Month: May 2012

It's close.

Felix Salmon's explains the $2 billion loss:

[W]hat was really going on here was that JP Morgan had hundreds of billions of dollars in excess deposits, thanks to its too-big-to-fail status. And rather than lending out that money and boosting the economy, Jamie Dimon decided to simply play with it in financial markets, just as a hedge fund would.

Kevin Drum calls for more regulation:

Dumb, blunt rules are the only kind that can work in the playpen of modern finance. We simply don't understand the world well enough to pretend that we can regulate things in minute detail, and we sure as hell don't have regulators who are either smart enough or can move fast enough to stay ahead of the rocket scientists trying to outwit them. That's not just impossible in practice, it's pretty much impossible even in theory. It's just plain impossible.

Peter Suderman disagrees:

Markets don’t evolve by preventing mistakes entirely. They learn by making mistakes, by experimenting with new business models, some of which prove unsuccessful, and then further refining the process, and usually making more mistakes along the way. But it’s incredibly difficult for anyone — regulator or market player — to know what will fail in advance, and regulations that prevent some failures also typically end up blocking a lot of potential successes. What JPMorgan’s blown deal mostly proves is that complex systems sometimes fail, and that it’s very hard to know exactly when and how those systems will fail until they do.

Jared Bernstein sees no alternative to regulation:

[F]inancial markets are inherently unstable. They will neither self-correct nor self-regulate. Their instability poses a threat to markets and economies and people across the globe. Therefore, they need to be regulated. That’s not to say that anyone knows the best way to do this yet in order to balance the necessity of oversight with the dynamics of the markets. We don’t know where to set the speed limits. It must be an iterative process. But we do know they need to be set, and JP’s loss should be taken as a warning that our tendency is to set them too low.

Bainbridge defends the bank:

Let's put that $2 billion loss in context. JP Morgan had first-quarter 2012 net income of $5.4 billion on revenues of $27.4 billion. Morgan thus is still in the black so far this year, despite this hit. The $2 billion figure is a headline-grabber, but it posed no threat to JP Morgan's viability, let alone a systemic threat. Using it to justify more restrictive regulation is thus mere agitprop.

 And Adam Sorensen isn't sure more regulation would have prevented the loss:

The bet in question would not have been banned under the Volcker rule if, as Dimon says, the position was classified as a hedge—insurance against another position—rather than a pure money-making scheme for the bank. The Volcker Rule is still being written, and its scope could be expanded, but even then, there’s no guarantee that bets of this kind would be prohibited.

Will Cain tries to understand:

I think it’s possible to be opposed to gay marriage without relying on bigotry or religious zealotry. I think there is a Burkean-traditionalist, cultural-mores-should-change-slowly argument. I also think there is an arbitrariness to the definition of marriage that isn’t resolved by simply encompassing same sex couples. In the end, I don’t personally find these arguments compelling – thus I support gay marriage. But I recognize they aren’t based in bigotry. 

I think that's easily the best argument against: a purely skeptical resistance to change of any crucial social institution. But the answer to that lies in the genius of federalism: it's possible to try this out in a few states first to see what happens, before we leap to a national consensus. And we have – across the US and Europe. So far: a total non-event for most, and a huge leap for inclusion and the pursuit of happiness for gay people and their families. And Burke, remember, once wrote: "We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature, and the means perhaps of its conservation" and "A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation." My view, given the ubiquity of openly gay people in our society, that it is the conservative mission to integrate them into existing institutions, rather than consign them to the margins or to some balkanized, separate category, like "civil unions". Tommy Christopher is less conflicted:

I will concede that it is possible to treat someone as a lesser human being without knowing you’re doing it, or without believing you’re doing it, but that doesn’t absolve you of your bigotry. If you like gay people just fine, but have some religious/cultural/philosophical reason for denying their right to marry each other, you are still denying their right to marry each other. In fact, the inability to tell that you’re a bigot is exactly the kind of ignorance that propels the bigotry.

Why an HIV vaccine has eluded scientists:

The virus is the most diverse we know of. It mutates so rapidly that people might carry millions of different versions of it, just months after becoming infected. HIV’s constantly changing form makes it unlike any viral foe we have tried to thwart with a vaccine.

