Felix Salmon

Eric Lichtblau has a depressing, must-read story today detailing how strong government regulation of the for-profit eduction sector was diluted into toothlessness by effective lobbying. Lobbyists, of course, trade on their access to politicians. And one way that they obtain that access surprised me — although it clearly didn’t surprise Lichtblau, who dropped it into his story in a subordinate clause with nary a raised eyebrow. Here it is with my emphasis:

Senator Tom Harkin, the Iowa Democrat who has led Congressional hearings into the colleges, got into a heated exchange with Mr. Stein, the Education Corporation investor.

The senator said that during a hallway conversation after lunch in the Senate dining room, Mr. Stein promised to “make life rough for me” if Mr. Harkin kept up his attacks.

“I took it as a threat — it was one of the most blatant comments ever made to me in my years in the Senate,” Mr. Harkin said.

Mr. Stein, a frequent Democratic donor who had bought the lunch with the senator at a charity auction, would not discuss the details of the conversation. But he said Mr. Harkin’s account was “totally incorrect”.

I’m sure that nothing illegal happened here, but it seems ethically well over the line to me. For one thing, Harkin is rich even by Senate standards: with an eight-figure net worth, he’s the 17th-richest member of the chamber. If he wants to support a certain charity, he’s more than capable of writing a check, rather than selling his own availability to any lobbyist who wants to bend his ear for an hour.

(Technically, Avy Stein is a private-equity investor who owns a network of schools called Education Corporation of America; he’s not a registered lobbyist. But that, of course, makes no difference.)

My point is that it would be obviously unethical and possibly illegal for Harkin to simply sell his lunch hours to anybody willing to pay his price. But isn’t that effectively what he’s doing here? Yes, the money went to charity rather than directly to Harkin. But the point is that Harkin got something he values greatly in return for his time, and it shouldn’t really matter if a politician is paid in cash or in kind.

According to Alex Knott, lobbyists — among whom Stein isn’t even included — made six donations in Harkin’s honor in 2010, adding up to a total of $218,000.

I don’t know how much Harkin and his wife donate to charity each year, but it’s surely more than nothing. And every time they donate a dollar to charity, they’re making the clearest possible statement that they would rather that charity have that dollar than hold on to it themselves. As a result, if you donate money to one of Harkin’s favorite charities, you can consider that your donation has roughly as much value to him as if you’d given the money to him directly.

Even if you apply a generous discount rate and assume that Harkin would personally prefer cash to a charitable donation in his name, the donation is still worth something to him. He might prefer $10,000 in cash to a $10,000 donation on his behalf, for instance, but he wouldn’t prefer $1,000 in cash to a $10,000 donation to a favored charity. And so you can consider that a $10,000 donation is worth at least $1,000 to Harkin.

Which raises the question: if you wouldn’t be allowed to give $1,000 to Harkin personally, how is it OK to tie a $10,000 donation to some quid pro quo with him? (I have no idea how much Stein paid for his lunch, but I assume it was a substantial amount.)

This is an ethical issue I’ve faced myself. Every so often I’m invited to give a talk somewhere, with a fee attached, and I’d happily give the talk even if there wasn’t a fee. If I ask them to donate the fee to charity, does that eradicate the kind of conflict that would be seen if I accepted a check? I don’t think it does, entirely. On the other hand, if I give the talk and I don’t ask them to donate the fee to charity, I feel as though I’ve missed an opportunity to support a great organization.

Normally I say that I won’t accept a fee, but that I invite them to donate the sum to Doctors Without Borders; they don’t have to tell me whether they did or not. It’s a not-entirely-satisfactory compromise. But then again, I’m just a pundit. For US Senators, the bar should be set high. And if you wouldn’t sell your availability for cash, you shouldn’t do it for a favored charity, either.

This is a chart of the number of bike commuters in New York. It’s known as the NYC Commuter Cycling Indicator, and it comes from surveys taken ten times per year at predetermined points around the city. It doesn’t give a good count of the number of bike commuters in New York, but it gives an excellent idea of the trends: bike commuting has essentially quadrupled in the past decade, and has doubled over the past four years. Which just happen to be the four years during which Janette Sadik-Khan has run the Department of Transportation.

This is important because it shows just how effective strong leadership can be, when combined with a dedication to creating good infrastructure. And if you delve a bit into the numbers behind the indicator, this comes out even more clearly. For instance: in 2007, the Queensboro Bridge saw an average of 1,292 cyclists per day, about 80% of the 1,626 cyclists per day on the Brooklyn Bridge. By 2011, the Queensboro number had shot up to 2,904 bikers per day — 25% more than the 2,322 cyclists crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. That’s entirely a function of the fact that the Brooklyn Bridge is unpleasant for cyclists, despite the fact that by dint of its location it should be one of the busiest bike corridors in the city.

The lesson of this chart, then, is that if you build bike lanes, cyclists will appear to fill them. That’s fantastic news, since cities with lots of cyclists are always the most pleasant cities to live and work in — even for people who don’t bike themselves. New York City has a long way to go before it can be considered genuinely bike-friendly. But it’s moving in the right direction, and the bike-sharing scheme to be launched next year will provide a massive boost. Let’s hope that now Sadik-Khan has provided the necessary momentum, her successors embrace and extend what she has started.

