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Don’t Fear the Taper

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You can’t avoid reading about it.  The stock market is sinking  . . .  Treasury bond yields are spiking   .  .  .  The TAPER is coming!

The panic began in the wake of Jon Hilsenrath’s May 10 Wall Street Journal  report (after the markets closed on that Friday afternoon) concerning a new strategy by the Federal Reserve to “wind down” its quantitative easing program.  The disclosure was carefully timed to give investors an opportunity to process the information and get used to the idea before the next opening bell of the stock market.

By the time the stock market reopened on Monday, May 13 – the first trading day after Jon Hilsenrath’s article – there was a surprising report on April Retail Sales from the Commerce Department’s Census Bureau.  The report disclosed that retail sales had unexpectedly increased by 0.1 percent in April, despite economists’ expectations of a 0.3 percent decline.  As a result, the Taper report had no significant impact on stock prices – at least on that day.

The Wall Street Journal report carried plenty of weight because of Jon Hilsenrath’s role as de facto “press secretary” for Ben Bernanke, as I discussed in my last posting.  Since the WSJ article’s publication, there has been a steady stream of commentary about the threats posed by the Taper.  Nevertheless, the word “taper” was never used in Hilsenrath’s article.  In fact, the article included an explanation by Philly FedHead (and FOMC member) Charles Plosser, that the Fed has “a dial that can move either way”.  The dial could be set to a particular level with either an increase or a decrease.

Regardless of whatever the Fed may have planned, the flow of commentary has focused on the notion that the Fed is about to taper back on its bond buying.  The current incarnation of quantitative easing (QE 4) involves the Fed’s purchase of $45 billion in bonds and $40 billion in mortgage-backed securities every month.  We are supposed to believe that the Fed will gradually ease back on the bond purchases – whether it might begin with a reduction to $40 billion or $35 billion in monthly purchases  . . .  the Fed will gradually taper the amount down to zero.

Despite what you may have read or heard about the taper, it’s not going to work that way.  Beyond that, taper is not really an appropriate way to describe the Fed’s plan.  In other words:

Don’t fear the taper.

Josh Brown interviewed Jon Hilsenrath for CNBC on May 22.  Here is what Josh Brown had to say about the interview:

There was one thing Jon Hilsenrath did say in my interview with him on TV last night that I think is very important and clears up a big misconception. He explained that Bernanke himself will not be using the term “taper” that everyone else is bandying about. The reason why is that the Fed does not want to create the impression that one policy move will necessarily be attached to three or four others. In other words, suppose the Fed were to drop its rate of monthly asset purchases from $85 billion to some less number in one of the next meetings. This could be a one-off action with nothing else behind it, designed to temper the market’s expectations and gauge the effects.

I’d remind you that what Bernanke, as a self-styled “student of the Depression” fears the most, is a premature tightening a la FDR in 1937-1938, just as the nation was finally on the mend. If you think that this central bank, which has just spent the last six years patiently reflating the economy, is about to yank the rug out from under it at the last moment, then you haven’t been paying attention.

The wave of panic which followed Jon Hilsenrath’s May 10 article about the Fed’s plans for its quantitative easing program has yet to be calmed by Hilsenrath’s clarification about how the Fed’s new strategy is likely to proceed.  As Napoleon once said:

“Men are Moved by two levers only: fear and self interest.”


 

Bernanke Taper Caper

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On May 11, Bruce Krasting expressed outrage about Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s use of The Wall Street Journal’s Jon Hilsenrath as his “point man” for leaking out the latest news from the Fed.  Hilsenrath’s Friday afternoon report (after the markets closed) that the Federal Reserve is working on a strategy to taper back its quantitative easing program was carefully orchestrated to avoid roiling the stock market.

We recently saw a demonstration of how important the quantitative easing program has been to investors.  On Thursday, May 9, both the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 fell from intraday record highs during the last 90 minutes of the session.  Philadelphia Federal Reserve president Charles Plosser announced that he would join forces with Kansas City FedHead Esther George to advocate attenuation of the quantitative easing program at the June 18 FOMC meeting.  The news definitely spooked the stock market.

Friday’s report from Hilsenrath/Bernanke gave investors a chance to process what was being disclosed and to get comfortable with the idea that quantitative easing will not go on forever.  The leak was obviously timed to provide a decent interval before the stock market opened again.  There is no definite plan in place to end the quantitative easing program by any particular date, nor is there a planned date for the inception of the wind-down being discussed.  Here is a bit of how Hilsenrath explained what is taking place:

Officials are focusing on clarifying the strategy so markets don’t overreact about their next moves.  For example, officials want to avoid creating expectations that their retreat will be a steady, uniform process like their approach from 2003 to 2006, when they raised short-term interest rates in a series of quarter-percentage-point increments over 17 straight policy meetings.

