All Things in Moderation

I just read on ESPN that John Terry, Chelsea’s center back and captain of the England national football (read: soccer) team, is to face criminal charges for allegedly uttering a racial slur in a match against Queens Park Rangers.

England captain John Terry will face a criminal charge over allegations that he racially abused an opponent in the Premier League.

Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service said Wednesday that there is sufficient evidence to prosecute the Chelsea defender for his on-field exchange Oct. 23 with Queens Park Rangers defender Anton Ferdinand.

The Telegraph has the history of the case.

This is complete insanity. It is not at all clear what Terry is alleged to have said (which is bizarre in itself – the “victim” is reported to have told police that he did not accuse Terry of making a racist remark), but it doesn’t really matter to me. It is just words, said on a football pitch. I’m not going to defend racist remarks, and if the league wants to punish Terry for any remarks he may have made, more power to them. But for this to be a legal matter, that there actually exists laws prohibiting the uttering of racial slurs, shows how utterly confused our good friends across the ocean have become regarding the notion of freedom that they themselves did so much to introduce to the world.

Our polticial, legal, and indeed national culture owes much to the UK, and I have long been a fan of the nation, both historically and contemporarily. But contrasting this foolishness with the recent events between the Cincinnati and Xavier basketball teams where real, phsyical harm was done, and the fact that it will lead to no criminal charges, shows how very far apart our cultures, and the role government should play in it, have grown.

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Vital Statistics:

S&P futures are slightly weaker on a miss by Oracle and European weakness. Oracle blamed the miss on customers delaying purchases and economic weakness in Europe. Analysts are forecasting a drop in corporate IT spending in Q112. Separately, RIMM is up over 9% on reports that they are an acquisition target by AMZN, and that MSFT and NOK considered a joint bid.

Speaking of takeovers, a lot of merger arbs expected the Obama FTC and DOJ to be aggressive antitrust enforcers, similar to the Clinton Administration, when Robert Pitofsky headed the FTC. (Anyone remember Staples / Office Depot?). Well, the Obama Administration finally blocked one – the Verizon / T-Mobile Deal. The Bush Administration had a particularly benign view of antitrust – allowing the merger of Whirlpool and Maytag / Quaker Oats and Pepsi among others. Obama more or less continued the benign view that the Bush Administration followed. It will be interesting to see if this is part of a trend.

The National Association of Realtors just released existing home sales data for November, including revisions going back to 2007. Due to errors in methodology, existing home sales have been overstated by about 14% – 15% for the last few years. Other data in the report: there are about 2.58 million homes for sale, or a 7-month supply. The median existing home price dropped 3.5% YOY to $164,200. 29% of all home sales were foreclosures or short sales. While the naturally bullish NAR is trying to put a happy face on the data, it shows the housing market still has a long way to go in order to reach normalcy. It also demonstrates how much the government efforts to limit foreclosures have depressed sales and delayed the necessary process of moving the distressed inventory. House prices won’t recover (and the economy won’t experience a robust recovery) until the shadow inventory has traded.

Chart: US Existing Home Sales (Seasonally Adjusted Annual Rate)

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Still watching Battlestar Galactica. Saw a preview of Caprica, and putting it in context, that show looks great. Sorry to find out it got cancelled prematurely, but I’m surprised Syfy had the money to put together a series like Battlestar in the first place. Anyway, it’s awesome.

Stupid consumers won’t buy the right kind of light bulbs, so they must be forced to.

Supposedly because you save enough on energy and replacement costs to justify the investment. If so, why not let bulb manufacturers make that case to consumers, who can then decide for themselves?A noncoercive approach is unacceptable, the Times implies, because consumers are driven by irrational concerns.

Speaking of infrastructure jobs, isn’t the Keystone Pipeline “infrastructure”? Or is it bad when when it’s energy infrastructure? I mean, petroleum energy infrastructure?

I’m sorry, but this is bullsh*t. It’s Google’s g*ddamned search engine. Why the hell can’t they feature search results that feature their own products? Google may not be that great at not being evil, but this is just stupid, and any success they have in this direction just sets a bad precedent. I love how competitive behavior is getting re-defined as “anti-competetive”. Google pimping their own products is now anti-competetive? No, that’s actually competing. In the marketplace.

“Given the scope of Google’s market share in general Internet search, a key question is whether Google is using its market power to steer users to its own web products or secondary services and discriminating against other websites with which it competes,” the lawmakers wrote in a letter sent Monday.

As a call back to our earlier comment-thread discussions about Song of the South, here are the 6 Most Secretly Racist Classic Children’s Books. Sherlock Holmes is a children’s book?

A few years ago I purchased a collection of vintage cartoons intended for children, but also intended to be cheap (most, I imagine, are very inexpensive to license or in the public domain). There was one Tom and Jerry short on there, but not the cat and mouse (indeed, they were later renamed Dick and Larry, to avoid confusion). Two Laurel and Hardy types, only animated, and there’s a sequence where they are flying in a plane and decide to visit Africa, in blackface. Delightfully racist–you know, for kids!

