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Morning Reading
Good morning. To start the day, how 'bout a stiff drink of Scotch? It's only been sitting on ice for 100 years:
Drilling for whisky in Antarctica (The Huffington Post):
A beverage company has asked a team to drill through Antarctica's ice for a lost cache of some vintage Scotch whisky that has been on the rocks since a century ago.
The drillers will be trying to reach two crates of McKinlay and Co. whisky that were shipped to the Antarctic by British polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton as part of his abandoned 1909 expedition.
Post-Mortems reveal obvious risks at banks (New York Times):
In what sounds like an episode of "CSI: Wall Street," dozens of government investigators -- the coroners of the financial crisis -- are conducting post-mortems on failed lenders across the nation. Their findings paint a striking portrait of management missteps and regulatory lapses.
[Charitable capitalism](http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091130/greider2?utm_source=feedburner&utm...(The+Nation%3A+All+Articles) (The Nation):
If Wall Street wants really to win back public respect, there is a more substantial gift it can make that does not involve money. Goldman Sachs and the other banking behemoths can take their foot off the Congress and free servile politicians to enact true financial reforms. Call off your lobbyists, let democracy function in behalf of the public interest, not yours.
Farewell to Wall Street's decade of hubris (MSN Money)
Is $6,300 a fair value for gold? (The Telegraph)
On California's budget shortfall (NPR) Oi:
Not only is there no light at the end of the tunnel of California's annual budget deficit, there's not even an end to the tunnel.
The tenor of these quotes is of the poor bureaucrat who cannot rule effectively due to unstoppable business interests. That is way off the mark - if bureaucrats could not provide legal favortism, there would be no such control. The fact that businesses use the established regulatory framework to their advantage is NOT a black mark on businesses, it is a natural consequence of a mixed economy. The answer is to get the government OUT, not in deeper.
"The answer is to get the government OUT, not in deeper." During the Gilded Age the government was pretty much completely out. Income and wealth were concentrated at the top in what was essentially a two class society. This was the hayday of laissez-faire and the robber barrons in America. It resulted in runious competition and a winner take all business climate, not unlike the board game Monopoly. That led to "progressive era" regulation. Jamie Dimon is calling for regulation for this same reason, survival.
But regulation by itself may be nothing more than PR. Concentrations of corporate wealth buy the laws and regulations they want because politicians need the money to run for office, as Milton Friedman observed. He concluded that removing government / regulation would allow competition to force corporations to act in the interests of society rather than as predators. The Gilded Age disproves that. Public finance of political campaigns might change this. In the mean time entrenched corporate interests own the government while most Americans are just along for the ride, befuddled by the slogans projected on the cave wall, as it were.