Hilsenrath’s quote of Dallas FedHead Richard Fisher’s explanation of the plan was beautiful:  “I don’t want to go from wild turkey to cold turkey“.

Bruce Krasting was the first to begin spreading panic and misinformation about Hilsenrath’s report.  Here’s an example:

The Fed’s new plan is to taper off QE over the balance of the year.

Of course, the foregoing statement is completely untrue.  Hilsenrath never said that.  Does Bruce Krasting have his own source on the Federal Reserve Board, who is leaking secret information to him? 

Perhaps we might see some of Bernanke’s foes initiate a Congressional inquiry into the “Tapergate scandal”.  What did Jon Hilsenrath know and when did he know it?

For a long time, Hilsenrath’s role as Ben Bernanke’s de facto press secretary has been a subject of cynical commentary.  Many have joked that Hilsenrath will replace Bernanke when he retires.  At Bernanke’s press conferences which follow the FOMC meetings, I keep expecting to hear the moderator announce that the next question will come from Jon Hilsenrath of The Wall Street Journal  .   .   .   Hilsenrath would then take the microphone and say:

You know, Ben – that last question just reminded me of another matter which would be really important to these people   .  .  .

Meanwhile, back in the real world, stock market investors are being confronted with the challenge of taking baby steps toward the idea of life without quantitative easing.  At the same time – as Jon Hilsenrath explained – the Fed is attempting to reach a decision on when to begin such a tapering effort.


 

Seeing Through Obama

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Obama is back giving Centrism a bad name.  His budget proposal has drawn criticism because it incorporates a mechanism for reducing Social Security Cost-of-Living benefits called the “chained CPI”, which ties those adjustments to the inflation rate.  Obama’s inclusion of the chained CPI has drawn harsh criticism from Progressives as well as the Liberal base of the Democratic Party.  Although the President and his sycophants characterize this proposal as an example of “Centrist” politics, it is actually an example of the economic neoliberalism which the Disappointer-in-Chief has advanced since taking office in 2009.

Despite its liberal slant, the FiredogLake blog has been critical of Obama since the beginning of his first term.  A recent article by Jon Walker at FDL presents an unvarnished look at Obama’s motives for including the chained CPI in his budget:

Obama didn’t put chained-CPI in for Republicans, regardless what he may claim.  While Republicans like to talk a big game on entitlements they have shown no real interest in cutting benefits for current retirees, who are the most important part of their base.

The comments to Walker’s piece give us a look at how a good number of liberals are finally seeing through the man who was advertised as an agent of Hope and Change.  I was particularly impressed by the following comment from a reader identified as “coloradoblue”:

War criminal
Mass murderer
Crimes against humanity
Crimes against the American people
Crimes against the constitution he swore to uphold
Failure to investigate, prosecute and punish the war criminals of the last administration
Failure to investigate, prosecute and punish the crimes of wall street
Destroyer of the legacy of FDR and LBJ and the dem party
Liar
Failure

Hell of legacy you’ve got there Barry. Hell of a legacy.

Oh, Snap!

Lest I repeat the entire batch of comments, I’ll include just one more. Reading through them provides one with the opportunity to understand the extent of disappointment in Obama, as expressed by those who voted for him.  This comment was from an individual using the name, “BearCountry”:

o was never really the “capitulator in chief.”  He has worked to destroy the safety net since he became pres.  When I voted for him in ’08 I knew he was not going to be a savior for the nation, but I didn’t realize how bad he would be.  He is worse than w because he knows full well what he is doing.  Those that defend him or blame the repugs are simply deluding themselves.

Progressive Democrats chose Obama over Hillary Clinton because they wanted to avoid electing a President who would advance the same neoliberalism we saw from Bill Clinton, the man who signed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 into law.  Bill Clinton’s enactment of that legislation completely deregulated derivatives trading, eventually giving rise to such “financial weapons of mass destruction” as naked credit default swaps, which brought us the 2008 financial crisis.

When Hillary begins her run for the 2016 Democratic Nomination, it will be interesting to see whether any of her opponents exploit the photo of Bubba and Blankfein in Boca.  On February 19 of 2012, The Business Insider published this photo of Bill Clinton having lunch with Goldman Sachs CEO, Lloyd Blankfein at the Boca Raton Resort and Country Club.  Obama’s function as a tool of the Wall Street megabanks will provide an ongoing reminder to anyone entertaining the thought of supporting Hillary, as to what they could expect from another Clinton administration.

