Toyota. The indispensable Michael Fumento has posted his forthcoming Forbes column at his Web site. His survey of the database at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration shows that it is a undigested lump of unevaluated complaints: “ Anybody can enter anything . An entry filed by someone named “Damnable Liar” claimed his car accelerated to the moon because of a child seat problem. That was mine. Many “complaints” are merely comments, and since NHTSA has no “sudden acceleration” category but rather uses “speed control,” the sudden-acceleration claims are lumped in with entries regarding vehicle sluggishness. But in the media conversion process they all become runaway Toyotas.
The 2006 U.S. elections, which put the Democrats in charge of the House and Senate, were widely described in media as a referendum on the Ir
Black Gets Bail . Conrad Black has been granted bail. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, over the protests of the U.S. government, has granted Conrad Black bail while his appeal is heard by the circuit court, following the Supreme Court's decision in the "honest services" case of Jeffrey Skilling. Market Cop. Last Saturday, writing about the Goldman Sachs settlement, I mentioned in passing the remarks of the rabidly anti-capitalist U.S. Senator Carl Levin, who mischaracterized the Goldman settlement as being tantamount to a confession of guilt. The lie was standard Levin, but I must admit that the senator was fully entitled to gloat. After all, he had won. Goldman had said it would fight, and it didn’t.
The invaluable Larry Ribstein (who left his personal "Ideoblog" for the excellent group effort "Truth on the Market" ) offers the definitive first-take on the Goldman case from the perspective of a busiiness-law professor . His key conclusion is that this suit was, in effect, the governmental version of a "strike suit," the term used when priv ate individuals go after a corporation in the expectation that it will settle and they can pocket their gains without having to prove wrongdoing in court. But, as Ribstein writes: "Instead of attorneys’ fees, the SEC’s objective appears to have been purely political." And part of that political objective, as he notes, was to alter the obligations that a corporation has to others. Exactly. The purpose was to move the American economy away from the stand-alone individualism of the capitalist system to the paternalistic collectivism of a feaudalistic-seigneurial system. spiderID=679
Goldman's Consent Decreee. Here is the consent decreee that Goldman Sachs agreed to in order to settle the SEC's suit. In it, the company does not admit or deny the allegations (standard wording) but does admit that it made "a mistake." Well, we knew that. If I take a walk on the bad side of town and get mugged, clearly I made a mistake. Goldman's "mistake" was to do something that provoked the SEC to mug it. Still, for the reasons I laid out here , I wish Goldman had fought the SEC in court. By capitulating, Goldman allows the SEC and the Obama administration more broadly to start taking us back to the mid-20th century era of feudalistic capitalism, under which companies are forced to act as the caring seigneurs of all their "stakeholders."And as for Goldman's attempt to preserve the distinction between committing a "mistake" and committing an immorality: naturally, it was quickly brushed aside by anti-capitalists such as the viciously anti-business Senator Carl Levin .
On July 12, The Washington Post ran a fascinating interview with Mark Thornton, Senior Vice President, Product Development, and Chief Medical Officer at Novavax. Inspiringly, the story was headlined “A career built on bringing livesaving drugs to the market and to patients.” And, for the most part, Thornton’s career is every bit as admirable as the headline makes it sound. “In college,” he tells us, “I fell in love with the notion of correcting a disease and making a person better by giving them a pharmaceutical.” And he ends the interview by commenting: “At Novavax, I can help bring these products to the marketplace and to patients.”
Hang your clothes on a hickory limb / But don't go near the water. That seems to be the message of Rep. Henry Waxman's bill to limit the conditions under which a person may drill for oil. According to Marlo Lewis of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Waxman restriction is simply that the would-be driller first accomplish the impossible. After that, he may go right ahead.
On June 24, the Supreme Court ordered the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago to reconsider the conviction of Conrad Black in light of the high court's rulinig in the “honest services” decision in Skilling v. United States . Predictably, the prosecutors in Black's case are arguing that he should not be free on bail while his appeal is being heard.
