Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are much in the news today, as the federal government finds itself obliged to make the 'implicit' government guarantee quite explicit.
I wrote a lot about these strange entities some time ago, and you can read what I had to say about what should have been done at Reinventing the Government Corporation, 1995 Ill. L. Rev. 543.
Among other things, I advocated breaking up Fannie and Freddie into smaller bodies that would not be too big to fail, and that would compete more with each other. I also proposed various accountability measures, and even looked into the issuance of risky subordinated debt to act like a canary in a coal mine.
I've put the full table of contents in the extended part below.
David Rieff has a long piece in tomorrow's NYT magazine about Cuban-American politics in Miami, provocatively titled, Will Little Havana Go Blue?.
The main conclusions track what those of us who live here see around us: Cuban-American politics are being changed by a generational shift (a rising generation that is American first and treats its hyphen much they way other ethnic groups do), and a political differences between recent immigrants and the revanchists who have been here 40-50 years. The recent escapees are much less willing to support policies that prevent them sending money to relatives left behind, and which limit their ability to visit their families still trapped in Cuba.
The result is a breakage of the monolithic support for the GOP and for its candidates. Particularly hurt are the Diaz-Balart brothers, who suffer from poor constituent services and a failure to bring home the kind of bacon that their storied predecessors — Claude Pepper, Dante Fascell — did.
Although Rieff doesn't address this directly, it turns out that Joe Garcia's vicious mockery of the Diaz-Balarts as a “one trick pony” may be right on the mark.
Rieff's piece contains another bit of wisdom. Miami's shift to normal politics away from unthinking equation of the GOP as the natural home for Cuban-Americans does not mean automatic victory for Democrats.
The lesson for local campaigners is obvious: Cuban-Americans being up for grabs means that they will need to be addressed in the same way as other swing constituencies: with appeals on the issues they care about (housing, jobs, health, social security, as well as Cuba) and — and this is probably key — turnout will rule. The community is no longer monolithic. Just like with many other communities that means whoever gets out their voters will win.
I trot over to the J-School TV studio as part of the sober, sensible, bipartisan consensus, intending to carry water for Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson.
And what do I find also on BBC/Newsnight when I get there?
I FIND THAT I AM ON WITH GROVER-FRACKING-NORQUIST!! I FIND THAT I AM ON WITH GROVER-FRACKING-NORQUIST!!! WHO HAS THREE POINTS HE WANTS TO MAKE:
Barack Obama wants to take your money by raising your taxes and pay it to the Communist Chinese.
Oil prices are high today and the economy is in a near recession because of Nancy Pelosi: before Nancy Pelosi became speaker economic growth was fine—and she is responsible for high oil prices too.
Economic growth is stalling because congress has not extended the Bush tax cuts. Congress needs to extend the Bush tax cuts, and if it does then that will fix the economy, and if it doesn't then the economy cannot recover.
Brad says he has to be medicated better to deal with this nonsense. (“OK. Calm down. Adjust my meds…”)
Or, it seems, being an economist, instead of being better medicated, he could just be better paid….
I am not paid enough to deal with this lying bullshit. I am not paid enough to deal with Grover Norquist and his willful stream of defecation into the global information pool.
It is is amazing how few liberal equivalents to Fred Barnes, Grover Norquist and that whole merry crew exist. Or maybe they exist and don't get media time. I'm not saying there's no one, but there's few and they're not on nearly as often.
Then again, on these issues, there probably are not a lot of responsible conservative economists willing to attack Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson right now.
At neighboring FIU, founding Dean Leonard Strickman has announced his resignation, effective a year from now. (This is the usual heads-up to allow a school to find a replacement.) Strickman's tenure was noted by several achievements, notably recruiting a serious faculty and steering FIU law to accreditation in the shortest possible time.
Interestingly, the announcement appears in FIU Law's online newspaper which appears to have a thriving comments section. One of the goals of UM's draft strategic plan is to create an online space for student-faculty and student-student interaction. Whether ours is going to be purely student-run, or have a dose of administrative intervention remains to be determined as do many questions about focus, access and comments policy. Perhaps here UM can learn from FIU's example.
Personally, whoever rides herd on it, I hope we create a forum that is as open as possible — while having some sort of mechanism to promote civility.
Posted inMiami|Comments Off on FIU Law Dean Leonard Strickland Announces Resignation
The latest: importgenius.com, the brainchild of brothers Ryan and David Petersen, with Michael Kanko. They exploit customs reporting obligations and Freedom of Information requests to organize and publish — in real-time — the contents of every shipping container entering the United States.
From importgenius.com.
There’s a neat ticker on the bottom of their page showing a trickle of these data. Watch it for a few minutes: it’s mesmerizing and provides a sometimes beautiful window into the wonders of international trade.
Talk about a not-so-covert channel leaking what your business is up to on a daily basis. What the Petersens and Kanko are onto is yet another unintended consequence of globalization. It makes me wonder what other sources like this are out there and accessible via the Freedom of Information Act. Similarly, as one commenter on the above article asked, how soon before people try to game the system:
I wonder if something like this will lead to a rise in ‘creative’ customs declarations. Say a proxy company to take that new shipment of 22,000 digital thingies that are then immediately sold to Apple and thus mitigating the chances of someone predicting the street date of their latest offering
Posted inInternet|Comments Off on A Taste of What Real-Time Data Can Do
