The fifth anniversary of Naked Capitalism’s first post is due on 19th December. According to WordPress, another 8,361 posts have gone up since 2006. 7,453 of them are posted by Yves, who thus averages four posts per day, week in, week out, for all that time: unnerving. For all the generosity of Yves’s tributes to other contributors, it’s pretty obvious where the lion’s share of the engagement is coming from, though I would have to single out Ed Harrison as the most wonderful near-full-time helper when Yves is having one of those bandwidth-challenged annual “holidays”.
From direct observation, and deduction, the average Yves Smith working day, which is to say, the average Yves Smith day, splits up something like this:
- Wash hair, and then fool about noisily with it: 1 hour.
- Scan blogs and read posts: 2-4 hours.
- Read emails and answer emails: 2-4 hours.
- Write posts: 3-4 hours.
- Check posts for goofs, typos and broken links: 0 hours.
- Assemble links and antidote: 2 hours.
- Burble on phone: 0-1 hour.
- Wrangle furiously with with hostile blog commenters, agonize over who to ban: 0-2 hours.
- Gym, bar, media appointment or occasional minor tech/troll panic: 0-3 hours. Media appointments include 0.5 hours of makeup application, for that evidently compulsory “harlot” look.
- Concurrently with the above, guzzle tea, coffee, plain yoghurt, fruit, and miscellaneous substances made from grains; chomp away at hideously perfumed gum.
I make that a minimum of 10 hours, and a maximum of 20; that seems about right. Such is the glamorous business of financial blogging. Somewhere, there was also time for:
- Writing ECONned, which was, if I remember correctly, 3 months full time drafting, 3 months full time correcting (and rererewriting one particularly recalcitrant chapter), 3 months proofing & galleys.
- Full time involvement on episodic client projects.
- Occasional puzzled complaints about feeling ‘burned out’.
And what’s it all for? A quick cherrypick of posts might help explain my take on why this evidently insane and compulsive activity actually matters.
Consider NC’s coverage of the US financial crisis:
- March 13th 2007: An early sighting of subprime CDOs
- July 30th 2007: CDO models
- August 20th, 2007: Monolines
- August 24th, 2007: Market based funding
- August 30th 2007: Ratings agencies
- September 28th, 2007: Money Market funds
- November 10th 2007: CDOs
Now, I am not claiming that Yves spotted every single unexploded bomb in the financial system at the first attempt, nor was the exact mechanism by which they were to be detonated necessarily clearly identified. But as a rough sketch map of the trouble spots, scribbled down on the fly, a year in advance of the final convulsions of the first phase of the crisis, that’s really quite a good job. You’d be pushed to find that kind of coverage all in one place in print or on TV. If you have time, look at the sober and thoughtful comments by insiders: a really prominent feature back then, still in evidence now, quite often. Most of all, the disjunction between the grim forebodings at NC and the trad media happy talk is striking. It was all useful perspective: for instance, briefed by NC, it was pretty easy to see through Lehman’s PR, ring-led by the hapless Charlie Gasparino.
When the final smashup came, it all made a grim kind of sense, not accessible to consumers of TV and newspaper news. If you weren’t enduringly sceptical of official stories as the start of that period, you were by the end.
Those stories were the prototypes for any number of other debunkings post crisis. For instance:
- Change you can’t believe in was formally announced on February 9th, 2009.
- The foreclosure fraud/robosigning/MERS/LPS saga, in high gear from from mid-2010 onwards, still ongoing…
- Coverage of the 50 AG foreclosure settlement and its long calvary started on October 30th 2010, and continues…
- A quite incredible number of fights with other finbloggers and media outlets; some, very well chosen indeed, others, in my quaveringly expressed opinion, more an expression of the abundance of pugnacity that is the engine behind all this voluminous dissent.
And on we go.
Finally: I see vlade has been commenting here since November 2007; that must be somewhere close to the endurance record. Rival veterans are encouraged to make their claims (in the comments, natch).
A salute to the raucous or polite or batshit or witty commenters, then; named and nameless alike, some of whom have led the blog to great big stories, and all of whom help to give the place its um, atmosphere.
This is Naked Capitalism fundraising week. Over 365 donors have already invested in our efforts to shed light on the dark and seamy corners of finance. Join us and participate via our Tip Jar or read about why we’re doing this fundraiser and other ways to donate on our kickoff post.
By Matt Stoller, the former Senior Policy Advisor to Rep. Alan Grayson and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. You can reach him at stoller (at) gmail.com or follow him on Twitter at @matthewstoller.
