The Man Beat Wall Street

I am referring, of course, to John Bogel, the founder of Vanguard, and the man who gave us the index fund, which showed that the self-appointed masters of the universe on Wall Street did worse than a random throw of the dice.

He died yesterday, aged 89:

John C. Bogle, who founded the Vanguard Group of Investment Companies in 1974 and built it into a giant mutual fund company, with $4.9 trillion in assets under management today, died on Wednesday at his home in Bryn Mawr, Pa. He was 89.

His personal assistant, Michael Nolan, said the cause was esophageal cancer. Mr. Bogle, who had struggled with a congenital heart defect and had several heart attacks, received a heart transplant in 1996.

Mr. Bogle built Vanguard, which is based in Malvern, Pa., on a cornerstone belief that was anathema to most mutual fund companies: that over the long term, most investment managers cannot outperform the broad market averages. He popularized and became the leading proponent of indexing, the practice of structuring an investment portfolio to mirror the performance of a market yardstick, like the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index.

“Indexing was the purview of institutional investors, but Jack Bogle came up with the consumer version,” said Daniel P. Wiener, the editor of The Independent Adviser for Vanguard Investors, a newsletter and website that has tracked the company for decades. “He made people aware of expenses, and told them that costs come right out of the bottom line.”

But Mr. Bogle became a harsh critic of the mutual fund industry in later years. In the second half of the 1990s, he said, stock market investors were spoiled by average annual returns of more than 20 percent per year and, as a result, cared too little about the high expenses they were paying to mutual fund managers for those managers’ presumed expertise at picking stocks. Mutual fund companies, he said, were all but immoral for accepting such fees.

He was right.

This Business Will Get out of Control. It Will Get out of Control and We’ll Be Lucky to Live through It.

No, I am not referring to the “Black Budget” that covers things like our spy satellites, I mean pretty much everything, up to and including the Department of Housing and Urban Development:

………

The only thing that did not make the news was an announcement by a little-known government body called the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board — FASAB — that essentially legalized secret national security spending. The new guidance, “SFFAS 56 – CLASSIFIED ACTIVITIES” permits government agencies to “modify” public financial statements and move expenditures from one line item to another. It also expressly allows federal agencies to refrain from telling taxpayers if and when public financial statements have been altered.

To Michigan State professor Mark Skidmore, who’s been studying discrepancies in defense expenditures for years, the new ruling ­— and the lack of public response to it — was a shock.

“From this point forward,” he says, “the federal government will keep two sets of books, one modified book for the public and one true book that is hidden.”

Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy was one of the few people across the country to pay attention to the FASAB news release. He was alarmed.

“It diminishes the credibility of all public budget documents,” he says.

I spent weeks trying to find a more harmless explanation for SFFAS 56, or at least one that did not amount to a rule that allows federal officials to fake public financial reports.

………

In plain English, the new guidance allowed federal agencies to “modify” public financial statements, with essentially a two-book system. Public statements would at best be unreliable, while the real books would be audited in “classified environment[s]” by certain designated officials.

When I asked FASAB who would be doing the auditing in “classified environment[s],” they answered:

“Please contact the federal entity’s Office of the Inspector General for questions pertaining to who does the auditing in a classified environment.”

This new rule is not confined to a few spy agencies. It appears to allow a stunningly long list of federal agencies to make use of new authority to “modify” public financial statements.

The Treasury Department’s definition of a “component reporting entity” includes 154 different agencies and bodies, from the Smithsonian Foundation to the CIA to the SEC to the Farm Credit Administration to the Railroad Retirement Board. The notion that any of these agencies could now submit altered public financial reports under the rubric of national security is mind-boggling.

………

One thing is certain: the taxpayer who opens up a federal financial statement expecting to find correct numbers will no longer be sure of what he or she is reading. Bluntly put, line items in public federal financial statements may now legally be, for lack of a better word — wrong.

Moreover, the state is not required to include a disclaimer telling the reader that modifications have been made.

………

Reached by email, Austin Fitts was pessimistic about the meaning of the new rule.

