The Financial Times has the story Bernanke muted on health of US economy.

The story is interesting for what it included:

Mr Bernanke said most unemployment is due to lack of demand rather than structural problems in the labour market, such as workers lacking the right skills, or being stuck in the wrong parts of the country.

and for what it did not include.  There was no mention of high taxes, too much regulation, or the infamous “uncertainty.”  I wonder if the people at Nightly Business Report, which I have stopped watching, read stories like this.  Perhaps their certainty that “uncertainty” is the cause of the problem makes it impossible to realize what it is that Bernanke does not say.  A case of the proverbial “dog that didn’t bark” syndrome?

Mass Live has the story Sen. Scott Brown, Elizabeth Warren and Marisa DeFranco weigh in on health care debate ahead of Supreme Court case.

I have selected three parts of the positions of the three candidates.  Pick which one you agree with most, then read the article to see who has the position you agree with.

1. “I campaigned against the President’s health care bill, I voted to repeal it and would vote to repeal it again. We already have health care in Massachusetts and we did it how we wanted to do it. People love the care and coverages that we have but they don’t like the cost. The costs are out of control. The legislature and the governor can fix that and I’m encouraging them to do it.”
2. “The mandate to buy coverage from the health insurance companies is the crux of the problem. I’m glad we did something on the national level but the Democrats really capitulated on the public option and that was a mistake. They started with the public option as their top marker. It’s classic negotiation 101, you negotiate high to end up at middle or high ground of where you want to end. They should have started with single-payer and they would have ended up with a public option. If the insurance companies are really behind their free market mentality, then operate in a market. And if the government is your competitor and you’re so much better than the government, compete.”
3. “I think the urgent question now is whether we’re going to be able to hold on to the health care reforms that just passed. There are a lot of people who want to repeal them. I think we need to focus on protecting them and on finding new ways to lower costs, which are still too high.”

The other way to play the game is to guess which candidate has which position, then read the article and score your results.  I am afraid there is no prize for the most right answers.  Or as David Letterman would say, “This is an exhibition, not a contest. No wagering, please.”

Credit goes to BillM for bringing this article to my attention.

The Miami Herald article President Obama: Trayvon Martin case a ‘tragedy’ covers the President’s remarks about this case.

“I can only imagine what these parents are going through,” the president said, adding that he couldn’t help but think about his daughters. “I think every parent in America should be able to understand why it is absolutely imperative that we investigate every aspect of this.”
.
.
.
GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney also issued a statement Friday about the case.

“What happened to Trayvon Martin is a tragedy,” Romney said “There needs to be a thorough investigation that reassures the public that justice is carried out with impartiality and integrity.”

Almost anyone could foresee the inevitable consequences of the Florida law.  When you shoot someone, there needs to be an investigation. If the cause were truly self-defense, the justice system is able to dispense proper justice without making it a law that mere suspicion of a person doing you bodily harm is enough to justify shooting that person.

It is not hard to imagine what some people might find suspicious that the rest of us would call normal behavior.  I wonder if a black person walking home from the store could consider a person of another race accosting him with a gun as looking suspicious. If the black person suspected that bodily harm was about to ensue, what right did that Florida law give to him?

By the Florida law, can you shoot someone if you provoke the “suspicious” behavior?  How would the following statement be applied by the police “investigators”? “I slapped him in the face and I suspected that he might kill me.”

When we were living in Texas, the town where we were living passed a law that said the police could arrest you for looking suspicious.  We pointed out to no avail, that a person walking up to a closed business and tugging on the door before realizing the business was closed could look suspicious to the police.  Probably not suspicious if I were white and dressed in a business suit, but definitely suspicious if I were black or I were wearing scruffy clothes.

Eventually the Texas law was declared unconstitutional.

I got into a “discussion” on Facebook with someone who insisted that there is no GOP War on Women.

The video below shows the ad that MoveOn.org is showing.

The Washington Post has the story Senate passes scaled-down version of bill to ban insider trading by officials.

In a sweeping bipartisan vote, the Senate approved legislation Thursday that formally bans lawmakers and all senior federal workers from making financial trades based on inside information gleaned from their oversight work.
.
.
.
On a 96-3 vote, the Senate approved legislation that was pared down from the version it approved in early February, voting for the House draft of the STOCK Act without any amendments so that the bill could get to the White House as soon as possible.