Europe’s banks need to raise an extra $153 billion — Bloomberg

Warren Buffett is buying a $2 billion solar plant in California — Businessweek

While George Soros bought the same amount in MF Global’s European bonds — WSJ (paywall)

NPR couldn’t find a millionaire who thinks the “millionaire’s surtax” affects hiring — NPR

AOL might be clipping Patch — AdAge

And Norway faces a massive butter shortage — Vancouver Sun/Reuters

Am I feeling a bit sheepish about my extreme pessimism of last night, in the wake of a healthy stock-market reaction in both Europe and the US? Not really. Markets did rise, but the movement was within what you might consider standard noise for stock indices these days: roughly 2% in Europe, a little lower in the US. A resounding vote of confidence in the EU this was not: instead, it looks more like the bad deal done in Europe was already priced in, and the markets just continued, today, on their normal volatile and noisy path. In fact, it’s not at all clear that the EU treaty was responsible for any of today’s market move at all.

In the video I shot yesterday with TBI’s Simone Foxman, Simone talks about how Europe’s bailout mechanism is a fragile thing. For one thing, she admits that “the ECB has to get involved in one way or another”, and that we’re not seeing that right now; later on, she wonders whether the markets would even place all that much faith in a German guarantee of PIIGS debts if Germany has been downgraded. “It’s going to be really tricky to not lose a lot of investor confidence” if and when the eurozone breaks up, she says, and when Germany is called upon to provide guarantees, “by then, markets may not trust them enough. If that fear keeps rolling, it snowballs down the mountain and all of sudden becomes an avalanche”.

This is one of those situations where the conventions of reporting market moves on a daily basis are decidedly unhelpful if you want to get a feel for what’s going on in Europe. The fact is that Europe still has a lot of very strong companies, which are worth real money going forwards; in many ways, owning those companies is a much smarter thing to do than simply putting your euros on deposit in a European bank. So looking at the share prices of European companies is really not a great way of working out what the market thinks of the prospects for the future of the eurozone. And looking at the value of the euro doesn’t help much either. Instead, you want to look at more obscure indicators, like the amount that Italian and Spanish banks need to pay if they want to borrow money on the interbank market.

More simply still, just look at the amount of new capital that Banco Santander — one of the strongest banks in Spain, if not Europe as a whole — is now being asked to raise. (More than €15 billion, if you must know.) Here’s Santander’s share price, over the past couple of years. The thing to notice is the inexorable downward slide, not any small uptick today. Does anybody really think we’ve now seen the all-time lows for this indicator? If not, then let’s stop treating intraday market noise as some kind of referendum on the latest Euro treaty.

Jim Chanos claims not to understand why hedgies are so critical of Barack Obama: after all, they’ve done pretty well for themselves over the past three years. But maybe this chart, from Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, might help him out:

What we see here is the very strong correlation between tax cuts for the rich (on the x-axis) and increased wealth for the rich (on the y-axis). This correlation comes as no surprise, of course. But Obama doesn’t want tax cuts for the rich: he wants to roll their taxes back to Clinton-era levels. Instead, he wants lower taxes for the middle classes, which won’t help hedge fund managers at all.

As Piketty and Saez note, lower top marginal tax rates don’t translate into higher growth — which means that the extra wealth going to the 1% really is a zero-sum game, and being taken out of the pockets of the 99%.

But it’s hard for a gazillionaire to come out and say that he wants more of everybody else’s money. So instead we get this kind of thing, wherein Leon Cooperman pulls out every rhetorical trick in the book in an open letter to Barack Obama:

What I can justifiably hold you accountable for is your and your minions’ role in setting the tenor of the rancorous debate now roiling us that smacks of what so many have characterized as “class warfare”. Whether this reflects your principled belief that the eternal divide between the haves and have-nots is at the root of all the evils that afflict our society or just a cynical, populist appeal to his base by a president struggling in the polls is of little importance. What does matter is that the divisive, polarizing tone of your rhetoric is cleaving a widening gulf, at this point as much visceral as philosophical, between the downtrodden and those best positioned to help them. It is a gulf that is at once counterproductive and freighted with dangerous historical precedents. And it is an approach to governing that owes more to desperate demagoguery than your Administration should feel comfortable with.

The first thing to note, here, as Piketty and Saez show, is that the 1% are not actually the people “best positioned to help” the 99%. When the 1% do well, the 1% do well. But that rising tide is nowhere to be seen.

But there’s another question raised by Cooperman’s letter, and Andrew Ross Sorkin phoned up Cooperman to ask it. What, exactly, is he referring to when he talks about Obama’s “divisive, polarizing tone”? Go on, take a guess. Here’s the answer:

“What pushed me over the fence was the president’s dialogue over the debt ceiling,” Mr. Cooperman said, explaining that just when it seemed like a compromise was near, President Obama went on national television and pressed harder on “millionaires and billionaires,” a phrase that has stuck in the craw of many of the elite. For example, Mr. Cooperman zeroed in on what he described as the president’s belittling remarks about taxing the wealthy: “If you are a wealthy C.E.O. or hedge fund manager in America right now, your taxes are lower than they have ever been. They are lower than they have been since the 1950s. And they can afford it,” the president said back in June. “You can still ride on your corporate jet. You’re just going to have to pay a little more.”

This just doesn’t make sense. Cooperman supported Obama in the 2008 election, when he trotted out the line about “tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires” many times. And the corporate-jet line was a specific reference to a specific tax break which Obama wanted to abolish as part of the deal.

I think the real reason that Cooperman has started throwing his toys out of the pram right now is Occupy Wall Street — a movement which is more opposed to Obama than aligned with him. But saner heads, like venture capitalist Nick Hanauer, understand that higher taxes on millionaires and billionaires are a necessary part of any successful fiscal policy going forwards:

Without consumers, you can’t have entrepreneurs and investors. And the more we have happy customers with lots of disposable income, the better our businesses will do.

