Felix Salmon

On June 11, I got an email from mike.power200@gmail.com:

Hi,
What are the tax if i live in ny and la?
Would you consider giving me a hand or at least some advice based on your experience?
Would you consider giving me a couple pointers?
Thank you in advance.
Sincerely,
Larry

It was the first of many such weird, semi-targeted spams. June 22, from petrov.gazprom@gmail.com:

Hi,
How much rent you can play on a 6 million house? What are the pros and cons I should be looking out for? Would you consider giving me a couple pointers? I really appreciate your help. Thankyou, Jerod

June 27, from winstonfinancial@gmail.com:

How much per square foot to build an apartment? I have been thinking about this for a while and was hoping you might be able to shed some light on the subject. Please point me in the right direction. Thank you for your help.
Thanks,
Jerod

July 1, from the same winstonfinancial address, but this time with a different name at the bottom:

Hello,
Are interest rates on cds going to go up? What Gotchas should I be aware of?
Please point me in the right direction.
Thankyou. Gratefully, John

On July 5, an email from petersons.production@gmail.com dispensed with the greeting entirely:

When are mortgages going back to normal?
I need a little help/direction before I can start. Any nuggets of wisdom would be absolutely great and very much appreciated. Would you consider giving me a couple pointers? Thank you very much. Warmest Regards, Terry

On July 10, the same email address asked me about fixed vs variable mortgages, signing itself “Susan”; on July 15, it was “Frank” looking to rent a house in the UK; and on July 19, the email had changed to petrov.gazprom@gmail.com, where “Tony” wanted to know “How much does it cost per day in london?”. By July 21, “Tony” had changed his email to iris.accountants@gmail.com, maybe because the petrov.gazprom address had switched over to “Leanne”, who, this morning, asked me “How much does 1 hour phone cost on the home phone?”.

The general rubric is clear: a foo.bar@gmail.com email address, a question, a plea for help, and a sign-off. Is anybody else getting these emails? And what is their purpose?

This is why I love the blogs. The Epicurean Dealmaker has picked up on a detail buried in the 17th paragraph of a dry Bloomberg story from March about the relative funding costs of Harvard and Princeton — a story which, in light of TED’s comments, surely counts as having massively buried its lede.

The subject is those notorious interest rate swaps, put on by Larry Summers, on which Harvard lost a whopping $1 billion. And here’s the key graf:

Most of the swaps, signed when Summers, 54, was Harvard’s president from 2001 to 2006, were intended to lock in rates for debt that Harvard expected to issue as far off as 2022, for a 340-acre campus expansion, according to Moody’s Investors Service. In 2006 and 2007, Moody’s warned of risks from those so-called forward swaps, though it said the school’s finances and management experience mitigated them. Summers declined to comment on the record about the matter.

It turns out that Summers wasn’t protecting Harvard from having to pay more on its floating-rate debt were interest rates to rise. Instead, he was swapping hypothetical future floating-rate bonds into fixed-rate obligations. Says TED:

Forward swaps, or forward start swaps—which behave like normal swaps except the offsetting fixed and floating rate payments are scheduled to start at a date certain in the future—by themselves count as little more than rank interest rate speculation, specifically in this instance as a bet that short-term interest rates will rise in the future. They can make a great deal of sense when an issuer intends to sell bonds in the relatively near future and when the issuer wants to hedge against budgetary uncertainty by converting floating rate obligations into fixed rate debt. That being said, I have rarely encountered a corporate client who feels confident enough about both their absolute funding needs and current and impending market conditions to enter into a forward swap starting more than nine months into the future. Entering into a forward start swap for debt you do not intend to issue up to 20 years in the future sounds like either rank hubris or free money for Wall Street swap desks.

Of course, it’s not uncommon to see the term “rank hubris” applied in the general vicinity of Larry Summers. But let’s be clear, here: what Summers did could in no way be considered a hedge, under any common definition of the term. He was indulging in interest-rate speculation, just like Robert Citron. I think it’s fair to say that no previous Harvard president would ever have considered himself qualified to do such a thing, but Summers never let such considerations stop him. And his alma mater is now paying the 10-digit price.

The NYT’s Graham Bowley comes out and says it in his report on Morgan Stanley’s weak earnings today:

The results were in sharp contrast to rivals Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, which both reported strong second-quarter profits last week. Those two banks in particular have rebounded more quickly, mostly by taking on more risk in trading for themselves and their customers. But Morgan Stanley, which was burned more severely by the crisis, has moved to reduce its risk taking and try to build a stable, less volatile firm.