Meanwhile Barry O. Tool is gonna’ have some ’splianin’ to do about his chained CPI proposal.  His angry former supporters will want some answers.


 

Why I Avoid Using Stop-Loss Orders

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I haven’t been posting here for a while because I have been busy writing about the stock market at the Wall Street Sector Selector website.

Within three months after I first started this blog, I began criticizing the permissive attitude taken by the Securities and Exchange Commission toward predatory securities trading tactics.

Since that time absolutely nothing has changed.  In fact, the SEC has allowed the stock market to become an even more dangerous place for “retail investors” (mom and pop) to keep their life savings.

The use of “limit orders” has become a joke.  The only reason for using a limit order is to let your enemies (the predatory traders) know the maximum extent to which you will allow yourself to be screwed on a trade.  Since July of 2009, I have discussed the threat posed to retail investors by the use of High-Frequency Trading (HFT) systems.  Computers – programmed with predatory algorithms – can engage in “computerized front-running” through the use of “flash orders” to force your own limit order to be executed at its most extreme expense to you.  I discussed this situation in more detail on May 18, 2010.

I rarely use “stop loss” orders.  They are used by investors to limit their loss if a stock price sinks.  The investor specifies a stop price (based on a percentage of the purchase price which is the maximum amount the investor is willing to lose on the stock).  If the stock eventually drops to the price in the stop order, the transaction is initiated and the order goes out to the exchange as a market order – to be filled at the best available price at the time.  In other words, there is no guarantee that the order will be filled at the price specified in the stop order.  In the “flash crash” on May 6 of 2010, many investors lost their shirts because their stop orders were executed and by the time the investors tried to repurchase the stocks, the prices rebounded to where they were before the flash crash.  Worse yet, by the time their stop orders were actually filled, the stock prices had dropped tremendously.  Not only did those investors lose money on the stop orders for no good reason – but many chose to buy back their stocks at the pre-crash prices.  As a result, they lost twice as much money just because of an emotional attachment to the stock.  (Emotional attachment to a particular stock is a bad investment habit.)  Since that time, a number of “mini flash crashes” have been engineered by predatory traders on particular stocks, forcing investors off their positions to take losses, which ultimately benefit the predators, who use stealthy tactics to reap those profits without being caught.

Maureen Farrell recently wrote an interesting piece for CNNMoney about the consequences of  “mini flash crashes”.  Here is some of what she had to say:

Stock exchanges have explicit rules for canceling “clearly erroneous trades” and for triggering so-called circuit breakers that halt trading.  None of the trades mentioned in this story met that criteria.

Generally, trades can be canceled if they fall 5% to 10% from the last trade, but the rules vary, depending on the market cap of a company and its trading volume.

Investors still have to notify the exchange within 30 minutes if they want their trade to be canceled.

And because many of the wild swings aren’t extreme enough to be considered “clearly erroneous,” individual investors may not even be aware that certain trades are being executed.

Although the article noted that “(t)he SEC continues to make changes to try to combat the frequency and impact of the mini flash crashes”, there is apparently nothing being done by the SEC to prevent the predatory engineering of those crashes.  The SEC is apparently doing nothing to allow investors to unwind trades triggered by those crashes.  More important, the SEC is doing nothing to track down and prosecute the culprits responsible for engineering and profiteering from these events.

Wall Street needs a new Sheriff.


 

Davos X Factors

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On January 23-27 the World Economic Forum held its tres chic annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland.  Admission was by invitation only.  Nick Paumgarten of The New Yorker offered the following explanation of how different segments of society view the annual Davos event:

People like to project onto Davos their fears and fantasies about the way the world works. Right-wingers see insidious, delusional liberalism, in its stakeholder ethos and its pretense of world improvement.  They picture a bunch of Keynesians, Continentals, and self-dealing do-gooders participating in some kind of off-the-books top-down command-control charade.  Left-wingers conjure a plutocratic cabal, a Star Chamber of master puppeteers, the one per cent – or .01 per cent, really – deciding the world’s fate behind a curtain of heavy security and utopian doublespeak.  The uninvited, the refuseniks, and even many of the participants see a colossal discharge of hot air, a peacock strut.  They all deploy, with a sneer, the term Davos Man, coined by the late political scientist Samuel Huntington, who decried a post-national wealthy globe-trotting élite.  Davos Man can be either a capitalist oppressor or a Commie conspirator.  Either way, he is a windbag, a pedant, and a hypocrite. Businesspeople who have never been to Davos find many ways to be dismissive of it: “I can’t do business there.”  “It’s too political.”  “It’s not what it used to be.”  The translation may be that that person has not been invited.

