Posted: 19 Oct 2010 07:03 PM PDT

Financial analyst sorts out the fantasy from reality of the financial meltdown

Madison, CT (Vocus) October 19, 2010

The collapse of the U.S. stock and housing markets and the subsequent credit crisis have left many Americans asking how it could have happened. However, to understand how the collapse happened, one must first understand how the huge systemic bubble that led to the collapse was built. Fairy Tale Capitalism: Fact and Fiction Behind Too Big To Fail (published by AuthorHouse) by financial analyst Emily Eisenlohr breaks down the evolution of the financial bubble and brings simple perspective to a seemingly daunting question.

Fairy Tale Capitalism is a brief history of how the biggest banks became 'Too Big to Fail'. The book peels away the fictions and presents the facts. Although reforming the financial sector may be complex, understanding how systemic risk grew is rather simple. Fairy Tale Capitalism puts the puzzle together one piece at a time.

Political leaders and Big Bank CEOs would have the public believe that the systemic bubble and its bursting resulted from human greed, global financial developments and regulatory neglect -- all outside the control of Congress. Fairy Tale Capitalism demonstrates the fiction of that claim. The real history is that Congress played a huge role in building the systemic bubble.

Congress can't claim it wasn't informed. In quote after quote Fairy Tale Capitalism uses public information to show how Congress had been well informed about systemic risks. Public hearing testimony and Congressionally-mandated reports alerted Congress to the risks of derivatives, regulatory gaps and the poorly understood relationship between the biggest banks and hedge funds. Yet all this information was ignored.

Focusing on current Congressional leadership, Fairy Tale Capitalism shows how the financial sector ensured Congress's support. Those in the financial sector turned their rising incomes into bigger campaign donations for Congressmen whose power grew with their seniority.

Fairy Tale Capitalism is the perfect primer for anyone interested in or engaged in national public policy and our government.

About the Author
Emily Eisenlohr is a financial analyst, specializing in credit analysis and policy advocacy. She spent two decades in the financial sector as a corporate banking executive and credit analyst for some of the biggest financial institutions in the U.S. including Citibank and Moody's Investors Service. Eisenlohr, a Chartered Financial Analyst, received a B.A. with honors from Mount Holyoke College, with a major in music and a minor in biology. Her M.B.A. is from the University of Chicago.

AuthorHouse is a premier book publisher for emerging, self-published authors. For more information, please visit http://www.authorhouse.com.

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Deanna Krinn
AuthorHouse
18885195121
Email Information

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Biography: The Falsest Art? - Huffingtonpost.com

Posted: 19 Oct 2010 03:14 PM PDT

"Biography is the falsest of arts," wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald in one of his many notebooks. Fitzgerald blamed the biographer of course, the summation required by the biographical enterprise, and not the subject for this falseness. He blamed the biographer's compunction to make men into movements, into types, archetypes, and so on.

Fitzgerald was partially right about this, I think. Yet every biographer knows, literary biographers in particular, our subjects are often unreliable witnesses, especially to what happens to them. They are unreliable largely because they believe so confidently that they are not. Our genre remains vibrant, to read and write, for this reason and also because: all art is adornment; we prefer adornment to bald fact; on all self-truths we practice self-surgery.

As a literary journalist who has interviewed and written about many contemporary writers, I can tell you that writers practice the strange art of willful obtusion. I can tell you they almost always prefer a beautiful lie to a banal truth. Who doesn't, I guess. A writer's archive is then just a rich depository of splayed and embellished truths; a writer's archive is layered with lies in the same way a desert cliff is raked with variant sediment. The best that a literary biographer can do then (whether working with a living subject or a dead one) is corroborate statements, challenge stories, check sentiments, and cross-check dates. The best we can do is search through the facts and fictions and then forge them into an understanding that can be shared. A literary biography, then, is a writer's understanding of a writer, shared.

My recent work inside the archives at The Huntington Library and at The John Hay Library at Brown University bears all these truths out. What's remembered of my subject there by Lillian Hellman is half-remembered in a half-light. What's remembered by Dorothy Parker, the same. What is remembered by William Faulkner is essentially that he and my subject went hunting on two occasions. William Carlos Williams recalls a brief editorial correspondence on a literary magazine he does not name. My subject's sister brags that her brother was an excellent student. He was not.

Beyond all the trouble of sorting fact from fiction is the far greater one of composition -- shaping a mass of dates and declarations into a story of a life that resembles some truth I want to tell. I've been driven to decide whether my subject was a major novelist or a minor one. Was his horrific car accident on a clear day in the middle of the California desert an accident after all? And finally, and most essentially, how does the boy of nine sequestered in his bedroom reading the great English and Russian novelists of the Nineteenth Century, fashion himself into one of the most engaging and peculiar modernists of the Twentieth Century?

Really, it's this last question to which I've devoted myself and my biography. How does the amateur enthusiast become the professional, the craftsman become the artist? As I work to finish my first complete draft, I've posted above my desk one of my favorite sentences from the work-in-progress:

"A writer is what a writer does, not what he means to do."

Isn't that right and true? I think so. This gives the literary biographer some hope that what remains can be studied and tested, measured and admired.

In the end, I've come to believe that what makes the biography of a writer (or any person for that matter) crackle and pop (and also reliable and true) is knowing as many lies as truths -- the lies they told to others, the lies others told of them, and most importantly, the lies they told themselves. In our lies live our truths.

Follow Joe Woodward on Twitter: www.twitter.com/nwproject

The New Republic: Can The People Decide Policy? - NPR News

Posted: 19 Oct 2010 12:51 PM PDT

iStockphoto.com

While democracy is supposed to carry out the wishes of the people, sometimes what the people want can be hard to figure out.

