2. Pulp nonfiction.
3. Fear of TALF.
4. Via Greg Mankiw, ranking of all blogs, MR is now at #36 ("widely referenced" seems to be the standard).
5. Via Brad DeLong, one rating of the top Hayekian public intellectuals (shouldn't Bill Easterly be in the top few?).
It’s not a myth.
It shouldn’t matter, but regulators ARE idiots, so yes it matters.
The prices weren’t right in the runup, why are they right in the fire sale?
It should be a myth, the regulators have made a bad dream reality.
Banks are special. We have a system that takes over banks that make dumb moves before they actually go bankrupt. The system is designed for a trend growth environment. The occasional bank that abuses their specialness status can be taken over by the FDIC. We do not have a system that can handle many many banks being dumb.
In a downturn, we want lower capital requirements. We apparently have the opposite in Mark-to-Market. Allowing banks to claw their way out of it, if capable, is different from subsidizing zombies ad infinitum.
The job of regulators would be to keep banks out of risky assets in boom times. Now that the banks are loaded up with them, and everybody knows they are risky, and all correlations have gone to 1.0, the regulators shout “impaired capital!”
35!
It’s incorrectly classified as Politics.
Congrats on being above CR and Mankiw. Mankiw was better when it wasn’t a link collection.
Re #2: “I’ve come to expect that even nobly conceived laws will be manipulated and distorted for private ends. But once in a while I hear a story that gives me the queasy feeling that I’m nowhere near cynical enough.”
He’ll be a little closer to cynical enough when he figures out that D.C. itself is a private end.
‘Others are less charitable. “You use the toilet every day,” said one hedge fund analyst who’s been closely following the issue. “Imagine if you could start pouring a little gasoline into the bowl and get fifty cents a gallon every time you flushed.”
WRT Global warming: Why should we even subsidize innefficient fuels to begin with? Libertarians would stop this nonsense.
#3: “An investor putting up $6 million to buy $100 million of one three-year class of the securities under the TALF could make about $840,000 a year, based on current Libor rates, if defaults on the underlying credit card loans are small enough to leave his notes unscathed, according to Bloomberg calculations.
That’s an annual return of roughly 14 percent, before considering a Fed administrative fee of $47,000.”
Feds to banks: You guys who levered up on risky assets at 10:1 or better were bad because potentially risked taxpayer bailouts, so, what we are going to do is definitely risk taxpayer money so we can funnel them to these good people at 17:1 or better. OMFG people. Someone stop the insanity.
The “thinkers” on the Hayek list range from amazingly brilliant to downright embarrassing. Sort of a pathetic attempt in my opinion. And what exactly does it mean to take Hayek “seriously” ?
I don’t Mr. De Long is entitled to his own facts or bad links. I suggest that Secretary Geithner delete it.
A quick scan of this list reveals what a joke Hayekian “intellectual” thought is.
Don’t get me wrong, “The Use of Knowledge in Society” is brilliant. But economic thought has evolved since then.
Uh, I see that Brad DeLong is claiming that Greg’s list
of top Hayekians is an April Fool’s joke. That would be
a relief, except that quite a few of the people on the
list, mostly lower down, would deserve to be on such a
list, so a pretty crafty joke, if it is one.
Greg,
So, not an April Fool’s joke after all.
Well, you can make any list you want I guess.
Would Hayek have accepted the praise of anybody?
I could name some other individuals in world history
who have had lots of people listening to them and
touted philosophers who might have been less than
enthusiastic about being touted by them, but I
might end up being accused of playing unfairly.
Kwak is a quack.
1. I have a strong feeling that the mark-to-market, arbitrary capital requirements would have been used as rationale for nationalizing banks if that were politically more acceptable. In that situation, it still wouldn’t have been the right thing to do.
What is, exactly the market price? Is it still this:
http://money.cnn.com/2008/07/29/news/newsmakers/thain.denial.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2008072915
So, your neighbor sold his house for a huge sum, which allowed you to go get a home-equity loan based on the “new value” of your house, you default on your loan because the value of your house goes down, now companies going out of business sell your loan at fire sale, which causes all the other banks loans to go down in value and they have to raise the difference in capital, which noone will give them because they are going out of business. What a world.
4. I can haz cheezburger has done more for the world than the 79 in front of it (excluding MR)
5. People always forget comparison to alternatives. So, who are the top public Marxist intellectuals?
Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Al Franken, Micheal Moore, Jeanine Garafolo and the list quickly and astonishingly goes downhill from there.