The World Economic Forum’s website explained the role of its official communities:

A key part of the Forum’s activities is the creation of distinctive communities of Member and Partner companies as well as leaders from civil society for more informal opportunities for interaction.

I would assume that at this year’s meeting, one of the most popular topics must have been risk management – including risk aversion.  Ever since the financial crisis, the world has been on the verge of economic chaos.  The possibility that Silvio Berlusconi could return to power in Italy has heightened concerns that the European sovereign debt crisis could reverse course from its current recovery trajectory and head into oblivion.

One of the World Economic Forum’s communities is the Risk Response Network.  The RRN “was launched to provide private and public sector leaders with an independent, impartial platform to map, monitor and mitigate global risks.”  It is comprised of individual representatives of leading global corporations, research institutions, media outlets, governments and NGOs.  The Risk Response Network released a 78-page report for this year’s annual meeting entitled, Global Risks 2013 — Eighth Edition.  The report’s topics included:  Testing Economic and Environmental Resilience, Digital Wildfires in a Hyperconnected World, The Dangers of Hubris on Human Health and Building National Resilience to Global Risks.

I found Section 5 of Global Risks 2013 to be particularly interesting.  It begins on page 55 of the report and is entitled, “X Factors”.  The report described this section in the following terms:

In this section, developed in collaboration with Nature, a leading science journal, the Risk Response Network asks readers to look beyond our high-risk concerns of the moment to consider a set of five X factors and reflect on what countries or companies should be doing to anticipate them.

*   *   *

X factors are serious issues, grounded in the latest scientific findings, but somewhat remote from what are generally seen as more immediate concerns such as failed states, extreme weather events, famine, macroeconomic instability or armed conflict. They capture broad and vaguely understood issues that could be hatching grounds for potential future risks (or opportunities).

The five X Factors discussed in the report were these:

Runaway climate change:  Is it possible that we have already passed a point of no return and that Earth’s atmosphere is tipping rapidly into an inhospitable state?

Significant cognitive enhancement:  Ethical dilemmas akin to doping in sports could start to extend into daily working life; an arms race in the neural “enhancement” of combat troops could also ensue.

Rogue deployment of geoengineering:  Technology is now being developed to manipulate the climate; a state or private individual could use it unilaterally.

Costs of living longer:  Medical advances are prolonging life, but long-term palliative care is expensive.  Covering the costs associated with old age could be a struggle.

Discovery of alien life:  Proof of life’s existence elsewhere in the universe could have profound psychological implications for human belief systems.

My favorite was the last X Factor:  Discovery of alien life.  Although the report focused on the notion that astronomers involved in the study of exoplanets could find spectral information revealing chemical signs of life, the last paragraph of the section provided some insights on the fear which has been keeping this subject under wraps for years:

Through basic education and awareness campaigns the general public can achieve a higher science and space literacy and cognitive resilience that would prepare them and prevent undesired social consequences of such a profound discovery and paradigm shift concerning mankind’s position in the universe.

So The Powers That Be are worried about “undesired social consequences” and “paradigm shift”.  Why is that not a surprise?

Those in search of “the right stuff” on this subject might be interested in what the late astronaut, Gordon Cooper had to say about it.

A good “basic education and awareness campaign” should begin with that video clip.


 

Obstruction of Justice

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Two years ago, I was inspired to write a piece entitled, “Justice Denied” after seeing hedge fund manager, David Einhorn interviewed by Charlie Rose.  I also discussed an essay Jesse Eisenger wrote for the DealBook blog at The New York Times entitled, “The Feds Stage a Sideshow While the Big Tent Sits Empty”.  The piece reinforced my suspicion that the “insider trading” investigation which received so much publicity in December of 2010 was simply a diversionary tactic to direct public attention away from the crimes which caused the financial crisis.

Since that time, a good deal of commentary has been written, lamenting the fact that no criminal charges have been brought against the miscreants who caused the financial crisis.  Unfortunately, Attorney General Eric Hold-Harmless has taken no action against those responsible, while the time for bringing those charges within the applicable Statutes of Limitations was allowed to tick away.

With the expiration of the relevant Statutes of Limitations, the next question becomes:  Does the failure to prosecute those cases rise to the level of obstruction of justice?  Although President Obama has repeatedly insisted that “no crimes were committed” which could have caused the financial crisis, we are now learning that such was not the case.

Jesse Eisenger recently wrote another piece for the Deal Book blog at the New York Times entitled, “Financial Crisis Lawsuit Suggests Bad Behavior at Morgan Stanley” which appeared on January 23.  In that essay, Eisenger discussed how the discovery process in civil lawsuits against the Wall Street Banks involved in the creation of the collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) based on subprime mortgages, revealed that those CDOs were known to be toxic at the time they were marketed.

The Naked Capitalism website has provided and excellent roadmap to the skulduggery involving the role CDOs played in causing the financial crisis.

Matt Taibbi has written another magnum opus on the financial crisis, this time focusing on sleazy conduct which took place after the meltdown.  In his article for Rolling Stone entitled, “Secrets and Lies of the Bailout”, we were reminded how the bank bailouts not only unjustly enriched the culprits who caused the problem – but they also provided the opportunity for those too-big-to-fail institutions to become even bigger while facilitating the cover-up of how the original mess occurred:

The public has been lied to so shamelessly and so often in the course of the past four years that the failure to tell the truth to the general populace has become a kind of baked-in, official feature of the financial rescue.  Money wasn’t the only thing the government gave Wall Street – it also conferred the right to hide the truth from the rest of us.  And it was all done in the name of helping regular people and creating jobs.  “It is,” says former bailout Inspector General Neil Barofsky, “the ultimate bait-and-switch.”

Despite so many efforts to hide the truth from “the little people”, the truth is slowly leaking out as a result of the dogged investigation by journalists and bloggers.  As discovery proceeds in the civil lawsuits against the megabanks, revealing the extent of criminal activity which brought about the most catastrophic economic disaster since the Great Depression, people will begin to ask:  “How did they get away with this?”  Perhaps the best way to answer that question would be to bring criminal charges against those who allowed the perpetrators to get away with it.


 

2012 Jackass of the Year Award

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It’s already time to announce the winner of TheCenterLane.com’s fifth annual Jackass of the Year Award.  This was another one of those years when we had a last-minute contestant, who tried to his best to snatch the award away from those who had been working all year for the honor.

In the aftermath of the tragic mass-murder of 26 young children at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, the National Rifle Association’s vice-president, Wayne LaPierre, held his infamous press conference on December 21, wherein he blamed everything except guns for the killings.  LaPierre blamed television violence, video games, hurricanes, “other natural or man-made disaster(s)”, terrorist attacks, and numerous other scapegoats.  Did he blame porn?  I can’t remember.  After the press conference, even Rupert Murcoch’s New York Post saw fit to trash the guy with its headline:  “Gun Nut: NRA Loon In Bizarre Rant Over Newtown”.  The New York Daily News ran a headline describing LaPierre as a “vile NRA nut”, and the “Craziest Man on Earth”.  Although I lack the professional credentials to render a diagnosis on the sanity of any individual, I do know a jackass when I see one.  Wayne LaPierre is such a severe jackass that he deserves serious consideration as our 2012 Jackass of the Year.

Every year I have to resist the temptation to nominate Stuart Varney of Fox News.  Varney is the senior business commentator for the Fox News Network.  It seems as though Jon Stewart runs at least one video clip per week of Varney making a fool of himself.  Varney is an unabashed hater of solar power and most other sources of “green energy”.  He frequently refers to advocates of green energy as “greenies”, as though such an approach were something shameful.  Nevertheless, Varney was able to dodge the award this year with his recent interview with Tommy Chong.  The interview wasn’t that great, but it was good enough to warrant sparing Varney the indignity of this award.

Unfortunately, there is no single individual whom we can blame for the December 21 hysteria.  The Vancouver Sun ran an interesting article about a local author named Brad Carrigan, who did his part to promote a good bit of the December 21 foolishness through a website where he sold books, videos, his own seminars and sessions at his “spiritual retreat centre in the mountains”.  Unfortunately, Carrigan did not become prominent enough to earn our Jackass of the Year Award.

In an election year, the candidates are usually too easy to single out for this award.  Nevertheless, the 2012 Presidential Campaign brought us this year’s Jackass of the Year Award winner:  Donald Trump.  His idiotic “birther-ism” served no other purpose than to motivate 400,000 people to sign a petition, requesting Macy’s to abandon its relationship with Trump.  A good place to find a handy list of reasons why Trump deserves this award can be found at the New York Daily News website.  There you will find a link to Penn Jillette’s book excerpt at Salon about Trump and what it was like to appear on Celebrity Apprentice.  According to Jillette, Trump really cares about the things insignificant bloggers have to say about him.  As one such insignificant blogger, all I can say is:  Congratulations, Jackass!


