Monthly Archives: November 2025

A Thought

Posted on by
Reply

Colleges and Universities are facing budget problems in the current and beginning to grow age of fiscal discipline after decades of profligate spending on one great idea after another and rampant hiring of school staff and management squads having little to nothing to do with academics. In their Wall Street Journal piece, Sara Randazzo and Heather Gillers distilled the problem to its essence:

As schools scramble to make cutbacks, they face broader questions about what kind of university they can be in this new era of financial constraint.

Here’s an idea. Work with me on this, it’s a-borning: how about these institutions turn their focus onto teaching and away from publishing and from pushing the latest politically correct claptrap, the latter which these days is illustrated by DEI bigotries and one-sided sexual offensivenesses “investigations?”

Get rid of all that non-academics-related staff bloat, freeze the gussying up of their labs with froo-froo that serves only to enhance academic shower appearances, take away the publish or perish foolishness that produces little more than word salads with science jargon dressings, reduce the rate of jobs-for-life awards, and stop fancying up student housing with stuff that does nothing to enhance studying and socializing.

Doubting NATO’s Utility

Posted on by
Reply

Trump I questioned the utility of NATO and wondered aloud whether the US should continue supporting it/staying a member. In immediate response, some (not enough) European member nations started honoring their promises of some years prior to contribute more to NATO—all of 2% of national GDP at the time. Over the ensuing years, most (though still only 2/3) of the member nations increased their contributions to very nearly meet (a large bump by these) or to meet or exceed those 2%. Trump’s overt disdain and blunt threats resulted in a material strengthening of the alliance.

Recently, the member nations met and agreed to push that contribution commitment to 5% of national GDP, and some nations are meeting that commitment (notably, the eastern and far northern European nations fronting on Russia). Also notably, though, Canada and western European members continue to freeload, and in order to get the agreement at all, the alliance was required to give Spain explicit permission to continue to freeload, despite its strongly growing economy.

Unfortunately, now the alliance is facing this. The headline and subheadline is the short and bitter of it:

NATO Member’s Top Court Considers Whether Saying Men And Women Are Different Is A War Crime
Finland’s Supreme Court heard arguments Thursday about whether quoting the Bible is illegal “hate speech” under its war crimes laws.

Yes, this is one of those far northern members, recently acceded to the alliance. Even so, this is a case of censorship by the nation’s chief prosecutor, unrestrained by either Finland’s President or Prime Minister, despite lower courts having repeatedly cleared the alleged miscreants of any wrong doing.

[Member of Parliament Paivi] Rasanen was first investigated for tweeting a Bible verse in 2019 to criticize Finland’s state church sponsoring a queer sex parade. Three criminal charges against her arose from the investigation, which also resulted in one criminal charge against [Lutheran Bishop Juhana] Pohjola for publishing a booklet Rasanen wrote about the Bible’s teaching on the sexes.

And

Two lower courts cleared Rasanen and Pohjola of all charges, but the prosecutor kept appealing, now to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization member’s highest court.

 

This is government censorship, government sexist bigotry, and government demand for political correctness all rolled into one.

If this case results in any form of conviction, then given the spread of censorship and sexist bigotry into the rest of NATO members—most notably, Germany, Netherlands, and UK—then it will be time to consider anew our withdrawal from an alliance too enamored of its political shower appearance to be able to resist the barbarian farther east.

It will be time to stand up a different, more serious mutual defense arrangement involving the Three Seas Initiative nations and the US.

The Problem with Too Big to Fail

Posted on by
Reply

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Progressive-Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) want to raise the FIDC’s deposit insurance cap from its current level of $250,000 to $10,000,000. They want to do this, too, regardless of the size of the financial institution and the nature of the institution, whether it’s a small deposit and lending enterprise or a large institution that specializes in large and larger investing. This is a very large overreaction over a couple of mid-sized banks going bankrupt from those banks’ management incompetence, not least of which was their decisions to not match their interest rate assets—loans outstanding, including to the government in holding its debt instruments—to their deposit interest rates, which were the banks’ debits. Nor did they match the duration of their loan assets to the duration of those deposit debits.

The runs on the banks, which began over otherwise ordinary credit concerns in the financial markets as a whole, turned into losses the banks should have been able to handle, but for those rate and duration mismatches. Neither the setup—those mismatches—nor the runs have anything to do with deposit insurance.

When any enterprise is held to be too big to fail, as a (fortunately very few) very large enterprises are held to be by the Federal government—the  systemically important financial institutions government considers some banks to be—then those enterprises, secure in the notion that government will bail them out if they run into trouble, become prone to take increasingly large risks and go well past risks that would otherwise by prudent business decisions to take.

That’s a very large moral hazard: not only are those enterprises taking those risks with other people’s money—bank depositors, for instance—they’re putting into risk the money of people far removed from that enterprise: us nationwide taxpayer money that the government will use to prop up those institutions that have gotten themselves [sic] into trouble.

Which brings me to this foolishness of raising the deposit insurance cap on banks. That’s only going to encourage banks, especially the smaller ones, to take risks that are too large for it to handle and would not take were they not so vastly backstopped by Uncle Sugar. That puts into risk play all the smaller depositors who are the ones frequenting these smaller banks. It also puts into play the money of all of us nationwide taxpayers, which money will be used to prop up the failing bank.

This is an insurance policy that should not be raised in its payout. In essence, all this insurance cap increase does is lower the threshold for Too Big to Fail (itself of no true value) down into the middle- and smaller-sized financial institutions.

Let the institutions stand or fall on their competence in a competitive environment. That competition will weed out the lousy managers, and the people will be made whole enough with the current $250k insurance payout. The large enterprises that invest in, deposit into, borrow from the larger financial institutions will exert their own pressures on top of the market’s intrinsic competitive pressures to…encourage…management competence.