Felix Salmon

Should people move their money from the big four commercial banks to smaller community banks? Arianna Huffington is making a big push, but I’ll believe it when I see it: moving banks is hard, and people are lazy.

The one thing I would urge though is that if you are moving your money out of BofA/Chase/Citi/Wells, that you strongly consider not only smaller banks but also local credit unions as a place to move your money to. The moveyourmoney.info website is happy to give me a list of local banks including Mitsubishi UFJ (no one’s idea of a small community bank), but doesn’t list any credit unions at all. Here’s a tool to help you find one. If you’re going to go to the hassle of switching away from the big banks, then at least make sure you’ve explored all the options.

Ryan Grim and Arthur Delaney have the must-read story of the day, on the politics of the House financial services committee. It’s long — 6,500 words, spread over three pages — and it took five journalists in all to piece it all together: don’t say that HuffPo doesn’t do original reporting!

Do read the whole thing, but in a nutshell, the problem is that the committee is far too big, weighing in with 71 members: when was the last time that you ever saw a 71-member committee which ever got anything done. To make matters worse, a large proportion of those 71 members are conservative Democrats in marginal seats facing Republican opponents. They want to be on the committee because it’s an easy way to monster campaign donations, with freshmen representatives raising over $1 million apiece if they sit on the committee. That’s twice as much as if they don’t. And once they’re on the committee, they tend to be pretty friendly to Wall Street and its lobbyists.

And with so many members, you can imagine the number of revolving doors there are:

Just as the lure of money leads inexperienced new members to join the committee, it prompts experienced staffers to bolt for larger paydays in the private sector. “You have this phenomenon where if you have a staffer who’s very experienced on a certain issue and is dealing with the financial sector for any number of months or years, all of a sudden they become a real acquisition target for Wall Street,” says Lynch.

According to a HuffPost analysis of the 243 people who’ve worked on the committee — including clerical and technology staff — since 2000, almost half of the 126 people who have left registered as lobbyists, mostly for the financial services industry…

And the revolving door turns in both directions. Sixteen of the committee’s 86 current staffers — including a good chunk of the senior staff — worked as lobbyists before coming to the committee. (And it’s not just Republicans; 12 of the 16 are Democrats.)

The only real hope for the committee is Barney Frank himself:

Ultimately, though, Democrats are essentially relying on a “great man” strategy, figuring they can dump as many bank-friendly Democrats on the committee as they want and Frank will generally keep them in line. “We have a lot of faith in Barney. He can handle it,” says a senior Democratic aide when asked about the phenomenon. Frank’s senior staffers, say several current and former committee aides, similarly outmatch their counterparts. The chairman, they say, is able to use the knowledge gap at both the member and the staff level to his advantage.

The problem, of course, is that there are limits to Frank’s power, and that if there are good political reasons to vote one way, then no amount of detail-mastery among Frank’s staffers is likely to change your mind.

Meanwhile, there’s strong empirical evidence that the sheer force of any given financial institution’s lobbying power is directly related to the riskiness of its lending operations. The IMF’s Deniz Igan, Prachi Mishra, and Thierry Tressel report:

Our findings indicate that lobbying is associated ex-ante with more risk-taking and ex-post with worse performance. They are consistent with a moral hazard interpretation whereby lenders engage in risky lending strategies because they expect preferential treatment associated with lobbying. Such preferential treatment could be a higher probability of being bailed out, potentially under less stringent conditions, in the event of a financial crisis.

There’s no way to fix this broken system before financial regulatory reform has come and gone as an issue before Congress. Which is one more reason to be pessimistic about the likelihood of necessary root-and-branch changes ever happening.

Is AT&T’s inability to provide decent wireless broadband in tech-savvy cities like New York and San Francisco a simple matter of physics? Phorgy says yes:

At low frequencies, radio waves are kind of like molasses. They can ooze around corners and through buildings…

As frequencies increase, the waves start acting more like laser beams. They no longer ooze around corners. You start to get “shadows” or dead spots with no signal. It becomes more difficult for the signals to penetrate walls etc. These problems get worse the higher you go in frequency…

So we have two extremes: low frequency molasses waves and high frequency laser beams. As bandwidth demands increase, we begin moving the dial away from molasses (where we have good wireless signals) to laser beams (where we have dark spots, shadows, with no signal, etc).