We also don’t know if the intended emphasis is on the public or the intellectual part. It’s hard to be an expert on both self-promotion as well as a consistent, coherent school of thought. Doubly hard for non-populist oriented entertainers and personalities. It did trip me out that the Air America people complained that liberal ideology couldn’t be condensed into sound bites. Sure, maybe you can’t capture the agonizing reality of political appropriations processes to entertaining radio, but what could be simpler point A to point B linear thinking than “we need more money to throw at the problem.”
Congrats on the popularity. As someone who reads (at least off-and-on) an obnoxiously large number of blogs, I could, I suppose, be surprised to only read three of the top 200 (you at 36, Obsidian Wings at 92, Hullabaloo at 127). I’m not, though, except insofar as I’d have expect Glenn Greenwald to rank. Anyway, you guys run a fascinating site; I’m glad this is well-known.
No, being a “public intellectual” mostly means being a second hand dealer in ideas.
Someone wrote:
“being a public intellectual means contributing your own original ideas”
Greg,
Hmmm. Well, I guess as long as it is accepted that so-called “public intellectual” on whatever
side may be moronic and ignorant, what the heck? I have the sense with some of the more public
but less impressive of these (e.g. Limbaugh) that the knowledge of Hayek is pretty thin, and that
what is going on is that they have heard that he is “pro-free market” and “deep,” and so they can put
on airs themselves as deep defenders of free markets and critics of whatever they want to call
“socialism,” by simply invoking Hayek.
So, I could well imagine that if Obama were to actually propose national health insurance, which he has
not done yet (and may never), Limbaugh and some others would denounce this as “socialistic” and invoke
Hayek and possibly even The Road to Serfdom, where, as you well know, Hayek actually came out for
national health insurance, even if he weakened that position somewhat later in his career.
As for me, well, I prefer to think that the “intellectual” part of this should weigh more heavily than
the “public” part, but, hey, it is your list.
Barkley — Limbaugh is more specific than you suggest. He sometimes quotes from obscure Hayek material to make a particular point. He’s no Ph.D., but he does read a lot of stuff, and he has a staff that scours the web. His “stack of stuff” isn’t childs play.
Subscribe to his web site (I don’t) and I think your illusions will be smashed.
Greg,
I went to his website. I saw some things that were not completely off the wall. I also
some that were, such as a claim that the reason we are in a recession is because the
Democrats wanted one for six years so they could win the election of 2008. This has
got to be the stupidest theory of the current situation I have seen anybody put forward,
just crackpot partisan hackery.
Sorry, not blown away or smashed, just reinforcing my view that even calling him an
800 pound gorilla is an insult to gorillas.
BTW, I did suggest two people for your list, but I gather that they are insufficiently
“public’ for you.
Greg and Barkley,
Its fun reading your parries, but what say you each on mark-to-market. I’m basically with Andrew.
The notion, expressed in the article, that “rules don’t matter because investors will adjust so who cares” seems to me idiocy because information is NOT costless nor is contracting costless. Screwy rules screw things up, and mark-to-market is screwy in some but not all cases, in my view.
So if you guys are though jousting on Hayek, would you please weigh in on mark-to-market. I think Andrew is on the right track, what say you?
Thanks Barkley; I missed your previous posts on it (I try to keep up with you, but I think my teaching load significantly exceeds yours).
So Barkley, why haven’t you named Joaquin Fuster as one of your Top Hayekian Public Intellectuals in America?
Could it be because he’s mostly just and academic and you’ve never heard of him?
Sort of a problem for your definition of “public intellectual” — mostly there’s no “public” for what you count as “intellectuals”.
Greg,
Thanks for the invite. Will pass doing much. Obviously I am less
enamored of those who speak or write columns or talk rather than write
books or academic articles, which I think are more likely to have influence
over time, which I think matters a lot, and influence based on actual ideas
rather than just “I heard Hayek is pro-free market, and so am I” (duuuh).
Most of those I would add are on there somewhere, although a number are on
the secondary list. I also really am not into the ranking stuff. However,
one who is on that second list who really should be way up there is Caldwell.
Quite aside from editing Hayek’s papers, a very big deal of great influence
over the longer run, his Hayek’s Challenge has been read by many people and
is far more important in influence than blog postings or talk radio spoutings
or newspaper columns by so many of the “more public” personalities you have
high on your list.
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