Atlantic articles

Moral: Wherein we, briefly, top and look at a couple of recent articles in The Atlantic (Jan 2015).

• How the Fed flubbed it - Review of Barry Eichengreen's Hall of Mirrors book. They say that he is going against the grain; well, we need that. The particulars might not match the theme here exactly, but the ramifications of years of largess are yet to be seen. 
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William D. Cohan,
Wall Street Rises Again
The Atlantic, January 2015

• Wall Street Rises Again - Now, we have four banks, in their aggregate, who encompass trillions of dollars.  Thanks, Fed and others. I deal with three of these (who have been slapping us silly and attempting to flay us, it seems, to within an inch of our lives) behemoths and have notes on how things have been seen from the bank customer over the last seven years. Not pretty at all. 

Of late, I have been puzzling about the use of "chimera" when some are obviously having very large pockets filled. Too, the talking heads go on about everyone's (those who have them) 401K have gains (hypothetical money that evaporates with the least amount of stress). Retracting the use? Are you kidding me?

Now, the argument is not against equity, per se. Debt, if leveraged and not collaborated, can be problematic, too. Allowing a co-owner or incurring a little debt are age-old choices. Is running finance like a stacked game fair?

No, the argument is that we ought to run finance like plumbing. That is, remove the Lords from other than some ceremonial roles.

The ca-pital-sino is the bad guy that we have spawned upon the world (at which, we can get beat, to boot). It is an over seer of markets with implications that its use denote capitalism (hah). Evaluations float; the most who might try to get their portion find the trough almost empty (what is left is basically a residue, and consequence, of fat cat consumption).

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For now, to quote Cohan: For the rest of us, sadly, the best hope is that the next crisis will be sufficiently existential to finally force fundamental, long-overdue change to the way Wall Street does business.

Remarks:  Modified: 01/10/2015

01/10/2015 -- Chimera comes about from charades: uninformed, error, intentional. The first one is reality; that economics talks about market efficiency, rational players, and perfect knowledge really tells us a lot about the dismal subject. The second relates to misused mathematics, as in, applying, almost by rote, algorithms/methods based upon a faulty basis and poorly understood framework. The last? Well, this is where the meat is (the rubber meets the road). The way the market system is stacked against the regular investor (many ways to define this) through various means, most of which are computationally framed (see error) provides the house of cards that we see on close observation. Janet would be handle this last group through some type of normative approach (to be discussed).