 

Too Much Apocalypse

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It happened again.  Another psycho went on a random killing spree.  As usual, the public is concerned with why and how this could have happened.  The expiration of the assault weapons ban, the popularity of ultra-violent video games and television violence are once again the focus of concern.  Mike Huckabee asserted that all of these episodes are happening because our public schools aren’t teaching kids about God.  What makes more sense is psychological evaluation of the particular killers rather than a simplistic panacea which would happen to benefit a pundit’s own industry.

I have my own cynical opinions about these events.  My fundamental beef concerns the wall-to-wall coverage these tragedies receive from the news media as well as the manner in which these calamities are covered.  The excessive coverage reinforces callousness – not only in the hearts of the viewers – but in the dark souls of the creeps who commit these acts.  My own cynicism surfaces immediately after one of these episodes occurs.  My first concern is what theme the news media will use in presenting the coverage of a particular tragedy and all of its tangential subplots.  The Teevee News Tragedy Exploitation Guidelines suggest that the first step involves the selection of a title that will be used for introducing the story every time it is discussed.  Alliteration is always a necessity for these titles.  After the Denver killings, I anticipated that a popular title would be “Midnight Movie Massacre”.  However, my choice was a bit over-the-top as it brought to mind images of the Crypt Keeper and Vincent Price.  As it turned out, “Movie Massacre” was a widely-used theme.  A friend of mine had suggested “Horror in Aurora”, although her choice lacked the necessary alliteration and it sounded like the name of an Ali fight.  For the most recent event, I am anticipating the use of “Slaughter at Sandy Hook” and “Kindergarten Killings”.

The second step in the Teevee News Tragedy Exploitation Guidelines involves both the selection of a visual image – or logo – for the tragedy as well as a somber theme melody.  The previously-discussed tile will appear as part of the logo.  The logo and the music will run whenever the story is introduced.

The third step in the Teevee News Tragedy Exploitation Guidelines requires interviews with people who can explain how the killer was always “a quiet guy who kept to himself”.

The fourth step involves providing coverage of the people who gather at makeshift shrines and participate in ad hoc memorial services in response to the killings.  They’re a dependable lot.  Although these individuals are always portrayed as kind, empathic souls, I would bet that many of them are the same characters who participate in Black Friday brawls at K-Mart, due to a pathological need to participate in media events – which is what brings many of them to these memorials.

An unpleasant byproduct of the saturation coverage teevee news gives to these events is a more hardened, callous public reaction to future tragedies of a similar nature.  During the weeks after the Challenger space shuttle disaster in 1986, a series of “shuttle jokes” began to make the rounds of office water coolers, bars, parties and other social gatherings across the country.  I remember reading an article in Time magazine during that period, wherein a psychologist explained that telling such jokes is a natural defense mechanism used by people to put distance between themselves and a tragedy, which is not really a part of their own lives.  Their experience of the tragedy came from extensive television coverage of the event.  Beyond the callousness which results as such a defense mechanism, can exposure to constant saturation coverage of similar shooting tragedies motivate an individual – who might already be pre-disposed to such behavior – to commit such an act himself because he became “hardened” in the same way Saddam Hussein “hardened” his sons by making them watch acts of torture?

I suspect that a key “conditioning” effect resulting from the manner in which the news business is conducted these days, comes from the constant drumbeat of apocalypse.  Before we have fully recovered from the 2008 financial meltdown, we are now informed that the country is headed off a fiscal cliff.  Not to worry, though – the Mayans have already told us that the world will be coming to an end on Friday.  Is it really any wonder that we have been seeing an upsurge of random, mass shooting incidents?

We might find – when we are all still alive on Saturday and if the “fiscal cliff” turns out to be a fiscal bunny hill – that the number of shooting sprees subsides later this year.  Let’s hope so.


 

Y2 Cliff

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Have you become sick of hearing about it?  The Mayan End of the World is less than three weeks away and the people on the teevee keep talking about the Fiscal Cliff.  I’m still waiting for Comet Kohoutek.  For those of you who are too young to remember, here is what Wikipedia tells us about Comet Kohoutek:

Before its close approach, Kohoutek was hyped by the media as the “comet of the century”.  However, Kohoutek’s display was considered a let-down, possibly due to partial disintegration when the comet closely approached the sun prior to Earth flyby.

Our next media-hyped non-event was the infamous Y2K story.  Thousands of people started hoarding canned food, building shelters and preparing for a Cro-Magnon lifestyle because the computers thought that every year began with the two digits 1 and 9.  Yeah, that happened.