California Attorney General Kamala Harris is one of the key players involved in the 50 state negotiations. The state was the seat of a good proportion of mortgage fraud nationally, and the California Attorney General’s office is one of the only state AG offices with enough legal resources to impact the national housing framework. Understanding how she thinks about politics matters, because this is how critical decisions are made. Harris’s decision-making seems to be driven by personal connections and fundraising networks. This is not at all unusual, but it does contrast a bit with other types of public servants, who often see their job as serving the law itself. So what do her personal connections and fundraising networks look like?
Well, largely she shares them with President Obama, who endorsed her late in 2010 for the AG office. Her brother-in-law, Tony West, was key fundraiser for Obama in California, having helped raise $65 million for Obama in the state, and he is considered a rising star in the Democratic Party. He now works at the DOJ and has expanded the Civil Rights department to take on some elements of mortgage fraud. The DOJ has an internal directive to make mortgage fraud a top priority, but what mortgage fraud means to the DOJ are mortgage modification scams and penny ante borrowers ripping off fly-by-night lenders. West, while not the direct actor in the DOJ’s settlement talks, is in all likelihood involved in pressure on state AGs to sign on to a settlement. And it’s simply inconceivable he hasn’t dealt with his sister-in-law and political ally on the matter. Harris and West are part of a coherent political network, and much of the strength of that network has to do with reinforcing the traditional bank-friendly policies of the Democratic elite and then using that to create political support.
The first indication that as California AG Harris was more sympathetic to the Obama side of the ledger on banking is that one of her first decisions as AG was to let off Angelo Mozilo without admitting to wrong-doing or personally paying a fine (the small money that went to restitution came from Bank of America shareholders). I suspect the issue is actually more personal to her than legal, not because she particularly cares about finance or foreclosures, but because her friends and allies are very concerned about ensuring that the banks get a release. In their view, this will cause the housing market to clear, the economy to recover, and then help reelection chances.
The political problem for Harris is that she was elected by liberal votes, and she’s getting enormous public pressure to resist signing on to a settlement that is perceived as favorable to the banks. While she backed out of an immediate settlement a few weeks ago, she refused to join the joint investigation by Eric Schneiderman and Beau Biden of the foreclosure fraud crisis. She has sat on the sidelines, trying to figure out what to do.
I pinged a savvy Bay Area political operative, and asked about Harris’s reputation. Here’s the response.
Kamala Harris is no Eric Schneiderman. What most people outside of San Francisco don’t know, is that she’s not a true progressive but rather a hack Democratic politician who plays to progressive audiences when it benefits her agenda.
When Kamala Harris got her start in big time San Francisco politics she was best known as the ex-girlfriend of Willie Brown. Willie Brown is a powerful figure in Calfiornia politics, having been longtime speaker of the state assembly until he was term limited out. At that point he ran for mayor of San Francisco and served two terms which were distinguished by corruption and personal patronage. For example, as mayor he increased the budget for “special assistants” from $15 million to $45 million and put a bunch of his friends on the payroll.
Harris dumped Brown shortly after he became mayor but he provided key help to her campaign for District Attorney in 2003. It was a tough race against a two-term incumbent. In that race she agreed to participate in a system that mandated campaign finance limits. In the last days of the race when it was clear she had a shot at winning, she ignored the mandated spending limits she had previously agreed to assuming that the fines would be well worth the expense of spending extra money in the home stretch if she won. And she did win. Her career as San Francisco’s District Attorney was marred by massive mismanagement of the city’s crime lab which was under her jurisdiction. As a result, hundreds of criminal cases had to be thrown out of court.
Though lifted up as a Netroots darling in her run for California AG in 2010, she’s really a classic Democratic party hack, though of the California variety which makes her better on issues like gay marriage and the death penalty than the average Dem. For example, she let the mortgage mauraders at Countrywide and its CEO Angelo Mozilo off the hook in February of 2011 when he paid a mere $6.5 million to get out of a predatory lending lawsuit filed by the state of California. [Actually he didn't, Bank of America paid it for him]
She has done some good things. She is fighing back against anti-gay marriage forces. And she joined the DOJ in opposing the AT&T takeover of T-Mobile. Under immense public pressure she pulled out of the 50-state settlement at the end of September. But now under tremendous pressure from the White House she may walk back her earlier promise to investigate the banks. This is not surprising. It’s worth noting that Harris won the Attorney General race in 2010 with the smallest margin of all statewide elected offices. She won by less than half a percent or 55,000 votes.