“The White House and Congress just opened a pipeline into the back of the US Treasury,” she wrote, “and announced to every private army, mercenary and thug in the world that we are open for business.”

What the rule actually will mean in practice is not clear. But it’s not hard to imagine how it could be employed. A quick look in the historical rearview mirror offers more than a few hints.

The Iran-Contra affair was, at its core, an accounting issue. In it, a group of actors used proceeds of weapons sales to fund unauthorized support of Nicaraguan rebels. Money was moved from one place to another, with the public cut out of the loop.

This is in-f%$#ing-sane.

They Should Spend the Rest of Their Lives in Prison

I am referring, of course to the Sacklers, who aggressively misled the American public about the risks of Oxycontin:

Members of the Sackler family, which owns the company that makes OxyContin, directed years of efforts to mislead doctors and patients about the dangers of the powerful opioid painkiller, a court filing citing previously undisclosed documents contends.

When evidence of growing abuse of the drug became clear in the early 2000s, one of them, Richard Sackler, advised pushing blame onto people who had become addicted.

“We have to hammer on abusers in every way possible,” Mr. Sackler wrote in an email in 2001, when he was president of the company, Purdue Pharma. “They are the culprits and the problem. They are reckless criminals.”

That email and other internal Purdue communications are cited by the attorney general of Massachusetts in a new court filing against the company, released on Tuesday. They represent the first evidence that appears to tie the Sacklers to specific decisions made by the company about the marketing of OxyContin. The aggressive promotion of the drug helped ignite the opioid epidemic.

The filing contends that Mr. Sackler, a son of a Purdue Pharma founder, urged that sales representatives advise doctors to prescribe the highest dosage of the powerful opioid painkiller because it was the most profitable.

This is a criminal enterprise. 

Go RICO on their asses and get a forfeiture order, because, as Billy Ray Valentine noted, “You know, it occurs to me that the best way you hurt rich people is by turning them into poor people.”

See also here .

Oh Snap!

Nancy Pelosi just just told Donald Trump that he can’t get his State of the Union Address while the government is shut down, claiming that the government shutdown raises significant security concerns:

As a federal shutdown lumbered through its fourth week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Wednesday sent a letter to President Trump urging him to postpone his Jan. 29 State of the Union address because of shutdown-related security reasons. Perhaps Trump could deliver his speech in writing that day, Pelosi suggested.

The letter was immediately described as a “power move” against Trump and as Pelosi “playing hardball” by threatening to deprive the president of both a stage and an audience. Meanwhile, the GOP decried it as “unprecedented” partisanship, with some (including Trump’s eldest son) accusing Pelosi of attempted censorship.

In retaliation, Trump canceled a trip by Pelosi and other members of Congress to visit troops overseas.

Nancy Pelosi has clearly one, because Trump just made himself look like a complete pissant:

The fight over the weeks-long government shutdown hit a bizarre new low as President Trump on Thursday canceled a planned trip to Afghanistan by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a day after she angered Republicans by suggesting the president delay his State of the Union Address.

Hours before Pelosi and top Democrats were set to depart for a visit to military leaders in Brussels and to troops in Afghanistan, Trump released a letter canceling what he termed a “public relations event.”

“I also feel that, during this period, it would be better if you were in Washington negotiating with me and joining the Strong Border Security movement to end the Shutdown,” he wrote. “We will reschedule this seven-day excursion when the Shutdown is over.”

I am amused.

Not at all Surprised

It turns out that the Orwellian-named Center for American Progress is in the pockets of the United Arab Emerates, and have gone hammer an tong after employees who are concerned about this:

The Center for American Progress fired two staffers suspected of being involved in leaking an email exchange that staffers thought reflected improper influence by the United Arab Emirates within the think tank, according to three sources with knowledge of the shake-up. Both staffers were investigated for leaking the contents of an internal email exchange to The Intercept, but neither of the former employees was The Intercept’s source.