I've always been a skeptic of a vaccine for these reasons, especially when treatment can acts as an effective vaccine, by sharply cutting viral loads and thereby infectiousness. The FDA may soon approve an anti-viral, Truvada, for HIV-negative men who want to stay that way. But the goal of a vaccine is not entirely quixotic, given the pace of scientific advance:

It took 47 years to create a vaccine for polio after the microbe behind it was identified. The measles vaccine took 42 years. The hepatitis B vaccine was a positive sprint at 16 years. “Twenty-eight years isn’t an inordinate amount of time,” says [Anthony Fauci, an immunologist who heads NIAID].

Alice Park has more on one of the leading candidates for an effective vaccine, developed in 2009.

They don't write book reviews like this (pdf) anymore:

Perhaps The Meaning of Disgust is useful as an aesthetic object in itself: an emblem of that most mod- ern creation, the pop philosophy book. Actual content, thought, or insight is entirely optional. The only real requirement is that the pages stroke the reader’s ego, make him feel he is doing something highbrow for once, something to better himself. The sad fact is the reader would learn more about disgust by reading Mad magazine.

For the rest of us—those who actually care about disgust, or aesthetic emotions, or scholarship at all— the book is bound to disappoint. "Who can deny the mood-destroying effect of an errant flatus just at the moment of erotic fervor?" he writes. McGinn’s book is just such a flatus, threatening to spoil an exciting intellectual moment for the rest of us. Sometimes with books, as with farts, it’s better to just hold it in.

Mindy Michels illustrates the rhetorical power that a political leader can have on gay equality:

Not quite three years ago, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender issues suddenly became Albanian headlines when Prime Minister Sali Berisha (who is still in office) unexpectedly declared his support for same-sex marriage at a televised meeting of his ministers. …

In 2009 fears about possible violence, discrimination, lack of acceptance, and, perhaps most importantly, the shame that it would cause family members meant that not one person in Albania would publicly acknowledge same-sex attraction. Today, there are LGBT activists openly protesting the homophobic and violent remarks of governmental officials. Young LGBT Albanians are giving presentations in college classrooms and going on television talk shows, educating students and the Albanian public about the realities of their lives. Leaders of LGBT organizations are speaking out in newspapers and on television. There is widespread publicity for the [first-ever LGBT] photo exhibit.

Justine Rosenthal explains how Newsweek came up with it. It's obviously a play on Clinton being the first black president. I am aware that James Buchanan (and maybe Abraham Lincoln) have been in the Oval Office before.

Worse than his gay problem.

Edmund White attended the same school as Romney, seven years prior. White's take on Romney's psychology:

On the one hand he had an embarrassingly famous father, the governor of Michigan, whom he idolized as the youngest child. On the other he was the sole Mormon, a member of what was definitely seen as a creepy, stigmatized cult in that world of bland Episcopalian Wasps (we had Episcopalian services at chapel three mornings a week). When his father was president of American Motors, he lived at home and was a day student, an envied status. When his father was elected governor and moved to the state capital of Lansing, he became a boarder. Suddenly he was surrounded by other Cranbrook students and the strict “masters,” 24/7. He no longer had the constant support of his tight-knit family. Now he had to win approval from the other boys.

No wonder he became a daring and even violent prankster. He who worried about his own marginal status couldn’t bear the presence of an unapologetic sissy like Lauber, with his long bleached hair (the Mormons, then as now, have insisted on a neat, traditional, conservative appearance, especially in their young missionary men whom they send out all over the world). In scorning and shearing a sissy student and leading a gang of five other boys in this “prank,” Romney may have felt popular and in the right for the first time.

Steve Almond compares his own experience witnessing a sexual assault in Junior High to Romney's. Cranbrook alum Mike Kinsley's hilarious take here:

One of [Romney's] favorite insults was: "Your mother is assistant secretary of Agriculture! Take it back? Make me, you future federal bureaucrat. And screw the pandas."

Or maybe I just imagined all that. It's been a long time.

My take here, here, here, here and here.