The one article you need to understand the Israeli election isn't by any of the usual suspects on the topic — not Jeffrey Goldberg, not Elliott Abrams, not Seth Lipsky, not Bret Stephens, not Jodi Rudoren, not Tom Friedman, not Nahum Barnea, not Eli Lake, not Charles Krauthammer, as shrewd as their various insights may be from time to time. No, it's by Juan Linz, who died in 2013 and who was the Sterling professor of political and social science at Yale. The article, "The Perils of Presidentialism," appeared in 1990 in Journal of Democracy, and it has to do with the structural differences between a presidential democracy like the one we have in America and a parliamentary democracy like the one that exists in Israel.

A news article in the New York Times notes the departure to the law firm WIlmerHale of the head of "an elite Wall Street task force" in the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York:

Mr. Sahni is the latest Wall Street prosecutor to switch sides. Over the last year, nine prosecutors have departed the Wall Street task force at the United States attorney's office, most joining big law firms. Marc P. Berger, the former chief of the Wall Street unit, landed at Ropes & Gray.

The job-hopping reflects the natural flow of the so-called revolving door, the metaphorical portal that turns prosecutors into defense lawyers and vice versa. It is a cycle playing out around the legal world, as the demand for white-collar specialists grows from Wall Street banks facing an ever-growing amount of government scrutiny.(Emphasis added.)

David Warsh's column this week is about the rise of the MIT economics department. One explanation (among many):

its willingness to appoint Jewish economists to senior positions, starting with Samuelson himself. Anti-Semitism was common in American universities on the eve of World War II, and while most of the best universities had one Jew or even two on their faculties of arts and sciences, to demonstrate that they were free of prejudice, none showed any willingness to appoint significant numbers until the flood of European émigrés after World War I began to open their doors. MIT was able to recruit its charter faculty – Morris Adelman, Max Millikan, Walt Rostow, Paul Rosenstein-Rodin, Solow, Evsey Domar and Franco Modigliani were Jews – "not only because of Samuelson's growing renown," writes Weintraub, "…but because the department and university were remarkably open to the hiring of Jewish faculty at a time when such hiring was just beginning to be possible at Ivy League Universities."

Professor Ronald Rotunda, writing in the Wall Street Journal, says Hillary Clinton may have violated 18 USC 1519, committing the federal crime of "anticipatory obstruction of justice," by deleting her emails from when she was Secretary of State.

J. Christian Adams, writing at PJ Media, says that if Secretary Clinton signed the standard "separation statement" when she left the department, she may have violated 18 USC 1001 by falsely stating to the government that she'd returned all work-related documents. (Update: The State Department says there is no record of her signing that separation agreement.)

Republicans are doubtless salivating over the prospect of keeping the Hillary email deletion story alive for the next two years via various legal maneuvers.

From a New York Times article about what Al Gore is up to these days:

that is the point of those slides on his laptop. In 1980, one shows, consultants for AT&T projected that 900,000 cellphones might be sold by 2000. In fact, there were 109 million by then. Today there are some seven billion. "So the question is: Why were they not only wrong, but way wrong?" he says. He presses a button, and up pops an old photo of a young Al Gore with a helmet of hair and an early mobile phone roughly the size of one of Michael Jordan's sneakers.
The same kind of transformation that turned those expensive, clunkers into powerful computers in every pocket is happening now in energy, he says, with new technology leapfrogging old infrastructure. "It's coming so fast," he says. "It's very, very exciting."

The demand by Mayor De Blasio for $50 million — and maybe more — for "affordable housing" as a condition for letting Collegiate School build a new building in Manhattan is the subject of my column this week. Please check it out at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here).

John Bogle Jr., the son of Vanguard index fund pioneer John Bogle, runs a long-short hedge fund, BloombergMarkets magazine reports in its April issue:

Bogle Jr., 54, has a sense of humor about the tension that comes from being an active fund manager and the son of the most famous advocate of passive investing. At an event honoring his father in 2012, he joked about some of the rules his dad taught him. "Always wear a wool tie in preference to silk, lest you be thought of as being flamboyant or be mistaken for an active fund manager or, worse, a hedge fund manager," he said.

The most important lessons the younger Bogle says he learned from his father have nothing to do with the market. He remembers visiting Vanguard headquarters on weekends, when the only person they'd encounter was the night security guard. "And my dad would know him by name, and he'd ask him about his kids and wife by name," he recalls.

Lawyers for New York Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver are seeking to have the charges against him dismissed on the grounds of "improper extrajudicial" comments by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara. (I somehow missed this last week when it was reported by the New York Times.)

The Times doesn't get into this, but if Mr. Silver's lawyers succeed with this angle, it's conceivable that it could have implications for the insider trading cases brought by Mr. Bharara, as well. Recall that even before bringing most of the cases, Mr. Bharara gave a speech to the New York City Bar Association in which he asserted that "illegal insider trading is rampant" and joked that defense lawyers wouldn't oppose his prosecutions because they would make money by billing the defendants targeted by them.

Defining and banning insider trading is the goal of two bills introduced in Congress in the past two weeks.

The bills are newsworthy in part because their existence underscores that current law on the matter is nonexistent, vague, and arbitrarily enforced — a patchwork of regulations, inferences, and footnotes (Dirks 14). Such an acknowledgement may be little solace for those who have endured professional purgatory, suffered jail time, had their once-flourishing businesses raided by the FBI and closed, or spent millions on legal fees as a consequence of prosecutions or even mere investigations or fishing expeditions under the current legal framework. But the development is welcome nonetheless. If it were already statutorily crystal-clear what insider trading is and that it is illegal, there'd be no need for the introduction of these laws.

"What the Medicare surtax means for you" is the headline of an item from the Vanguard mutual fund company that is a great example of the consequences of ObamaCare — inflicting more complexity and punishing people who make more than a government-approved amount of money. Vanguard advises, "Taking a few financial planning steps can help you reduce the possibility of exposure to the Medicare surtax. First, consider how you manage your NII and MAGI."

NII is "net investment income" and MAGI is 'modified adjusted gross income."

Money manager Clifford Asness and Aaron Brown have a draft of a new paper up about climate change.

"Where Have All of Los Angeles's Mega-Rich People Gone?" asks the real estate site Curbed, which reports:

The New York Times reports:

In 2009, Citibank, Citigroup's main banking subsidiary, had $32 trillion in derivatives, according to regulatory filings. That figure more than doubled, to $70 trillion, in the third quarter of 2014.

"It's a little bit of a head scratcher," Mike Mayo, a bank analyst at the brokerage and investment group CLSA, said. "Why is this the best use of Citi's capital?" Over the same five-year period, derivatives in JPMorgan's main banking unit declined by 17 percent, to $65 trillion. (The derivatives holdings are stated using their notional value, an industry measure that does not reflect the actual amount that the banks could lose.)

The New York Observer has made the shrewd move of hiring Lisa Schiffren to write a political column called "Right Hook." The first column assesses the Republican presidential field and says the race to come is between Jeb Bush and Scott Walker. My own tendency is to be a little more cautious about making those pronouncements before a single vote has been cast, but a columnist should get some credit for going out on a limb, too. I'll be looking forward to reading more.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's courage in facing down public employee unions is the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here).