Of course, we will have to wait for some disinterested lawyer to pore over the wording of the actual bill to see if it actually matches the headline and story.

I just cannot resist taking this cheap shot by quoting the following part of the article:

On largely bipartisan votes, the Senate included a provision … to strengthen anti-corruption laws that the Supreme Court had ruled against as insufficiently vague.

Presumably the unfortunate wording of this is an editing error.  Or perhaps the the Congress actually made the bill sufficiently vague to satisfy the Supreme Court.  Doesn’t one always strengthen rules by making them more vague?

According to Robert Reich’s article, If You Took the Greed Out of Wall Street, All You’d Have Left is Pavement: Why Greg Smith’s Critique is Way Too Narrow, today’s Goldman Sachs greed is not an aberration.

It is not an aberration for Goldman Sachs and it is not an aberration for Wall Street.  Reich reminds us of past history of Goldman Sachs taking it clients to the cleaners time and again.

Perhaps even Reich doesn’t cast his net wide enough.  It is not an aberration for some humans in all periods of history.  To think that there does not need to be proper regulations of financial activities is to misunderstand human nature.

I have never liked political systems and theories that need to ignore human nature for them to work.  Thus extreme capitalism and extreme communism will never be satisfactory models for me.  Actually any “model” has its limits by its very nature.  A “model” is always something less complete than reality.  It is purposely simplified so that humans can understand some aspect of the system being modeled.  You have to always be cognizant of the fact that if you expect the “model” to predict reality outside of the bounds of the implicit and explicit assumptions, then you are bound to be disappointed.  It is not always easy to tell where those boundaries are.  Sometimes it is even difficult to pin down the assumptions that you have made in creating the model.

You might refer to my previous post, Financial Modelers’ Manifesto, to see how professionals in the financial modeling business try to deal with the limits of financial models.

You might remember the previous posts Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory and Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory – Update.

You might want to follow up by reading, Artist admits to shortcuts in show about Apple.

Here is the movie, narrated by Tom Hanks, that reminds us how far we have come from the disaster unfolding before President Obama took office to the current state of recovery. The current state could be better, but we know for sure that it could be a lot worse.

It would be such a shame to stop the policy of recovery and return to the policy of disaster that all the Republican Presidential candidates are prescribing.

If we need to go through another disaster for the American voters to really understand what the Republican policies are all about, the United States will not come out of it with anywhere near its current standing in the world.

Historically, all eras where one nation leads the world do eventually come to an end. Frequently the citizens of that nation bring about their own downfall. I really would not like that to happen in this country while I am still around.

Bank of America: Too Crooked to Fail by Matt Taibbi is another one for the records.

The bank has defrauded everyone from investors and insurers to homeowners and the unemployed. So why does the government keep bailing it out?

I admit to only having read the first 3 pages of this 5 page article.  How many pages of a career criminal’s rap sheet do you have to read to get the picture?

The first 3 pages were enough to get to the explanation of why bank regulation was introduced and why revoking it has led to exactly the abuses that the regulations were invented to prevent.

For a time, this ridiculous rivalry between two strutting Southern peacocks was restrained by the law – specifically, the McFadden-Pepper Act of 1927 and the Douglas Amendment to the Bank Holding Company Act of 1956. These two federal statutes, which made it illegal for a bank holding company to own and operate banks in more than one state, were effectively designed to prevent exactly the Too Big to Fail problem we now find ourselves faced with. The goal, as Sen. Paul Douglas explained at the time, was “to prevent an undue concentration of banking and financial power, and instead keep the private control of credit diffused as much as possible.”

Since the 1980s we have decided that “undue concentration of banking and financial power” was now due.  It shouldn’t be a surprise that stealing money is easier than earning it, especially if you own the police force.

The propaganda machine rolls on, making people more afraid of the people protesting the robbery than they are afraid of the robbers.

People seem to be saying, “Go ahead and steal my money.  Anything is better than being a socialist.”

I just couldn’t resist, so I read The New York Times piece Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs by Greg Smith.

How did we get here? The firm changed the way it thought about leadership. Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an example and doing the right thing. Today, if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence.

I have no pithy nor even snide comments to make.  I have nothing to add, either.  I really don’t even have a reason to think this might be memorable and so worth recording on my blog.