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Technology-based manufacturing of all sorts, Mr. Immelt says, has to be a central part of reinvigorating the economy. In speeches and position papers, Mr. Immelt, a member of the White House’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, has called for doubling manufacturing employment in America, to 20 percent of the work force, which he concedes is an “aspirational” goal.
Making progress, he adds, will require significantly improving the nation’s prowess as an exporter. G.E., by the way, happens to be America’s second-largest exporter, after Boeing. So Mr. Immelt’s views about what changes would benefit the economy would probably help G.E. as well.
“Many bought into the idea that America could go from a technology-based, export-oriented powerhouse to a services-led, consumption-based economy — and somehow still expect to prosper,” Mr. Immelt said in a typical speech last year before the Detroit Economic Club. “That idea was flat wrong.” He added: “Our economy tilted instead toward the quicker profits of financial services.”
For G.E. and Jeffrey Immelt, a Return to Basics - NYTimes.com
GE ditching bogus financial schemes and going back to real goods to rebuild the company. Ponzi schemes or wars, financial sleight of hand or real goods, America’s economy will always be based on screwing the other guy, even if the other guy is a fellow American.
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“Never have so few owed so much to so many, and given them so small a return,” Mr. Kane said. “We see, for example, how little these institutions have given back to troubled homeowners whose houses are threatened with foreclosure.”
Mr. Kane’s point is important. Certainly, the low interest rates the Fed charged to institutional borrowers during the disaster translate into a significant subsidy, indeed a gift, to many of the firms that set the financial collapse in motion.
But the Fed is silent on how big that subsidy actually was.
Fed Lending Benefited Banks Far and Wide - NYTimes.com
If you want to be really mad at something, read this. Not only did the Fed basically subsidize asshole banks at the expense of taxpayers, the bailout data was not released until now. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act was signed into law in July 2010 without the benefit of this information, which would have shaped it differently, no doubt.
Posted on December 7, 2010 with 1 note
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Google’s income shifting — involving strategies known to lawyers as the “Double Irish” and the “Dutch Sandwich” — helped reduce its overseas tax rate to 2.4 percent, the lowest of the top five U.S. technology companies by market capitalization, according to regulatory filings in six countries.
Google 2.4% Rate Shows How $60 Billion Lost to Tax Loopholes - Bloomberg
How is it that “Double Irish” and “Dutch Sandwich” are not sex acts but are tax evasion techniques? To me, that’s the real criminal element more than the actual tax dodging. If you’re having sex with a corporate tax attorney, you will never know if he’s suggesting a kinky new tax shelter scheme or a sex act with great payoff.
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The aphorism “This is rich” finds its most appropriate subject. The economy imploded just so this could happen. I believe that. It’s the only way I can deal with this recession.
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As they detected that they had amassed excessive “long” positions, they began to sell aggressively, which caused the mutual fund’s algorithm in turn to accelerate its selling.
Startlingly, as the computers of the high-frequency traders traded contracts back and forth, a “hot potato” effect was created, the report said, as contracts changed hands 27,000 times in 14 seconds, but with eventually only 200 actually being bought or sold.
The selling pressure was then transferred from the futures markets to the stock market by arbitrageurs who started to buy the cheap futures contracts but sell cash shares on markets like the New York Stock Exchange.
Lone Sale of $4.1 Billion in Contracts Led to ‘Flash Crash’ in May - NYTimes.com
Imaginary money will always be a mystery to me. The FCC traced the crash to a trading algorithm run by one company, but there is no explanation on why the company ran the program with parameters to accelerate sales as prices dropped.
There is so much fallout from this so-called Flash Crash, ranging from administrative—extending the time-out period from 5 seconds to 5 minutes when irregularity is detected—to psychological—traders are still gunshy, not having all the questions answered.
To get over the nervous titillation that has haunted the finance sector, market analysts and economists need to get comfortable with Bataillean theory of La Part maudite or the accursed share. To quote George Bataille himself:
If a part of wealth (subject to a rough estimate) is doomed to destruction or at least to unproductive use without any possible profit, it is logical, even inescapable, to surrender commodities without return. Henceforth, leaving aside pure and simple dissipation, analogous to the construction of the Pyramids, the possibility of pursuing growth is itself subordinated to giving: The industrial development of the entire world demands of Americans that they lucidly grasp the necessity, for an economy such as theirs, of having a margin of profitless operations. An immense industrial network cannot be managed in the same way that one changes a tire… It expresses a circuit of cosmic energy on which it depends, which it cannot limit, and whose laws it cannot ignore without consequences. Woe to those who, to the very end, insist on regulating the movement that exceeds them with the narrow mind of the mechanic who changes a tire.
The current mindset is to fix the economy, to fix the trading system as if these things are broken or were designed to work in the first place. Things would be so much easier if we as a society accepted the fucked-up, opaque, convoluted mess we’ve made of the financial system and realized the brokenness is built into the system, i.e., there will always be an excess that will dissipate in outrageously glorious show of wealth or in an equally outrageously glorious failure.
As I said, imaginary money will always be a mystery to me, but the economy that came to a grinding halt seems to be paralyzed by analysis and second guesses, when we just need to say, “Fuck it. We fucked up.” and move on.
Posted on October 1, 2010 with 1 note
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What they do doesn’t show up in Google Finance, let alone in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. No one really knows how they operate or why. But over the past few weeks, Nanex, a data services firm has dragged some of the odder algorithm specimens into the light. The trading bots visualized in the stock charts in this story aren’t doing anything that could be construed to help the market. Unknown entities for unknown reasons are sending thousands of orders a second through the electronic stock exchanges with no intent to actually trade.
Market Data Firm Spots the Tracks of Bizarre Robot Traders - Science and Tech - The Atlantic
The article likens this trade bot phenomenon to crop circles, but it reminds me more of numbers stations. The experts interviewed only offer hypotheses related to trading, but what if these algorithmic patterns weren’t related to trading at all, but were coded messages for something else entirely? JJ Abrams might think up of a rube like this for one of his enigma-wrapped-in-a-mystery series.
I was laid off 2 days before my birthday in 2009, a dismal blessing. I miss health insurance and payroll, but I haven't bought bread since the pink slip because I have time to bake.
Sometimes I'm a serious job hunter, sometimes a serious slacker, but mostly, I'm an underemployed, freelance Jaqueline of many trades including writing and dogsitting. Either way, I scrapbook my finds and activities here for your benefit and amusement.
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