Monthly Archives: October 2015

Unchanged Behaviors

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The US and the PRC made an agreement during the month-ago PRC President Xi Jinping visit with President Barack Obama that the PRC would stop hacking into US corporate computers for industrial espionage or any other purpose.

Unchanged behavior

Chinese hacking attempts on American corporate intellectual property have occurred with regularity over the past three weeks….

Unchanged behavior

The US will continue to directly raise concerns regarding cybersecurity with the Chinese, monitor the country’s cyber activities closely and press China to abide by all of its commitments, the [a senior Obama administration official] added.

Unchanged behavior

This administration continues to do nothing about the PRC’s hacking beyond finger wagging and stern words.

The Victim Should Tamp it Down

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President Obama on Friday stood by his administration’s approach to the unrest in Israel, again urging both sides to “tamp down rhetoric” fueling the violence[.]

Because when the victim demurs from being attacked, he’s feeding the violence. Sure.

Because there’s an essential moral equivalence between the terrorist and his victim when the two are on a national or quasi-national level. That’s the Progressive position.

Unintended Consequence?

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Or was it intended? Big banks, banks the Warren/Obama regulations deem systemic risks—too big to fail—are driving away cash deposits. Never mind that those deposits are loanable funds (oh—regulations, again, discouraging lending while Progressives contradictorily jawbone and pressure financial institutions to make risky loans to poor credit rating borrowers, because—regulations again—those credit ratings are somehow racist).

For instance,

State Street Corp, the Boston bank that manages assets for institutional investors, for the first time has begun charging some customers for large dollar deposits, people familiar with the matter said. JP Morgan Chase & Co, the nation’s largest bank by assets, has cut unwanted deposits by more than $150 billion this year, in part by charging fees.

Because:

The banks’ actions are driven by profit-crunching low interest rates and regulations adopted since the financial crisis to gird banks against funding disruptions.

The latest fees center on large sums deemed risky by regulators, sometimes dubbed hot-money* deposits thought likely to flee during times of crises.

Because honest Americans wanting to earn money off their cash mustn’t be allowed to do that. And banks can’t be trusted to know what they’re doing with hot deposits; Progressive Know Betters are the only ones equipped to dispose of OPM.

Or: this is a tacit recognition that Progressive policies over the last seven years have been utter failures, and all that stored cash has to be flushed back into the economy, and the latest regulations have nothing to do with risk, systemic or otherwise, regardless of the surrounding Obamatalk.

It harkens back to FDR’s assault on business by demanding they disgorge themselves of cash—retained earnings—because they were “hoarding” or on a “capital strike.” Hoarding, “striking” because business had no viable place to invest its cash, due to FDR’s economic policies.

 

*Note: Banks usually attract “hot money” by offering relatively short-term certificates of deposit that have above-average interest rates. As soon as the institution reduces interest rates or another institution offers higher rates, investors with “hot money” withdraw their funds and move them to another institution with higher rates.

Vox Populi is a Thing to be Feared

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British Prime Minister David Cameron, as most of you know, has committed the UK to a popular referendum on the nation’s continued membership in the European Union if he doesn’t get what he wants in terms of a rewrite of the treaties that created the EU.

EU leadership thinks this is a bad thing, and they’ve acted on that badness in the past: referenda by France, the Netherlands, and Ireland to the Constitutional and Lisbon Treaties, in which the people of each of those nations solidly to overwhelmingly rejected those arrangements, were ignored outright, and the Know Betters of Europe simply went to the more compliant national governments for the needed assents. They have no such capability regarding a UK vote to depart the EU altogether; neither does the EU have the guns with which to compel continued membership.

The Brexit message will be poured “like a pint of beer into a thirsty electorate,” one alarmed official warns.

And

Officials now speak of contagion.

And

The fear among EU diplomats is that if Britain’s demands to rewrite the EU’s underlying treaties are met, radical parties across the continent will demand their own tailor-made deals. The union unravels.

Can’t have the people speaking for themselves. What would the EU Know Betters and bureaucrats do for jobs if they weren’t needed in a pan-European government? Whom would they control, if not the people themselves?

The only ones who fear the voice of the people, though, are those Know Betters and bureaucrats. Everyone else welcomes that voice.

A Bipartisan Misunderstanding

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Congressmen Kyrsten Sinema (D, AZ) and Randy Neugebauer (R, TX) rightly decry the partisan nature of the Elizabeth Warren/Dodd-Frank Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, but their solution is wholly wrong. They want the existing single-director power structure replaced by a multi-person bipartisan commission, one that wouldn’t be so prone to the party in White House…influence.

As an example of how well a bipartisan commission would work, the Congressmen cite the SEC, the fair and balanced commission that uses in house judges to act on and punish those the SEC accuses of illegal investing practices.

It’s interesting that they didn’t cite the FCC, of Internet interference notoriety, or the NLRB, the commission that’s an arm of Big Union.

No, the proper correction to the partisan nature of the CFPB is to get rid of this wholly unaccountable even to Congress, with budgeting on demand from the Federal Reserve Bank, monstrosity altogether.

Replace with what, then? Nothing. The function is not needed. American citizens aren’t as slack-jawed, droolingly stupid as the Know Betters in government—of either party—make us out to be.