An Over-Saturation Strategy?

Yet more Muslim outrage, now over some disrespectful cartoons in a French magazine.

Now I'm not a big fan of gratuitous insults to people's faith, but once the cat is out of the bag and the rioting has already begun, maybe at this point the best approach would be to just pile it on - just keep releasing one deplorably blasphemous insult after another - they can't keep rioting 365/24/7 - at some point exhaustion will have to set in, and the reaction will eventually degrade into the Arabic equivalent of "Oy!", and life will just move on.

Did the Gummint Make Money on the AIG Bailout?

This has been the subject of some debate over the last day or so. The Treasury announced it had made an $18b profit. Watchdog Neil Barofsky and blogger Henry Blodget got into a little Twitter spat over it, leaving completely unsatisfied. Dreading the task of attempting to look into it more deeply, I instead partook of various diversions such as a the Yankees-Red Sox game and red wine.

I'm happy to report though that physicist Steve Hsu has accepted the premise (that the AIG bailout was profitable) and that's good enough for me. But that then conjures up a disturbing paradox.

Intuitively, one feels that bailing out blood-sucking financial institutions (like AIG and the banksters) is a bad thing, while bailing out actual goods-producing firms (like GM) seems rather virtuous. But it looks like bailing out the vampire squids is actually profitable - or at worse break-even - while rescuing the manufacturers has led to losses.

Hsu expected the AIG bailout to be profitable because the tendency of markets is to both overshoot - and undershoot - value. So at the depths of the depression, when the bailouts were instigated, financial assets were generally undervalued, thus providing a good buying opportunity for the Treasury. And especially in the meltdown, financial assets were in a state of complete chaos valuation-wise - no one really had a clue about their intrinsic value, as no one had a clue about what could be paid off and what couldn't. But with financial assets, liquidity in and of itself can stabilize financial assets and thus raise their value (assuming the reduced value is due to lack of liquidity).

But with manufactured goods, far more of their value is built into the goods themselves (at a minimum, scrap value). Sure, the value of any good will be depressed during a recession due to the demand curve, but the value of a car is not dependent on who has possession of it at a given time. A mortgage, on the other hand - or a CDS - is indeed entirely dependent on the specific counterparty. Thus, bailing out GM does not ipso facto increase the value of their manufacturing plant nor of their cars. By the same token,neither did the poor fiscal shape of GM affect its intrinsic value.

In a pure bankruptcy, GM's liabilities would have been abrogated and it's assets sold at auction. Assuming GM cars would have any marketability, it's inconceivable that it would not have survived as an auto-manufacturing concern. What could not have survived is the U.A.W.'s role in the new G.M. That is what Obama bailed out - not GM, but the UAW, which is why there will be no GM-bailout profit.

When You Can't Say "I told you so"

With the recent chaos in Egypt and Libya, I imagine Mitt Romney would love to get up on a podium and proclaim "I told you this would happen. I warned America that the Obama administration's interventionist policies in the Mid East would only lead to disaster..." But of course he can't because he did no such thing - in fact, he has only criticized Obama for not being interventionist enough, for being too timid about overthrowing our friends and ushering in "democracy." So what's he supposed to do now - how can he attempt to take advantage of this obvious opening? He can't, really, except to sputter about whether or not Obama apologized.

And is Romney still actually running for president? It's hard to tell - he seems unable to come up with a single argument to actually convince anyone why he'd be a better president than Obama, other than his own mega-competence, which seems to get undermined at every turn in this campaign. I think, in his own mind, he's pretty much done with the campaign, and is now just hoping that various financial, diplomatic, or domestic meltdowns pave his way into the Rose Garden. Because right now, he's making Bob Dole look like Harry Truman.