………

A CAP spokesperson acknowledged two employees were fired as a result of the leak investigation, but said that the leak was not the reason they were fired: “We are not going to discuss internal personnel matters, but no one was fired at CAP for leaking or whistleblowing.” Internally, however, multiple members of CAP leadership have used the leak as the leading rationale for the firings in multiple settings, sources said. Gude did not return requests for comment.

At issue was an internal debate over how to frame CAP’s response to the murder of Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi, who was dismembered by Saudi Arabian officials inside the nation’s consulate in Istanbul on October 2.

The initial draft of the CAP’s statement condemned the killing and Saudi Arabia’s role in it, calling for specific consequences. Brian Katulis, a Gulf expert at CAP, objected to the specific consequences proposed in an email exchange with other national security staffers, according to sources who described the contents of the thread to The Intercept. At an impasse, the specifics were dropped, replaced merely with a call to “take additional steps to reassess” the U.S.-Saudi relationship, and the statement was released to the public on October 12.

I’m not surprised.

It’s a vipers nest of Clintonite grifters like Neera Tanden, Tom Daschle, John Podesta, and Larry Summers, so it’s no surprise that they are bought and paid for by the Saudi’s Persian Gulf war criminal (Yemen) buddies.

Making Boris F%$#ing Johnson look like Ernst F%$#ing Blofeld:

I am referring, of course, to Theresa May, who didn’t just lose her Brexit vote, but did so by a margin greater than any in modern history, and it’s the first defeat of a treaty in Parliament since 1864.

Jeremy Corbyn is calling for a vote of confidence, as should be expected by the opposition in any Parliamentary Democracy:

British lawmakers defeated Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit divorce deal by a crushing margin on Tuesday, triggering political chaos that could lead to a disorderly exit from the EU or even to a reversal of the 2016 decision to leave.

After parliament voted 432-202 against her deal, the worst defeat in modern British history, opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn promptly called a vote of no confidence in May’s government, to be held at 1900 GMT on Wednesday.

With the clock ticking down to March 29, the date set in law for Brexit, the United Kingdom is now ensnared in the deepest political crisis in half a century as it grapples with how, or even whether, to exit the European project that it joined in 1973.

………

More than 100 of May’s own Conservative lawmakers – both Brexit backers and supporters of EU membership – joined forces to vote down the deal. In doing so, they smashed the previous record defeat for a government, a 166-vote margin, set in 1924.

The humiliating loss, the first British parliamentary defeat of a treaty since 1864, appeared to catastrophically undermine May’s two-year strategy of forging an amicable divorce with close ties to the EU after the March 29 exit.

This is a complete clusterF%$#.

The only bright side for May is that she has left such a dogs breakfast of Brexit that none of the Tories want her job:

If there was any consolation for May, it was that her internal adversaries appeared set to fight off the attempt to topple her.

Seriously, she is making the Trump administration look like bloody geniuses.

Did Nazi That Coming

There is no such thing as too racist for the GOP.
On the other hand, there is such a thing as too STUPIDLY racist for the GOP, and Iowa Representative Steve King has crossed that bridge:

House GOP leaders moved Monday to remove Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) from all of his committee assignments following a firestorm over remarks considered racist.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) told reporters after a meeting of the Republican Steering Committee that King would not receive any committee assignments for the new Congress.

King faced bipartisan criticism after telling The New York Times in an interview published last week, “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?”

King had been a member of the House Judiciary, Agriculture and Small Business committees. He had also served as chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice in the last Congress, and could have stood to serve as its ranking member under the Democratic majority.

………

“We will not be seating Steve King on any committees in the 116th Congress,” McCarthy told reporters.

This is the first time that a Representative hasn’t had any committee assignments since Jim Traficant was expelled from the house in 2001 and 2002, and before that, it was more than 100 years.

The only question remaining is whether he will resign.

They are Not Shareholders, They are Unindicted Co-Conspirators

It looks like PG&E is planning to declare bankruptcy.

Many people are concerned about the fate of the shareholders, but they, or their fund managers/hedge funds, knew that PG&E had a cavalier attitude toward safety and infrastructure, ans so those investors deserve to lose their investments:

Utilities have long been considered ultrasafe bets. But PG&E Corp.’s
announcement Monday that it will file for bankruptcy is teaching investors that isn’t always true.