While analysts say the approach may pay off in the long run, for now Morgan’s losses are raising questions about the strategy being pursued by its chief executive, John J. Mack.

This seems clear: Goldman Sachs is making money because it’s “taking on more risk”; Morgan Stanley is losing money because it “has moved to reduce its risk taking”. What’s more, anonymous analysts seem to think that the take-less-risk approach is a good idea.

But:

Clearly there are limits to reducing risk-taking. And if you use the purest indicator of risk-taking that Morgan Stanley reports quarterly, it’s going up, quite fast, not down. (From $105 million to $154 million in five quarters is a 36% annualized growth rate.)

So how come Morgan Stanley is so weak while Goldman Sachs is so strong? It’s very unclear to me.

File under “getting results”: after I kvetched (not for the first time) about how both The Audit and Dealscape served up truncated RSS feeds, both have now switched to full feeds. Dealscape has an interesting model, which I haven’t seen before: its free content gets served up in full, interspersed with truncated versions of its paid content. Essentially, the RSS feed is acting as an advertisement for the subscription service.

OK, scratch all that. I wrote the above, and then went out for a walk in the Chinese countryside, and when I came back, although The Audit still had its full RSS feed, Dealscape had re-truncated theirs. Why? It makes no sense: everybody I’ve talked to who’s switched from partial feeds to full feeds has seen their web traffic go up as a result. (Update: Now The Audit has re-truncated too! Aargh!)

But that’s not the only thing which doesn’t make sense about The Deal’s blogs. For instance, after I said that I tended not to blog stuff behind subscription firewalls — “controlled-circulation magazines, research reports, paysite passwords, that sort of thing”, Yvette Kantrow responded by saying that “Salmon’s readers could, in fact, read virtually anything they choose to read, even if it is behind a firewall, if they are willing to pay for it”.

No, actually, they couldn’t. Of the three examples I gave, two are specifically not available to anybody willing to pay for them. Yvette Kantrow might live in a world where “reader” is synonymous with “well-connected and important US-based financial-market professional”, but I don’t, and I don’t want to, either. I’m glad I have such readers, but I’m also glad I have lots of other readers, too, who can’t pick up the phone and ask a bank for a copy of a research report, and who don’t have the kind of cachet which lands them on the distribution list of controlled-circulation magazines.

A lot of them don’t even live in the US, which means that even if they wanted to go down to their local newsstand to buy a copy of Rolling Stone, they couldn’t. International payment systems are still a bit rickety, and in many countries it’s still pretty much unthinkable for people to give out their credit-card details over the internet. In any case, the fact is that if I link to something behind a subscription firewall, the chances are that only a small proportion of my readers will be able to read it.

Kantrow continues:

Call me hopelessly old-fashioned, but why not ask readers to foot some of the bill for content journalists create — especially now, when online ad sales are severely depressed? Do bloggers value journalism so cheaply? In Salmon’s blog-infused world, any content that isn’t available for free, online, simply doesn’t exist. As he puts it, “you can’t link from your blog to a magazine sitting on your bedside table.” True enough, but by the same token, you can’t link to a phone call or a human conversation, either. Would Salmon “feel like an idiot” blogging about one of those if its content were compelling?

Firstly, there’s nothing old-fashioned about readers paying for journalism: the historical business model behind journalism was to give the content away in an attempt to maximize circulation, and then charge advertisers for access to those readers. If readers did pay a subscription fee, it was always less than the printing and distribution costs of the physical object — they’d partially pay for the paper, and the news came free.

As for content which isn’t available for free online, I don’t think it doesn’t exist. But the bar is raised a lot before I’ll write about such material on my blog, and indeed I’ve been known to spend some time going back and forth with editors and publishers asking them to make a certain article free so that I have something to link to.

There’s also something a bit broken about the idea that I should ask my readers to foot the bill for someone else’s journalism — especially when a very high proportion of the stuff I link to I think is fundamentally wrong or misguided. If Ben Stein were behind a subscription firewall, for instance, I would never want to be considered to be encouraging my readers to pay for his execrable columns. The ecology of hyperlinks breaks down immediately when money gets introduced: you get a sharp uptick in bloggers writing extremely annoying things like “a certain publication, which I shan’t link to here, has accused me of” etc etc. Blog readers, who used to be part of the conversation, at that point find themselves essentially just overhearing one side of it. And that serves no one.