There are many clever modulation tricks that delay the inevitable, but the basic rule is that you cannot defeat Heisenberg.

The fundamental insight here is true: smartphones operate at very high frequencies, sometimes above 2.5 GHz. And covering a city with wireless broadband at those frequencies is hard. But after a brief email exchange with Ultimi Barbarorum’s Baruch, who knows much more about this kind of thing than I do, I’m far from convinced that what we’re seeing right now with AT&T has anything to do with the hard physical limits that Phorgy is talking about.

For one thing, Phorgy’s limit of 1,000mps in total for a few city blocks is I think far higher than anything AT&T is currently able to provide. With what Baruch calls “compression, prioritisation, all that level 4-7 stuff you can do at the packet level” (don’t ask me), you can serve a lot of people with that kind of bandwidth.

But more to the point, we already have a real-world counterexample which pretty much disproves any thesis that AT&T is bumping up against Heisenbergian limits. Phorgy’s saying that the problem with New York and San Francisco is that (a) they are very high density, complete with skyscraper canyons and the like; and (b) they have lots of people all trying to use 3G cellphones at once. But there’s a city with even higher density than either of those two, with even more people using 3G cellphones, and which has no signal-quality problems at all.

Tokyo is proof positive that this can be done.

The bottleneck is money, not Heisenberg. Building a Japan-style 3G network is extremely expensive: it involves lots of high-frequency and low-frequency base stations and base station relays and femtocells and backhaul capacity and IT investment and other things I don’t pretend to understand.

And of course this kind of investment doesn’t scale. If AT&T puts enormous of money into solving the problems of New York and San Francisco, they can use similar techniques in, um, Chicago. But nowhere else in the US has that kind of density — in contrast to Japan, where density issues are endemic.

If I were an AT&T shareholder, then, I’m not sure how much money I’d want my company to spend on beefing up 3G wireless in New York and San Francisco, especially when there’s little obvious return on such an enormous investment. Sometimes you make more money with cheaper unhappy customers than with more expensive happy customers. And this could well be one of those times.

Update: Some good comments, especially from Mark. Meanwhile, Paul Krugman asks whether central Tokyo might not be such a great counterexample after all: is it maybe less dense than Manhattan? Probably depends on how you define the two areas. But there are other cities which serve just as well: Hong Kong, for example.

Just how far is the WSJ moving towards UK-style journalism? Well, the editor of its European edition, Patience Wheatcroft, used to edit the Sunday Telegraph — a broadsheet gently ribbed in media circles for its ability to illustrate just about any story with a picture of a girl in a bikini.

Today, she gives us a case study in how that’s done, illustrating her column on the impossibly-dry subject of international capital adequacy regimes with the photo caption at left.

The quote is a great one — but the decision to illustrate it as literally as possible is pure Fleet Street. And of course if this bikini-photo is too small for those of us reading the column online, a bigger version is only a click away!

In any case, many thanks to the WSJ for using a Reuters picture. I think in this case a dot-portrait would have defeated the purpose somewhat.

What happens if you cap credit-card interest rates at 16%? Yes, at the margin, the amount of credit extended on credit cards would fall. That’s a feature, not a bug. But would it fall dramatically? Pamela Yip quotes Odysseas Papadimitriou:

“If you cap the interest rate, it’s not like people are going to have lower interest rates than they do now,” said Odysseas Papadimitriou, chief executive and founder of Evolution Finance Inc., which operates CardHub.com. “Instead, everyone who has an interest rate below 16 percent will continue to have the same interest rate and everyone who has above 16 percent will not have access to credit any longer.”

Papadimitriou previously was senior marketing director at Capital One, so he has some insight into how card companies work.

This isn’t really true.

For one thing, credit-card companies make substantially all of their profits from people paying more than 16% interest on their cards. The rest of us generate a certain amount of cashflow in terms of interchange fees, but mainly we’re option value: so long as we have a credit card, there’s a chance that we’ll start running up large balances on it, miss a payments by a couple of days, and suddenly we’re a high-value customer.

Capping interest rates at 16% would force credit-card companies to move away from the current soak-the-poor sweatbox approach, and move instead towards a much more equitable system without bizarre cross-subsidies from the poor to the rich. Chances are that annual fees would rise and loyalty rewards would shrink — and as a result the people who pay off their cards in full every month — the people who use credit cards mainly for payments convenience, rather than because there’s a credit line attached — would start using credit cards less and debit cards more. Again, feature, not bug.