The Washington Post today offered those few of us unwilling to read the 2,300-page Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill a cartoon summary of what it all means: “Reinventing Financial Regulation,” by Brady Dennis and Alberto Cuadra. It is not entirely clear to me who did the text and who did the graphics. But the essence of the Consumer Protection provision is clearly stated (and illustrated): “In the lead up to the financial crisis, seven regulators shared responsibility for looking out for consumers of mortgages, credit cards, and other such loans, but none treated consumers as a top priority.”
Richard Scrushy, former HealthSouth Corp. chairman, today filed a motion with the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, seeking to be released from prison while the court reconsiders his 2006 conviction, as the Supreme Court ordered it to do following the high court’s “honest services” decision.
“Waterboarding” is a controversial procedure in which interrogators compel a target to cooperate by making him feel as though he is dying—specifically, by making him feel that he is drowning. I am not convinced that it amounts to torture, or that its use against Islamic jihadists is wrong. But I am convinced that U.S. prosecutors have devised a metaphorical form of waterboarding, which they regularly employ against innocent businessmen. They have discovered a means by which they can convince a businessman who is not even suspected of a crime that his company—to which he may have devoted his life—will be killed if he does not cooperate with them. And that, I think, is wrong.
The ever-stalwart Tom Kirkendall, of Houston’s Clear Thinkers, writes today about the plight of former Merrill Lynch executive James Brown , one of the last Enron figures still pursued by our Javert-like Department of Justice (sic). My own take on Enron, now, is that it involved some financial fraud, notably by Andy Fastow and a couple of his cronies, but that it also involved what Rob Bradley has called “philosophical fraud” and I have called postmodernism . Under the circumstances, I think we need to say of its dubious but non-frauduent practices something similar to what ACLU types often say of disagreeable speakers: “I disagree entirely with the way you conduct your business, but I shall defend to the death your right to conduct it as you see fit.” The invaluable Professor St
According to Eric Dash’s article in the NYT ( “A Film That Explores Humanity on Wall Street” ), Kevin Spacey has a new Wall Street film coming out: “Margin Call.” The headline is taken from Spacey’s comment: “I am trying to humanize bankers.” But Dash opens his article with the remark “Finding humanity on Wall Street, some might say, can be a little like finding a good mortgage in a bundle of C.D.O’s. Traders, after all, tend to pride themselves on their dispassionate objectivity.” Notice how exactly backwards that is. Subprime mortgages were precisely those based not on “objectivity” but on “humanity.”
The New York Times headline the other day was utterly predictable in its class-warfare connotations: "Biggest Defaulters on Mortgages Are the Rich." Indeed, it was so predictable that I confess I did not even try to read through the story (by David Streifeld, who formerly covered the adversary culture for the Washington Post) to find out how the statistics had been manipulated to yield to the desired result. Fortunately, someone else did.
May 2002-- On December 2, 2001, Enron Corporation filed for bankruptcy. With the company's assets then estimated at $62 billion, it was the
For the last 200 or 300 years, collectivists of various stripes have been screaming that we must protect people from free markets. Well, I am beginning to see their point. Except that I turn it around: We must protect markets from people. Consider: If we suddenly declared that minors, of any age, had to be allowed to enter into whatever bargains and contracts they wished, would we not simultaneously restrict markets severely in order to prevent those minors from hurting themselves?
Spitzer Insurance case is tossed. More on this to come , but it seems that one of the cases launched against insurers by Eliot Spitzer way back when he was New York’s attorney general has finally been thrown out. It has taken five years. Can you imagine what these men have gone through during that time? I do not yet know the particulars of the case, but here was my article on Spitzer’s Reign of Terror .
The Department of Justice (sic) has admitted that, as part of a 2007 “deferred prosecution agreement” it entered into with Amex, former
Muhammad Yunus, who founded Bangladesh's Grameen Bank in 1983, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his promotion of micro-financing, and..