What about those phone calls and human conversations? I blog those very rarely, for precisely that reason. Reporters make phone calls and write them up; bloggers can and do report occasionally, but it’s by no means a necessary part of their job.

There are no hard and fast rules in blogging; that’s one of the reasons I like it so much. But in general blogging is all about the free exchange of information. And yes, Yvette, that means that bloggers tend to “basically ignore anything that’s not available for free, online”. There are always exceptions to that rule. But it’s important to understand that it’s not a function of some kind of doctrinaire position in the free vs paid debate. It’s just a function of what bloggers do — which is to enjoin the public debate, rather than private debates accessible only to people paying an entry fee.

Mike Konczal (he’s come out now) says, plausibly enough, that the most important financial innovation of the past 30 years is the 401(k). Which is not to say, of course, that it’s a good thing.

Mike says the 401(k) is “the creation of a loophole in a tax bill”, which I think is doing it something of a disservice — the move from defined-benefit to defined-contribution pensions is a global one, and Mike’s really just using the 401(k) in particular as a proxy for defined-contribution pensions in general. Those would have taken off regardless, even if that particular tax bill hadn’t existed.

Mike’s right that such plans aren’t an obvious improvement on what went before. In fact, looking at his arguments in favor (“it’s a plus that consumers can directly manage their retirement finances”), one in general isn’t very impressed: there’s no reason to believe that consumers are particularly good at managing their retirement finances, and quite a lot of reason to believe that they can be extremely bad at it. That said, Mike’s right that there’s an air of historical inevitability to the whole thing. You might not like it, but it was bound to happen sooner or later.

There’s also however an air of historical inevitability about individuals schooling and working longer before they have families; I don’t think that the 401(k) was an important cause of that particular trend, although the hypothesis is intriguing.

In any case, Mike’s done nothing to counteract my thesis that financial innovation over the past couple of decades has been, on net, a bad thing. The 401(k) might be very important. But I’m far from convinced that Americans are better off for it.

Congratulations to the Baseline Scenario chaps for getting Elizabeth Warren to blog for them — she’s provided a good riposte to those who argue against the creation of a Consumer Financial Protection Agency.

Before Warren became head of the Congressional Oversight Panel, she was a frequent contributor to CreditSlips. It would be great if she started up there again, since there’s obviously nothing preventing her from blogging, and since she equally obviously has a lot to say on this kind of thing. And really, the head of the CFPA (Warren is the obvious prime candidate for the job) should be blogging.

Back in March, Scott Locklin’s second-ever blog entry was a takedown of my Wired article which ended with this:

I’ll be fine until someone sends me another piece of nonsense by Nassim Taleb, at which point, as my favorite wrestler, the Iron Sheik likes to say, “I will make him humble; old country way.”

Happily, that day has now come, and Locklin’s screed against Taleb makes for delicious reading. Among his vocabulary: clowns; impostures; mush headed absurdity; Berkeley tapwater; careen; chicken entrails and pixie dust; utile; dyspepsia; serfs; mountebanks; and “heretical alpha monkey of the quants”.

Substantively, Locklin makes a very astute comparison:

Taleb, on the other hand, is sort of the Paul Feyerabend of quantitative finance. Like Feyerabend, he is well read, a good writer and quite charming. Like Feyerabend, Taleb seems to earn his daily bread by showing up and being kind of witty. Finally, both Feyerabend and Taleb are very much Against Method. This means, effectively, they’re both intellectual nihilists. Feyerabend thought we couldn’t know anything for various reasons too silly to get into right now. Taleb thinks all of quantitative finance is nonsense and we should do away with quants.

I’m a fan of Feyerabend, which is maybe why I’m a fan of Taleb as well: both of them force us to carefully examine things we believe mainly because clever and successful experts tell us that they’re true. And I haven’t asked Taleb about this, but I suspect that he wouldn’t be very upset to be called “the Paul Feyerabend of quantitative finance”. Certainly the two share an interest in thinking big.

Locklin ends his blog entry by saying that a successful quant like Jim Simons is “making money more or less proving people like Taleb wrong”. To use Locklin’s own analogy, that’s like saying that a successful physics experiment more or less proves Feyerabend wrong. Which given that Feyerabend was a successful physicist before he became a philosopher, is a bit weird.