That’s why our current policies are so upside down. When the American middle class defends a tax system in which the lion’s share of benefits accrues to the richest, all in the name of job creation, all that happens is that the rich get richer.

And that’s what has been happening in the U.S. for the last 30 years.

Rich businesspeople like me don’t create jobs. Middle-class consumers do, and when they thrive, U.S. businesses grow and profit. That’s why taxing the rich to pay for investments that benefit all is a great deal for both the middle class and the rich.

So let’s give a break to the true job creators. Let’s tax the rich like we once did and use that money to spur growth by putting purchasing power back in the hands of the middle class. And let’s remember that capitalists without customers are out of business.

Hanauer’s absolutely right: the idea that millionaires (that is, people with seven-figure incomes) are job creators simply isn’t borne out by any empirical evidence whatsoever. And I particularly like NPR’s idea of asking the GOP to point to a single business owner who would hire fewer people if the top marginal tax rate were to go up. Astoundingly, in a country of 300 million people, they couldn’t find a single one.

So while people like Cooperman are interesting as a political phenomenon, their rhetoric doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. I do, however, continue to wonder at the ability of the Republican Party to sell higher incomes for the 1% to the public as a whole. Is there any other country in the world where a major political party panders so cravenly to such a tiny base — and gets broad political support for doing so?

I thought disasters were all meant to happen over the weekend? Somehow, in Brussels, EU leaders have contrived to pull defeat out of the jaws of victory on Thursday night, leaving Friday for finger-pointing and recriminations and wondering whether anybody who signed on to this deal has any chance at all of even getting re-elected, let alone being remembered as one of the leaders who saved the euro.

Remember how Wolfgang Münchau said that the Euro zone had to get it right at this summit or it would collapse? Well, the Euro zone has most emphatically not got it right. Take any of the list of prescriptions of the minimum necessary right now — from Münchau, from Larry Summers, from Mohamed El-Erian — and the one thing that jumps out at you, especially in light of the most recent news, is that if you look at anybody’s list, there’s an enormous number of items which has zero chance of actually happening.

Here’s how the FT put it on Wednesday:

It borders on hysterical to say there are but hours to save the euro, but there is a risk that if the crisis is not now tamed the price of a rescue might start to spiral out of politicians’ grasp. The stakes are therefore very high at Friday’s summit. The world cannot afford another half-baked solution.

And yet, inevitably, another half-baked solution is exactly what we got. Which means, I fear, that it is now, officially, too late to save the Eurozone: the collapse of the entire edifice is now not a matter of if but rather of when.

For one thing, fracture is being built into today’s deal: rather than find something acceptable to all 27 members of the European Union, the deal being done is getting negotiated only between the 17 members of the Euro zone. Where does that leave EU members like Britain which don’t use the euro? Out in the cold, with no leverage. If the UK doesn’t want to help save the euro — and, by all accounts, it doesn’t — then that in and of itself makes the task much more difficult.

But that’s just the beginning of the failures we’re seeing from European leaders right now. It seems that German chancellor Angela Merkel is insisting on a fully-fledged treaty change — something there simply isn’t time for, and which the electorates of nearly all European countries would dismiss out of hand. Europe, whatever its other faults, is still a democracy, and it’s clear that any deal is going to be hugely unpopular among most of Europe’s population. There’s simply no chance that a new treaty will get the unanimous ratification it needs, and in the mean time the EU’s crisis-management tools are just not up to dealing with the magnitude of the current crisis.

The fundamental problem is that there isn’t enough money to go around. The current bailout fund, the European Financial Stability Facility, is barely big enough to cope with Greece; it doesn’t have a chance of being able to bail out a big economy like Italy or Spain. So it needs to beef up: it needs to be able to borrow money from the one entity which is actually capable of printing money, the European Central Bank.

But the ECB’s president, Mario Draghi, has made it clear that’s not going to happen. Draghi is nominally Italian but in reality one of the stateless European technocratic elite: a former vice chairman and managing director of Goldman Sachs, he’s perfectly comfortable delivering Italy the bad news that he’s not going to lend her the money she needs. He’s very reluctant to lend it directly, he won’t lend it to the EFSF, and he won’t lend it to the IMF. Draghi has his instructions, and he’s sticking to them — even if doing so means the end of the euro zone as we know it.

And there’s more bad news, too. All of Europe’s hopes right now are being placed in something called the European Stability Mechanism — a permanent successor to the temporary EFSF. Since it’s permanent, the ESM is going to have to be constructed with the ability to put out fires of any conceivable size. And as such, it’s going to have to be able to borrow enormous amounts of money, and lend them on to countries which have found themselves in trouble.

But that would make the ESM, essentially, a bank. And the European leaders seem determined, today, to prevent the ESM from operating as a bank at all. Which means it will never get the firepower it needs to be taken seriously.

Oh, and did I mention that the ESM seems set to be capped at a mere €500 billion euros? That’s a lot of money, of course, but compare it to Italy’s total debt of roughly €2 trillion. And that isn’t even counting Spain, or Portugal, or Ireland, or whatever money Greece might yet still need.

Don’t think that Europe’s banks might be able to step in and lend their governments the money they need, either. The European Banking Authority, with exquisite timing, informed the world on Thursday that the continent’s banks need to raise €115 billion in new capital, including more than €15 billion for Spain’s Banco Santander alone. Where are they going to find that kind of scratch? Certainly not from their beleaguered governments. And there aren’t many private investors clamoring to invest in this particular train-wreck, either.