— KW

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I found myself in lower Manhattan yesterday with some time to kill before my timed pass for the newly opened 9/11 Memorial, so I wandered through Zuccotti Park, former ground zero of the Occupy Wall Street encampment.

Zuccotti Park is typical of several New York City semi-public spaces in that it is not a park in the conventional sense as there are no green spaces. It is a tiered totally hardscaped sliver of a city block with a wide assortment of benches and tables presumably for the enjoyment of nearby office workers on breaks.

Since the police evicted the occupiers/protesters/squatters in the dead of the night, the park has been ringed with two sets of portable crowd control barricades. The inner ring which is double thick in places encircles the park itself except for two difficult to discern cattle gate style entrances inconveniently located so as to make using the park as a short cut between Church Street and Broadway useless despite the crowded holiday pedestrian traffic around the park. The outer ring was another set of barricades at the curb-street line allowing for street crossing at corners but otherwise restricting access for jaywalkers.

Indeed, the park was deserted except for the occasional determined pedestrian and two people huddled at the stone tables, one looking none too warm and definitely on the unhoused end of the homeless-hipster continuum and the other awaiting to hustle chess opponents who never seemed to arrive.

The only two protesters to be seen were at the far east end of the park. One had an incoherent cardboard sign about livestreaming the protest. The other was the ‘official’ OWS representative who was collecting donations while clutching a cup of coffee for warmth. I chatted with him for just a few minutes while he explained how the cops were doing their best to make the park look inaccessible while nominally maintaining it open.

At any given time there were more than a dozen policemen circulating in and around the park, frequently congregating in small groups to chat and joke. There was no serious crowd control going on except for maintaining a highly visible presence.

The OWS protesters are in search of another base of operation, most recently on property owned by nearby Trinity Church who has rebuffed them. I can see why they have to because nobody is going to be occupying Zuccotti Park any time soon.

More photos here.

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Vital Statistics:

Housing starts were better than expected at 685k, which more or less matches the post-recession high of 687k. Trouble is, a normal number is closer to 1500, and these “highs” are lower than the troughs in the last 8 recessions. So, yes it shows that housing is maybe, conceivably, hopefully picking itself up off the mat, but we are still in a deep freeze.

Joe Nocera is back on the revisionist history beat with an editorial claiming that Fannie and Fred didn’t have a role in the crisis. I propose that all liberal columnists who write columns defending Fannie address the American Dream Commitment, which was a $ 2 trillion piece of social engineering policy that has been thoroughly swept under the rug. Just because the media refuses to address it doesn’t mean it didn’t exist.

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Somebody else is trying to do the Bad Lip Reading thing. This is their take on Rick Perry’s “Strong” Ad.

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Kind of late, I think. But Jeb Bush is saying some conservative stuff in a campaign-y way. Either he’s testing the waters, or he’s trying to give the candidates currently in the running a little advice on how to try and sound.

We have to make it easier for people to do the things that allow them to rise. We have to let them compete. We need to let people fight for business. We need to let people take risks. We need to let people fail. We need to let people suffer the consequences of bad decisions. And we need to let people enjoy the fruits of good decisions, even good luck.

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Still not sure how that’s accomplished, but I love the whole gastronomical engineering movement, and hope it continues to expand.

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This 2006 paper claimed that American manufacturing retained its world lead and 20%+ of global manufacturing from c. 1980 to 2005.  It claimed job loss in the sector was entirely due to mechanization.


Cited within the paper is a Fed Reserve of Cleveland abstract, but its conclusions differ.

http://www.clevelandfed.org/Research/Commentary/2006/0101.pdf

I would like to see the data broken out between defense and non-defense manufacturing output.  An analysis, over time, of the portion of output generated by S&P 500 and non-S&P 500 companies might show concentrations in manufacturing, like the trend in agribusiness away from the diminishing family farm component.


Some of you have access to, and often deal with, data that would tend to confirm or deny the premise of the 2006 paper.  Your thoughts are welcome.
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NoVAH, what do you think of the passing off of the minimum standards for coverage under ACA to the states?  Upside?  Downside?

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Vital Statistics:

The next two weeks are going to be slow for the markets. In spite of the improving economy, it has been a dour holiday season so far. Banks are announcing another round of job cuts, and those who are lucky enough to keep their jobs will see their bonuses cut in half. Bloomberg is reporting that Royal Bank of Scotland is contemplating exiting the equities business. This is in addition to job cuts being announced by Citi and Morgan Stanley.

Paul Krugman is discussing what will probably be the next financial headache in this morning’s NYT – the bursting of the Chinese real estate bubble. While Western banks don’t have a lot of direct exposure to Chinese banks, they do have a lot of exposure to Hong Kong banks, specifically HSBC (aka Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corp) and Standard Chartered. Krugman’s main worry is a collapse in demand and the fact that a weakened global economy cannot take the strain of a Chinese collapse.

Kim Jong-Il has died, and his 28 year old son is taking over. Market moving? Not really, unless you are long the Won. We have a deal on the extension of the payroll tax cut. Wait, we don’t? Again, market moving? Not really. No one cares anymore. Prince Alwaleed has bought himself some Twitter.

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