While we can’t count on Harris to do the right thing because she is a committed progressive, we can count on her to make the decision that she believes gives her career the most benefit (or conversely causes her the least pain). This means the pressure from voters who barely put her in office when Democrats like Jerry Brown and Barbara Boxer won by comfortable margins can possibly be a counterpoint to promises from the Wall Street banks and Obama Administration officials. Our only hope is massive pushback from voters.
I suspect that if she signs on to a settlement, it will ultimately damage her own political prospects among a certain slice of the electorate, and forever brand her as one of the 1%. But it could bring short-term political benefits, perhaps in the form of a potential cabinet role in a second Obama administration or solidified positioning as a bank-friendly candidate in a future Senatorial or Gubernatorial run. California is an expensive state for politics. In many ways, making the wrong decision will turn her into a relatively unpopular figure with unlimited resources. It’s not an easy choice, but politics isn’t simple.
That said, Harris is just one player in this saga, though obviously California is an important state. Regardless of what she decides, problems of foreclosures and fraud will continue, led by a raft of private suits, investigations by New York and Delaware, and least-noticed but very significantly, a very tough AG in hard hit Nevada, Catherine Cortez Masto, who has at her disposal legal powers that end foreclosure fraud. And of course the story of the housing crisis doesn’t start and end with the settlement, it will continue because of fundamentals. Policy, though, does matter, and because of that, politics matters. And without endorsing any set policy or political action, this is how the politics look.
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<b>News</b> round-up November 14 - 18 - Edge MagazineA look at the most recent NBA lockout news, with analysis on the potential veracity of the speculation.
NBA Lockout <b>News</b>: Eventually A Hopeful Rumor Might Actually Be <b>...</b>Your daily cup of orange and blue coffee. Horse Tracks!
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<b>News</b> round-up November 14 - 18 - Edge MagazineA look at the most recent NBA lockout news, with analysis on the potential veracity of the speculation.
NBA Lockout <b>News</b>: Eventually A Hopeful Rumor Might Actually Be <b>...</b>Your daily cup of orange and blue coffee. Horse Tracks!
Denver Broncos <b>News</b>: Horse Tracks - 11/19/11 - Mile High Report The fifth anniversary of Naked Capitalism’s first post is due on 19th December. According to WordPress, another 8,361 posts have gone up since 2006. 7,453 of them are posted by Yves, who thus averages four posts per day, week in, week out, for all that time: unnerving. For all the generosity of Yves’s tributes to other contributors, it’s pretty obvious where the lion’s share of the engagement is coming from, though I would have to single out Ed Harrison as the most wonderful near-full-time helper when Yves is having one of those bandwidth-challenged annual “holidays”.
From direct observation, and deduction, the average Yves Smith working day, which is to say, the average Yves Smith day, splits up something like this:
- Wash hair, and then fool about noisily with it: 1 hour.
- Scan blogs and read posts: 2-4 hours.
- Read emails and answer emails: 2-4 hours.
- Write posts: 3-4 hours.
- Check posts for goofs, typos and broken links: 0 hours.
- Assemble links and antidote: 2 hours.
- Burble on phone: 0-1 hour.
- Wrangle furiously with with hostile blog commenters, agonize over who to ban: 0-2 hours.
- Gym, bar, media appointment or occasional minor tech/troll panic: 0-3 hours. Media appointments include 0.5 hours of makeup application, for that evidently compulsory “harlot” look.
- Concurrently with the above, guzzle tea, coffee, plain yoghurt, fruit, and miscellaneous substances made from grains; chomp away at hideously perfumed gum.
I make that a minimum of 10 hours, and a maximum of 20; that seems about right. Such is the glamorous business of financial blogging. Somewhere, there was also time for:
- Writing ECONned, which was, if I remember correctly, 3 months full time drafting, 3 months full time correcting (and rererewriting one particularly recalcitrant chapter), 3 months proofing & galleys.
- Full time involvement on episodic client projects.
- Occasional puzzled complaints about feeling ‘burned out’.
And what’s it all for? A quick cherrypick of posts might help explain my take on why this evidently insane and compulsive activity actually matters.
Consider NC’s coverage of the US financial crisis:
- March 13th 2007: An early sighting of subprime CDOs
- July 30th 2007: CDO models
- August 20th, 2007: Monolines
- August 24th, 2007: Market based funding
- August 30th 2007: Ratings agencies
- September 28th, 2007: Money Market funds
- November 10th 2007: CDOs
Now, I am not claiming that Yves spotted every single unexploded bomb in the financial system at the first attempt, nor was the exact mechanism by which they were to be detonated necessarily clearly identified. But as a rough sketch map of the trouble spots, scribbled down on the fly, a year in advance of the final convulsions of the first phase of the crisis, that’s really quite a good job. You’d be pushed to find that kind of coverage all in one place in print or on TV. If you have time, look at the sober and thoughtful comments by insiders: a really prominent feature back then, still in evidence now, quite often. Most of all, the disjunction between the grim forebodings at NC and the trad media happy talk is striking. It was all useful perspective: for instance, briefed by NC, it was pretty easy to see through Lehman’s PR, ring-led by the hapless Charlie Gasparino.