It all adds up to one of the most disastrous summits imaginable. A continent which has risen to multiple occasions over the past 66 years has, in 2011, decided to implode in a spectacle of pathetic ignominy. Its individual countries will survive, of course, albeit in unnecessarily straitened circumstances. But the dream of European unity is dissolving in real time, as the eyes of the world look on in disbelief.

Europe’s leaders have set a course which leads directly to a gruesome global recession, before we’ve even recovered from the last one. Europe can’t afford that; America can’t afford that; the world can’t afford that. But the hopes of arriving anywhere else have never been dimmer.

In this Counterparties, almost every link will have something to do with Europe:

Citigroup reckons Europe’s headed for a six quarter recession — FT Alphaville

Ireland’s central bank wants more printing presses in the event of a Euro collapse — WSJ

ING makes some charts predicting post-Euro economies — FT Alphaville

Financial stability is a pointless goal, “resiliency and resolution” is better — London Banker

Eurobonds could increase the risk of joint defaults — VoxEU

Ezra Klein: The Euro crisis is really about growth, not debt — Bloomberg

Funny: The shockingly short lifespan of today’s European treaty rumor — WSJ Marketbeat

The AP gets inside a secret CIA prison in Romania — Associated Press

Next week should have the most IPOs in the last four years — Renaissance Capital

And this Dutch wheelchair athlete was in a crash, is miraculously no longer disabled — Reuters

In November 2010, on what was pretty much his last day working for Treasury, I spoke to Michael Barr, an assistant secretary; he was upset about a post of mine which said that Treasury was going to do absolutely nothing with respect to holding banks accountable for the various mortgage scandals.

Not true, he said: in fact, the government was doing a lot of things targeting banks and holding them responsible for their actions.

Barr rattled off a laundry list of reviews which are being done by various arms of the government, including what he described as an “11-agency, 8-week review of servicer practices, with hundreds of investigators crawling all over the banks”. That information is finding its way to the state attorneys general, in their review. Meanwhile, said Barr, an alphabet soup of regulators (OTS, OCC, FDIC) is looking at various financial services companies (MERS, along with lots of different servicers, trustees, and banks); HUD is holding everybody to FHA and HAMP guidelines; and the FTC is looking at non-bank lenders. And keeping everything coordinated is the new Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force which has been put together under the leadership of Justice’s Tom Perrelli.

“Why are we investing these resources and including Tom Perelli in the discussions?” asked Barr. “We’re holding the banks accountable to fix it.” I asked him whether he thought that was even possible. “Their conduct suggests they can’t,” he said, adding that “they can be held accountable for not following the law. HUD can assess significant fines on them.”

Barr was clear about what he expected to happen in 2011. Specifically, he said, “if there are legal violations found, banks are responsible for fixing them and for addressing the problems.” And more generally, the government’s actions “will increase the chance that when foreclosures happen, they will happen according to established law.”

The timetable for all this? The reviews should be largely completed this year, with the full scope of the problems being apparent by the end of January. By the end of the first quarter, the banks should be in serious discussions about how they’re going to fix what’s broken. And then it gets necessarily hazier: “Institutions are resistant to change and have difficulty implementing,” said Barr, but “you’ll see flow improvement over the course of the next year.”

Could I hold Treasury to that? Sort of: “You should hold us to whether things get better or worse. If a year from now nothing has changed, that would be a reasonable criticism.”

Well, here we are, a year later, and so it’s time to check in and see what has been achieved. I asked Treasury, and they sent me the November Housing Scorecard, which is mainly notable for the fact that JP Morgan Chase “was found to be in need of substantial improvement under the program” and will no longer get servicer incentives from Treasury. They also sent me written testimony from October about how HAMP is coming along. (Slowly.)

What they didn’t point me to — because it doesn’t exist — was any kind of settlement between the attorneys general and the banks. This time last year, it looked almost certain that such a settlement was going to happen; now, with Massachusetts going its own way and California proving unwilling to give in very much, the chances of seeing any settlement at all are diminishing by the day. Realistically, if we don’t see something in the next few weeks, the chances of getting a big settlement will be very small indeed.

So the one big thing which everybody expected to have seen by now hasn’t happened. And because it hasn’t happened, the banks haven’t paid any fines; they haven’t detailed how they’re going to compensate the people who they mistreated in various foreclosure processes; they haven’t substantially improved their servicing operations; and they certainly haven’t embraced principal reductions as a tool for getting the housing market back onto a healthy footing. In fact, they haven’t really done anything at all, since it behooves them to keep any improvements they might be able to make as a bargaining chip they can use in negotiations with the government.

Going forwards, it’s still likely that the banks will end up paying some kind of fine, and promising that they’ll clean up their act in future. But the fine won’t hurt — it’ll be a cost of doing business. And the promise will be worthless, as such promises always are — I’ve never seen an agreement with real teeth, where penalties actually get enacted. In other words, the servicing system will continue to be broken, the banks will continue to make things worse rather than better, and the government will have failed in its self-imposed task of getting a grip on this problem and doing something meaningful about it.

I do think that there are people in government who have tried. But I also think that — as I said last year — they’re doomed, ultimately, to failure. Treasury said that we would have seen real progress by now; we haven’t. And there’s very little chance of getting anything substantive done between now and the election — in fact, things seem to be moving in exactly the wrong direction. Which makes me think that in the battle of Treasury vs the banks, the banks — predictably — have won.

Virtually everybody I know with Instapaper and/or Read It Later uses it all the time — the ability to read long articles in a clean format, at your leisure, on planes or subways or just when you have a few minutes to kill standing in line at the supermarket, is a great improvement to quality of life. And both of them are now popular enough that they can start extracting interesting patterns from their data.

