[QUOTE=Prime95;382002]Washington's revolving door continues: [URL]http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/02/politics/eric-cantor-wall-street/index.html?hpt=hp_t4[/URL][/QUOTE]

Yeah. Big surprise there. :rolleyes:

Fascinating perspective on [url=http://www.mersenneforum.org/showthread.php?t=19596]Ferguson, MO[/url] from, all of places, [i]Road and Track[/i] magazine — as NC's Lambert Strether [url=http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/09/200pm-water-cooler-9414.html]notes[/url], "the Corvette Stingray was manufactured in Ferguson, back when the country built stuff".

[url=http://www.roadandtrack.com/features/web-originals/echoes-of-a-long-dead-corvette-plant-in-the-powder-keg-of-ferguson-missouri]Echoes of a long dead Corvette plant in the powder keg of Ferguson, Missouri[/url]:
[quote]I sleep through the day at my parents’ house, smack dab on the city-county border, then make for Ferguson around 10 pm. Most of the rioting, including that shown in the oft-looped QuikTrip cameraphone video, took place along a single drag of West Florissant Avenue. Actually, it’s shocking how small the affected area is. Blocks turn into miles during a twenty-four-hour news cycle. Widespread looting is sexy. A dozen shameless smash-and-grabs aren’t. That story feels incredibly peripheral once you see everything else that’s happening here.

Through the windshield of the Corvette, it’s hard to spot the anarchic ghetto villains that need to be put down. Instead, the view holds too many payday loan kiosks to count. This is a desperate community. A third of its residents live in poverty. Nearly 50 percent of its homeowners are drowning under their mortgages. Two public schools lost accreditation in the last year. The momentary furor on TV is an irrational reaction to irrational circumstances. The deeper problems here are long-festering.

Nobody’s sure if an unarmed 18-year-old was killed in an act of self-defense or simply gunned down unnecessarily on August 9th, but I know that human beings don’t exist in a vacuum: He graduated from Normandy High, 3.6 miles from Labadie Avenue, and was shot to death 5.8 miles from where St. Louis used to make Chevrolet Corvettes.

On I-55 returning to Ann Arbor, the placard on the Stingray’s console catches my eye again. I can’t help but wonder what Michael Brown’s life might have been like if he’d been born 288 miles away in Bowling Green, Kentucky.[/quote]

The Ig Nobel awards have been presented and I found the economics one particularly funny:
[QUOTE][B]ECONOMICS PRIZE[/B] [ITALY]: ISTAT — the Italian government's National Institute of Statistics, for proudly taking the lead in fulfilling the European Union mandate for each country to increase the official size of its national economy by including revenues from prostitution, illegal drug sales, smuggling, and all other unlawful financial transactions between willing participants. [/QUOTE]Full list: [URL]http://www.improbable.com/ig/winners/[/URL]

[QUOTE=Nick;383397]The Ig Nobel awards have been presented and I found the economics one particularly funny:[/QUOTE]A good example of Goodhart's Law. In this case they changed what is counted to get a different number.

[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law[/url] :
[QUOTE]Its most popular formulation is: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."[/QUOTE]

Just Tossing this Out There.....
 

"US elites beginning to realize there's a problem"

[url]http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/09/22/1331455/-US-elites-beginning-to-realize-there-s-a-problem[/url]

[url=wallstreetonparade.com/2014/09/alibaba-wall-street-would-rather-you-dont-kick-the-tires/]Alibaba: Wall Street Would Rather You Don’t Kick the Tires[/url]

So, using the company's name to draw parallels with the eponymous Arabian Nights tale, the IPO market is the thieves' den and the Chinacorp financial shenanigans are the magic words?

The Goldman Sachs Tapes
 

This is being described as the "regulatory capture equivalent of the Ray Rice elevator video" - For those of us who knew from its various (in)actions how captured the Fed - especially its key NY branch - is by the TBTF banks this it's unsurprising, but still it's nice to have the proof available for all to see:

[url]http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-09-26/the-secret-goldman-sachs-tapes[/url]

[url]http://www.propublica.org/article/carmen-segarras-secret-recordings-from-inside-new-york-fed[/url]

[url]http://podcast.thisamericanlife.org/podcast/536.mp3[/url]

Wake me when anything actually changes as a result of the whistleblowing.

======================

Fascinating inside poop on an underreported aspect of the [i]Argentina v. Vulture Funds[/i] saga:

[url=www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/09/battling-curb-vulture-funds.html]Battling to Curb “Vulture Funds”[/url]
[quote]Martin Khor focuses on the alarm created by the ruling against Argentina that allowed a Paul Singer’s NML, a vulture fund with a small position in Argentina’s bonds, to vitiate a hard-fought bond restructuring. The particularly ugly part that don’t get the attention warranted is that [b]it is widely believed that Singer took a much larger position in credit default swaps, meaning he was seeking to create and betting on an Argentine default[/b]. And another ugly wrinkle is the role of private law in these processes. ISDA, a private organization, determines what is an event of default for credit default swaps.

[b]Singer was on the committee that voted whether Argentina was in default (recall it had made payment under the restructuring to the trustee, Bank of New York, but BONY was barred by the court from remitting payment to the bondholders). This gave him a direct say in an event in which he had a large economic interest. And that was no lucky accident.[/b][/quote]
Talk about rigging the game ... heads I win, tails you lose.

[QUOTE]Wake me when anything actually changes as a result of the whistleblowing.[/QUOTE]
[snark]You mean, beyond Ms Segarra being charged with theft of confidential information and illegal recording? Aren't the Fed officials and 'poor' Goldman the real victims here? [/snark]

[url]http://www.dailyfinance.com/2014/10/01/herbalife-insider-trading-charges/[/url]

A couple of very good articles by Matt Levine over at Bloomberg View.

On the Carmen Segarra tapes. What Goldman and Santander were doing is not as bad as it first seemed to me.
[url]http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-09-26/secret-fed-tapes-recorded-goldman-s-capital-game[/url]

On the Herbalife insider trading case:
[url]http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-09-30/accused-herbalife-insider-trader-tried-to-take-back-his-trades[/url]

It is interesting how aggressively the SEC has been pursuing insider trading cases. Contrast the sentences being handed down for relatively small gains to the way the bankers who looted billions have gone scot-free.

[QUOTE]There is ... a lot going on in Herbalife. For instance: Is it an illegal pyramid scheme, as Pershing Square claims? Or, if you don't like that one: Is Pershing Square illegally manipulating its stock, as Herbalife claims? Or maybe, did George Soros illegally counter-manipulate its stock, as Pershing Square [URL="http://dealbreaker.com/2013/08/everyone-thinks-everyone-else-is-manipulating-herbalife/"]also claims[/URL]?8 Those are all critical questions in a multibillion-dollar battle over the very existence of a large public company. And they're all in the SEC's jurisdiction. And the SEC brought this case! And why not? Wouldn't you prefer to avoid the hard questions if you could spend your time on delightful trivia like this?[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=garo;384182]On the Carmen Segarra tapes. What Goldman and Santander were doing is not as bad as it first seemed to me.
[url]http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-09-26/secret-fed-tapes-recorded-goldman-s-capital-game[/url][/QUOTE]

Bill Black [url=http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/10/a-perfectly-legal-scam-is-perfectly-unacceptable-to-real-regulators.html]begs to differ[/url] - though he notes that the Santander capital-requirements scammery is merely one symptom of a much deeper pathology of regulatory capture.