The Baupost Group LLC, Viking Global Investors LP and BlueMountain Capital Management LLC were among the hedge funds that snapped up shares of PG&E Corp. during the third quarter of 2018, just before the deadliest wildfire in California history triggered an existential crisis for the state’s largest utility.

That crisis entered a new phase Monday when PG&E said that it intends to seek chapter 11 bankruptcy protection by the end of the month due to more than $30 billion it faces related to its role in sparking deadly California wildfires in 2017 and 2018. That sent its shares down 52%. Shares have now fallen 83% since the fire began on Nov. 8 and bonds are down 25%. The price of PG&E bonds due in 2034 fell about 8% Monday, according to MarketAxess.

You have to understand something here: People were not investing in PG&E IN SPITE OF their horrible safety record, they did so BECAUSE of their horrible safety record.

They looked at fires, and pipeline explosions, and pollution, and thought, “These are people truly committed to extracting the last possible penny out of any situation, no matter who they hurt or kill.”

The shareholders should be wiped out.

The bondholders should be wiped out.

The executives should be wiped out, and jailed in a SuperMax as a warning to others.

And then, it’s capital should become state owned.

100 Years Ago Today


The Aftermath


The Headline

I am referring, of course to The Great Boston Molasses Flood:

For bystanders, the first clue something was wrong was a sound different from the usual thrum of the overhead train. The Boston Evening Transcript later described it as “a deep rumble.”

At around 1pm on 15 January 1919, a 50ft-tall steel holding tank on Commercial Street in Boston’s North End ruptured, sending 2.3m gallons of molasses pouring into the neighborhood.

Owned by the United States Industrial Alcohol Company, the molasses had been brought to the city from the Caribbean, then piped from the harbor to the vat through 220ft of heated piping. The tank was built in 1915 to accommodate increased wartime demand. But from its inception, it leaked.

On 13 January, it had been filled almost to capacity. Two days later, parts of the metal tank ripped though trusses of the elevated train track, 20ft below. Horses and people were swept away.

………

A class action lawsuit arose from the flood, Dorr v United States Industrial Alcohol Company, with 119 plaintiffs including families of victims and injured parties. They argued that the tank was too thin and poorly built. The company argued that Italian anarchist groups blew up the tank.

The investigation lasted more than five years, with over a thousand witnesses testifying. In April 1925, a state auditor ruled that company’s negligence led to structural failure of the tank. Victims and their families were granted $628,000 in damages.

The first class action lawsuit against a major corporation, Dorr paved the way for modern regulation.

………

One local, Stephen Puleo, was working on a master’s thesis on Italian immigrants when he began to research the flood. The North End neighborhood was more than 90% Italian back then, a working class area. In 2003 Puleo published a book, Dark Tide: the Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919.

Puleo told the Guardian: “The tank itself didn’t even require a permit to be built. I liked to tell people, the molasses flood did for building construction standards what the Cocoanut Grove fire did for fire standards across the country. You have these two disasters, and long-standing positive ramifications.”

Also the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire.

Why we need pesky bureaucrats.

Bird is not the Word

In the world of DMCA take-down notices, the scooter rental service Bird has jumped the shark, issuing a notice to Cory Doctorow for the mere mention of the fact that there are kits that allow people to replace the circuit boards on seized scooters that are resold to the public.

First, this is completely bogus: Swapping the circuit board does not give unlicensed access to Bird’s software, it removes it, and second:

You Are Pulling This Crap on Cory Doctorow? Are You F%$#Ing Sh%$ting Me?

This has gotta be the stupidest take-down notice ever:

According to a new letter published Friday by an Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer, the scooter startup Bird significantly overstepped when it recently demanded that Boing Boing remove a post describing personal “conversion kits” that enable the removal of Bird’s proprietary hardware from a seized scooter.