Read It Later has a new post up about which authors are the most read on its platform, and the results are quite startling: the list of most-saved authors, and the list of authors with the highest return rate (the authors who people actually read, after they’ve saved an article) are both dominated by a lot of Gawker Media writers. “Nick Denton’s Gawker Media properties (Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Deadspin, Gawker),” write Coco Krumme and Mark Armstrong, “are among the most popular any way you cut it.”

This is partly because Gawker Media is a big and popular media company. But it’s also, I think, indicative of an important trend in the way that information is presented and consumed online.

There’s no doubt that our digital lives are becoming increasingly cluttered, and that we’re presented with more information per minute spent online than at any time in the past. There’s been a steady rise in the density of information that websites present to us, and the most successful websites (the Huffington Post and the Daily Mail are prime examples here) tend to fill their pages with enormous numbers of links and shiny things to click on.

One of the things that the Gawker redesign did was to make every Gawker Media webpage extremely dense, with lots of links to lots of stories. That’s a good thing. But it also makes it harder to give individual stories, especially long ones, the kind of space that readers like. And so those readers turn to tools like Read It Later when they come across a Gawker Media post they want to give real attention to.

Call it the density barbell: information is being presented in either a very dense form, or else in a very clean and sparse form. Both have their uses. And as tools like Instapaper and Read It Later become more widely used, websites can be even more aggressive in ramping up the density on their pages, safe in the knowledge readers can easily strip it away if they want to.

This kind of binary approach to information stands in stark contrast to what’s going on at Google, where a redesign of Google Reader, Gmail and other web apps has met with a vast outpouring of unhappiness. What’s happened there is that Google, in an attempt to make information easier to read, has massively decreased the density of its pages — even as the rest of the world is going in the opposite direction. For any one piece of information, that’s great — it’s easier to find and read. But for information consumption and navigation purposes, it’s dreadful: the redesigns slow down productivity, in a world where Reader and Gmail are key productivity tools.

What Google should have done, I think, is go in the other direction, and increase the density of the information in its apps — while adding some kind of simple tool allowing extraneous information to be eradicated at the touch of a button. People like simple and uncluttered in theory, but in practice we’re on an inexorable ride towards complex and cluttered — with tools then added on top for the purposes of filtering or reading. Give me everything, and then give me an easy way to find and read what I want. Don’t give me an unacceptable subset of everything and ask me to make do.

The good news, today, is that Jon Corzine is testifying; the bad news is that he’s almost certainly not going to say anything substantive in his testimony. His prepared statement is a bit odd: he says that he has “had limited access to many relevant documents, including internal communications and account statements, and even my own notes, all of which are essential to my being able to testify accurately” — and then says that somehow he might have been able to gain such access between now and January, as though anything will have changed between now and then.

In any case, when it comes to the huge black hole where MF Global’s customer funds should be, Corzine’s testimony is clear: “I simply do not know where the money is, or why the accounts have not been reconciled to date.”

But Christopher Elias has an idea — he reckons that the hole in MF Global customer accounts might well be due to rehypothecation.

You’ll remember rehypothecation from the Lehman bankruptcy: brokerage customers of Lehman in the US got their money back much more easily than brokerage customers of Lehman in the UK, because in the UK brokerages are allowed to “rehypothecate” customer funds — essentially, to use them for their own corporate purposes, including putting them up as collateral in their own trades.

And guess what: MF Global, too, had a UK subsidiary, MF Global UK Limited, which had over 10,000 accounts. Just as Lehman monies sloshed back and forth chaotically from New York to London and back in the company’s final days, it seems that something similar was going on at MF Global: after all, JP Morgan Chase in London seems to have been transferred quite substantial sums in the days before MF Global’s bankruptcy.

This is all highly speculative, of course. And given the utter mess which investigators seem to have found when trying to piece together what happened to customer funds, it’s entirely possible that we’ll never know exactly where they went. Money’s fungible, and once it disappears into the global financial system, it can’t easily be traced.

Corzine’s statement includes an apology “to all those affected” by MF Global’s bankruptcy; he also takes responsibility for entering into the ill-fated repo-to-maturity trades. But he doesn’t seem inclined to admit that as CEO of the company, it was his job to ensure that customer funds were well looked after:

As the chief executive officer of MF Global, I ultimately had overall responsibility for the firm. I did not, however, generally involve myself in the mechanics of the clearing and settlement of trades, or in the movement of cash and collateral. Nor was I an expert on the complicated rules and regulations governing the various different operating businesses that comprised MF Global. I had little expertise or experience in those operational aspects of the business.

This is an abrogation of responsibility, but it also rings true: back-office clearing and settlement operations are largely ignored by senior management most of the time. Still, Corzine was responsible for them. And he testifies that in its final week, “MF Global undertook extraordinary steps” in an attempt “to sell assets and generate liquidity”. It it possible that those extraordinary steps included hands entering cookie jars where they weren’t actually allowed to enter? I’d say it’s not only possible but likely. And that the more “extraordinary” the steps that Corzine was encouraging his lieutenants to take, the more likely that he would have been effectively condoning the idea that customer funds could be used in an attempt to stave off bankruptcy.

Ultimately, of course, it was the missing customer funds which torpedoed any prospects of MF Global being sold to a deep-pocketed buyer: Corzine might have scrambled a bit too much in those “chaotic, sleepless nights” which he now recollects so dimly. I sincerely hope that his actions in those days and nights can be pieced together with hindsight. Because at some point he’s going to have to be held accountable for what he did.

