I think so, dear readers. With the advent of peace and plenty, as we move to the broad sunlit uplands of The Recovery, I fear some of the spice has gone out of the commentary on sites like this one, and its friends. Where people used to read econoblogs to actually understand a crisis that CNN and Fox News soundbites didn’t seem to encompass anymore, as the meltdown recedes into the past there’s now just a dull ennui. And with that, the econoblogosphere is moving back to where it used to be, which is to cater to a niche, broader than most, but a niche nonetheless, with a circumscribed influence.
The high point of bloggy “power”, we shall probably find in retrospect, was when a number of bloggers were invited to the US Treasury department and fed some by all accounts delicious cookies, as well as being ferociously spun to by the Goldmans guys whose turn it was to be on sabbatical at the Treasury that when it came to financial reform and what had gone wrong in the banking sector they did in fact Get It, whatever It was.
Since then, of course, we have had Obama praise the bonuses to “savvy businessman” Lloyd Blankfein, who as we all know is doing god’s work; mind-numbingly massive “trading” profits from all the big commercial, investment, commercial investment banks at the same time as accepting government and Fed largesse*; an even more hideous clusterfuck over finance reform than exists over healthcare reform in the US; and this despite none of the proposals under discussion seeming likely to properly change anything worthwhile, other than maybe the Volcker prop trading rule and this last seems fairly dead in the water.
What really rankles this blogger is that the Great Spinozist Republic is being subverted again. Regulatory capture is one thing, the total inability of a political system to make any steps to reform itself when what is wrong is staring at you in the face, is quite another. Political money and public ignorance has corrupted civic decency in the US to such an extent that doing the right thing for the Republic appears quite impossible.
All these things should make econo-bloggers all quiver with righteous anger, which we would communicate to our readers who would then rise up en masse against the legislators captured by Big Banking, and some form of actual reform might even take place.
But something along the chain has broken. Either we have lost interest or, more likely, the world has. To be sure, there are brave souls who carry on the fight. Felix does an admirable job of keeping us up to date with the nuts and bolts of finance reform. Taibbi provides the rhetoric (“vampire squids”, indeed). Calculated Risk and Naked Capitalism carry on doing their thing, as does Zero Hedge in its batshit sawn-off shotgun way. TED gives us the lowdown and I mean low, on what it really means to be a banker (though TED’s next post is just as likely to be about his favourite type of upholstery. Thanks for including us in the list of blogs you read, BTW). There are others, and Abnormal Returns continues to aggregate them. But the rest of us seem to have stopped caring so much. The minutiae of practical policy is much less amusing than making lots of money in financial markets that really, truly appear to be on the mend.
The wider global economy seems to be much better too. Sure, the US seems a bit screwed up still, and unemployment is high, but frankly that’s not where the action is at anymore. Baruch was astonished to read that Gartner is predicting 20% year on year growth in PC units globally. We can talk about overleveraged consumers until we’re blue in the face and we’ll still be wrong. That’s a crapload of PCs, and someone’s buying them. You don’t sell craploads of PCs like that unless there was something going fundamentally right in more places than where things are going fundamentally wrong.
But a better economy just makes people fat and happy, and fat and happy people aren’t likely to be roused by righteous anger. Fat and happy people are not likely to want to change much. Fat and happy people are much more likely to assume the light at the end of the tunnel gives out onto a large outdoor buffet than the next oncoming crisis. Hell, fat and happy people are more likely to do the stuff to bring on the next crisis, to binge, to borrow more, stoke the next bubble wherever that may be and feel pretty smart doing so, just like we did in 2006 and 2007. Reformed Broker Josh captures the new Zeitgeist rather well just today when he lists the things people no longer appear to be interested in e.g. financial reform, unemployment, etc and says
most market participants have instead turned their focus to finding secular growth stories, deep-value high yielders to replace the lack of money market interest and other such assorted baskets to put their eggs in.
Fine with me. I could use a break from the “news” myself.
I can’t say much better. Josh is saying what lots of us think.
Baruch isn’t really the person to do anything about this himself. He isn’t Spartacus. It was no co-incidence he was not invited to hob-nob at the Treasury; David at Aleph Blog was kind enough to suggest he and some others should be next time, but Baruch would probably have just eaten more of the cookies than was fair and got bored and played Homerun Battle 3D on his new iPhone until it ran out of power, annoying everyone. Baruch is one of those who likes to analyse what Is and try and make money out of it. He is not very interested in, or good at, what Should Be, though is slightly envious of those who have strong opinions in this direction. Less “designing better futures“, more buying the right ones. Even if Baruch had a prediliction to think about policy he doesn’t have time to think about more than what he writes about already; he has a day job, and a very intense one, which soaks up what mental energy he can muster these days.
But buying better futures are not what the best blogs in this space are about (and not what Nick Gogerty’s blog is either). Posts about the latest chart formation in the S&P500 are not memorable. They help no-one. Blogs about how best to trade can be interesting, but remain narrow and mercenary. So in the end are posts about how many iPads Apple will sell, the stock-in-trade of UB recently. Myself and Bento are just not that qualified to do much else and don’t have the time to post as often as we want. But there are other bloggers who are and who can. At its best, the econo-blogosphere can be the last haven of truly independent, non-captured, and crucially, informed, commentary able to affect policy and opinion makers positively. It used to do just that. It may not help in the end but let someone at least try.
Get your game back on, people. Get some fire in the belly again. A crisis is a terrible thing to waste, and it looks like we are on the verge of wasting ours.
* the irony is of course, is that the millions in banker wodge financing the lobbyists is at least partly the hot money doled out by the Fed to banks in that extraordinary money machine called ” quantitative easing”: Fed buys up at full whack the treasuries it issues to banks at a discount, financed by cheap rates set by the Fed itself. Said banks, busting out with Fed-invented cash, or more properly, “trading profits”, refuse to lend it to small businesses like they’re supposed to in the textbooks and support the economy. No, they plow it into awarding themselves big bonuses and, most pricelessly, pay lobbyists to pay off politicians to subvert both good sense and a public opinion which is as viscerally opposed to big banking as it is ignorant and pliant, and make sure the status quo ante crisum is restored. An edifying spectacle.
