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2011 Jackass Of The Year

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There were so many contenders for TheCenterLane.com’s 2011 Jackass Of The Year award, I was ready to give up on making a decision.  Former Congressman Anthony Weiner (who never even “got lucky” with any of the women who received his “Peter Tweets”) was certainly a contender.  Another runner-up was Arnold Schwarzenegger, who chose to have an affair with his unattractive housekeeper – apparently just because she was there.

This year’s winner is Jon S. Corzine, the former Senator and Governor of New Jersey – in addition to having been the former CEO of Goldman Sachs.  Most infamously, Corzine was named chairman and CEO of MF Global in March of 2010.  It took Corzine only 20 months to drive the firm into bankruptcy.  As Stephen Foley of The Independent reported, Corzine gambled $6 billion of the firm’s money on his belief that Italy would not default on its government bonds.  When that wager was exposed, MF Global’s clients and trading partners stopped doing business with the firm.  Within a few days, MF Global went belly-up, in what became one of the ten biggest bankruptcies in American history.

On Halloween, the Deal Book blog at The New York Times discussed what happened after a discovery by federal regulators that hundreds of millions of dollars (perhaps 950) in MF Global customers’ money had gone missing:

The recognition that money was missing scuttled at the 11th hour an agreement to sell a major part of MF Global to a rival brokerage firm.  MF Global had staked its survival on completing the deal. Instead, the New York-based firm filed for bankruptcy on Monday.

Regulators are examining whether MF Global diverted some customer funds to support its own trades as the firm teetered on the brink of collapse.

One of those customers was a gentleman named Gerald Celente.  On December 17, Mr. Celente appeared on Max Keiser’s television program, On the Edge to describe what happened with his contract (placed through MF Global in April) to purchase an undisclosed quantity of December gold for an amount slightly in excess of $1,400 per ounce.  Celente skewered more individuals than Jon Corzine while describing a travesty which exposed even more of the ways by which the Commodity Futures Modernization Act has been destroying America.  Be sure to watch the interview.

On the same day as the Celente interview, The Washington Post published a piece by Barry Ritholtz, which focused on six astonishing elements of the MF Global story.  Let’s take a look at a few of those elements:

3.  As a result of MF Global’s lobbying, key rules were deregulated.  This allowed the firm to use client money to buy risky sovereign debt.

4.  In 2010, someone from the Commodities Futures Trading Commission recognized these prior deregulations had dramatically ramped clients’ exposure to risk and proposed changing those rules. Jon Corzine, MF Global’s chief executive, successfully prevented the tightening of these regulations.  Had the regulations been tightened, it would have prevented the kind of bets that lost MF Global’s segregated client monies.

5.  None of MF Global’s Canadian clients lost any money thanks to tighter regulations there.

One would think that someone in Jon Corzine’s position would have learned something from the mistakes (such as excessive leveraging and risky bets) which contributed to the financial crisis.  He didn’t.  That’s why Jon S. Corzine is the winner of TheCenterLane.com’s 2011 Jackass Of The Year award.  Congratulations, Jackass!


 

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The Stupid War Against The Stimulus

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February 23, 2009

We keep hearing rants against President Obama’s economic stimulus bill.  The final version of the bill was passed by both the House of Representatives and the Senate on February 13.  On February 17, it was signed into law by our new President.  It is now called the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.  Nevertheless, there are people out there (nearly all of them Republicans) fuming about the stimulus bill, despite the fact that the debate is now over.  The bill has already gone into effect.  So what’s the point?  Many commentators feel that currently, there is fierce competition to stand out as the new leader of the Republican Party.  Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal apparently believes he can advance his career by complaining about the stimulus and refusing to accept money allocated under the stimulus bill to expand eligibility for unemployment compensation because it would increase taxes on employers.  As Robert Pear and J. David Goodman reported for The New York Times, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour said that he, too, would reject the money for expanding unemployment insurance:

“There is some we will not take in Mississippi,” Governor Barbour told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.  “We want more jobs.  You don’t get more jobs by putting an extra tax on creating jobs.”