Here’s the leaked report from European Council President Van Rompuy  — FT

Herman Achille Van Rompuy has been said to have the “charisma of a damp rag” — Reuters

Greek deposits continue to fall – Spiegel

These charts show that it’s hard for the US to decouple its economy from Europe — Tim Duy

These charts show that the ECB might have to start printing money — VoxEU

And these charts show who’s dropping out of the US labor force — Modeled Behavior

The 30-year-old MF Global bankruptcy “boy wonder” who despises Corzine — Fortune

A well-reported portrait of what it’s like to be dragged into poverty — HuffPo

And the Gingrich campaign still has a lot of debt, half of it for private jets — WaPo

Traffic congestion is one of those problems to which there is no single silver-bullet solutions. If a city has too much congestion, the main thing it needs to do is build out much better public transportation infrastructure — something which takes many years and many billions of dollars. But failing that, or in the mean time, is there anything else?

Balaji Prabhakar reckons he can try to give prizes to people who drive at non-peak hours; it’s a cute idea, but I don’t think it scales. And then there’s congestion pricing, of course. But right now, there’s surprisingly little evidence that it actually works, and some evidence that it doesn’t, at least in the medium term: in London, congestion went up after it went down, and much of the small decline in congestion can be attributed to better public transportation rather than the congestion charge itself.

The people at GPS maker TomTom, however, have another idea about how to reduce congestion, at least at the margin. TomTom has a lot of Live devices, which are constantly transmitting their location; on top of that, every time the old-fashioned GPS devices get plugged in to a computer and upgraded, they also upload details of where they’ve been and when. And TomTom also has data from cellphone companies about how fast various phones are moving on certain streets at certain times of day.

Put it all together, and you get a very rich database of where to find congestion, both in terms of geography and in terms of time of the day and week.

This information can reduce congestion in one of two ways. Firstly, the information can directly change driver behavior. TomTom claims that it can reduce travel times by up to 15% — which obviously reduces overall congestion in and of itself a little bit, since that car is on the road for less time. And if we ever reach a point at which 10% of drivers are using that technology, then you see further benefits: enough cars get rerouted from busy to less-busy streets that the busy streets clear up a bit and move faster. Overall, TomTom reckons that congestion gets reduced for everybody by 5%, even if they’re not using any GPS device at all.

And then there’s bigger changes which can be made at the municipal level. TomTom has a whole business which sells congestion information to cities, which can then use that information to inform minor decisions like traffic-signal timings, and major ones like rebuilding roads. Historically, cities have needed clunky hardware like cameras and in-street loops to detect how much congestion there is; the TomTom data is cheaper than that, it’s much more precise, and it covers all roads rather than just the main arteries.

This is great news, right? Yesterday, for instance, we got detailed information on pedestrian congestion in NYC. The “pedestrian volume index” has now reached 113.2 from 100 in 2007, and we know about individual blocks with great specificity: on West 14th Street between Hudson and Eighth, for instance, there were 11,166 pedestrians per day between 4pm and 7pm in September, compared with 8,911 in May and 7,055 the previous September.

That’s very useful information — but it pales in usefulness when compared to equally detailed information on automotive congestion. Finally, we can settle once and for all whether the pedestrianization of Broadway has resulted in higher or lower traffic speeds. We can find out what happens to congestion when bike lanes are installed. And we can measure congestion overall in the city, with an eye to working out how much the deadweight cost of congestion is, and whether some kind of congestion charge might make sense. Most obviously, the real-time TomTom data is good enough that it can and should be used to adjust traffic signals in real time, as and when traffic jams appear.

So, is this happening? Turns out, that question is very difficult to answer. I spoke to a couple of TomTom executives three weeks ago, and they told me that they had done a little study, just for their own edification, on the Herald Square area, to see what happened to traffic speeds there when Broadway got pedestrianized. I asked if they would send it to me, and they said that they’d be happy to — they just wanted to check with the city of New York first.

And then, last week, I was told that a New York Department of Transportation Deputy Commissioner asked TomTom not to share its data with me.

TomTom is still looking for some data, somewhere in the world, that it can share with me — but I don’t have anything yet. And this data is very hard to find, for anybody outside TomTom: the company informs me that even TomTom’s own non-profit, The Traffic Foundation, which says that it will be “tapping into TomTom’s community of 50 million users”, has no access at all to this wonderful and enormous traffic database, which now has more than 4 trillion datapoints.

If this data were a little more public, researchers could plug away at it to see what the effects of infrastructure changes are on congestion, for instance, and to help create a set of best practices for what kind of interventions get the best congestion-reduction bang for the buck. But that doesn’t seem to be happening. And TomTom is very quiet indeed about which municipalities have bought its data, and what those municipalities are doing with it.

There’s an amazing opportunity, here, to use advanced statistical and quantitative techniques to painlessly improve city life: it’s exactly the kind of thing that the TED people got so excited about when they decided to award their TED Prize to The City 2.0. But I worry that TomTom is keeping this data far too close to its chest, and that cities like New York are similarly unhappy about the idea that it might become public in any way.

Of course, TomTom is a public company, with an obligation to its shareholders to maximize the amount of money that it can generate from its database. And it doesn’t want to annoy potential clients, especially not when its share price has been bumping along at very low levels for the past couple of years. Sooner or later this information is bound to start getting used widely — can’t Google just buy TomTom, already, and make it much more public? The entire company, after all, has a market capitalization of less than a billion dollars. The profit motive, here, shouldn’t get in the way of the massive public good that can come from this database.

TBI’s Simone Foxman has got her wonk on and is getting into the weeds of Eurozone bail-in policies — a crucial subject about which there isn’t nearly enough public coverage. Simone says that I’m wrong, and that the EU is in no way intending to guarantee the debts of the PIIGS. And I very much hope that she’s right about that.

