This essay has seems to have prompted widespread anger from libertarians. I think that one of the core failures of the modern libertarian movement is that it is so hip linked to laissez-faire capitalism that its proponents are willing to sacrifice individual liberty in support of private economic interest. Live by the sword, die by the sword I guess. Of course, many of those who seem the most outraged by this are the same who promoted Sarah Palin as a libertarian. In my mind, these people discredited their movement before the financial crisis reached a boiling point. This is just another nail in the coffin.

The argument as a whole is reminiscent of wearying dorm-room debates that took place circa 1989 about whether the fall of the Soviet bloc demonstrated the failure of communism. Academic Marxists were never going to be convinced that anything that happened in the real world could invalidate their belief system.

For reference, here is a pretty decent explanation of the credit crisis:

In this ultra-low rate environment, where prices were appreciating, and most mortgages were being securitized, all that mattered to the mortgage originator was that a BORROWER NOT DEFAULT FOR 90 DAYS (some contracts were 6 Months). The contracts between the firms that originated mortgages and the Wall Street firms that securitized them had explicit warranties. The mortgage seller guaranteed to the mortgage bundle buyer (underwriter) that payments were current, the mortgage holders were valid, and that the loan would not default for 90 or 180 days.

So long as the mortgage did not default in that period of time, it could not be "put back" to the originator. A salesman or mortgage business would only lose their fee if the borrower defaulted within that 3 or 6 month contractually specified period. Indeed, a default gave the buyer the right to return the mortgage and charge back the lender the full purchase price.

What do rational, profit-maximizers do? They put people in houses that would not default in 90 days -- and the easiest way to do that were the 2/28 ARM mortgages. Cheap teaser rates for 24 months, then the big reset. Once the reset occurred 24 months later, it was long off the books of the mortgage originators -- by then, it was Wall Street's problem.

Technically, thats Option-ARM mortgages. See also figure 1.7 on page 8 of this report which shows a massive reset of Alt-A and Option ARM mortgages in 2011. I don't fully understand this chart as it juxtaposes Option ARMs, which are a type of loan with Subprime, which is a type of credit score, but presuming its accurate we may see a second wave housing crisis hit in 2011.

Update: According to this information those option-arms are going to reset sooner.

To the core point, these loan originators took advantage of a loop hole in contracts written by brokers and created loan products that were doomed to fail, and a whole bunch of housing speculators got in on the deal. Wall Street shouldn't have offered that deal, but it did. Regulators should have been allowed to act, but were not. The idea that the market will always forsee these things is wrong. Sometimes the market drives off a cliff.

How the financial collapse killed libertarianism. - By Jacob Weisberg - Slate Magazine

Capital calls are due when investors in venture funds have to make good on their promises to commit money to funds. Unlike hedge funds, venture funds don’t collect all of their money at once. They secure promises from limited partners — rich people, endowments, and pension funds — to wire money at certain intervals over a number of years.

“The last time we saw this happen was from 2001 to 2004, when individuals didn’t make capital calls even though they were obligated to do so,” he added.

Whats going down in the venture industry.

Dreaded capital calls at venture funds may not be met » VentureBeat

Another very MemeStreams like company with a whole lot of veture funding.

Twine, a bookmarking and knowledge-tracking application developed by Radar Networks, is leaving its closed beta tonight with an array of new features, in hopes of becoming one of the definitive websites of the next generation of the Internet.

Here is an interesting observation:

But the most likely problem would be that it’s just too early for something like Twine. About half of web users don’t even use search engines yet, so it might be a symptom of the Silicon Valley bubble to assume large numbers of people want an information tool like Twine.

Twine goes fully public with next-generation bookmarking » VentureBeat

PartnerUp, a Deluxe Company, is an online community for entrepreneurs and startups that help them find people for their businesses, such as co-founders, business partners, advisors, board members, and skilled technical people. In addition, PartnerUp helps entrepreneurs ask for and offer up advice, find commercial real estate, and find resources for their businesses.

