Econo-politics Link-fest

On Goldman Sachs :

John Robb :

Does this signal a reversal in the titanic life and death struggle between nation-states and the global financial oligarchy? No. The amount of lawfare needed to reverse the course of this war before sovereign defaults litter the battlefield is immense: thousands of trials, trillions in assessed damages, and tens of thousands sent to jail. Even that might not be enough without a long campaign of financial COIN to pacify and disassemble the too-big-to-fail banks and hedge funds.

Valdis Krebbs maps sub-prime mortgages flow into Goldman Sachs. Clearly, it ought to be possible, today, for any potential buyer of a package of investments to see a map like this. Or even an active map / model, implemented like a spreadsheet on which you can play games of what-if.

re: The Auditors

Why did it take so long for the media, the regulators and the legislators to acknowledge what some of us have known for a while?

...

Why didn’t the Big 4 audit firms warn that these obscenely over leveraged institutions threatened our financial future? Why didn’t the auditors question, push back, or raise objections to illegal and unethical disclosure gaps? Every one of the failed or bailed out financial institutions carried non-qualified, clean audit opinions in their wallets when they cashed the taxpayers’ check.

...

Something is rotten with the accounting industry.

Update Jim Kunstler asks a related question :

The question that now begs to be answered is: why is this activity not being investigated and prosecuted under the federal RICO statutes against racketeering? ... How is it not a racket to deliberately and systematically construct investments designed to fail so you can collect what amounts to insurance against them -- and then to sell those financial instruments to customers without telling them that these investments were engineered to blow up? At the very least it amounts to a failure to disclose material information, which is the basis for distinguishing illegality. More to the point, it almost certainly amounts to prosecutable criminal fraud and insider trading.

Meanwhile, in the face of volcanoes, The Economist promotes resilience in favour of risk management for a networked world.

The aim is less about trying to predict what unlikely events may come along, and more about creating mechanisms and relationships that would help the firm and its partners respond with agility if disaster did strike.

RIP Guru!

Maybe .. just maybe .. the world is starting to wise up to the true crimes of the bankers.

This is massive! Moral opinions can be changed by magnets!

Hexayurt's Dark Mountain Camp looks like it could be very interesting.

Essential viewing. Watch it, even if you assume you know it already.

Some of these are hilarious.

Bonfire, nice.

This is so beautiful : micro-labs could be driven by music.

Morning in Hackney Wick

Excellent article on current UK economic and political prospects.

Observer, yesterday:

It should be a source of national pride that Britain is thought a desirable destination by refugees, who have throughout history enriched the countries that welcome them. Instead, people who turn to us for help are vilified and punished for asking. It must also be possible to distinguish humanely between real and false claims to refugee status. The investment required is not financial, but political. It requires a leader who will look at the current system and say plainly what is there: cruelty, injustice and shame throughout.

Yay! I got Gbloink! on YouTube.



Update : More on Gbloink!

Keynes vs. Hayek

Oh, of course.

It doesn't matter how sane something is, you can always find someone to be against it.

People seem to be raving about Aline Frazao, who comes from Angola but sounds Brazilian.

I'm on a major Brazilian tip since coming back to the UK (go figure), so I've been enjoying this. But what I'm really intrigued by is, if she becomes a meme in the dubstep corner of the blogosphere, will someone start sampling and remixing her?

LightLeafs a concept-design for lights.

George Monbiot :

Yesterday in the Guardian Peter Preston called for a prophet to lead us out of the wilderness. "We need one passionate, persuasive scientist who can connect and convince … We need to be taught to believe by a true believer." Would it work? No. Look at the hatred and derision the passionate and persuasive Al Gore attracts. The problem is not only that most climate scientists can speak no recognisable human language, but also the expectation that people are amenable to persuasion.

In 2008 the Washington Post summarised recent psychological research on misinformation. This shows that in some cases debunking a false story can increase the number of people who believe it. In one study, 34% of conservatives who were told about the Bush government's claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction were inclined to believe them. But among those who were shown that the government's claims were later comprehensively refuted by the Duelfer report, 64% ended up believing that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

:-(

Normblog worries that Monbiot goes "too far" in that :

That people are sometimes resistant to being persuaded of what is true (when it is indeed true) is readily observable. But a theory purporting to explain why they must be resistant to persuasion is something else. It risks opening on to suggestions of an alternative method of 'winning' them over. There is no democratically acceptable alternative method. Sometimes you can persuade people, other times not. Welcome to the real world.

But there's more to be said than that. Daily, science is going to turn out evidence of human decision making being irrational : affected by unconscious environmental cues, learned associations, chemical triggers, partisan feelings etc. Yet our belief in democracy is fundamentally, philosophically, committed to humans as rational and free decision makers. What should we do when this commitment becomes scientifically untenable?

Will this, itself, become a reason for politicians to reject science? To deny the results of psychological research in favour of an unjustifiable faith in human agency? Will someone come up with a philosophical compatibilism? (As in "don't worry, decisions are still free and rational even though we can now see their causes"? But how sustainable will this be as we also discover better ways to manipulate beliefs?)

We have always sought to persuade. Sometimes we succeed. And sometimes we don't. But what happens when it becomes clear that persuasive power is mere "engineering", available to the highest bidder?

This looks pretty good. A chance to directly fund the cancer research projects that interest you.

Plus, bonus archive link : "Live together, Die alone"

An example of magical thinking / user-interface that I didn't notice before :

We are about to study the idea of a computational process. Computational processes are abstract beings that inhabit computers. As they evolve, processes manipulate other abstract things called data. The evolution of a process is directed by a pattern of rules called a program. People create programs to direct processes. In effect, we conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells.