Real Congressional Reform– The Art Auble Plan

The draft report from the Fiscal Responsibility Commission, subject of my previous post, has some proposals for reform of how Congress makes (or doesn’t make) expenditure decisions.  Frankly, I do not understand them.  Perhaps this is because the draft report is simply a series of slides, not really a report.  Or maybe these things are too complex for a simpleton like me to understand.

Separately, there is apparently a proposal to cut Congresspersons’ pay, and even one to reduce their pay every year that the government runs a deficit.

But these won’t work, for a very simple reason: Continue reading Real Congressional Reform– The Art Auble Plan

Fiscal responsibility and reform

The “President’s National Committee on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform” has issued its “draft report,” actually just a series of powerpoint-like slides in pdf format, with a few complete sentences here and there.   Yves Smith [correction: These comments were guest-posted on Naked Capitalism but originate at The Daily Bail] has already posted comments, of which I fully endorse the last sentence, but I would like to expand a bit here on my own site.

Now, it would be too much to expect the President’s Commission to suggest anything that would seriously change the way the powers-that-be conduct their business.  Continue reading Fiscal responsibility and reform

Car plague and bankster plague intersect

I have long tried to avoid any dealings with the various tentacles of Chase Morgan Stanley, figuring somehow or other I would be injured by them.  Apparently, at least in Colorado, some (or all?) of their staff are exempt from prosecution for assault.  Google finds only two reports, one from the UK Daily Mail , one from the Vail Daily, local to the event.

In case these links disappear, the first three sentences from the Daily Mail story give a pretty good summary.

A financial manager for wealthy clients will not face charges for a hit-and-run because it could jeopardise his job, it has been revealed. Martin Joel Erzinger, 52, was set to face felony charges for running over a doctor who he hit from behind in his 2010 Mercedes Benz, and then speeding off. But now he will simply face two misdemeanour traffic charges from the July 3 incident in Eagle, Colorado.

And from the Daily Vail:

Erzinger, an Arrowhead homeowner, is a director in private wealth management at Morgan Stanley Smith Barney in Denver. His biography on Worth.com states that Erzinger is “dedicated to ultra high net worth individuals, their families and foundations.”

Erzinger manages more than $1 billion in assets. He would have to publicly disclose any felony charge within 30 days, according to North American Securities Dealers regulations.

The decision to drop felony charges was made by the local prosecutor, over the victim’s objections.  One infers from the articles that the Erzinger will pay some monetary restitution.

More details from the Daily Vail:

Erzinger drove all the way through Avon, the town’s roundabouts, under I-70 and stopped in the Pizza Hut parking lot where he called the Mercedes auto assistance service to report damage to his vehicle, and asked that his car be towed, records show. He did not ask for law enforcement assistance, according to court records.

Erzinger told police he was unaware he had hit Milo, court documents say….

Meanwhile another motorist, Steven Lay of Eagle, stopped to help Milo and called 911.

It appears that neither the perpetrator nor the victim is British, so it’s kind of curious why the Daily Mail covered this.  Or maybe more curious why only one paper in North America did.

ht Naked Capitalism

Are you smarter than a hedge fund trader?

As for me, I’m just a little dumber than average, among the people who undertook the Trader’s Brain Scan, a test of memory and pattern recognition skills which presumably are important to profitable trading in financial markets.  Nothing on the test about bribing Congressbeings or extracting inside information from officials. Maybe that’s in one of the other modules.

This is among a dozen tests for (actual or aspiring) investors, traders, and entrepreneurs at Marketpsych.  Free registration (giving them an email address and signing their agreement) is required, but the results appear right in your browser as well as in the emails they send, and your name is not requested.

You could invest in privilege…

…thru the Rent Seeking ETF proposed by blogger Cassandra Does Tokyo.

Companies that purchase influence, contracts, and favorable legislation/regulation are worthy of investor attention (not because they are more dynamic, which they aren’t) but because they have a definable edge – something many others cannot boast about. Of course, ETF marketers would need to sanitize the pursuit into something like “Government Partnership Focused ETF”…

Somehow she omitted land from this fund; I guess there are already ETF’s for real estate.

Corporate income tax is evil

We know that because “Don’t be evil” Google pays almost no corporate income tax.   This Bloomberg/Business Week article outlines how they do it.  It involves Dutch, Irish, and Bermudan subsidiaries, and is apparently quite legal.  In addition to playing international transfer-pricing games, of course, corporations can take advantage of various incentives and loopholes built into or discovered in the tax code.

Naturally, I am mentioning this to point out that a land value tax cannot be avoided, as long as land transaction, description, and payment records are public. (And, I might add, as long as there are some reasonably free news media, and some members of the public who pay at least a little bit of attention.) There is never any question as to which jursidiction land is in, and there is no need for incentives to attact land.

Dangerous checks, no balances

I always knew that those checks sent by the credit card companies were dangerous.  You pay a cash advance fee, and interest; it’s extremely unlikely that you couldn’t get better rates elsewhere if you urgently need cash.  Now I have received from Discover Card some unilateral revisions to the Cardmember “Agreement:”

We will charge you a Returned Discover Card Check Fee each time we decline to honor a Discover Card cash advance check, balance transfer check, promotional purchase check, or other promotional check.  The amount of this fee is $25, except [if we have already done this to you within the past six months] it will be $35.

So, any time they want, if I try to use one of those checks, they can pick up an easy $25 or more.  Probably put something nasty on my credit report, too.

Banksters as parasites

At the Monetary Reform Conference a couple weeks ago, Michael Hudson asserted that banksters, like biological parasites,  change the way the host thinks, to better suit the parasite’s needs.  I wouldn’t question this regarding  banksters, but I doubted the biological fact. Then I encountered the October 9 episode of Radio National’s All in the Mind.   Mice infected by toxoplasma lose their fear of cats. Fish infected by trematodes behave in ways to attract predator birds, etc.

The site includes a transcript, audio, and (scroll way down to) an extensive bibliography.

We Institutionalize Kleptocracy

That’s how Yves Smith describes the probable outcome of the latest bunch of mortgage finance scandals.  We already know that lenders lied, brokers lied, consumers were instructed to lie, and the whole house of cards was built on perpetually-rising land prices. In recent weeks, and especially the past couple of days, we are learning that the back office lied too, nobody bothered to process much of the paperwork, it was easier to just forge documents as needed, and for many parcels it will be difficult or impossible for tell who really owns the mortgage (which likely will never be repaid anyway as it far exceeds what the property could be sold for).

The solution? Smith (and others) expect the federal authorities to move in, Continue reading We Institutionalize Kleptocracy