This week, everyone is talking about the Fiscal Cliff.  By now, there have been enough sober reports (and lawsuits by the Mayans) to force people into the realization that the world will not end on the 21st day of this month.  The country has found a better focus for its consensual panic:  The Cliff.  Concerns voiced by Ben Bernanke and others brought our attention to the possibility that if our government resumes its budget standoff – after the can was kicked down the road last summer – our government’s credit rating could face another cut.  As a result, Bernanke invented the cliff metaphor and everyone ran with it – despite the fact that it is not appropriate.

The best Fiscal Cliff Smackdown came from Barry Ritholtz, who wrote a great piece for The Washington Post entitled, “How important is the fiscal cliff for investors?  Hint: Not very.”  The explanation of the cliff contained in the article was quite helpful for those unfamiliar with the details:

Let’s start with a definition:  The term refers to the deal that Congress made in late 2011 to temporarily resolve the debt ceiling debate.  The “sequestration,” as it is known, calls for three elements:  tax increases, spending cuts and an increase to the payroll tax (FICA).  The Washington Post’s Wonkblog has run the numbers and finds “$180 billion from income tax hikes, $120 billion in revenue from the payroll tax, $110 billion from the sequester’s automatic spending cuts and $160 billion from expiring tax breaks and other programs.”

*   *   *

The term “fiscal cliff,” popularized by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, is really a misnomer.  As several analysts have correctly observed, the effects of sequestration are not a Jan. 1, 2013, event.  The impact of the spending cuts and tax hikes would be phased in over time.  A fiscal slope is more accurate. Additionally, as students of history have learned, single-variable analysis for complex financial issues is invariably wrong.  Because of the inherent complexity of economies and markets, we cannot adequately explain or predict their behavior by merely looking at just one variable.

Ritholtz brought our attention to a great article about the fiscal cliff hype, written by Ryan Chittum for the Columbia Journalism Review.  Chittum blamed CNBC’s “Rise Above” publicity campaign as the primary force driving fiscal cliff anxiety:

Any time you see Wall Street CEOs and CNBC campaigning for what they call the common good, it’s worth raising an eyebrow or two.

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You’ll note that CNBC has not Risen Above for the common good on issues like stimulating a depressed economy, ameliorating the housing catastrophe, or prosecuting its Wall Street sources/dinner partners for the subprime fiasco.  But make no mistake:  even if it had, it would have been stepping outside the boundaries of traditional American journalism practice into political advocacy.  And that’s precisely what it’s doing here, at further cost to its credibility as a mainstream news organization instead of some HD version of Wall Street CCTV.

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Last but not least is the hypocrisy of CNBC in talking about Rising Above politics.  This is the network, after all, that kicked off the Tea Party, an austerity push that was one of the more damaging political movements in recent memory.

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It’s just not CNBC’s job, institutionally, to campaign for anything. Cover the news, as they say, don’t become it.

December 21 will come and go with nothing happening.  It will be January 1, 2000 all over again.  The fiscal cliff “deadline” – January 1, 2013 – will come and go with nothing happening.  The budget can will be kicked down the road again by the “lame duck” Congress.

In the mean time we can entertain ourselves by learning how celebrities are preparing for Armageddon.  After all, they’re here to entertain us.


 

Day of Tragedy

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It’s that day again.  November 22, 1963 was Tina’s 13th birthday.  Old lucky 13!  It must have been an awful birthday present for a girl of that age to receive the news that the President had been assassinated.  Tina’s father was in the Navy and by the time of his retirement, he had achieved the rank of Vice Admiral.  The assassination of a Navy hero, who had rescued several of his comrades with a broken back after the sinking of the PT109, must have been a gloomy occasion at Tina’s home.  Tina’s birthday would forever be remembered as a national day of tragedy.

The cover-up of the JFK assassination became a national disgrace.  It became the most extensive and most successful government cover-up since the 1947 incident in Roswell, New Mexico.  The cover-up of the JFK assassination caused many Americans to become distrustful of their government.  Worse yet, it quickly became apparent that the JFK assassination was just one of many government cover-ups and an industry soon became built around investigating various government-led campaigns to conceal other killings, hazardous conditions and industrial mishaps.

Washington Post journalist Jack Anderson became one of the few figures employed within the mainstream news media to seriously investigate theories involving a conspiracy to assassinate JFK.  His investigation led him to focus on involvement of the Mafia, as a result of the CIA’s efforts to recruit Mafia hit men to kill Castro.  His televised documentary, American Exposé:  Who Murdered JFK? is available on YouTube.

As a kid from Chicago, I was a big fan of a guy named Sherman Skolnick, one of the early proponents of the theory that President Kennedy was killed as part of a joint effort by the Mafia and the CIA.  Although Skolnick was often ridiculed as a “kook” and a  “conspiracy theorist”, his investigations led to the prosecution and imprisonment of many sleazy politicians and corrupt judges.

