A survey of 873 Bloomberg subscribers found "77 percent of U.S. respondents believe Obama is too anti-business and four-out-of-five are only somewhat confident or not confident of his ability to handle a financial emergency. The poll also finds a decline in Obama's overall favorability rating one year after taking office. He is viewed favorably by 27 percent of U.S. investors. In an October poll, 32 percent in the U.S. held a positive impression." There's a big difference between somewhat confident and not confident, and I'm not sure what is gained by lumping the two together. And Bloomberg subscribers are a more elite group than your average retail investor. Still, though, these aren't good numbers for Mr. Obama. The irony, too, is that on the left, the complaint is that Mr. Obama hasn't been tough enough on business, writing the health care overhaul to benefit drug companies and health insurers and not really being tough enough on the banks.

The Wall Street Journal waddles in this morning with a review of George Melloan's The Great Money Binge, which was reviewed here on FutureOfCapitalism.com all the way back on November 17, 2009.

Writing in the Washington Examiner, Timothy Carney has a fascinating item about how Senator Schumer, the senior Democrat of New York, is denouncing the Supreme Court ruling opening up campaign speech by corporations, even though he's already awash in corporate campaign contributions, and even though a dozen of Mr. Schumer's former staffers are registered Washington lobbyists. Writes Mr. Carney, "set free of from Congress's speech regulations, non-profits and corporations might not rely so much on these indirect means of political influence. That means less campaign cash coming into Schumer, fewer corporations courting Schumer's staff, and less sucking up to Schumer by lobbyists."

The passing this week of the publishing executive Ernst Cramer is a moment to reflect, not only on an amazing life story, but on the possibilities of mixing an ideological mission and a for-profit company. As an article in the Axel Springer flagship BILD reports, Cramer was born in 1913 in Augsburg. In 1938 he was imprisoned by the Nazis and and spent six weeks in the Buchenwald concentration camp before becoming one of the last Jews allowed out of Germany to America. His parents and brother were killed in the Holocaust. In America, he lived in Virginia and Mississippi and worked on a farm before enlisting in the American army and landing with the Allies at Normandy in 1944. When he arrived in Germany as part of the Allied forces, he decided to stay, and rose to a series of significant positions as a journalist and executive within Axel Springer, one of the leading publishers in Europe. I met him a few times and saw him speak in Germany, Washington, or New York at conferences of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation or the Leo Baeck Institute, and I never got to know him well, but always admired him from afar, not least for the fact that in his 80s and 90s he was bounding confidently up steps and along sidewalks. Most relevant, perhaps, to the FutureOfCapitalism.com audience is the way that Axel Springer unabashedly pursues "corporate principles" as part of the company's articles of association. They are, according to the company's Web site:

The founder and manager of the Elliott Associates hedge fund, Paul Singer, was one of my partners in the New York Sun and is the chairman of the Manhattan Institute. He recently passed along some perspectives on the financial crisis and public policy that our readers may find of interest. Before I dig into the details, one overall point is worth making – this is a climate in which people who invest for a living are spending a lot of time thinking about politics and policy, because the government is such a big player in the economy now that it's often hard to make reasonable investment decisions without making judgments about how government will act.

The Supreme Court today issued a decision (pdf) that may, in the long run, be an even bigger victory for individual freedom and defeat for government power than Scott Brown's victory in the Massachusetts U.S. Senate election. In the case, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, a 5-4 majority consisting of Justices Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, and Alito struck down a ban on electioneering communications by corporations, saying the restriction was a violation of the First Amendment guarantee of free speech. In doing so, the court overturned a 1990 precedent, Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, in which a 6-3 majority led by Justice Thurgood Marshall found that the public interest in fighting corruption justified such restrictions on corporate political expenditures.

Today's New York Times gives big play to an article about a federal case against 22 arms-industry executives that the newspaper describes as "the biggest prosecution of individuals for foreign corporate bribery ever pursued by the Justice Department." The article makes clear that the "bribes" in question were actually payments by arms dealers to undercover FBI agents posing as African government officials. I emailed Harvey Silverglate, a lawyer and civil liberties activist who is author of Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent. "Isn't that entrapment?" I asked, "Are there any limits on this sort of thing? I realize it happens all the time -- Marion Barry, Abscam, street-level local drug type operations -- but am I wrong to be uncomfortable with the blurring of the distinction between an actual crime and a potential crime manufactured by the government for the purpose of tempting people into violating the law?"