It’s perfectly possible to spend a lifetime in science without ever having to grapple with or worry about Feyerabend’s philosophy — just as it’s perfectly possible to spend a lifetime in finance without expending any time on Taleb’s arguments. Many of those scientists and financiers will be very successful. But for those of us who want to take a step back and re-examine the foundations of science, or finance, then grappling with Feyerabend and Taleb is I think a useful and illuminating thing to do.

Update: Taleb emails to say he considers himself closer to Hayek than to Feyerabend.

Gladwell on overconfidence: a reprise of his May speech.

  “Greg Mankiw is just about the least interesting economics blogger out there.”  

Pepper spray in ATMs — what could possibly go wrong?

The decline of Google, Barbie edition

“Two of my friends vehemently declared the rice not al dente enough, which caused me to become irate.”

The cost of parking in cities around the world. Interesting utter lack of correlation between daily and montly rates.

In my blog entry this morning about Robert Shiller and his bonkers defense of subprime mortgages, I made an en passant reference to financial innovation being, net-net, a bad thing. I didn’t go into too much detail, because it wasn’t all that relevant to the point at hand, and because, as Sean Matthews pointed out, this question has been debated in the blogosphere in some depth in the recent past.

But Tyler Cowen picked up on the line, and wrote:

I can understand that particular financial innovations might be bad, but financial innovation overall? Surely this claim was false in years 1200, 1900, and also 1950. (Of course you’ll find very harmful financial explosions between those years and the current day but still on net you’ll take the progress.) If the U.S. economy resumes growing at an average rate of about two percent a year, eventually our economy will look very, very different than it does today. It’s hard for me to see running the economy of 2100 with the banking system of…what is the nostalgic year? 1992? 1957?

We’ll need more than better ATMs, which is not to say we need approve of every step along the way.

I think that the case for the positive effects of financial innovation is yes pretty strong if you roll back the clock to 1200 or 1900 or 1950. But over the past 25 years or so, the claim is much harder to make stick.

As for banking systems, Tyler I think concedes that there’s an important distinction which needs to be made here. On the one hand, there’s what you might generally lump into back-office functions — the distribution, clearing, and settlement of exchange. ATMs, charge cards, debit cards, PayPal, online banking, m-banking, etc all fall into this bucket, and advances here are often (although not always) a good thing.

Then there’s the more purely financial innovation. There are good things here too — fractional reserve banking, factoring, common-stock limited-liability companies, tradable fungible bonds, stock-market index funds, that sort of thing. But on this front I think the low-hanging fruit was plucked decades if not centuries ago, and that we’ve long since entered a world of diminishing returns when it comes to the positive developments. Meanwhile, the negative developments, from portfolio insurance to CDO-squareds, have been arriving at an ever-accelerating pace.

I agree with Justin Fox:

I’m with Tyler in that I’d rather have today’s financial system, however flawed it is, than the financial system of 1200. But at the same time, an estimated 97.3% of all financial innovations (I just made that up, but it seems about right) are just new ways to fleece customers or hide risk, and all major financial crises have been associated with some financial innovation or another.

The point is that we’re not in 1200, or 1900, or even 1950. And if you look at how fast the US economy managed to grow in the 50s and 60s without the benefit of Black-Scholes or the Gaussian copula function — or, for that matter, how fast the Chinese economy has grown of late with very strict fetters on financial activities — it looks very much as though most of the financial innovation in recent decades constitutes a history of increasingly-desperate attempts to eke out returns in the context of a naturally-slowing economy. And that history, I think, is doomed to failure.

So yes, in 2100 I’m sure that checks and credit cards — hell, maybe even cash, too — are going to be a thing of the past. But all that falls under the general rubric of “better ATMs”. Are we going to need more than that to run the 22nd-Century economy? I’m not convinced. And even if we do, there’s no reason why we can’t get there from here slowly, and with circumspection.

What are the chances of this CIT deal actually preventing a bankruptcy filing, rather than just delaying it for a few months? At first glance, it would seem that the chances are good: why else would bondholders throw $3 billion of good money after the bad money they’ve already invested? But at second glance it’s not so simple: that $3 billion in new funding not only carries a double-digit interest rate, but is also secured by a whopping $10 billion in assets.

