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Filling the Financial Regulatory Void « The Baseline Scenario
I would argue that the fundamental flaw in financial regulation is that it is based on the assumption that regulators are not self-interested individuals like the rest of us. We think about regulation only in terms of how to engineer the incentives of the regulated and ignore the fact that regulators themselves rarely have a stake in doing their job well, which in any other occupation would limit the motivation and types of individuals a position attracts.
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It is unlikely that consumers will ever hold much influence over the realities of the financial regulatory process because they are not organized in comparison to the financial industry, which concentrates significant resources in the creation of inefficient regulators. By and large, consumers are not well-informed about what they have at stake in the regulatory process and, even if they were, that would not be the sole determinant of how they define themselves politically.
Adding another layer of guards to guard the existing guards ultimately results in an infinite regress. I do not think it is cynical to suggest that, absent an actual paradigm shift with respect to accountability in the financial industry, we are just going to have more of the rent-seeking that has gone on to date and the economic calamities that ensue. For my part, I would propose opening up financial regulation to a small group of social entrepreneurs. Let people establish for-profit companies that can compete for government contracts to stress test the holdings of financial institutions independently and audit their records.
CDC - Products - Publications and Products Descriptions
Vital Statistics of the United States, Health E-stats, Life Tables, and more from the CDC
Strange New Air Force Facility Energizes Ionosphere, Fans Conspiracy Flames
About the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program.
Forget Who Pays Medical Bills, It’s Who Sets the Cost - NYTimes.com
Fee-for-service versus other payment models in medicine.
Why markets can’t cure healthcare - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com
One of the most influential economic papers of the postwar era was Kenneth Arrow’s Uncertainty and the welfare economics of health care, which demonstrated — decisively, I and many others believe — that health care can’t be marketed like bread or TVs. Let me offer my own version of Arrow’s argument.
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There are two strongly distinctive aspects of health care. One is that you don’t know when or whether you’ll need care — but if you do, the care can be extremely expensive. The big bucks are in triple coronary bypass surgery, not routine visits to the doctor’s office; and very, very few people can afford to pay major medical costs out of pocket.
This tells you right away that health care can’t be sold like bread. It must be largely paid for by some kind of insurance. And this in turn means that someone other than the patient ends up making decisions about what to buy. Consumer choice is nonsense when it comes to health care. And you can’t just trust insurance companies either — they’re not in business for their health, or yours.
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The second thing about health care is that it’s complicated, and you can’t rely on experience or comparison shopping. (”I hear they’ve got a real deal on stents over at St. Mary’s!”) That’s why doctors are supposed to follow an ethical code, why we expect more from them than from bakers or grocery store owners.
You could rely on a health maintenance organization to make the hard choices and do the cost management, and to some extent we do. But HMOs have been highly limited in their ability to achieve cost-effectiveness because people don’t trust them — they’re profit-making institutions, and your treatment is their cost.
Apps for America 2: The Data.gov Challenge
Apps for America is a special contest we're putting on this year to celebrate the release of Data.gov! We're doing it alongside Google, O'Reilly Media, and TechWeb and the winners will be announced at the Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase in Washington, DC at the end of the Summer.
Welcome to USAspending.gov
USAspending.gov, a re-launch of www.fedspending.org, provides this information to the public, as collected from federal agencies, in an easy to use website. The data is largely from sources: the Federal Procurement Data System, which contains information about federal contracts; and the Federal Assistance Award Data System, which contains information about federal financial assistance such as grants, loans, insurance, and direct subsidies like Social Security.
Data.gov
The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government.
BBC NEWS | UK | Medieval battle records go online
The detailed service records of 250,000 medieval soldiers - including archers who served with Henry V at the Battle of Agincourt - have gone online.
Peter Dreier: Labor Pains at UCLA
This year, with the worst state budget crisis in memory, anti-labor forces think they can prevail. UC labor studies, a minuscule part of the state budget, is the only UC program that the Governor specifically targeted for elimination. The combined budgets for these programs is only $5.4 million a year.
Rest Stops, R.I.P. | GOOD
State governments are shutting down interstate rest-stops because of money woes and competition from KwikMats and McDonalds.