Part of the problem here is that we’re all just working from whispered and unsourced news reports: it’s not like there’s any clear public language about what Merkozy is proposing. And even if there were, it would of course be subject to change over the course of the current negotiations.

Foxman points me to a form of words in an official Eurogroup statement from November 28:

Rules will be adapted to provide for a case by case participation of private sector creditors, fully consistent with IMF policies. In all cases, in order to protect taxpayers’ money, and to send a clear signal to private creditors that their claims are subordinated to those of the official sector, an ESM loan will enjoy preferred creditor status, junior only to the IMF loan.

And today there’s a letter from Merkozy which is even more opaque:

As far as the private-sector involvement is concerned, the ESM treaty should be revised to make clear that Greece required a unique and exceptional solution. We recall that all other Euro area Member States reaffirm their inflexible determination to honour fully their own individual sovereign signature. A recital in the preamble should clarify that the euro area will apply the IMF practice. As agreed, common terms of reference on CACs shall be introduced in national legislations.

The good news here is that it looks like there won’t, after all, be anything like an explicit Eurozone backstop of all members’ sovereign debts: the only thing which is abundantly clear about both of these formulations is that they’re explicit about absolutely nothing.

For one thing, the idea that anybody could turn to “IMF policies” for guidance on these matters is laughable: there are no IMF policies on the subject, beyond a general rule that the IMF itself won’t lend to a country which is in default to its private creditors. (And even the IMF seems happy to break that rule when it needs to.) As for “IMF practice”, that basically means a case-by-case “we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it” approach. Which is reasonably sensible.

So I suspect that the “IMF policies” language is going to stay in there, precisely because no one really has a clue what it means. I doubt, however, that we’ll keep the bizarre notion that that the ESM will both have preferred creditor status and be junior to the IMF. The whole point of preferred creditors is that they never take losses, while the whole point of being junior is that you might take losses. I’m pretty sure that the IMF would be very unhappy indeed with the precedent-setting idea that a preferred creditor could accept a haircut, even if that preferred creditor was not the IMF itself.

And meanwhile, the “inflexible determination to honour fully” sovereign debts is being devolved down to the individual member-state level, where it has always been, rather than being run up to the EU level.

So where does this leave private-sector bondholders? They could still get bailed in if the ESM takes a haircut — but the ESM is clearly determined not to take a haircut, as is evidenced by its attempt to give itself preferred creditor status. But if a Eurozone country gets into fiscal trouble and is forced to hand over a certain amount of fiscal sovereignty to the EU, will the EU then force that country to restructure its bonds? My feeling here is that the answer is no.

If the ESM goes according to plan, then basically what happens is that the EU as a whole steps in when a country can’t get its fiscal act in order, and takes over to provide adult supervision and to force hard decisions to get made. One of those decisions will be to honour fully all sovereign debts. Ex hypothesi, the country in question can’t roll over those debts — which means that the ESM will have to step in to fund all budget deficits. And so even as private-sector debts are coming due and being rolled off, the ESM will be providing new-money funding.

All of which looks very much like an EU guarantee of sovereign debt.

But at the same time, the chances of the ESM going entirely according to plan have to be reasonably slim. And there’s enough wriggle room in the language as currently envisioned that if things start going really pear-shaped in Italy or Spain, private-sector bondholders could still see themselves forced to accept some kind of haircut.

It would just take the failure of the ESM for that to happen.

So is the ESM an EU guarantee of all Eurozone sovereign debt? To a first approximation, if it works, then I think it probably is. But it’s not a blanket, iron-clad guarantee. And that, at least, is good news.

Historically, it was hard for institutions to reply in any effective manner to press reports which they thought were full of egregious errors and mistakes. They could complain to various editors, and maybe even get a short response on the letters page, but they rarely got the opportunity to reply in their own words and at the length they thought the reply deserved.

The web, of course, has changed all that, and ISDA’s media.comment blog is a great example of a criticized institution taking matters into its own hands. It names and links to the articles it’s criticizing, and I’m pretty sure that it would happily engage in real debate, if those organizations ever deigned to reply. Which they don’t. As a result, ISDA seems — is — more transparent and open than the likes of the New York Times and Bloomberg.

The Federal Reserve, on the other hand? Not so much.

In a six-page letter today addressed to the Senate Banking Committee, Ben Bernanke lashes out at “a series of articles–one just last week–concerning the Federal Reserve’s emergency lending activities”. He says those articles “have contained a variety of egregious errors and mistakes”. And he encloses “a memo prepared by Board staff that addresses some of the most serious errors and claims in those articles”.

Nowhere in those six pages is a single article actually identified. The Fed memo, similarly, has no named author. And the whole thing is available only as one of those PDFs-from-a-copy-machine, which makes it impossible to copy-and-paste or to search. The Fed put the letter up on its website and made sure that various economic journalists, like myself and Binyamin Appelbaum, knew all about it. But the whole thing is an incredibly passive-aggressive way of attacking Bloomberg, which, to reiterate, is never actually named.

Bloomberg did not let the opportunity go to waste. It’s clearly the main object of the Fed’s ire, but because it isn’t named, it can do two rather clever things in its official response. The first is to respond to the Fed’s complaints by citing various different stories it’s written over the years — since the Fed never actually specified which story or stories it had issues with. And the second is to simply deny that it said what the Fed is complaining about at all. When the Fed, for instance, says that “the articles misleadingly depict financial institutions receiving liquidity assistance as insolvent,” Bloomberg simply and effectively replies that it “never described any of the financial institutions mentioned in its bailout stories as insolvent”.

