier then thou motor

Posted by js paine at 08:00 PM

call him norm
he's a harvard social philospher

he's want's uncle to get into the corporate eunich biz

“the proliferation of for profit schools, hospitals and prisons; the outsourcing of war to private military contractors.”

that not being bad enough…

“We’ve seen the eclipse of public police forces by private security firms..”

the crux
“Some of the good things in life are corrupted or degraded if turned into commodities”

ie good things
like reading and …policing

——-

if we buy and sell everything good
to enhance production of good things

watch out

some good things will be degraded

in particular in this age
the church commercial universal

we look even closer
we look to the share of surplus welfare created

that gets captured as net revenue in the buy sell process

no only markets but profits too

both
may enhance production efficiency

but devalue the product

producing to sell
is not producing for the intrinsic qualities

of the process or product

to the producer or maybe even

the consumer

one thinks of commercial sexual services eh ???

answer
a return to home spun bourgois totality

a catholic humanist secularity

get a hierarchy
to put correct clothes on naked markets

sorta like

pants on male horses

ahh the age of henry adams fantasia

enter the various secular priestly orders
updates

avatars

of our white judeo-christian 13th century clericy

credentialed one presumes
by dame academe

loved by the parlor tartuffes
worshiped by the goody goody lending library gals

honored by the center aisle majority politicos

even as they all in their several ways
sin against …THE NURSE RATCHET NORMS

'nough to make a libertarian contrarian
out of maoist moi

a grizzly adams to checkmate cuzz henry

Posted by js paine at 07:58 PM

red herring anyone ???

if uncle has a hundred eyes and twenty pairs of hands
but takes orders from wall street

what doth it matter

how many are chopped off or put out

equally
if uncle suddenly rises from his supine posture

and takes action

i agree

with the spirit of bruce

the more hands the merrier

u 'll prolly catch more flat fish that way

even if a few lines foul each other up

my school of org sez
if you want a task done set up another agency

the added admin staff costs here are minimal

compared to the potential consequences

the ecology of meaningful and effective regulation
is all about redundancy as bw points out

“Penalize the officers of the corporation. Require the payment of fines out of funds set aside for the payment of “bonuses” and other, theoretically discretionary “compensation”. Require corporations to write five-year clawback into all labor compensation in excess, say, of $100,000 per annum, and then use clawback to pay fines.”

exactly
escrow the bulk of top mangements compensation

subject to a long payout and release program

btw
the rentier class and their fund shepards

seem as indiffrent to the top boys

ten percent of the cream

as any contented corrupt unorganized multitude

would be

so enter uncle

well i say if uncle has to make it happen
then the present dominanat system

with its zillion petty “security holders”

and it's

concomitant maybe “causing”

privately “held” but “public”

for profit corporations

are part of our economic deep future's integument

not its seed

recall this plain fact

a system of widely diversified portfolios
is in itself

a source of major moral hazard

each earning stream each stock and bond performance

becomes that less ccrucial to well being

the worship of earnings reports
and published balance sheets

maybe this is what bw means by naughty governance

scale effects

too big to own is too big to supervise

mutual funds by pooling earnings
make each of them far lesss noticed

short of the sudden systemic convulsion

only inside managers end up …..caring
and tax collectors and regulators of course

g men and g gals

not even bankers care
if the debt was securitized as it mostly now is in good times for Big inc

Where i see bw and myself parting ways
is in the solutions

he wants sort of corporate ludite lite
back is the way forward

back i guess to partnerships and mutual associations

and limited liability

as a reward not a right

returning ownership and managment
to an operating company scale

where outside supervision is coherent

and transparency to public eyes

can't be an illusion

i doubt bw or mt want to return
to dickensian stage operating companies

where conditions were a secret but every one didn't care because …size was small enough to allow failure

and let that be the just reward to ownership

and its closely path following small band of creditors

henry ford among others then and now
with his off spring tried to perpetuate

the carlisle paradigm

the ahab paradigm for the ford motor company

into the modern mass production era

he /they ended up caving on one front after another

the public corporation in the midst of our credit economy

exists precisely because

it partly socializes liability structure

raises leveraging capacity

to me we gotta plow ahead further
socialize these hegemonic institutions further

expand their social impact

harnness their inevitable asocial

non responsible agents at the top

by creating for them

the necessary parlleling incentives

like bw suggests

Posted by js paine at 07:54 PM

“The old system worked well for the banks (if not for their shareholders), so why should they embrace change?”

who are …the banks here ?? if not the stockholders ??

top management???™

or maybe
tm

plus

some vague gathering of senior creditors

(other banks and private equity ops )???

“It has long been recognized that those American
banks that are too big to fail are also too big to be managed.”

manage ???
by who

“state agencies ” ???

but isn't it their congress their agencies
their “state” ???

ohhnhhhh i see
brake em up

and then …the little bank interests

can't associate

and retain or restore state agency control ???

any association of little banks
must fail ??

ohhh ya uncle milty sez so … all cartels fail
internal jockeying for advantage and all ….

just what about a top 1000 littler banks
is “socially preferable” to a 10 big banks system ??

i'll tel ya i wouldn't want to live on the difference long run

if their aggregate gain
from their marginal lobby dollar

is the same either as ten our a thousand

and their pro rata contribution is the same…

ohh co ordination problems

look at the AMA what an incoherent scramble they are eh ???

hmmmmm i say uncle oughta
brake off the depository and payments system

of every bank above bruce wilder size

and take the entire show public

form a national grid out of it

i suggest further
uncle carve this grid's servicing units

into three or four competing sub -systems

let em provide “cylical working capital “loans
ie keep the payments system flowing

and pay insurance premia to uncle back up

as to the rest of the big boy private banking community

who cares
if they blow themselves apart ???