When the final smashup came, it all made a grim kind of sense, not accessible to consumers of TV and newspaper news. If you weren’t enduringly sceptical of official stories as the start of that period, you were by the end.
Those stories were the prototypes for any number of other debunkings post crisis. For instance:
- Change you can’t believe in was formally announced on February 9th, 2009.
- The foreclosure fraud/robosigning/MERS/LPS saga, in high gear from from mid-2010 onwards, still ongoing…
- Coverage of the 50 AG foreclosure settlement and its long calvary started on October 30th 2010, and continues…
- A quite incredible number of fights with other finbloggers and media outlets; some, very well chosen indeed, others, in my quaveringly expressed opinion, more an expression of the abundance of pugnacity that is the engine behind all this voluminous dissent.
And on we go.
Finally: I see vlade has been commenting here since November 2007; that must be somewhere close to the endurance record. Rival veterans are encouraged to make their claims (in the comments, natch).
A salute to the raucous or polite or batshit or witty commenters, then; named and nameless alike, some of whom have led the blog to great big stories, and all of whom help to give the place its um, atmosphere.
This is Naked Capitalism fundraising week. Over 365 donors have already invested in our efforts to shed light on the dark and seamy corners of finance. Join us and participate via our Tip Jar or read about why we’re doing this fundraiser and other ways to donate on our kickoff post.
By Matt Stoller, the former Senior Policy Advisor to Rep. Alan Grayson and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. You can reach him at stoller (at) gmail.com or follow him on Twitter at @matthewstoller.
California Attorney General Kamala Harris is one of the key players involved in the 50 state negotiations. The state was the seat of a good proportion of mortgage fraud nationally, and the California Attorney General’s office is one of the only state AG offices with enough legal resources to impact the national housing framework. Understanding how she thinks about politics matters, because this is how critical decisions are made. Harris’s decision-making seems to be driven by personal connections and fundraising networks. This is not at all unusual, but it does contrast a bit with other types of public servants, who often see their job as serving the law itself. So what do her personal connections and fundraising networks look like?
Well, largely she shares them with President Obama, who endorsed her late in 2010 for the AG office. Her brother-in-law, Tony West, was key fundraiser for Obama in California, having helped raise $65 million for Obama in the state, and he is considered a rising star in the Democratic Party. He now works at the DOJ and has expanded the Civil Rights department to take on some elements of mortgage fraud. The DOJ has an internal directive to make mortgage fraud a top priority, but what mortgage fraud means to the DOJ are mortgage modification scams and penny ante borrowers ripping off fly-by-night lenders. West, while not the direct actor in the DOJ’s settlement talks, is in all likelihood involved in pressure on state AGs to sign on to a settlement. And it’s simply inconceivable he hasn’t dealt with his sister-in-law and political ally on the matter. Harris and West are part of a coherent political network, and much of the strength of that network has to do with reinforcing the traditional bank-friendly policies of the Democratic elite and then using that to create political support.
The first indication that as California AG Harris was more sympathetic to the Obama side of the ledger on banking is that one of her first decisions as AG was to let off Angelo Mozilo without admitting to wrong-doing or personally paying a fine (the small money that went to restitution came from Bank of America shareholders). I suspect the issue is actually more personal to her than legal, not because she particularly cares about finance or foreclosures, but because her friends and allies are very concerned about ensuring that the banks get a release. In their view, this will cause the housing market to clear, the economy to recover, and then help reelection chances.
The political problem for Harris is that she was elected by liberal votes, and she’s getting enormous public pressure to resist signing on to a settlement that is perceived as favorable to the banks. While she backed out of an immediate settlement a few weeks ago, she refused to join the joint investigation by Eric Schneiderman and Beau Biden of the foreclosure fraud crisis. She has sat on the sidelines, trying to figure out what to do.
I pinged a savvy Bay Area political operative, and asked about Harris’s reputation. Here’s the response.
Kamala Harris is no Eric Schneiderman. What most people outside of San Francisco don’t know, is that she’s not a true progressive but rather a hack Democratic politician who plays to progressive audiences when it benefits her agenda.