AIG. Was Joe Cassano of AIG “the man who crashed the world” as Michael Lewis proclaimed , and as other anti-capitalists such as Gretchen
Toyota. The indispensable Michael Fumento has posted his forthcoming Forbes column at his Web site. His survey of the database at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration shows that it is a undigested lump of unevaluated complaints: “ Anybody can enter anything . An entry filed by someone named “Damnable Liar” claimed his car accelerated to the moon because of a child seat problem. That was mine. Many “complaints” are merely comments, and since NHTSA has no “sudden acceleration” category but rather uses “speed control,” the sudden-acceleration claims are lumped in with entries regarding vehicle sluggishness. But in the media conversion process they all become runaway Toyotas.
The 2006 U.S. elections, which put the Democrats in charge of the House and Senate, were widely described in media as a referendum on the Ir
Black Gets Bail . Conrad Black has been granted bail. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, over the protests of the U.S. government, has granted Conrad Black bail while his appeal is heard by the circuit court, following the Supreme Court's decision in the "honest services" case of Jeffrey Skilling. Market Cop. Last Saturday, writing about the Goldman Sachs settlement, I mentioned in passing the remarks of the rabidly anti-capitalist U.S. Senator Carl Levin, who mischaracterized the Goldman settlement as being tantamount to a confession of guilt. The lie was standard Levin, but I must admit that the senator was fully entitled to gloat. After all, he had won. Goldman had said it would fight, and it didn’t.
The invaluable Larry Ribstein (who left his personal "Ideoblog" for the excellent group effort "Truth on the Market" ) offers the definitive first-take on the Goldman case from the perspective of a busiiness-law professor . His key conclusion is that this suit was, in effect, the governmental version of a "strike suit," the term used when priv ate individuals go after a corporation in the expectation that it will settle and they can pocket their gains without having to prove wrongdoing in court. But, as Ribstein writes: "Instead of attorneys’ fees, the SEC’s objective appears to have been purely political." And part of that political objective, as he notes, was to alter the obligations that a corporation has to others. Exactly. The purpose was to move the American economy away from the stand-alone individualism of the capitalist system to the paternalistic collectivism of a feaudalistic-seigneurial system. spiderID=679
Goldman's Consent Decreee. Here is the consent decreee that Goldman Sachs agreed to in order to settle the SEC's suit. In it, the company does not admit or deny the allegations (standard wording) but does admit that it made "a mistake." Well, we knew that. If I take a walk on the bad side of town and get mugged, clearly I made a mistake. Goldman's "mistake" was to do something that provoked the SEC to mug it. Still, for the reasons I laid out here , I wish Goldman had fought the SEC in court. By capitulating, Goldman allows the SEC and the Obama administration more broadly to start taking us back to the mid-20th century era of feudalistic capitalism, under which companies are forced to act as the caring seigneurs of all their "stakeholders."And as for Goldman's attempt to preserve the distinction between committing a "mistake" and committing an immorality: naturally, it was quickly brushed aside by anti-capitalists such as the viciously anti-business Senator Carl Levin .
On July 12, The Washington Post ran a fascinating interview with Mark Thornton, Senior Vice President, Product Development, and Chief Medical Officer at Novavax. Inspiringly, the story was headlined “A career built on bringing livesaving drugs to the market and to patients.” And, for the most part, Thornton’s career is every bit as admirable as the headline makes it sound. “In college,” he tells us, “I fell in love with the notion of correcting a disease and making a person better by giving them a pharmaceutical.” And he ends the interview by commenting: “At Novavax, I can help bring these products to the marketplace and to patients.”
Hang your clothes on a hickory limb / But don't go near the water. That seems to be the message of Rep. Henry Waxman's bill to limit the conditions under which a person may drill for oil. According to Marlo Lewis of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Waxman restriction is simply that the would-be driller first accomplish the impossible. After that, he may go right ahead.
On June 24, the Supreme Court ordered the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago to reconsider the conviction of Conrad Black in light of the high court's rulinig in the “honest services” decision in Skilling v. United States . Predictably, the prosecutors in Black's case are arguing that he should not be free on bail while his appeal is being heard.
