As IF Times

link NY pension fund to sue BP for investment loss | Reuters.

The CFA program is an intense certification degree which confers on its graduates knowledge of every aspect of finance, accounting and investing analysis and techniques.  It appears that a new section will have to be added in the area of achieving investment returns.  The sue section.  If all the statistical models created do not result in the theoretical return, then sue the investment as a means of achieving the expected result.   If you can’t earn it, sue for it.

Actually, this case will set a precedent for anyone who has ever lost money in an investment due to unforeseen circumstances….which means every one, because who can foresee losing money?  Who knew that bs.com wasn’t worth 5 jillion dollars at it’s market peak?  All the people who ever lost money in General Motors can sue on the grounds that they intentionally made cars that wouldn’t sell.

I wonder how they’re going to frame a case against Apple computers, widely known to be selling new Iphones like booze to sailors, recently moving 1.7 million of them in the first 3 days of their introduction.  Yet the stock price has fallen from a high of 279 barely 2 weeks ago to today’s less lofty level of 245.  That has to be grounds for some kind of suit.  There may be created an entirely new category of investment returns for fund managers, called “entitled returns”, the return that should have happened if the vicissitudes of reality didn’t interfere.  They may label this the what would have been, or the “wah wah” return expectation.

It will be most interesting if/when one day government bonds begin defaulting.  What will be the basis for the lawsuits then?  That they had no idea that the debt had no backing? That they couldn’t have foreseen this coming?  Lawyers should constitute a part of every investment program.

link The Associated Press: Obama pledges changes to avert future spills.

Future students of history and civilization will study this last half century period in America and will no doubt be fascinated by the various official responses to national calamities.  In addition to the linked story above is the news that the present Attorney General, Eric Holder is making a personal appearance in the Gulf region presumably to ascertain what legal actions can be taken in the wake of this big oil leak.  The administration has also let it be known that a commission will be organized to investigate what to do and to make more laws.  This makes sense to whom?  A massive engineering problem arises requiring experts from all kinds of technical disciplines to try to resolve and the government sends in…. lawyers???

As if every ailment that affects society has a legal solution. Western society has been conditioned to think that somehow, legal resolutions are the ultimate cure all.  The first instinct for most when some misfortune befalls them is to call a lawyer and why not? This seems to be the civilized way to act in a decent society.  Except that what will ultimately happen is people will tire of the inanity of this mindset and will revolt.  As the current raging rancor over Arizona’s immigration laws demonstrate, people will flout laws anyway if no one is going to enforce them.  Why go to the trouble of engaging shiploads of lawyers to create laws if no one bothers to enforce them?  Is this not just a massive make-work program for lawyers?

The tragically flawed delusion inflicted upon society that somehow lawyers and laws are the salvation of all has reached comical proportions.  Massive oil leak? Send in lawyers. Gas pedal sticking in your Toyota? Call in the lawyers.  A business like Microsoft too succesful? You guessed it, get lawyers involved. As I mentioned in a previous post, just wait for the lawsuits from college graduates who can’t find jobs after spending a small fortune in tuition. 

In direct contradiction to a society that supposedly nurtures self determination and initiative, byzantine and nuisance laws actually discourage human development and impedes the progress of people.  Just today, there is the news story of a woman who is suing Google for giving her map directions which placed her in the middle of a highway where she was injured by traffic, see here: http://www.nydailynews.com/tech_guide/2010/05/31/2010-05-31_lauren_rosenberg_sues_google_blames_faulty_google_maps_directions_after_being_hi.html  Not surprisingly, this woman is from California where the altered state is the preferred state.

This state of delusion has formed a society in which finger pointing is the default response for all events affecting our individual lives.  The gulf oil leak as covered by the media is focused upon legal heads arguing over who’s at fault for the catastrophe.  Apparently the blame reaches all the way to the first Bush administration.  In line with legal tactics, everyone involved with the leak can expect to be found somewhat culpable for the fiasco.  British Petroleum certainly, but what of all the suppliers to the rig site?  What of the providers of steel, of the manufacturers of the drilling machinery?  What of the State or Federal bodies that granted permits for the drilling?  What about the financial institutions that financed the project?  What about the people who provided food to the workers on the rig?  Will they be roped in as well since they ‘enabled’ the drilling to take place?

It appears that we’re well past the point where reams of laws and more importantly, the mentality of the legal system  can be seen to be protecting the people.  We are now well into the stage where the legal requirements governing people’s everyday lives behave more like sand in the gears than the lubricant they should be.  Years ago, a book by a former Jurist, Catherine Crier wrote a book entitled The Case Against Lawyers, which described the many ways in which the law profession was undermining society by creating an unfair legal system.  Onerous laws and regulations are in large part responsible for migration of many core industries to other emerging nations.   Businesses would recoil at the thought of having the Mafia extort protection money from them as a cost of doing business.  Onerous laws and regulations are exactly the same thing, except….who protects us from the lawyers?

The worst part of what has happened is that entire generations of bright minds have been sucked into the lure of the law racket because it  continues to be a lucrative profession regardless of economic cycles.  The consequence is that bright minds have been diverted from doing things that can actually benefit society, in areas of medical research and engineering for example.  As long as people can succeed in life by pointing fingers for a living, that’s unlikely to change.