The fracas began on December 8, 2018, when Cory Doctorow, the longtime Boing Boing writer and famed science fiction author, wrote a post entitled: “$30 plug-and-play kit converts a Bird scooter into a ‘personal scooter.’”

In it, Doctorow described the existence of kits that purport to allow someone to legally purchase an impounded Bird scooter and then alter it for personal use.

Bird did not take kindly to this post. On December 20, the company demanded that Boing Boing remove it. Bird’s lawyer, Linda Kwak, claimed that, simply by writing about the existence of these kits, Boing Boing violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

………

On Friday, EFF lawyer Kit Walsh, who represents Doctorow in this dustup, wrote to Kwak that Doctorow “has no obligation to, and will not, comply with your request to remove this article.”

………

It appears that the current exemption to the Section 1201 law that normally prohibits circumvention of digital locks is protected under the section that specifically allows for “Computer programs that are contained in and control the functioning of a lawfully acquired motorized land vehicle… when circumvention is a necessary step to allow the diagnosis, repair, or lawful modification of a vehicle function.”

And also, Cory F%$#ing Doctorow?

This man is the EFF’s public face on fighting digital rights management, and has arguably been the most prominent opponent of DRM in the computer community world wide, and you serve up this sh%$ sandwich?

What the F%$# is wrong with you?

It’s On

The teachers of the Los Angeles Unified School District have gone on strike, meaning that over 30,000 teachers will be on the picket lines, 500,000 students will be out, and 900 schools will be shuttered.

You will see a lot about pay and benefits, but this is really about the leadership of the LAUSD wanting to starve the public schools to feed the charter school industry:


More than 30,000 Los Angeles public-school teachers began the largest school strike in the country on Monday and the first in three decades in the district. Holding plastic-covered signs on rain-drenched picket lines across the city, they demanded higher pay, smaller classes and more support staff in schools.

The strike effectively shut down learning for roughly 500,000 students at 900 schools in the district, the second-largest public school system in the nation. The schools remained open, staffed by substitutes hired by the city, but many parents chose to keep their children at home, either out of support for the strike or because they did not want them inside schools with a skeletal staff.

With negotiations apparently at a standstill, the strike could last days or even weeks.

The decision to walk off the job came after months of negotiations between the teachers’ union, United Teachers Los Angeles, and the Los Angeles Unified School District. Although educators on all sides agree California should spend more money on education, the union and the district are locked in a bitter feud about how Los Angeles should use the money it already gets.

The above article only mentions charter schools by accident, but when you actually listen to the teachers, it is clears that looting by charter schools, and incessant high stakes testing, are the top of the list of grievances.

Have a Nice Glass of Shut the F%$# Up, Alan

After nearly blowing up the world 10 years ago, Alan Greenspan seems to think that there are still people who give a crap what he thinks:

Raising the marginal tax rate on the richest Americans to 70 percent would put a major dent in the economy, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said Monday.

During an interview with the CBS program “60 Minutes” that aired Sunday, freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposed that such a levy be imposed to pay for what she calls a “Green New Deal” to slash carbon emissions and ultimately wean the U.S. off its reliance on fossil fuels.

The tax would apply to those earning more than $10 million a year, a group that currently pays the top marginal tax rate of 37 percent.

Without getting into the details, Greenspan said the move would have dire consequences.

………

When it comes to taxes, Greenspan said the measure passed in 2017 “was an excellent tax cut” though Congress failed to come up with a way to pay for it. He noted that the U.S. budget deficit for fiscal 2018 is likely to hit $1 trillion due in large part to entitlement burdens that lawmakers have not addressed.

It appears that Ayn Rand’s biggest fan doesn’t give a sh%$ about deficits unless there is a possibility that they might help poor people.

This is a man whose take on financial fraud was that the market would take of the problem.

Please, Alan Greenspan, shut the F%$# Up.

Linkage

Big Brother, Schmig Brother, Facebook Edition:

Rats — Sinking Ship — PG&E

I’m not sure if it’s an attempt to get the hell out of dodge, of if they decided that the woman made a good scapegoat, but t PG&E’s CEO Geisha Williams has left the building:

Pacific Gas and Electric Company announced the departure of its chief executive Sunday as it remained besieged by a financial crisis related to California’s historic wildfires.