What’s not true is that anybody currently paying a rate of interest above 16% would suddenly find themselves with no credit at all. Mike Konczal, back in May, showed this mathematically: high credit-card interest rates are all about maximizing profit for the card issuer, rather than being remotely related to increased credit risk. If you’re currently paying 29.99% on your credit card, that’s not because it’s the minimum level at which you’re profitable for the bank: rather, it’s because it’s the level at which you’re maximally profitable for the bank. Big difference. There’s a very good chance the bank would make money charging you 16%, too — just not as much money.

That said, Yip is right that the cap on interest rates ain’t gonna happen. The banking lobby is too strong, and we’re up against serious reform fatigue in Congress. Instead, we’ll continue to live in a world where banks deliberately make it as hard as possible to borrow money the old-fashioned way, by taking out a loan, just because they make so much more money by offering you a credit card instead. And that’s depressing.

Is there a simple physical limit to how many wireless broadband customers you can have in a small area? — Phorgy

Chinese Harmony train sets speed record — FT

Altucher on why you should rent rather than buy — NYPost

How Goldman Sachs is the guy who can make the Jack of Spades jump out of the deck and squirt cider in your ear — Kid Dynamite

“One of the oddest things to happen in the past year has been the fight between John Taylor and his Taylor Rule” — DeLong

Fox vs Time Warner Cable: Yet another reason to move to a-la-carte pricing — NYT

Should America be manufacturing its own luggage? — Economist

AT&T Resumes Online iPhone Sales — WSJ

“We’re on a sugar high,’’ El-Erian says. “It feels good for a while but is unsustainable.” — Globe

A very clear and useful primer on why the expanding monetary base isn’t intrinsically inflationary — Mankiw

The map of remoteness — New Scientist

Car routes in Boston — Cartogrammar

Depressing: No cap-and-trade attempt in 2010? — Politico

“Congress is effectively making private insurers unnecessary, yet continuing to insist that we can’t do without them” — New Yorker

TMZ’s 2009 ad revenue is $15M vs. $28M in 2008. (Blame the economy and AOL’s ad sales division woes.) — NYT

You knew it had to happen at some point: a couple of economics professors at UC Davis have done an “event study” of the Tiger Woods news cycle, and concluded that

In the days beginning with Tiger Woods’ recent car accident and ending with his announced “indefinite leave” from golf, shareholders of companies that Mr. Woods endorses lost $5-14 billion in wealth.

This is silly stuff, of course: not only are the error bars larger than the estimated losses, but a huge proportion of those multi-billions comes from the decline of the share price of enormous companies like P&G, which had just one exposure to Tiger Woods through its Gillette subsidiary. Drawing a causal relationship between the Tiger Woods scandal and fluctuations in P&G’s share price is simply impossible.

What’s more interesting to me is that the numbers got weirdly changed when the UC Davis PR department got its hands on them and led not with the $5 billion to $14 billion range, nor with the $14 billion maximum figure, but rather with this:

Tiger Woods Scandal Cost Shareholders up to $12 Billion

I have no idea where the $12 billion number came from, as distinct from the $14 billion number in the study. But that’s the number that the WSJ’s Stephen Grocer decided to go with as well.

And how do the authors explain away the inconvenient fact that Tiger’s highest-profile sponsor, Accenture, saw no losses at all? You’re going to love this one:

Economic theory predicts that Mr. Woods should be able to capture nearly all of the excess profit generated by his endorsement of a firm like Accenture. For Tiger Woods, having Accenture as a sponsor probably does not increase the overall value of ‘the Tiger brand’ all that much. Mr. Woods should therefore have a lot of bargaining power when negotiating that deal, and may be able to extract a payment very close to Accenture’s incremental profit from the relationship. And if Accenture is paying Mr. Woods something very close to its extra profit from his endorsement, it is not much worse off without him than with him. Indeed, our estimates show no ill effect at all for Accenture after the accident.

This is completely bonkers. For one thing, the authors — Christopher Knittel and Victor Stango — have already pegged the value of the Accenture contract at $20 million a year — the same amount as the Gatorade contract, and less than the Nike contract. They then go on to say that the harm to Accenture of losing Tiger is unlikely to be much more than the $20 million that Accenture was paying him. Which might make some sense, if it wasn’t for the fact that they’re pegging the harm to everybody else of losing Tiger at $12 billion. (Or $5 billion, or $14 billion, or, well, just pull a number out of thin air, really.)