what are they doing anyway ???

buy outs buy ins

speculation finance

the three Ls

liquidity …leverage…larceny

what liquidity adds to our social construction of new innovative productive capacity ???
what leverage rewards

better corporations over their rivals ???

when and how much is any of this socially enhancing ???

take venture capital
i'll bet a couple three federal gse's

could do all this funding

and do it

at a lower social cost

while taking and handling more and more diverse maybe even optimally greater risks ..

ie

pump in more innovation financing

and do a better long run job of innovation

as to plain vanilla mum and pup
start ups

sbl loans should be as easy to get

as student loans

Posted by: paine | Link to comment | Jun 09, 2009 at 12:57 PM

paine says…
“are governments being overly cautious that they might kill the goose that laid the golden egg?”

what golden egg ??

“If the US downsized its banks, would that enable other countries to create large bank players that

would squeeze our own smaller banks?”

not if it was illegal to have over x share of any loan market or depository market

big uncle could protect all his little bank-chicks

——————

SS
stig was a known quantity before he and akerloff shared the prize

i doubt anyone really worries about the politics of any one prize candidate

as long as there are off sets on both sides

over the haul of it all

kharris:

“Big Capitalism isn't capitalism at all..”

capitalism requires many little firms
to be capitalism???

“Big Capitalism is all about jiggering outcomes
in non-market ways.”

do you mean non cmpetitive ways ???

“… a system of political influence
that shields big firms and well organized interests from the influence of the market..”

“well organized interests ???”

big associations or just associations of the big ??

“… we need to fight against it.”

well i agree there completely

but
the unqualified word ” market “

just as a word

don't batter down much for me

u must mean quite a lot of specific things

that the word might contain

like the word capitalism might contain specific aggreable things for u

but when either has bad outcomes

they still remain what they are

corporations and markets

aren't you at all concerned
that the cry

“brake em up”

has been around as long as

the big corporations themselves

and

braking em up has been tried once or twice too ..eh ??

Posted by: paine | Link to comment | Jun 09, 2009 at 01:26 PM

paine says…
“The Fed facilities along with the TARP have in fact transformed private assets into public assets “

okay as metaphor and maybe de facto circumstances

but
“…insufficient to collateralize the issuance of public debt and thus creating a perception of bad faith as it relates to

“the good faith and credit” of the United States of America”

??????????
i'm hoping this isn't gibberish

but i confess

i can't make coherent sense of it

btw
people “long” on this and “short” on that

or folks who like the black swan submission hold
or using the word “put” after

the latest public rascals name

gets beyond me quick

i guess i'm short on “market” trendee jargon
at least as

a fundementally satisfactory explanation

of what the fucks going on

Posted by js paine at 07:52 PM

“we need to reconnect markets and values”

no we need to build economic organizations
ie groups of cofunctioning …humans

that by their collective actions

ultimately if privately

in pursuit of each ones own personal happiness

spontaneously as if by an invisible parson's hand

parallel

the larger society wide welfare objectives

i contend cut off the organization's profit balls
will simple be a ritual mutilation

that doesn't change insider looting defrauding

irresponsible risk taking and risk avoiding

okay so maybe the mix of actions might morph
but not the over all on balance

social welfare outcome

its gonna take a lot more intricate

— if as radical in sum —-

set of modifications then a mere

institutional eunuching

'make em all mutualist and maybe pint size ' mr bruce sez

“We are
as ill-served by treating the term, “rent-seeking” as a pejorative,

as we are

by imagining that market competition is some special case of Darwinian evolution, where survival of the fittest promotes economic virtue and efficiency.”

nice counter pose

so long as we aren't lured into thinking

existing gains from greater “organization”

need in all cases

take the form of privately a-propriated rents

why not lower prices or social dividends or

ahh gosplan 2.0 !!!!

btw as u know bw
stiglitz has a “wonderland ” theorem on this

———-

“There's a great deal of evidence that there are some significant diseconomies of scale in banking “

scale effects here ??

from market failures
firm failures or both ??

”.. the role of faulty mathematical models in managing the underwriting of mortgage lending? — those articles are all describing diseconomies of scale in banking.”
sarcasm here ???

” the fatal effects on investment banks of moving from partnerships to corporate ownership structures? — implicitly, these articles witness diseconomies of scale. “

are u laffing at the notion
limited liability hazards

grow with firm size ???

“The story of the growth, corruption and failure of Fannie and Freddie? — implicit evidence of diseconomies of scale in banking.”

i'm dense today i guess
or bruce is getting too subtle in his irony

internalized short run profits
swamped

in the long run

by accumulated toxins

and on top of that

un internalized social costs

of broadly risky gainful behaviours

then agian
sector wide state change effects

as knock ons from a single firm's

too big to fail failure ???

hmmm

then again

as you point out

economies of scale in firm destruction

operates best if driven by “state ” policy

that produces toxic busines model morphs

…
“the political climate allows corporate kleptomania to continue “

now yer talkin' bro

too big to fail leads to
too easy to pilfer pillage peculate default defraud squander subvert and in a pinch subborn ….

thank our several God for revelations

otherwise we'd have to figure out
where the fuck values come from

and why them
and why now and why here

and why the little algorithm like imps

seem subject to change over time

and from place to place

this is a case of moving the imponderables
to the next level

where they can be safely assumed

into submission to demonstrable “truthiness”

i think of meatloffs aea address of a few years back
as launching another brigade into actions

as part of the contemporary

we have sinned

great norms normalizing conquest

of profit angle -land

Posted by js paine at 07:51 PM