PG&E said the company had initiated a search to replace the top official, Geisha Williams, who had led the utility since 2017. It said John Simon, the company’s general counsel, would serve as interim chief executive during the search.

………

PG&E, the state’s largest investor-owned utility, faces an estimated $30 billion exposure to liability for damages from the 2017 and 2018 wildfires that killed scores in Northern California. The sum would exceed its insurance and assets, raising concern in the state capital about the utility’s future.

The billions in potential costs have prompted a series of downgrades in PG&E’s ratings, including decisions last week by Moody’s Investors Service and S&P Global Ratings to downgrade the utility’s bonds to junk.

………

Fire investigators determined that PG&E’s equipment was responsible for at least 18 of 21 major fires in 2017 as well as fires in 2018. Some of the fires have been attributed to power lines’ coming into contact with trees, which critics have said is a result of the utility’s failure to trim the trees. 

Last time around, with the support of then-governor Jerry Brown, the state legislature bailed them out.
I think that the political climate regarding the much-reviled utility are different now, and the new governor, Gavin Newsom, is far less of a corporate stooge than Jerry Brown is.
On the theory that a crisis is frequently also an opportunity, I would strongly suggest that someone looks a making significant portions of PG&E state owned.

Toyota Brings Back Tail Fins

I have a 2004 Toyota Prius.

It’s my midlife crisis car, because I am the dullest motherf%$#er on the planet.

It’s not beautiful in the way that a Jaguar E-Type convertable is, but I rather like it’s jelly-bean like appearance:

It’s appearance is clear and unadorned and functional, which I like.

The new Priuses (Prii?) sport wonderful specifications, particularly the plug-in hybrid Prius Prime, but the styling is not to my taste.

I find it busy and distracting.

I was looking at the back, and I had this weird sense of deja vu, and then it hit me: Toyota has put tail fins on their cars.

Specifically, it’s a somewhat less ostentatious version of the tail fins from a 1959 Chevy Belair:

Please tell me that I am not the only one who sees this.

I Don’t Get It

Citing numerous law enforcement sources, the New York Times is reporting that the FBI opened an investigation of whether Trump was working for Putin in response to James Comey’s firing, which has described as a “blockbuster”.

 First, why is no one looking into Trump being mobbed up. He has to be, he’s a developer in New York and northern New Jersey. (Also, why did no reporters look into it during the campaign) Second, the report does not mention any specific information.

I am not sure how this is a blockbuster.

Conducting a counterintelligence investigation in such a situation should be standard, just as the obstruction of justice investigation was.

If Trump fired Comey to cover his own ass (probably yes) then there are both criminal and intelligence effects, so an investigation of both would not only not be unusual, it would be almost routine.

Also, given the history of the FBI, it is hardly surprising that there would be leaks regarding such an investigation.

The investigation, in and of itself does not constitute a major story.

In the days after President Trump fired James B. Comey as F.B.I. director, law enforcement officials became so concerned by the president’s behavior that they began investigating whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests, according to former law enforcement officials and others familiar with the investigation.

The inquiry carried explosive implications. Counterintelligence investigators had to consider whether the president’s own actions constituted a possible threat to national security. Agents also sought to determine whether Mr. Trump was knowingly working for Russia or had unwittingly fallen under Moscow’s influence.

The investigation the F.B.I. opened into Mr. Trump also had a criminal aspect, which has long been publicly known: whether his firing of Mr. Comey constituted obstruction of justice.

………

The F.B.I. conducts two types of inquiries, criminal and counterintelligence investigations. Unlike criminal investigations, which are typically aimed at solving a crime and can result in arrests and convictions, counterintelligence inquiries are generally fact-finding missions to understand what a foreign power is doing and to stop any anti-American activity, like thefts of United States government secrets or covert efforts to influence policy. In most cases, the investigations are carried out quietly, sometimes for years. Often, they result in no arrests.