Accenture is clearly the biggest loser from the whole Tiger affair: it has to scrap its entire global marketing strategy and start from scratch. What’s more, Accenture’s total Tiger-related marketing spend is vastly greater than the $20 million a year it’s paying Tiger personally. The company has run into a large unexpected tail event, in a way that Nike and Gatorade haven’t. Those companies sponsor lots of athletes: one more or less has an affect at the margin, but that’s about it. If the Tiger scandal had no visible effect on the Accenture share price, you can be sure it had no effect elsewhere.

Update: Mike Konczal finds the real reason why P&G stock fell after Tiger Woods scandal erupted. Nothing to do with Tiger, and everything to do with revised earnings estimates.

Raghuram Rajan tells the WSJ’s Mark Whitehouse that when it comes to capitalism, there’s a natural tradeoff between security, on the one hand, and dynamism, on the other. Justin Fox adds some necessary skepticism:

The greatest run of economic growth this nation has ever experienced took place from the 1940s through the 1960s, a period during which the welfare state grew and grew. And the financial innovation and dynamism of the past few decades has brought only modest rewards for most American families (measured by median household incomes).

I’m not saying there’s no tradeoff at all. Just that it’s complicated, and that there are probably some methods of providing economic security (a well-run universal health care or pension system, say) that could lead to increased economic dynamism because they encourage people to make riskier job choices.

I’d actually go further than that, and say that the dynamism of capitalism is largely a function of safety nets, dispersed risk, and limited downside. The limited-liability joint-stock company run by professional managers is a both a driver of dynamism and an exercise in maximizing the safety of as many principals as possible.

What’s more, a large reason for the excesses of the financial-services industry over the past decade is the insane level of bankers’ pay — the men in charge were so rich that they ran no real quality-of-life risk when taking enormous gambles with other people’s money. Even the biggest losers — the likes of Dick Fuld and Jimmy Cayne — are extremely wealthy men to this day.

If we want to increase the dynamism of the real economy — technology, manufacturing, services, all that kind of non-FIRE stuff — then making the finance industry smaller and less volatile is quite likely to help. After all, making it larger and more volatile did no visible good at all.

Nick Paumgarten’s 9,000-word profile of John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods, obviously went to press too late to incorporate the news that he’s finally stepping down as chairman of the company.

The move comes a good two-and-a-half years after the sockpuppet scandal which should have cost Mackey both of his jobs but which instead ended in nothing but a narrow and pathetic amendment to the company code of conduct.

Mackey has built Whole Foods up largely by acquisition, which means that his personal stake in the company is tiny — less than 1%, and less than the average daily volume in the stock. All the same, Paumgarten describes Mackey as “not always an accidental accumulator or practitioner of power”, and it’s pretty clear that if there’s any threat to his complete control over the company, it’s going to come from his newest investors, rather than from any other executive. When Mackey buys a rival grocer, its executives often take on a senior role in Whole Foods — but after that, they rarely last long.

Still, Mackey stands out among founders of multi-billion-dollar companies for the relative modesty of his wealth and income. His 1.1 million shares are worth $31 million today, and have provided him with zero dividend income since August 2008. And yet he’s much more powerful, charismatic, and important than most other corporate founders and leaders — and has survived multiple episodes which would have cost virtually any other CEO their job. Could it be that somehow Mackey has swapped money for power, and that better-paid CEOs get held to a higher standard?

AT&T stops selling iPhones in NYC because their network here is so craptastic — Consumerist, AllThingsD

“March 2009 is a reductio ad absurdum of the notion that CAPM alpha can be used as a metric of investment performance” — Dsquared

The inverse relationship between CEO pay and shareholder returns — WSJ

Real earnings of the S&P 500 ended the decade 80% lower than they began — Econbrowser

The WSJ’s Tastings column, RIP. Its common-sense attitude to wine will be sorely missed — WSJ

Bloomberg Quietly Scraps General News Department — Gawker

NominaStultorum explains why “New York, concrete jungle where dreams are made of” is grammatical — Awl

The discussion about Goldman’s synthetic CDOs just happens to coincide with a separate thread about a working paper by four researchers at Princeton, who seem to have a solid mathematical demonstration that CDOs simply can’t be priced: the amount of computing power necessary to do so just doesn’t exist.

Robert Oak has a good English-language explanation of the implications of the article: it boils down to the idea that if Goldman was loading up its synthetic CDOs with nuclear waste, there’s a good chance that its clients couldn’t have worked that out. Not because they were insufficiently sophisticated, but just because there aren’t enough computers in the world to do so.

It’s possible to overstate the connection between the paper and the events that happened at the height of the credit bubble. There’s a hidden implication in the paper that maybe with better models or faster computers we might have avoided some of this mess — but the solution to model risk isn’t more complex models, its less reliance on models altogether. And anybody who applied a simple smell test to the mortgages underlying the CDOs in question — rather than deciding instead to trust various quants both in-house and at the ratings agencies — would have come to the right conclusion without any computing power at all.

That said, there’s a case to be made that Goldman — along with much of the rest of Wall Street — was indeed arbitraging the models that investors and ratings agencies were using to price CDOs in general and synthetic CDOs in particular. The latter were particularly toxic, because synthetic CDOs are zero-sum, meaning that Goldman stood to gain in precise proportion to the degree to which the buyers of the paper were underestimating the risk involved.

The result was that Goldman had every incentive to structure CDOs which would blow up spectacularly, leaving investors with massive losses and Goldman with equal and opposite gains. The investors, meanwhile, might not have trusted Goldman (after all, they understood the zero-sum nature of these instruments), but did trust — far too much — mathematical models which turned out to be deeply flawed. And which, now, seem to be far too complex to get a grip on in any case, given the limitations of today’s computers.

In the final analysis, much of the problem here was a function of banks waving the magic letters “AAA” in front of the eyes of lazy institutional investors who thought they were getting free money by buying risk-free debt at hefty spreads over Treasuries. Some banks, like Merrill Lynch, did that and still contrived to lose billions; Goldman, by contrast, did that and managed to make a profit on the deals.

The whole sorry episode I think was fairly summed up by Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein when he said that “we participated in things that were clearly wrong and have reason to regret”. At the same time, however, Goldman wasn’t particularly evil or cunning here. It was simply acting like everybody else in the finance world, trying to take as much advantage of the credit boom as it possibly could. The main difference was that it had a bit more control over its own balance sheet than most of its rivals.

GDP bonds are the instrument that refuses to die: Robert Shiller has resuscitated them in the NYT this weekend, this time with equity-like characteristics.

Each trill would represent one-trillionth of the country’s G.D.P. And each would pay in perpetuity, and in domestic currency, a quarterly dividend equal to a trillionth of the nation’s quarterly nominal G.D.P.

There are lots and lots of reasons why this is a bad idea, not least the fact that measuring the rate of increase of GDP is vastly easier than measuring GDP itself. Bonds like the ones pushed by Jonathan Ford are at least linked to the GDP growth rate; Shiller’s bonds, by contrast, are linked to actual nominal GDP, and that’s a much harder number to pin down.

But much more seriously, Shiller’s “trills” would be incredibly — and unhelpfully — volatile, as David Merkel explains. That fact becomes immediately obvious the minute you realize that if expected long-term nominal GDP growth ever rose above the yield on a sovereign perpetual bond, the value of a “trill” would be infinite.

Right now, the spread between the two numbers is relatively small, at 100bp. (Shiller seems to be using an expectation for long-term GDP growth of 3.4%; Merkel puts the yield on a hypothetical US perpetual bond at 4.4%.) If that spread fell further, the price of a trill would start rising exponentially. Similarly, if that spread were to widen much, the value of a trill would plunge. As a result, there would be a huge amount of market risk involved in buying trills: you could easily lose half or more of your investment if real long-term rates started to rise a lot.

And if trills are bad for the buyers, they’re equally bad for the seller. The whole concept of debt finance is predicated on the idea of investing in future growth: the country borrows money from investors for the present and future benefit of the nation as a whole. Shiller’s trills turn that concept on its head: the more successful the country becomes, the more it owes its creditors.

The underlying problem here is that sovereigns and individuals can’t sell equity in themselves. (That’s the main reason why the jock exchange never took off.) The S&P 500 might not be a perfect proxy for investing in the US as a whole, but it’s not a bad one either. If people want to buy a volatile investment which goes up, over the long term, in line with national GDP, the stock market is still the best place to look.