Stumbling and Mumbling: Regulation vs nationalization
4 arguments for strong regulation of banks. "But we regulate banks not because they'll make too much money, but for fear that, left to themselves, they'll lose too much."
Money for Art, Pt 1: Arts Funding in America - book/daddy
The important conclusion to draw from this history is this: Being used as a weapon or a whipping boy has been a political function that the arts have repeatedly been dragged into well before the '90s. Of course, sometimes artists weren't dragged at all; they joined the fray willingly, eager to stick a thumb in the eye of the bourgeoisie, and then demand federal payment for the service.
Lake of the Woods Control Board
The Lake of the Woods Control Board is a Canadian board which regulates the water levels of Lake of the Woods and Lac Seul, and the flows in the Winnipeg and English Rivers downstream of these lakes to their junction, for the benefit of all users and interests.
The Elusive Green Economy - The Atlantic (July/August 2009)
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Exhilaration over clean energy has so thoroughly swept Silicon Valley that it has transformed the local culture. Conspicuous consumption has given way to conspicuous conservation. The favored status symbol is no longer the giant yacht or the sprawling mansion but the home designed to be so ruthlessly energy-efficient that it generates its own power
and
produces a surplus that can be selflessly fed back into the grid. One top venture capitalist who showed me his Portola Valley home had embarked on such a project and then, after choosing the reclaimed stone and composting toilets, had succumbed completely to environmentalist fervor and kept right on going, contracting with a local nursery to grow the flora necessary for a “native play meadow” and bringing in a team of wildlife biologists, equipped with motion-sensitive night-vision cameras, to lure back to their natural habitat the elusive riverine tortoise and dusky-footed wood rat that once roamed the property. A documentary film is in the works. -
The nut of the problem traces all the way back to Jimmy Carter’s choice of tax credits as the vehicle for subsidizing renewable energy. Direct grants would have been simpler. But Congress had recently changed the federal-budget process to keep closer track of how much money was being spent. It suddenly became easier to spend indirectly, by manipulating the tax code. Although no one realized it at the time, Carter’s decision to use tax credits lit the very long fuse on a bomb that detonated last fall and nearly took down the entire renewable-energy industry in America.
The trouble with tax credits is that in order to make use of them, you must owe taxes, and most start-ups struggling toward profitability do not. So while a company looking to build a wind or solar facility would qualify for valuable benefits, it had no means of realizing this “tax equity.” The work-around was to partner with someone who did, someone large enough to finance a $500 million facility and profitable enough to incur a large tax bill. Having witnessed two decades of busts and bankruptcies, traditional U.S. banks wanted no part of this. European banks, going by their more positive experience, were comfortable funding large renewable projects, but didn’t qualify for U.S. tax credits. The perversity of the government’s incentives demanded a big balance sheet, huge profits, and an indifference to risk.
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Economic Perspectives from Kansas City: A Message to President Obama: Stop Priming the Pump, Hire the Unemployed
So, when the government is called to action, the economic profession has replaced Keynes’s “fiscal policy via public works” with a “leaky bucket pump-priming mechanism.”
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The truth is that no one really knows how fast GDP needs to grow and how large government spending needs to be in order to bring the unemployment rate down. To a large degree, this is because we don’t know how leaky the bucket is. Will indebted households save or spend their tax cuts? Will the unemployed spend much of their unemployment insurance on mortgage payments? How long would layoffs and other cost-cutting measures last before private firms fix their own balance sheets and start hiring? How large a government injection into the private sector is necessary to improve profit expectations and employment conditions?
All of this is rather uncertain, which is why Keynes, never had any “leaky bucket” or “pump priming” idea in mind. For him “the real problem fundamental yet essentially simple…[is] to provide employment for everyone” (Keynes 1980, 267) and the most bang for the buck from fiscal policy would be achieved via direct job creation. This he called “on the spot” employment via public works. -
useful to think of Keynesian fiscal policy, not as aggregate demand management, but as labor demand management. Yes, Keynes believed that priming the pump would prevent severe depressions, but it couldn’t be counted on to bring the economy to full employment. This is in part because it tends to push prices and erode income distribution once the economy begins to recover. To dodge these problems, in all circumstances, government spending had to be targeted to the unemployed themselves. He urged that when the government couldn’t take the worker to the contract, it should bring the contract to the worker.
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