Consider the $1.1 billion of CIT debt which is coming due in August. Those bonds were changing hands last week at an extremely steep discount, which means that many of the current bondholders bought them at 50 or 30 or even 10 cents on the dollar. For those bondholders, this deal is a no-brainer. They’re advancing CIT enough money to pay off the August bonds in full, which means that they get to double their initial investment right there. They’re getting more than 10% interest on the money they’re lending. And they’re massively overcollateralized on that money, too, which means that their recovery given default is almost certain to be 100%. Add it all up, and you’re looking at a very high return for very little risk.

So where does that leave CIT? For one thing, it leaves the lender with no unpledged assets at all, which is not a position any financial institution likes to be in. But more to the point, the $3 billion is going to run out very quickly, some time in the first quarter.

Over the rest of this year, CIT is going to have to embark upon a series of debt-for-equity or debt-for-debt swaps, all designed to take out a huge chunk of those monster first-quarter maturities and allow the company time to start making money again. But it’s not clear why CIT’s bondholders would particularly want new equity or longer-maturity debt. And the one asset which Jeffrey Peek had to play with until this weekend — those $10 billion in unpledged assets — is now spoken for.

This deal makes sense for the lenders, then, and at worst delays the inevitable for CIT. But it’s still far from clear that the private sector is capable of putting together a lasting solution to the problem of a leveraged financial institution facing a massive liquidity crisis.

Robert Shiller thinks that creating a Consumer Financial Protection Agency “seems a good idea”, but is also a fan of financial innovation:

Our financial system has essentially exploded, with financial innovations like collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps and subprime mortgages giving rise in the past few years to abuses that culminated in disasters in many sectors of the economy.

We need to invent our way out of these hazards…

The subprime mortgage is an example of a recent invention that offered benefits and risks… the higher rates compensated lenders for higher default rates. And the prepayment penalties made sure that people whose credit improved couldn’t just refinance somewhere else at a lower rate, thus leaving the lenders stuck with the rest, including those whose credit had worsened.

We need consumer products that people can use properly, and if this is what “plain vanilla” means, that’s a good thing. But we also need financial innovation.

This is the point at which I want to do my Jon-Stewart-rubbing-his-eyes act: Shiller really has just written a column defending “financial innovation” and using, as his sole example of a good financial innovation, the subprime mortgage.

Shiller seems to think that the best response to harmful financial innovations like CDOs is even more financial innovation, to reverse the damage initially caused. Wouldn’t it be better just to scale back the amount of financial innovation we had in the first place? Net-net, financial innovation is a bad thing: the downside, during times of crisis, is higher than the upside in more normal years.

And Shiller’s defense of subprime mortgages is unbelievably weak. He never comes close to addressing the point that a huge proportion of subprime mortgages were sold to people who could have qualified for a prime mortgage; and his attempted defense of prepayment penalties is utterly bonkers. People prepaid subprime mortgages for three main reasons: (a) because their house had gone up in value and they wanted to do a cash-out refinance; (b) because they were selling their house; and (c) because interest rates had fallen since they took out their mortgage. The number of people who wanted to prepay a subprime mortgage because their credit had improved was negligible.

In fact, as Shiller knows but won’t admit, prepayment penalties were a profit center for subprime lenders — a way of squeezing money out of borrowers at the end of the relationship as well as at the beginning. If this is financial innovation, I want much less of it, thanks for asking. And while I agree that the CFPA “should be staffed by people who know finance and its intricacies”. I just don’t think they should start from the assumption that financial innovation is a good thing.

Obama administration officials are now going on the record when it comes to what I’ve been calling the Baker-Samwick proposal but which Dean Baker has now much more pithily rechristened the right-to-rent plan:

A top Treasury Department official told a Senate panel yesterday that the government is considering a proposal to allow homeowners to stay in their home as renters after a foreclosure…

“It’s certainly an idea we’re thinking about,” Herbert M. Allison, assistant secretary for financial stability, told the Senate Banking Committee.

The idea was first floated by Dean Baker in August 2007; Andrew Samwick signed on, from the other end of the political spectrum, almost immediately. (Contra Joe Nocera, this idea was not “first broached” by Dan Alpert in October 2008; the Alpert plan is needlessly complicated, and involves giving away to homeowners a valuable option to repurchase their homes which is neither necessary nor desirable.)