Jonathan Bernstein writes at aplainblogaboutpolitics.

Speaking of the news that the Awakening in Iraq may not end the way that it started (see this NYT article, a good Matt Yglesias post, and my remarks about politicians and policy)...

One of the most interesting things about Iraq, to me, is how it demonstrates how the relationship between elections and public policy really work. I'm thinking about the 2006 election cycle. Of course, liberals were terribly disappointed in the immediate aftermath of those elections: Democrats in Congress, despite moving into the majority, were not only unable to end the war in Iraq, but found no way to prevent the surge. In other words, the immediate effects of the 2006 election appeared to be the exact opposite of what people wanted. Could that possibly be justified in a democracy?

Well, yes and no. Putting aside for a moment the question of justification, we can look a bit more at what messages were actually sent and received. As usual, it's difficult to tell exactly what the electorate was "saying" in the 2006 elections. We can trace some things…the Iraq war was unpopular, and it hurt Bush's approval ratings and, eventually, GOP candidates. It's a lot harder, however, to conclude that the electorate was "saying" anything specific about Iraq policy. No doubt that most liberal Democrats wanted out of Iraq. But of course most liberal Democrats wanted out of Iraq in 2004, too.

Beyond that, however, even when we have good survey or polling data, it's hard — in my view, impossible — to draw specific conclusions about exactly what the electorate is saying. Many voters in 2006 weren't even thinking of Iraq. They may have been concerned about various Congressional scandals having nothing to do with policy, or they may have just been reacting to a particularly good set of Democratic candidates (who were running and were well-funded, to be sure, because George W. Bush had become unpopular, which was in large part because of Iraq). And then we know that most voters know very little about public policy. That makes it hard, too; even good survey data are going to be dependent on what voters know about policy, and it's very possible that voters may have vague preferences (Iraq is going badly! Make it better!) that lead them to one set of answers to one set of polling questions, but other (contradictory) answers to other questions.

That's not because voters are stupid — it's just that most voters don't take the time to carefully study all the various policy options available on all the issues of the day, and so they'll often respond to polls with policies or positions that are internally inconsistent. One of the reasonable conclusions to draw from this is that detailed policy mandates from elections are fictions.

And yet...from the perspective of four years on, it seems pretty clear to me that the 2006 election has, in fact, ended (or, better, will soon end) American involvement in Iraq.

Two parts to this. On the Hill, Democrats who were responsive to antiwar voters pushed to end the war, while the remaining Republicans (seeing the results of the 2006 elections) probably were not eager to stand up for it. That wasn't enough to have a direct effect, at least with a Republican in the White House determined to oppose those Democrats, but it did change the equation quite a bit. At the White House, it certainly seems to me (and I've only skimmed the insider accounts that are out so far, let alone those still to come) that the elections were taken as an immediate signal to Do Something!: thus dumping Donald Rumsfeld, thus the surge, and thus the eventual agreement to leave, an agreement that Barack Obama has so far carried out.

Do Something! may not seem to be much, but in fact we can go back to Alexander Hamilton and think about "energy in the executive" compared to drift. What this means, to me, is very simple: a president who focuses on a problem is apt to solve it. That goes for smart presidents and foolish ones, liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans. The key variable isn't whether they have good plans; the key variable is whether they aggressively attack the problem or not.

See, no matter who the president might be, you're going to get a lot of drift, because there's just so much that the government does or could do, and because it really does take presidential involvement to make sure that presidential policies are enacted. A good president can be judicious about what to delegate and when to get personally involved, and a president with a strong reputation for getting his way and a good White House staff may be able get results with relatively less of a personal commitment. Indeed, that's one of the best ways, in my view, to judge presidents: how much "energy in the executive" (properly understood) did they create. To me, of all the criticisms of George W. Bush that are reasonable, the most devastating is that he put wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on autopilot for years.

Perhaps then whatever the merits or lack of merits of the surge, it would at least be better than drift. And that's the way to see the 2006 election from the point of view of the White House; the instruction heard from the American people to Do Something! about Iraq ended drift. And, once the war was actively managed, and with few Republicans up for election (including presidential candidates) in 2008 eager to make Iraq a central issue in the campaign — but with the president reluctant to accept "defeat" on his watch — a strategy involving a show of force, a declaration of victory, and then a retreat begun before the 2008 election (in order to take it off the table) but scheduled for completion after the election (so the next crowd could be blamed if it went wrong) made a lot of sense.

Is that "democratic"?

I think we can say is that it was democracy as it actually is, whatever we might want democracy to be. Yes, it's democracy in a Madisonian system of separated institutions, sharing powers; in a parliamentary system, it's possible that elections in 2006 would have chucked the incumbent party and installed the antiwar Democrats. On the other hand, changing parties (at least in the White House) in 1968 didn't end Vietnam for years...it's never going to be easy for the current government to take ownership of losing a war, whether they were responsible for beginning it or not. And some of the things discussed here — the difficultly of identifying a signal out of election returns — are just as true in parliamentary elections.

I talked last week about the strong incentive for politicians who get elected to keep their constituents happy, and the 2006/Iraq example, to me, speaks to just how complex that can be. It's strikes me as better than the alternatives, but anyone who tells you that democracy is simply a question of doing what the people want doesn't really understand what's involved.

Fiction

Selasa, 19 Oktober 2010

“Separating Financial Fact from Convenient Fiction - YAHOO!” plus 2 more

“Separating Financial Fact from Convenient Fiction - YAHOO!” plus 2 more

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