When Kamala Harris got her start in big time San Francisco politics she was best known as the ex-girlfriend of Willie Brown. Willie Brown is a powerful figure in Calfiornia politics, having been longtime speaker of the state assembly until he was term limited out. At that point he ran for mayor of San Francisco and served two terms which were distinguished by corruption and personal patronage. For example, as mayor he increased the budget for “special assistants” from $15 million to $45 million and put a bunch of his friends on the payroll.
Harris dumped Brown shortly after he became mayor but he provided key help to her campaign for District Attorney in 2003. It was a tough race against a two-term incumbent. In that race she agreed to participate in a system that mandated campaign finance limits. In the last days of the race when it was clear she had a shot at winning, she ignored the mandated spending limits she had previously agreed to assuming that the fines would be well worth the expense of spending extra money in the home stretch if she won. And she did win. Her career as San Francisco’s District Attorney was marred by massive mismanagement of the city’s crime lab which was under her jurisdiction. As a result, hundreds of criminal cases had to be thrown out of court.
Though lifted up as a Netroots darling in her run for California AG in 2010, she’s really a classic Democratic party hack, though of the California variety which makes her better on issues like gay marriage and the death penalty than the average Dem. For example, she let the mortgage mauraders at Countrywide and its CEO Angelo Mozilo off the hook in February of 2011 when he paid a mere $6.5 million to get out of a predatory lending lawsuit filed by the state of California. [Actually he didn't, Bank of America paid it for him]
She has done some good things. She is fighing back against anti-gay marriage forces. And she joined the DOJ in opposing the AT&T takeover of T-Mobile. Under immense public pressure she pulled out of the 50-state settlement at the end of September. But now under tremendous pressure from the White House she may walk back her earlier promise to investigate the banks. This is not surprising. It’s worth noting that Harris won the Attorney General race in 2010 with the smallest margin of all statewide elected offices. She won by less than half a percent or 55,000 votes.
While we can’t count on Harris to do the right thing because she is a committed progressive, we can count on her to make the decision that she believes gives her career the most benefit (or conversely causes her the least pain). This means the pressure from voters who barely put her in office when Democrats like Jerry Brown and Barbara Boxer won by comfortable margins can possibly be a counterpoint to promises from the Wall Street banks and Obama Administration officials. Our only hope is massive pushback from voters.
I suspect that if she signs on to a settlement, it will ultimately damage her own political prospects among a certain slice of the electorate, and forever brand her as one of the 1%. But it could bring short-term political benefits, perhaps in the form of a potential cabinet role in a second Obama administration or solidified positioning as a bank-friendly candidate in a future Senatorial or Gubernatorial run. California is an expensive state for politics. In many ways, making the wrong decision will turn her into a relatively unpopular figure with unlimited resources. It’s not an easy choice, but politics isn’t simple.
That said, Harris is just one player in this saga, though obviously California is an important state. Regardless of what she decides, problems of foreclosures and fraud will continue, led by a raft of private suits, investigations by New York and Delaware, and least-noticed but very significantly, a very tough AG in hard hit Nevada, Catherine Cortez Masto, who has at her disposal legal powers that end foreclosure fraud. And of course the story of the housing crisis doesn’t start and end with the settlement, it will continue because of fundamentals. Policy, though, does matter, and because of that, politics matters. And without endorsing any set policy or political action, this is how the politics look.
http://acapella.harmony-central.com/member.php?372800-hamton88 http://www.aiakc.org/member/66028/ http://airwavesf.com/site/index.php/member/25164/ http://armeehund.ch/index.php/forums/member/32177/ http://benchrest.com/member.php?23625-hamton6688&vmid=2231#vmessage2231 http://blog.dancingdeer.com/index.php/member/216535/ http://bmxmuseum.com/forums/profile.php?section=personality&id=78681 http://board.muse.mu/member.php?u=382543 http://boards.celebrityloop.com/member.php?u=356946&vmid=6033#vmessage6033 http://bridgitmendler.org/forums/index.php?action=profile;u=14708;sa=summary News round-up November 14 - 18. Unhappy Skyrim players, fluctuating retail performance and massaged Metacritic scores - a week in videogames. News round-up image ...
<b>News</b> round-up November 14 - 18 - Edge MagazineA look at the most recent NBA lockout news, with analysis on the potential veracity of the speculation.
NBA Lockout <b>News</b>: Eventually A Hopeful Rumor Might Actually Be <b>...</b>Your daily cup of orange and blue coffee. Horse Tracks!
Denver Broncos <b>News</b>: Horse Tracks - 11/19/11 - Mile High Report