The PartnerUp team blogs on the StartUp Blog, an up-and-coming blog about entrepreneurship, small business, and startups. If you get a chance, check it out at startup.partnerup.com.

This sounds vaugely interesting.

PartnerUp’s Weekly Opportunities » VentureBeat

"We hope that as a content uploader, you have gained a sense of some of the challenges we face everyday in operating YouTube," she added.

This just keeps getting better!

YouTube to McCain: You Made Your DMCA Bed, Lie in It | Threat Level from Wired.com

2008-10-05: Damn It Feels Good To Be a Banksta

Take a stroll through the archive, Ishida has been on a roll for about the last 2 months!

Sinfest

[O]verreaching copyright claims have resulted in the removal of non-infringing campaign videos from YouTube, thus silencing political speech. Numerous times during the course of the campaign, our advertisements or web videos have been the subject of DMCA takedown notices regarding uses that are clearly privileged under the fair use doctrine. The uses at issue have been the inclusion of fewer than ten seconds of footage from news broadcasts in campaign ads or videos, as a basis for commentary on the issues presented in the news reports, or on the reports themselves. These are paradigmatic examples of fair use...

Blahahaha McCain voted for the DMCA

McCain Campaign Feels DMCA Sting | Electronic Frontier Foundation

North Korea has now achieved one of its most-prized objectives: removal from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism. In exchange, the U.S. has received "promises" on verification that are vague and amount to an agreement to negotiate the critical points later.

The NK delisting is HUGE. The question of whether they got everything they needed from this seems open but I would be very, very surprised if the Bush Administration lowered sanctions on NK prematurely.

Bush's North Korea Surrender Will Have Lasting Consequences - WSJ.com

Some further ruminations on Janelane's prior post.

The modern low on the Graham P/E was 6.6 in July and August of 1982, and it has sunk below 10 for several long stretches since World War II -- most recently, from 1977 through 1984. It would take a bottom of about 600 on the S&P 500 to take the current Graham P/E down to 10. That's roughly a 30% drop from last week's levels; an equivalent drop would take the Dow below 6000.

Could the market really overshoot that far on the downside? "That's a serious possibility, because it's done it before," says Prof. Shiller. "It strikes me that it might go down a lot more" from current levels.

In order to trade at a Graham P/E as bad as the 1982 low, the S&P 500 would have to fall to roughly 400, more than a 50% slide from where it is today. A similar drop in the Dow would hit bottom somewhere around 4000.

What History Tells Us About the Market - WSJ.com

So, here is what I think.

In the mid nineties things got out of control. They knew it was a bubble. It got huge. Really really huge. If you compare the late nineties DJIA with the late eighties Nikkei, it looks the same. A massive, massive bubble. No one should have been buying stocks in the late nineties.

The Japanese dealt with this by attempting to wring the excesses out of their system coercively. The result was 15 years of anemic growth and a stock market that only goes down.

So, instead, we blew a bubble... We blew it at just the right time. As the original bubble fell apart around 2002 the new bubble, based on loose cash, took its place.

Below these bubbles the real economy still grows. In fact, because of the bubble, our real economy grew faster during this decade that it would have if they had just let the post millennial crash occur.

The idea is to run the bubble until the actual size of the economy catches up... They chose the moment to deflate it. They chose to raise the interest rates. They knew what would happen.

If 8,500 is a reasonable value for the DJIA in 2008 after years of bubble assisted growth, imagine how unreasonable it must have been in the late nineties. Imagine how unreasonable Dow 10,000 was.

Do we need another bubble? Maybe we don't. Maybe our valuations are now close enough to reality that we can simply proceed from here.

The only problem that we have right now is that I think the wizards that are running this process have lost control of the deflation. Its not happening as gracefully as they had hoped. This is a very dangerous time.

RE: Remembering a Classic Investing Theory - New York Times