Bloomberg News has the latest development on the "What If The Rich Leave" front: Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, whose stake in the company, post-initial public offering, could be valued at about $3.8 billion, is renouncing his American citizenship and heading to Singapore.

Earlier coverage of the rich-leaving-America story on this site is here, here, and here.

The New York Times (here) and the Washington Post (here) are making a big deal out of Mitt Romney's prep school misbehavior in 1965. I'm the last one who would defend high school bullying or pranks or misbehavior, but let it just be said that it is not unprecedented. Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy's 1974 book Times To Remember reported about John Kennedy's time at Choate:

President Obama is a potential victim of the announcement by JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who earned $23 million last year, that his firm had suffered at least $2 billion in trading losses related to the so-called "London Whale" in a move that Mr. Dimon conceded was "poorly reviewed, poorly executed and poorly monitored."

White House visitor access records show at least 18 visits to the White House by Mr. Dimon during the Obama administration. The most recent disclosed visit, according to the visitor access records on the White House site, appears to have been January 21, 2012, when Mr. Dimon, accompanied by his wife Judith and daughters Julia, Kara, and Laura, attended a White House holiday open house.

Three takeaway lessons from the implosion of the law firm Dewey and LeBoeuf:

There's no no-risk route. People who chose to go to law school, then chose to go work at a law firm founded more than 100 years ago, whose offices featured marble spiral staircases and, from the 43rd floor, views of Central Park, whose partners had included a former governor of New York (Thomas Dewey) and the son of the secretary of state (Elihu Root Jr.), and whose clients were Fortune 500 companies, might have thought they were playing it safe. But even low-risk routes have risk, and often when you think you are taking a low-risk route, that's when you have to be most careful, because you could just be underestimating the risk.

Steven Horwitz has a short post headlined "Hayek's Tolerant and Pluralistic Liberal Vision," marking what would have been the 113th birthday of F.A. Hayek:

As Hayek points out ... the Greek word for "to exchange" also means "to admit into the community" and "to change from enemy to friend." Exchange in a market-based society exposes us to new people with different ends, and brings them into our set of social relationships.

Jamie Dettmer, a former New York Sun colleague of mine, has a wonderful post giving five reasons he maintains a bank account in Europe.

The Dettmer post is a response to a tweet from President Obama's campaign spokesman, Ben Labolt, that said, "There are only 2 reasons to have a Swiss bank account: hedging against the dollar or avoiding paying fair share in taxes."

Hey, given the Geithner-Bernanke team, hedging against the dollar might not be such a bad idea.

The top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, Ed Markey, is out with a press release describing himself as "an advocate for keeping America's natural gas here for use by American families and businesses." The release is about a letter that Congressman Markey sent to the energy secretary, Steven Chu, that says in part:

I believe that using our domestically produced natural gas here in America to reduce our dependence on foreign supplies should take precedence over any plans to export our natural gas. Currently, nine applications have been filed with your department to export more than 20 percent of current domestic natural gas consumption. And more applications could come in to the department in addition to these initial applications.

Here are some reasons that Mr. Markey's approach is misguided:

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein's latest column is up at the Hoover Institution web site. It's about financing higher education:

Michael Kinsley writes at Bloomberg View about Jamie Dimon's compensation:

Let's even imagine that all the paper shuffling and exotic transactions that go on in American finance are productive somehow. Does it follow that we need to pay Jamie Dimon, chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co., $23 million to do whatever it is that he does?

Maybe Dimon is uniquely talented and simply would not do it for less. But maybe he would settle for $10 million if pushed to the wall. Or perhaps someone just as good, or almost as good, would do the job for a lower price? This doesn't mean that Dimon should be fired and replaced. But it does mean that he doesn't need to be paid more, or even as much.

Francois Hollande's victory in Sunday's election in France is the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at the New York Sun (here) and Reason (here).

Politico has an article about Facebook's Washington, D.C. operation:

On the Republican side, Joel Kaplan, a former member of President George W. Bush's White House staff, runs the Washington office. Greg Maurer, director of public policy, was director of member services for [House Speaker] Boehner. He works with House members.

Myriah Jordan, a former Bush administration aide and counsel to Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), is manager of public policy for Facebook and works on the firm's Hill team on the Senate side. Marne Levine, vice president of global public policy, was chief of staff of the National Economic Council under Larry Summers.

Other hires are mentioned by Washington insiders as smart: Chris Herndon, manager of public policy, who worked with Republicans on the Senate Commerce Committee and now works on the House side with Maurer; Louisa Terrell, director of public policy, who was a former White House special assistant to the president, will work on Facebook's Senate team with Jordan.

"Did Paul Ryan Throw Ayn Rand Under The Bus?" is the headline on Robert Tracinski's article at RealClearMarkets.com, which gets into some interesting issues.

USA Today has an editorial that injects some reality into President Obama's campaign to keep interest rates low on subsidized student loans, a campaign on which the president has been spending a large amount of time:

Student loan rates are as high as they are in part because they're risky. For one thing, there's no collateral, no home or a car a lender can repossess if the borrower defaults. The government can hardly take back someone's education.

And student borrowers do default; about 23% of recipients stop making payments on the subsidized Stafford loans Congress is fighting over. Private lenders that make student loans handle the risk by charging rates sharply higher than the government does — up to 12% or more.

The Obama campaign's slideshow The Life of Julia is worth a look. James Taranto, David Harsanyi, and John Podhoretz all have good responses. There's a certain serf-like, dependence-encouraging, self-reliance-sapping element to the Julia slideshow that probably explains why it has struck such a nerve. Some of the criticisms of Mr. Romney are not even accurate — the Obama slideshow, for example, warns that Mr. Romney will double interest rates on student loans, but Mr. Romney has expressed support for extending the current low, subsidized rates. There's probably some truth in the idea that at some points in people's lives they benefit more from the government and at other points they may benefit less. But it's a long distance from "ask not what your county can do for you" to "look at all the free goodies the government is giving you."

The Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting has an article about how six or seven (depending on how one counts) officials from the administration of the former governor of Maine, Democrat John Baldacci, have gotten relatively high-paying jobs at the University of Maine. Some of them bypassed the usual search processes and some of them lacked the degrees that are supposed to be required for the jobs. "Excluding benefits, the annual payroll for the seven positions is $898,000," the article says. Yet another reason that it's so important to keep that government-subsidized student loan rate nice and low.