Whether by design or by accident, the big Warren Buffett news that most pess outlets focused on yesterday were his comments on the Kraft-Cadbury deal and the bank tax, not his company's $97.2 million settlement with the SEC on charges stemming from a transaction in which four GenRe executives were eventually convicted and sentenced to prison for fraud. The story was buried on page C2 of today's Wall Street Journal, and it didn't appear at all in the New York Times, which did post a blog item about it early this morning. Becky Quick didn't ask about it during her half-hour interview with Mr. Buffett on CNBC, nor did Bloomberg News's Betty Liu in her interview with Mr. Buffett. It's hard to think of another very rich business executive who could get in this much hot water with the government and still enjoy such a pure, folksy popular reputation.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates has a new Web site up, and while the organization is a bit clunky, the substance is fascinating; those with a free-market perspective will find a lot to like. A few examples:

CNBC had a half-hour this morning with Warren Buffett that made for some interesting viewing. Mr. Buffett complained that the government had diluted his stake in Wells Fargo. "I didn't like it. The government forced him to issue shares," Mr. Buffett said. "The government's done a lot of good things for the economy, and net I'm a beneficiary and Berkshire Hathaway is a beneficiary of the things overall that they've done. But they cost us real money at Well Fargo."

Mr. Buffett, who supports increases in the estate tax (which incentivizes people to sell their businesses to him) and in income taxes (which he mostly avoids paying), criticized President Obama's proposal of a tax on banks (which would hurt Mr. Buffett's bank holdings in Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs among others). "I don't understand that. It's some kind of a guilt tax," he said. Instead of taxing bankers, he said, why not a special tax on autoworkers who benefited from the auto bailout or on members of Congress who "ran Fannie and Freddie." "It just doesn't make any sense to me," Mr. Buffett said.

Bloomberg News has an article about investors annoyed that hedge funds wouldn't let them withdraw their money in the downturn. "Hedge-fund firms including D.E. Shaw & Co. and Harbinger Capital Partners LLC that froze client assets during the financial crisis have yet to pay back a total of about $77 billion to investors, according to estimates by Credit Suisse Tremont Index LLC, which tracks hedge funds," the article says. "D.E. Shaw, the $28 billion investment firm run by David E. Shaw, restricted quarterly redemptions on its two biggest funds in November 2008 even after one of the funds had made money that year and the firm told clients that it had enough cash to meet Dec. 31, 2008, redemptions, according to investors. D.E. Shaw plans to return all money to investors by the end of this month, including $3.4 billion from its Occulus fund, which gained as much as 6.9 percent in 2008 and 10.5 percent last year through October, investors said." What Bloomberg doesn't mention in this article is that while D.E. Shaw's investors had trouble getting their money out, at least one of its employees had no such trouble. That would be the chief of President Obama's National Economic Council, Lawrence Summers, who earned $5.2 million a year for his one-day-a-week job at the D.E. Shaw hedge fund. Now D.E. Shaw is trying to get the Obama administration's Securities and Exchange Commission to write short-selling regulations that favor it.

How big a win was it last night for Scott Brown? The Kennedy compound is in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, which is actually part of the town of Barnstable on Cape Cod. Scott Brown won in nine out of nine precincts in the town of Barnstable and carried the town overall by a margin of 12,331 to 7,543, or 61% to 37%, according to the town election results (pdf). Senator Kennedy's neighbors, in other words, voted for Scott Brown by a wide margin.

Thomas Frank has an intriguing column in today's Wall Street Journal.

Is it just me, or did the Republican nomination to run against Senator Schumer in New York in 2010 all of a sudden get a lot more valuable after Scott Brown's apparent victory in Massachusetts. You could say that a Schumer opponent would be off to a late start, or that New York is a heavily Democratic state, but Massachusetts is heavily Democratic state, too, and Mr. Brown's rise in the polls came quickly. It was just last month that the pundits were claiming that victory in the Democratic primary in the Bay State was "tantamount" to election.

It's not just the Republicans who will have some new choices confronting them if Scott Brown emerges as the victor in the U.S. Senate election in Massachusetts. The Democrats will face a decision, too, about whether to pull back or press ahead with their legislative agenda.

The outlines of the debate are already there. Rep. Eliot Engel, a Democrat from the Bronx, tells the Daily News that a loss by Democrats in Massachusetts would force a quick House vote on health care. "I'm telling you, Massachusetts, if it goes wrong, is going to be a big catalyst to push a vote," said Bronx Rep. Eliot Engel, who is among many in the House frustrated with how long the Senate took. "They will tell us that it's now or never, we've gotta have a bill, we've gotta do this, we've gotta do that."