As IF Times

link Timothy P. Carney: Goldman rallies for Obama in Wall Street ‘reform’ | Washington Examiner.

This will be interesting.  The general media will not understand that this is the story of the year, bigger than Tiger and yes, even bigger than Kate Gosselin on Dancing with the Stars. 

It appears that Goldman Sachs will be HELPING the administration with reforming Wall St practices!! They are coming out in favour of restrictions on capital use, of use of leverage and certain activities that would place banks in conflict with customers. 

!!! 

You can’t make this stuff up.  Goldman has long been the gold standard on the street, always making the most profit, being involved in the best deals and having the most connected top level people.  In fact the top finance people in the cabinets of many of the previous administrations look like an alumni roll call of ex Goldman people.  All the other banks on the street emulated Goldman’s business models, to the degree that they could and when Goldman created a profitable market space, the others were soon to follow. 

The big bonanza came when Goldman went public in the eighties which allowed not only much much larger pools of capital from which to lever their trading and investment positions, it also allowed the formerly careful partnership the ability to be less scrupulous about the degree of leverage employed in its banking activities.  A prudent person may leverage their postion say, 5 to 1 in order to achieve returns.  From accounts brought to light by books such as The Big Short, leverage was allowed to climb to 30 to 1 in some cases. 

Not to say that this is neccessarily imprudent, because that would be Monday morning quarterbacking, but it was the asymetric risk reward aspect discussed in earlier pieces that led to the  eventual damage to the financial system.  As of now, it’s only speculation as to whether this was imprudence borne of benign management ignorance or recklessness resulting from questionable practices.  In other words, they were either not smart enough, or TOO smart.

Either way, it appears illogical to engage them in searching for fixes. Why don’t they hire Bernie Madoff to advise them?  He’s about as expert as anyone and we know he’s not doing anything for the next 25 years.

link Spanking Linked to Kids’ Later Aggression.

I would hazard a guess to say that the authors of this now widely circulated study never had bratty kids.  Or plenty of cotton for their ears.  Or have annoyed countless other people in grocery stores, shopping malls and amusement parks with their kids wailing like police sirens.  Like global warming, it’s a stretch to assume that just because something happens to come under current study,  that a profound revelation has emerged after centuries of human existence.

In the case of child rearing, how did generations of people spanning all cultures from all over the world  manage to survive all this time if they reared kids who became aggressive bullies?  That explains the commentators on MSNBC, but for the mass of the world’s population, for whom corporal punishment of their children is the norm, this argument  just doesn’t hold water.  In an ideal world, you would tell the rotten kids to ixnay the bad behaviour and they would stop and if you’re lucky, that’s the end of it.  But sometimes, they are so rotten, only 5 fingers across the butt will get their attention.

Of course that’s not to say that the parents of Mao Tse Tung or Adolf  Hitler or Pol Pot didn’t beat them as kids, I’m sure they must have deserved it at some time.  I think it’s more likely that these people were enabled in their bullying careers.  For people like Hitler to come to influence you need a Chamberlain who enables him.

Heck, I think it’s borderline abuse NOT to spank kids.  Even at a young age, their thought processes develop quickly.  If you disassociate bad behavior from pain, you may be programming them to think that way their entire lives.  There’s a reason pain receptors exist.  It’s amazing how few kids put their hands in fire when burned once.  If they suffer no pain for bad behaviour and only tsk tsks, they will be  programmed to game the system once they enter real life.  Without hard consequences, kids will treat life as a video game where they can crash all they want and start a new game.  A smack on the behind is precisely what is needed to snap some kids out of their self indulgent and bad behaviour.  When you talk about bullying at the kid level, I think we can accept the notion that some are born naturally more aggressive than others.  In the schoolyard environment, some are going to want to impose their influence on others as a precursor to their future law careers. 

If children are only given soft punishments such as time outs, it will be accepted as a minor nuisance and in the future, they will plot ways to get around the punishment.  Even worse, they will create arguments as to why they should not get “punished” and so begins their life of rationalization and excuse making.  Punishment for kids should be corporal and it should not be negotiable.  I’d  bet that the fear or dread of physical pain translates into positive  law abiding behavior in adult life and not the opposite as suggested by these studies.  Lashes on the butt are much more effective than those with the tongue.

Like most of the world, they will learn an important lesson.  Life is not always fair and if you screw up, you will suffer pain.  Besides, as the saying goes, it always hurts the parents more anyway.