My favorite JFK assassination conspiracy theory centered around the involvement of Carlos Marcello, who later admitted to ordering the hit. Marcello was the chieftain of the New Orleans mob, with Dallas under his jurisdiction.  The connections between New Orleans and the assassination in Dallas aroused the curiosity of New Orleans prosecutor, Jim Garrison – the central character in the movie, JFK.

The assassination conspiracy theory I preferred, was based on the notion that Joseph Kennedy, who had numerous real estate holdings in Chicago and who had been a prohibition-era distributor of liquor, was no stranger to the Chicago mob.  According to the theory, Joe Kennedy made a deal with Chicago mobsters that if they could steal the election for JFK, the new President would win Havana back for the Mafia.  Havana had been famous for its casinos, prostitution and drugs before Fidel Castro came along and spoiled the party.  When JFK pulled the plug on the Bay of Pigs invasion – after it was already under way– he drew the ire of the Outfit.  Worse yet, JFK and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy had been riding roughshod over Carlos Marcello’s organization and its management the Teamsters Union, through Marcello’s proxy, Jimmy Hoffa.  JFK had double-crossed the mob and people who double-cross the mob get killed.

A number of investigations have revealed that the 1960 election voting patterns in Chicago’s infamous, Mafia-controlled “River Wards” were not any different than they had been in the previous election, when Adlai Stevenson opposed Dwight Eisenhower.

David Greenberg of Slate provided the best take on the idea:

Even before Election Day, rumors circulated about fraud, especially in Chicago, where Mayor Richard Daley’s machine was known for delivering whopping Democratic tallies by fair means and foul.  When it became clear how narrowly Nixon lost, outraged Republicans grew convinced that cheating had tipped the election and lobbied for an investigation.

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Completed Dec. 9, the recount of 863 precincts showed that the original tally had undercounted Nixon’s (and Adamowski’s) votes, but only by 943, far from the 4,500 needed to alter the results.  In fact, in 40 percent of the rechecked precincts, Nixon’s vote was overcounted.  Displeased, the Republicans took the case to federal court, only to have a judge dismiss the suits.  Still undeterred, they turned to the State Board of Elections, which was composed of four Republicans, including the governor, and one Democrat.  Yet the state board, too, unanimously rejected the petition, citing the GOP’s failure to provide even a single affidavit on its behalf.  The national party finally backed off after Dec. 19, when the nation’s Electoral College certified Kennedy as the new president—but even then local Republicans wouldn’t accept the Illinois results.

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The GOP’s failure to prove fraud doesn’t mean, of course, that the election was clean.  That question remains unsolved and unsolvable.  But what’s typically left out of the legend is that multiple election boards saw no reason to overturn the results. Neither did state or federal judges.  Neither did an Illinois special prosecutor in 1961.  And neither have academic inquiries into the Illinois case (both a 1961 study by three University of Chicago professors and more recent research by political scientist Edmund Kallina concluded that whatever fraud existed wasn’t substantial enough to alter the election).

On the other hand, some fraud clearly occurred in Cook County.  At least three people were sent to jail for election-related crimes, and 677 others were indicted before being acquitted by Judge John M. Karns, a Daley crony.  Many of the allegations involved practices that wouldn’t be detected by a recount, leading the conservative Chicago Tribune, among others, to conclude that “once an election has been stolen in Cook County, it stays stolen.”  What’s more, according to journalist Seymour Hersh, a former Justice Department prosecutor who heard tapes of FBI wiretaps from the period believed that Illinois was rightfully Nixon’s. Hersh also has written that J. Edgar Hoover believed Nixon actually won the presidency but in deciding to follow normal procedures and refer the FBI’s findings to the attorney general—as of Jan. 20, 1961, Robert F. Kennedy—he effectively buried the case.

So, JFK never breached any “deal” with the mob.  This doesn’t rule out the possibility that Carlos Marcello was involved in the assassination.  He simply may have wanted to put an end to the harassment arising from his management of the Teamsters Union.  We may never know the full truth.

In the mean time, one of the original critics of the Warren Report, Mark Lane, has just written a new book about the CIA’s involvement in the Kennedy assassination:  Last Word.

Despite having her birthday forever overshadowed by the gloomiest event in American history, Tina Weymouth went on to lead a literally upbeat life, playing bass for the Talking Heads and fronting for the Tom Tom Club.  Her niece, Katharine Weymouth, is now the publisher of The Washington Post, Jack Anderson’s old newspaper.

Happy Birthday, Tina!