The article noted that California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (also a Republican) would be happy to take any money from the stimulus bill that had been rejected by any other governor.

The hostility against the stimulus just doesn’t make sense.  A few Republicans may think they might look like heroes to the traditional Republican “base” right now, but as the stimulus plan begins to bear fruit, they are going to look like fools.

Tom Friedman discussed one intriguing conversation he had with a true American capitalist (the sort of voter Republicans always have taken for granted) in the February 21 New York Times:

The wind and solar industries in America “were dead in the fourth quarter,” said John Woolard, chief executive of BrightSource Energy, which builds and operates cutting-edge solar-thermal plants in the Mojave Desert.  Almost five gigawatts of new solar-thermal projects — the equivalent of five big nuclear plants — at various stages of permitting were being held up because of a lack of financing.

“All of these projects will now go ahead,” said Woolard.  “You are talking about thousands of jobs  …  We really got something right in this legislation.”

These jobs will be in engineering, constructing and operating huge solar systems and wind farms and manufacturing new photovoltaics.  Together they will drive innovation in all these areas — and move wind and solar technology down the cost-volume learning curve so they can compete against fossil fuels and become export industries at the “ChinIndia price,” that is the price at which they can scale in China and India.

Mr. Wollard “gets it” but the usual Republican spokesmen don’t.  As Jonathan Alter points out in the March 2 edition of Newsweek:

Columnist Charles Krauthammer called the $787 billion stimulus package “a legislative abomination,” and Karl Rove wrote that “the more Americans learn about the bill, the less they like it.”

Polls say otherwise.  The public likes the signs of action, respects that the new president is willing to admit error and appreciates his constant reminders that there are no easy cures to what ails us.

*   *   *

The GOP did a good job trivializing the stimulus, but Obama may have the last laugh.  The package is so big, and stretches across so many states, that it provides him at least four years of photo ops as Daddy O on tour, bringing home the jobs right in your local media market.  It was hardly a coincidence that video of bridge repair in Missouri began airing only moments after the president signed the bill.

As Walter Alarkon explained in his February 21 posting on The Hill website, there is a split among Republican governors as to whether the party’s next leader will be a centrist or a traditional conservative.  As his piece demonstrated, there are some Republicans who “get it”:

One possible White House hopeful, Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. (R), wouldn’t criticize the stimulus despite his red state bona fides.  He said that the federal money would fund infrastructure projects that could help the Beehive State’s economy.

“You have to have a party that is results oriented, that actually develops solutions to some of our nagging problems of today,” he said.

He said that Republicans who turn to “gratuitous rhetoric” will continue to lose.

Another Republican who “gets it” is Florida Governor Charlie Crist.  During his February 22 appearance on NBC’s Meet The Press, David Gregory asked Governor Crist whether he thought it was a mistake for the Republican Party to define itself by opposition to the stimulus.  Governor Crist gave this response:

Well, it may be.  All I know is I have to do what I think is in the best interest of the people of Florida.  And from my perspective, it’s to try and help them.  Help them every single day in every way that I can in education, in infrastructure, in health care; do the kinds of things that keep us from having to raise taxes.  You know, another part that people don’t talk about in the stimulus bill is that it cuts taxes.  About a third of it cuts taxes.   . . .   At the same time, because of the stimulus we’ll be able to pay our teachers more next year than we were this past year.  So I think it works, it works well, it helps people, it does what’s right.

How does one argue with that?  The current moot debate over the stimulus bill simply underscores one of the reasons why the Republicans suffered such huge losses in 2006 and 2008.  They need to abandon the failed strategy of focusing on the preferences of their so-called “base” and start representing the rest of America.  If they don’t learn this lesson, they will never win a majority in the Senate or the House and they will have to abandon their dreams of another Republican President.