The group of people hit hardest by interest rates are those used to living on interest payments. “The elderly and others on fixed incomes have been especially hard hit,” reports Stephanie Strom. But just how hard have they been hit?

“The unemployment situation and the general downturn in the economy had an impact, but what’s going to happen now as C.D.’s mature is that retirees and the elderly are going to take anywhere from a half to three-quarters of a percent cut in their incomes,” said Joe Parks, a retired accountant in Houston on the advisory board of Better Investing, an organization that works to help people become savvier investors. “It’s a real problem.”

A cut of as much as three-quarters of a percent? Somebody call 911! The median income for households where the householder is 65 and over was just under $28,000 in 2006. If low interest rates have hit that by 0.75%, we’re talking about a drop less than $20 per month. Is that “a real problem”, when Barack Obama is sending out $250 checks to everybody drawing Social Security, just ‘cos he’s a nice guy? I don’t think so.

Low interest rates are one way of trying to bring down the number of people getting laid off, when unemployment can reduce your income by 75%, rather than by 0.75%. Remember that Social Security payments are going up, not down (for no good reason), and in any case there’s no rule saying that anybody has to keep their principal untouched, and live only on interest payments. For that matter, there’s no rule saying that people who live on interest payments have to invest their money in risk-free investments.

The fact is that even if interest rates were 5% rather than 1%, you’d still need a $400,000 nest egg to earn $20,000 a year in interest payments. Right now, the economy is facing much bigger problems than the plight of individuals with $400,000 of liquid cash in the bank. And what’s more, we already have a safety net for retirees — it’s called Social Security, and its generosity is a serious fiscal issue going forwards.

So you’ll excuse me for not getting particularly exercised about the plight of savers in a low-interest-rate economy. If they want higher returns, they can take some risks with their money, and if they want to spend more, they have large nest eggs just sitting there for the spending. They certainly shouldn’t be a serious part of the deliberations at the Fed over whether and when to raise rates.

(One thing worth adding here: it’s possible that Parks misspoke, and that what he meant was that retirees were going to take a cut of up to 0.75 percentage points in the interest rate they could get on maturing funds. But that of course tells us nothing about their total income.)

Warren Buffett is a lovable, avuncular chap, not one of those axe-wielding CEOs who are feared by employees and idolized by the kind of red-claw capitalists who think that firing lots of people is a major leadership skill. Yet somehow he seems to have fired 21,000 people — 8.6% of his workforce — over the past year. And the cuts are being felt hardest by Berkshire’s poorest employees: some 3,000 textile workers have lost their jobs at Fruit of the Loom in El Salvador.

Alice Schroeder, Buffett’s biographer, explains that Buffett is expert at hiring “bad cops” to fire employees and to insulate himself from any blowback:

At NetJets, Sokol has got an enormous challenge on his hands. The changes he’s making at NetJets are so significant that Sokol’s angry employees apparently took their complaints about him to the press.

Try to imagine Berkshire employees doing that to Buffett. It’s unthinkable, right? Buffett could order animal sacrifices on his birthday and his employees probably wouldn’t complain to the New York Times…

No matter who succeeds Buffett (Sokol, if he pulls off the turnaround) this part of the franchise will be “lost” after Buffett is gone, because it is unique to the way Buffett has arranged his image over the years. Buffett has gone to a lot of trouble to be universally liked. I can’t think of anybody else qualified who can replicate that.

Schroeder explains that being universally liked is a major source of Buffett’s wealth: it makes it a lot easier for him to acquire any given business. Absent Buffett, it’s going be much harder for Berkshire to acquire the privately-held companies that it specializes in buying. And more generally, it’s going to be a practical impossibility for Berkshire to be run by someone as teflon-coated as Buffett. Could anybody else fire 3,000 Salvadorean textile workers and receive essentially no bad press at all?

(Incidentally, if anybody can find the RSS feed for Schroeder’s blog, “Passages”, I’d love to add it to my reader.)

Treasury provides an unlimited guarantee for Frannie, formalizing what’s existed de facto for decades — Reuters

“The people in charge of most technology companies are disinclined to realize that their success was due to luck” — Baseline Scenario

Bernie Madoff Assaulted in Prison? — ABC

The NYT seems to think that calling a politician by his first name means he’s not feared. Tell that to Rahm — NYT

Merry Christmas!