As of December 3, 2009 at 09:25 pm, the video below is the complete debate and it comes from WGBH.

The debate was among Michael Capuano, Martha Coakley, Alan Khazei and Stephen Pagliuca.

I found a key discussion occurred when the subject of new regulations for the banks came up. Stephen Pagliuca made the case that if we did not allow the U.S. banks to grow to large size as they did, then they would not have been able to compete against the bigger banks in other countries and we would have lost the business to those other banks.

Can you imagine what would have happened if the bankrupting business had all been left to the other world banks?  Of course, I can imagine that the other world banks would say that they wouldn’t have gotten into the troublesome business if they had not been driven by competition from the under-regulated US banks.

What happened to the banks over the last few years does bring to the fore the arguments that behavioral economists and many modern economists of other stripes have been trying to explain to the American people.  The way the system works now without adequate regulation, whatever insane scheme your competitor comes up with to make money in the short term, you have to follow in order to compete.   Pagliuca was right about that.

Even worse, if you know the scheme is insane, you cannot afford to stay out of that market. Even with the knowledge that if will probably bankrupt you if do you get in, what are you supposed to do?

What Pagliuca got wrong is how things need to change now that we understand what happened.  He doesn’t apparently fully understand what happened on the grand scale.

Only a Federal (and International) regulator can set the ground rules to say that none of you can get into that business without the proper safeguards (like capital requirements and true risk analysis and disclosure).  Not only does it keep the bad actors from acting, but it helps protect the sane actors who don’t want to be driven out of business in order to compete with insanity.  It also protects the rest of us from this flaw in unregulated capitalism.

The upshot is that with all his private business experience, Stephen Pagliuca has shown that he is unable to step back from that role to see what different responsibilities a U.S. Senator has.  We do not need another government official who cannot understand the proper place of the government in the regulating of society which includes the regulation of an essential capitalist economy.

Contrast this to Mike Capuano’s positions on the economy. I have much greater confidence that Capuano gets it more than any of the other candidates.

December 2, 2009 at 10:45 pm

NECN claims that there are 4 clips showing the debate and that a video of the entire debate will be posted later.

Clip 1, Clip 2, Clip 3, Clip 4

December 3, 2009 at 09:25 pm

The text below is no longer relevant. I have swicthed to using the link on WGBH.

As soon as I get a link that works, I will post the video of the debate here. So far I have only found snippets of the debate. One of which is shown below. See comments about video clips at the bottom of this post.

Follow this link to the story about Google’s response to the Microsoft/News Corp initiative mentioned in my earlier blog post, Microsoft to Pay News Corp to Delist From Google.

I had suspected that there would be an ongoing negotiation between these businesses to split the profits in a new way.  I cannot believe that Google hadn’t had some method in the works to respond to the attack by Microsoft.  Microsoft’s initial ploy could never have passed anti-trust scrutiny in its major markets.

What has me a little confused though is that there are already numerous sites that are searched by aggregator sites like Huffington Post and yet have paywalls of various sorts.  Perhaps Huffington Post already pays a fee to these sites.