The supreme court today handed down a decision in a case on federal election spending by corporations. Basically, the new ruling, which reverses about 100 years or so of precedent, grants corporations free speech rights in regards to federal election campaigns. Given that (according to CNN) 22 or so states have similar laws on the books regarding state level campaigns, we can also expect this reversal to apply to state legislatures by the 2010 elections. The ruling also applies to unions and trade groups in addition to corporations.
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I was originally going to write this post last year, but I decided to hold off until NFL free agency started, just to give the Chiefs a chance to prove me wrong. So far, they have failed. I also considered titling this post “Look out Silver Market, Clark Hunt is stockpiling Cash!” All numbers were sourced from major news publications via Google searches.
Sphere: Related ContentThe American economy is in a weird place right now. We’ve just gotten over a double bubble pair of economic expansions and are currently entering what may be the latter phases of The Great Recession. Things are starting to look less horrible now than they were a few months ago, although they’re still dark and depressing. By some measures, unemployment is as high as 20%, by others its as high as 10%. Neither number is remotely good. Even so, productivity is up for the third straight quarter, and the Dow Jones has gained around 3000 pts since last spring.
Sphere: Related ContentI’ve read a fair amount in mainstream publications about how the financial industry over the last few years has become “too big” of a sector of the U.S. economy. There have also been numerous stories about this on television. The general storyline portrayed is that the financial services industry, as a percentage of the economy, has gotten too big and therefore is causing all sorts of problems. A further implied storyline is that no one is really sure why this is all happening and its beyond anyone’s control. The reality is not so much.
Sphere: Related ContentThe winner of the second edition of “Who reads this website?” is Time.com’s Justin Fox* for this essay on cnn/money about shareholder value. I covered nearly the exact same territory except without the professional reporter type citations and quotes in this piece written March 23.
*Actually, we already new Mr. Fox was a reader given that he’s linked to this site before, and since the essay was taken from his new book I can’t really take credit for it, but we’ll pretend like thats the case anyways.
Sphere: Related ContentI never knew a whole lot about Eliot Spitzer before he got busted for keeping a prostitute as a sort of mistress last year. I knew that he’d been an New York DA who’d taken on and beaten up a lot of the big Wall Street firms for basically being greedy, law breaking d-bags. And won every case big time. Then it was discovered he kept a prostitute and had to resign. The next thing I heard from the guy was when I saw that he had a column at Slate.com. I clicked on his first article more out of morbid curiosity than anything else. That was an eye-opener.
Sphere: Related ContentA few weeks ago a bunch of major papers in big American cities made headlines by closing up shop. Many other newspapers have cut down on the number of daily editions they print. Lots of stuff about this has been written, blaming the internet or declining reading habits or the internet or tv or the internet or greedy/moronic media moguls for the problems. To a large degree (especially the bit about the internet), this is an accurate assessment of the problems facing print media. But it misses a core flaw in the revenue structure of all advertising supported enterprises.
Sphere: Related ContentI watched the new Star Trek movie today. Pretty entertaining, but they completely and totally disregarded how physics actually worked and really, really ignored the chain of command in order to make their plot work. But since all these contrivances were in the service of making the plot work and didn’t really matter that much in terms of the story, I’m happy to let it go. But the stuff they were doing did get me thinking about some of the more interesting aspects of quantum mechanics I’ve read about, and that got me thinking about how some of them apply to - and explain/solve - some of the more vexing problems of behavioral economics.
Sphere: Related ContentContinued from this post.
The new neo-classicist economic theories now in vogue in D.C. (circa the 1980’s) rested on a couple of key principles in order to work. 1) Investor and management interests could be properly aligned. 2) A mostly free market would function the same as a truly free market. 3) In order to support #2, all markets should be de-regulated as much as possible. 4) Free markets are always the most efficient way to allocate any resource. 5) People are willing to accept the downside and losses of risk when it goes bad. 6) People are rational economic actors. 7) Everyone will always have optimal information.
Sphere: Related ContentI was reading this post by Time.com’s Barbara Kiviat and thought to myself “Well yeah, of course they’ll take over, the banks have an inherently flawed business model.” That’s when I stopped and realized, wait, what? Banks have an inherently flawed business model? So I thought about it some more to try and discover what had prompted my subconcious to kick that idea into my forebrain unasked for. And all of a sudden I realized the answer: The Internet.
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