All of which makes the exchange less of an actual debate and more of a case of two powerful institutions talking past each other.

The Fed has various blogs; it could easily have used one to single out specific errors in the Bloomberg article, which Bloomberg would then have had to respond to directly. But instead it just writes a memo talking vaguely about “these articles”, and in doing so plays straight into Bloomberg’s hands.

And of course both the Fed memo and the Bloomberg response perpetuate the myth that Fed officials don’t talk to Bloomberg reporters on a daily basis. There’s lots of back-channel noise, here, which isn’t seeing the light of day; the memo and official response are just the carefully-chosen public face of a debate which is happening primarily in private. (The Fed’s a bit like Goldman Sachs: it loves talking “on background”, but hates saying anything on the record. Which is why a large part of Fed-watching is working out which reporters are getting the coveted phone calls from Fed board members, and then reading between the lines to work out who’s telling them what.)

Bloomberg has won this particular round, just because it’s being very open about what it’s saying, while the Fed memo seems mealy-mouthed and less than fully open about what it’s trying to say. If you’re going to complain about “egregious errors and mistakes”, it behooves you to be specific about exactly where the errors and mistakes lie, and to quote them directly. If you don’t do that, you automatically look as though you have a weak case, and you open yourself up to counterattacks like the one from Bloomberg.

Which is not to say that the Fed is being completely disingenuous here. The Bloomberg article in question ginned up rather more scandal than there really was. “Details suggest taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger,” it says, breathlessly — but really they don’t: the details that Bloomberg managed to obtain really don’t tell us anything about the Fed’s lender-of-last-resort operations in aggregate that we didn’t already know. They do give us new information about a few specific banks, none more so than Morgan Stanley.

Or, take this passage, under the sub-head “$7.77 Trillion”:

The amount of money the central bank parceled out was surprising even to Gary H. Stern, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis from 1985 to 2009, who says he “wasn’t aware of the magnitude.” It dwarfed the Treasury Department’s better-known $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Add up guarantees and lending limits, and the Fed had committed $7.77 trillion as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year.

If you read the passage very carefully, there’s nothing actually inaccurate there. But the impression given is that “the amount of money the central bank parceled out” was $7.8 trillion, a sum which “dwarfed” TARP and is more than half of US GDP. And that’s not true — the actual amount that the central bank parceled out never exceeded $1.2 trillion, a fact you won’t find in the Bloomberg article.*

And this, too, is misleading:

Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, says banks “were either in bad shape or taking advantage of the Fed giving them a good deal. The former contradicts their public statements. The latter — getting loans at below-market rates during a financial crisis — is quite a gift.”

The Fed says it typically makes emergency loans more expensive than those available in the marketplace to discourage banks from abusing the privilege. During the crisis, Fed loans were among the cheapest around, with funding available for as low as 0.01 percent in December 2008, according to data from the central bank and money-market rates tracked by Bloomberg.

The 0.01% funding was one loan, to one bank, on New Year’s Eve, as the emergency-lending program was coming to an end: in no way is it indicative of the interest rates charged by the program as a whole. And Baker’s characterization of the Fed loans as being “at below-market rates” is left conveniently undefined, in the context of the fact that the credit market had seized up and that there were no real “market rates” any more in the interbank market. Indeed, the comment makes it into a caption in the article, which says that “banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates”.

The fact of the matter is, as the Fed points out in its letter, that the Fed set the interest rates on the lending at a penalty over normal market rates. And — you really have to work to get this — Bloomberg’s methodology doesn’t actually take into account the interest rates charged by the Fed at all! Bloomberg just takes the amount of money that the banks borrowed from the Fed, and then multiplies it by their net interest margin — the profit they reported on loans. The Fed could have been lending at a penalty rate of 25%, and according to Bloomberg the banks would still have made $13 billion in profits on the loans, so long as their net interest margin didn’t change. Just because the banks had a positive net interest margin does not mean that the Fed was lending them money at below-market rates, as Bloomberg would have you believe.

The Bloomberg article reads like a highly partisan attempt to paint the Fed in the worst possible light, with misleading assertions and extensive quotes from Fed critics. The Fed could, if it wanted to, have spelled this out. But in attempting to be high-handed and refusing so much as to utter Bloomberg’s name, it just seems out of touch and opaque — which is exactly the impression Bloomberg would love you to have.

So Bloomberg wins — and the Fed ends up looking even worse. Maybe next time the Fed will be a bit more transparent and heartfelt and honest. It will find itself in a much stronger position if it goes there.

*Update: You will find the fact that the banks never borrowed more than $1.2 trillion in the article, but it’s subtle enough that I missed it on multiple readings. At the top of the piece, we’re told that the banks”required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day”.

Uh-oh: construction’s grinding to a halt in Chinese “ghost towns” — WSJ

I’m a big fan of Paul Krugman’s headline pun — NYT

Corzine suggested he’d quit if board members didn’t trust his MF Global Euro bet — WSJ

After promising not to, Wall Street firms have re-violated fraud laws at least 51 times — NYT

Be afraid of a run on the shadow banking system — WSJ

This is grisly: for-profit hospices are paying referral fees for dying patients — Bloomberg

Romney spent $100,000 in state money to erase his gubernatorial record — Reuters

A list of historical figures Newt Gingrich has compared himself to — The Atlantic Wire

Yahoo prepares to battle a brain drain — WSJ

Sorry, “international waters” is not itself a business model — Atlantic Cities

Why does the police department of Tampa, Florida need a tank? — The Daily