It’s worth noting that the right-to-rent plan is very different from the existing Fannie Mae plan which allows homeowners to rent their homes on a month-to-month basis, if they give up their cash-for-keys option whereby they get paid for moving out. Renting month-to-month is not a happy state of affairs: your landlord can kick you out of your home at any time. It’s easy to see why most homeowners would prefer cash up front for moving now. Under right-to-rent, by contrast, the homeowner can stay in the home for at least five years, if not ten.

In an ideal world, banks which foreclosed on homeowners would then sell those homes to professional landlords, who would rent the houses out in perpetuity, either to the former homeowner or to renters who moved in after the homeowners moved out. That would raise the amount of rented housing in the US, and decrease the homeownership rate — and lower homeownership means lower unemployment. This plan isn’t just good for soon-to-be-foreclosed-upon homeowners, it’s good for employment, too!

Phil Wahba and Ilaina Jonas report:

Several large investment firms are creating new lending companies that plan to go public to raise billions of dollars to take advantage of the distress in the commercial real estate market, and more are on the horizon.

The planned IPOs, which include units of firms like Apollo Management and Alliance Bernstein, could be just the beginning of what some bankers expect to be a boom in Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) going public over the next few years.

The U.S. commercial real estate market has been reeling ever since a prime source of financing, the commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) market, virtually closed and banks shut off their lending spigots in the past year.

Essentially what’s happening here is that debt (in the form of CMBS) is being rolled over into equity (in the form of REITs). This is a good thing, and I hope we see much more of it.

This is a two-stage process, I think: first the REITs will buy up distressed CMBS at a discount, then they will wait for those CMBS to default, at which time the REITs will take possession of the collateral — the commercial real-estate securing the CMBS. In other words, the REITs — and the REIT investors — aren’t looking at yields, they are looking at property values.

It’s an open question, of course, how much leverage these new REITs will be able to use, and also whether the kind of institutional investors who used to invest in CMBS will ever have any interest investing in REITs instead. But I hope that the answers are “very little” and “yes” respectively. It’s a good idea for an investor to accept a bit of short-term equity market volatility if it means losing a lot of long-term tail risk.

There should be as few financial regulators as possible, and they should be as powerful as possible. So this is a good idea, I think:

Conservative leader David Cameron will abolish the Financial Services Authority and give its powers to the Bank of England if his party wins the next general election.

The beefed up central bank would monitor the health of the financial system, setting capital requirements and leverage limits, and police individual lenders. A Financial Policy Committee would be established with the same stature as the bank’s existing interest rate-setting Monetary Policy Committee.

Having strong regulators is obviously not a sufficient condition for preventing financial crises, but it is a necessary condition. Everybody thought that the FSA was a strong “super-regulator”, of course. But further consolidation can’t hurt.

Yvette Kantrow has a truly astonishing parenthetical in her peculiar piece on the CJR, Goldman Sachs, and Matt Taibbi:

Audit writer Ryan Chittum said his site’s silence had nothing to do with Goldman but everything to do with the fact that Rolling Stone was slow to put the entire Taibbi piece online. (It was a complaint lodged by many bloggers, who apparently did not want to shell out $5.95 at the newsstand. How sad for magazines.)

Chittum is more than capable of defending himself on the merits. But where on earth does Kantrow get the idea that financial bloggers should be perfectly happy to pay $5.95 to read Taibbi’s article on paper?

I get a lot of stuff sent to me, for free, which is normally behind some kind of subscription firewall: controlled-circulation magazines, research reports, paysite passwords, that sort of thing. I very rarely blog any of it, because I feel like an idiot blogging something which my readers can’t read. (For that reason, I try to link to WSJ articles via Google, to minimize the chances of my readers running into a firewall.)

So, yes, Chittum could have gone out and spent $6 on the paper version of Taibbi’s article. But then what would he have done? He’s a blogger, and you can’t link from your blog to a magazine sitting on your bedside table. What’s more, when you blog an article you generally want to quote from it, which is always much easier when you can copy-and-paste.

It’s entirely reasonable, then, for bloggers in general, and Chittum in particular, to wait until there was an easy and legitimate way for readers to read the article before blogging it. A blog without a hyperlink is a sad and sorry thing, and most decent bloggers will try pretty hard to avoid writing such a thing.

(Incidentally, both Kantrow and Chittum truncate their RSS feeds. Come on, people! Get with the program!)