I’ve only gotten through the first three chapters of the book unfortunately. Being interspersed with sessions of “Learn You some Erlang for Great Good”

I’ll have to bump up my reading priorities and hopefully start to make some sense of this world.

That said, you were easily one of my personal heros through the onslaught of the financial crisis, going back to March of that year even. If I’m ever in a position to name two buildings after anyone I’ve got you and Brooksley Born at the very top of my list.

I realize you didn’t ask me this, but it seems like to be supportable that argument would have to establish a causal and necessary link between the U.S. megabanks and the reserve status of the U.S. Dollar?

I guess a lot of my questioning comes from my experience in tech. Basically zero financing for any startup I’ve encountered or worked with has come from the “investments” of these megabanks. Almost unanimously they’re bootstrapped or VC funded. In rare occurrence they’re built-out on SBA loans.

So I’m exceedingly suspicious of the idea that the megabanks actually do anything useful and non-substitutable regarding either deposits or investing.

That makes sense to me. But in that case we’re really just talking about a facility for demand deposits right? It makes sense to me that would be extremely banal by and large, but it likewise strikes me as something for which a profit motive is a wholly unnecessary performance incentive, and further is something that could largely be operated like a public utility.

Perhaps such drastic changes aren’t necessary currently, as by your statement that marketplace seems to be largely regulating its abuses and outliers well enough on its own under the FDIC.

Realistically what can even plausibly be done about this? It inevitably comes down to incentives I would think, no? What ought they to be, how would we get them there, and what would it take to maintain them? In real terms.

Or to put it more succinctly, since there are at least five very smart banking and finance industry experts here, what specifically and explicitly is gained in our social economy by backing our depositor institutions with a profit motive and the protections of the corporate veil? Then further, what specifically and explicitly is gained in our social economy by backing speculation with corporate welfare and government largesse?

It seems like those two sets of incentive structures have gotten completely reversed from what arguably makes any sense at all.

I’m sorry if this is off-topic. I’ve just been befuddled by it for awhile now, and never in a million years thought there’d be so many people with the knowledge and expertise to comment on it in the same place at the same time.

I’ve been having an ever more difficult time figuring out why we abide private for-profit banking at all.

The typical claim of banks in a capitalist structure is that they exist to efficiently allocate capital to productive enterprises, except that with each year they soak up a larger and larger share of all corporate profits, which means implicitly that unless money-changing is itself the most productive enterprise, they’re grossly failing at the sole purpose of their existence and special charter. It just seems bizarre to me.

It’s extremely difficult for me to understand on the most fundamental level what society actually gains from the organization of banking as it is. Most of the interesting investing happens along the lines of venture and angel capital, the government already takes on the loan guarantees for the lion’s share of business loans through the SBA.

From what I can tell the only function that our banking system serves, that couldn’t be otherwise be easily serviced through government intervention directly combined with not-for-profit depositor institutions, is to throw a whole boatload of government largesse (both fiscal and structural) at arguably the least productive members of our social economy for its own sake. Again, it just seems bizarre to me.

These kinds of settlement deals are garbage anyway. They’re just a transfer from current shareholders to previous shareholders at best, and a transfer from oneself to oneself at worst. The corporate officers and directors aren’t penalized really at all, so the size of the penalty is rather irrelevant unfortunately.

Well that’s all very exciting. Can anybody remind me how many sternly worded letters and books are required to bring this artifice down? I always forget.

Why? What possible good can come from governing by who can read the phonebook the longest?

Our entire immigration system, hell the entire global immigration system, is a complete and unmitigated clusterfuck. Full stop.

It is a grossly repellent regime of control placed on every single person in every single corner of the Earth (except the wealthy).

At the same time that capital and corporate charters are allowed to flutter about across borders, and between the gaps in government oversight, we have a relentless, faceless, incoherent, and immovable set of controls placed on the people, the regular inhabitants of Earth.

The same can be said for any majority tipping point. Instead of being the 67th Senator you can just be the 51st instead.

Well Jon, the problem here is that in America we’re conditioned at every single stage of our political processes and by every single political institution to accept “slightly less horrible” as the only possible outcome.

Which one is the assault rifle?

I don’t know. Why can’t Americans drink responsibly or have socialized medicine? Why aren’t the Mexican Drug Wars extending to Europe?

That deft interview segment on behalf of Barofsky brought some tiny glimmer of hope for humanity back from the soggy ashes I’m otherwise slogging through.

Excepting that this isn’t apparently true. High-capacity magazines (not clips FYI, spanishinquisition) are extremely prone to jamming, and clearing a misfed round is much harder and more time consuming than simply reloading a magazine.

People seem to constantly and drastically overstate the difficulty of reloading a firearm. If you’ve never so much as held a gun in your life, it would take me little more than a single afternoon to get you proficient in dropping and reloading a magazine from virtually any firearm in a couple of seconds.

This charade we have every week in the face of a mass shooting is so obviously for show

I guess that’s fitting then. Considering that’s basically all every pointless knee-jerk “gun control” solution that’s offered would end up being.

The reason to oppose arbitrary material bans is that they don’t work for any remotely motivated violator. Whatever other strawmen are constructed and beaten down are just two sides masturbating in front of each other.

Had any trouble locating marijuana in the last 40 years?

I think you’re right.

Still ironic that it was the common failure mode of high-capacity magazines that ended the shooting spree he was talking about, not a requirement to reload, which is vastly easier and quicker than clearing a misfed cartridge.

No, I’m guessing that you personally can’t identify an “assault rifle” with any coherence, and thus asked you to do so.