The Vanguard mutual fund company has an interview with the economics editor of the Wall Street Journal, David Wessel, about his book Red Ink. The interview includes this passage:
During the financial crisis, when the federal government essentially nationalized Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson essentially wiped out the shareholders and preferred shareholders of Fannie and Freddie. The shareholders were a lot of different kinds of investors; many of the preferred shareholders were U.S. banks. He didn't take a nickel from the bond holders of Fannie and Freddie, and in part that was because so many of them were the Chinese.
Free-market radio host Peter Schiff goes to the Democratic National Convention and finds a lot of people willing to agree with his whimsical suggestion that there should be a law either banning or capping corporate profits. YouTube video embedded below.
ProPublica has a column, which also runs in the New York Times, critical of the Securities and Exchange Commission's decision to allow hedge funds and other private investment partnerships to advertise in search of investors. The columnist complains that the SEC "not plan to mandate any new process to ensure" that the "investments are appropriate" for the investors.
There are at least three flaws with this line of criticism.
The first is that the column asks the SEC to do something that Congress did not ask it to do. Congress was trying to make it easier for entrepreneurs to raise capital. If the SEC were to then go and erect new barriers that make it harder, the SEC would be acting opposite to Congress's intentions. The way it's supposed to work in this country is that the laws are made by elected members of Congress, not unelected SEC commissioners.
Four big takeaways from the second night of the Democratic National Convention:
Negativity: Diana DeGette, a Democratic congresswoman from Colorado, said Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan "want to make women second-class citizens again." The governor of Connecticut, Dannel Malloy, said Republicans are "engaged in a systemic effort to disenfranchise millions of African-Americans, Hispanics, and senior citizens." A nun, Sister Simone Campbell, described the Ryan budget as "immoral."
Economist writer D.R., writing about the Republican National Convention: "this reporter's favourite moment involved a testimonial on stage from a Hispanic businessman whose main gripe, it turned out, was that his firm had not secured fat enough contracts from the government)."
Newt Gingrich says President Obama will be undone by three numbers — gas prices, the unemployment rate, and the national debt:
Conventions largely break into two kinds: achievement conventions and accusation conventions.
If you are an incumbent with a good record you run an achievement convention and remind everyone what a good job you have done and why they should reelect you. Mitch Daniels reelection commercials which just listed his achievements without any words for sixty seconds- there were two of them- is a classic example of an achievement campaign.
Obviously the Obama convention cannot be an achievement campaign. The failure of their policies forces them to have an accusation convention. That means accuse Romney of everything. Accuse Ryan of everything you failed to accuse Romney of. Accuse Republicans in general of even more than you have accused Romney-Ryan.
The problem for Obama is that these three numbers are going to be louder than all their accusations combined.
John Stossel's take on Mitt Romney' speech at the Republican National Convention: "He said nothing of significance. .... Romney said he has a 'plan to create 12 million jobs.' Huh? Why not 13 million? Why not 50? Promising 12 million is an absurd conceit."
At the first night of their convention, the Democratic Party took aim at banks and insurance companies.
The mayor of Minneapolis, R.T. Rybak, praised President Obama for having "the guts to take on the insurance companies and reform health care."
The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, praised Mr. Obama for taking on "the big banks that brought our economy to its knees," and he spoke of the president's willingness to "take on the insurance companies that were ripping us off."
A former Republican voter from Colorado, Maria Ciano, faulted the Republican ticket of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan because "they want to put insurance companies in charge of my health care."
The secretary of health and human services, Kathleen Sebelius, said, "I've spent my career fighting the worst practices of insurance companies."
E.J. McMahon of the Manhattan Institute's Empire Center does a really exemplary job of answering Yale professor Robert Shiller's New York Times column bemoaning the supposed plunge in state and local government employment. Mr. McMahon reports:
relative to pupil enrollment, local school employment remains higher than it was in 2000, the peak of the nation's last sustained economic expansion. (Specifically, as of July 2000, there were 130 local government education employees per 1,000 pupils enrolled in the fall of 2000. As of July 2012, local government education employment came to 132 workers per 1,000 pupils in projected fall enrollment.)
Yale announced eight members of its search committee for a new president, prompting a somewhat comical complaint that the committee "includes 5 corporate executives."
The search committee is a group of 12 — four Yale faculty members yet to be named, and eight other members who were named.
Those eight are:
Francisco G. Cigarroa '79, chancellor, University of Texas System
Peter B. Dervan '72 Ph.D., the Bren Professor of Chemistry, California Institute of Technology
Donna L. Dubinsky '77, founder and board chair, Numenta, Inc.
Charles W. Goodyear '80, president, Goodyear Capital Corporation
Paul L. Joskow '70, M.Phil, '72 Ph.D., president, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and former Chair of the Economics Department of MIT
Indra K. Nooyi '80 M.P.P.M., chair of the Board and CEO, PepsiCo, Inc.
E. John Rice, Jr. '88, founder & CEO, Management Leadership for Tomorrow
The New York subway system's policy on advertising in trains, and the dire and graphic warnings required on cigarette packages are the topics of libertarian law professor Richard Epstein's column this week. He comes down on the side of letting the government-run MTA impose some restrictions on the advertising in the trains. My preferred way of dealing with the issue would be to privatize the MTA.
Mitt Romney's ambiguous plans for the war in Afghanistan are the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at Reason (here) or at the New York Sun (here).
The New York Times has a profile of Valerie Jarrett, an aide to President Obama:
she can also be imperious — at one event ordering a drink from a four-star general she mistook for a waiter — and attached to the trappings of power in a way some in the White House consider unseemly for a member of the staff.
A case in point is her full-time Secret Service detail. The White House refuses to disclose the number of agents or their cost, citing security concerns. But the appearance so worried some aides that two were dispatched to urge her to give the detail up.
She listened politely, one said, but the agents stayed.
A Bloomberg Businessweek article about a meeting of Republican donors explains how the reporter got into the meeting:
I was invited as the guest of a financier who is a significant Republican donor. The financier knew that I was a journalist. At no point was I presented with, nor did I agree to, restrictions regarding the information I heard. Upon my arrival at the breakfast, I was not asked if I was a journalist. I gave my name, identified the person who had invited me, was handed a wristband, and ushered into the dining room. American Crossroads disputes this version of events, but a spokesman did not immediately return calls to elaborate.
The "financier" did the Bloomberg reporter a favor. The transparent move would be to identify the financier so readers who see the person mentioned in future articles by this reporter or news organization can assess for themselves if the favor is being repaid.
Meghan Clyne, a former colleague of mine at the New York Sun, has a piece in the Weekly Standard remarking on the Democratic Party's oddly retrograde approach to the votes of women:
a perceptive observer may notice a curious thing about this "war on women." It is based entirely on one set of policies: those pertaining to women's reproductive systems. By the Democrats' logic, to oppose abortion on demand and taxpayer-funded contraception is to be "anti-woman." Womanhood is thus defined by the desire for unrestricted abortion and free birth control; women themselves are reducible to ovaries.
It was once permissible in American politics to view women as incapable of concerns beyond childbearing—but not in this century. And in addition to insulting women's intelligence, this approach may well backfire. American women are active, thoughtful citizens; their political concerns are focused on the future of their nation, not the cheapest and easiest way to shut down their reproductive tracts.
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