The Washington Post today offered those few of us unwilling to read the 2,300-page Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill a cartoon summary of what it all means: “Reinventing Financial Regulation,” by Brady Dennis and Alberto Cuadra. It is not entirely clear to me who did the text and who did the graphics. But the essence of the Consumer Protection provision is clearly stated (and illustrated): “In the lead up to the financial crisis, seven regulators shared responsibility for looking out for consumers of mortgages, credit cards, and other such loans, but none treated consumers as a top priority.”
Richard Scrushy, former HealthSouth Corp. chairman, today filed a motion with the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, seeking to be released from prison while the court reconsiders his 2006 conviction, as the Supreme Court ordered it to do following the high court’s “honest services” decision.
“Waterboarding” is a controversial procedure in which interrogators compel a target to cooperate by making him feel as though he is dying—specifically, by making him feel that he is drowning. I am not convinced that it amounts to torture, or that its use against Islamic jihadists is wrong. But I am convinced that U.S. prosecutors have devised a metaphorical form of waterboarding, which they regularly employ against innocent businessmen. They have discovered a means by which they can convince a businessman who is not even suspected of a crime that his company—to which he may have devoted his life—will be killed if he does not cooperate with them. And that, I think, is wrong.
The ever-stalwart Tom Kirkendall, of Houston’s Clear Thinkers, writes today about the plight of former Merrill Lynch executive James Brown , one of the last Enron figures still pursued by our Javert-like Department of Justice (sic). My own take on Enron, now, is that it involved some financial fraud, notably by Andy Fastow and a couple of his cronies, but that it also involved what Rob Bradley has called “philosophical fraud” and I have called postmodernism . Under the circumstances, I think we need to say of its dubious but non-frauduent practices something similar to what ACLU types often say of disagreeable speakers: “I disagree entirely with the way you conduct your business, but I shall defend to the death your right to conduct it as you see fit.” The invaluable Professor St
According to Eric Dash’s article in the NYT ( “A Film That Explores Humanity on Wall Street” ), Kevin Spacey has a new Wall Street film coming out: “Margin Call.” The headline is taken from Spacey’s comment: “I am trying to humanize bankers.” But Dash opens his article with the remark “Finding humanity on Wall Street, some might say, can be a little like finding a good mortgage in a bundle of C.D.O’s. Traders, after all, tend to pride themselves on their dispassionate objectivity.” Notice how exactly backwards that is. Subprime mortgages were precisely those based not on “objectivity” but on “humanity.”
The New York Times headline the other day was utterly predictable in its class-warfare connotations: "Biggest Defaulters on Mortgages Are the Rich." Indeed, it was so predictable that I confess I did not even try to read through the story (by David Streifeld, who formerly covered the adversary culture for the Washington Post) to find out how the statistics had been manipulated to yield to the desired result. Fortunately, someone else did.
May 2002-- On December 2, 2001, Enron Corporation filed for bankruptcy. With the company's assets then estimated at $62 billion, it was the
For the last 200 or 300 years, collectivists of various stripes have been screaming that we must protect people from free markets. Well, I am beginning to see their point. Except that I turn it around: We must protect markets from people. Consider: If we suddenly declared that minors, of any age, had to be allowed to enter into whatever bargains and contracts they wished, would we not simultaneously restrict markets severely in order to prevent those minors from hurting themselves?
Spitzer Insurance case is tossed. More on this to come , but it seems that one of the cases launched against insurers by Eliot Spitzer way back when he was New York’s attorney general has finally been thrown out. It has taken five years. Can you imagine what these men have gone through during that time? I do not yet know the particulars of the case, but here was my article on Spitzer’s Reign of Terror .
The Department of Justice (sic) has admitted that, as part of a 2007 “deferred prosecution agreement” it entered into with Amex, former
Muhammad Yunus, who founded Bangladesh's Grameen Bank in 1983, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his promotion of micro-financing, and..
AIG. Was Joe Cassano of AIG “the man who crashed the world” as Michael Lewis proclaimed , and as other anti-capitalists such as Gretchen