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1. One reason why big banks give money to Democrat politicians is that bankers are usually urban Ivy League educated types and their equivalent. Such people tend to support the Democrats. Most bankers have highly specialised jobs within the bank, and don’t think about the big picture very much, so if there is an inconsistency in this, it does not impact them on a daily basis.

   Posted by Michael Jennings on 25 June 2011 at 11:19pm
   
   

2. Yes Michael it is partly social background (and ideology). But it is also self interest - someone like Barney Frank or Chris Dodd (or Barack Obama) is not going to have any moral problems with the various antics of government schemes (from which some people in the financial industry can profit).

   Someone like John McCain will only go along as long as he does not understand what is happening. Of course he is ignorant (I mean no insult by that - I just mean that he lacks key knowledge of the subject), but if was ever really explained to him (or a lot of others) ....

   However, one need not have any fear of genuine (as opposed to faked up) moral outrage from the Dems. They have no shame.

   Posted by Paul Marks on 27 June 2011 at 05:36pm
   
   

3. To put things in cruder terms….

   Better to make deals with Reds - than get found out by Rednecks.

   Posted by Paul Marks on 27 June 2011 at 05:39pm
   
   

4. A criticism: after about 15 mins in to the podcast, Paul begins to frame a question as to whether the economy collapses before or after… something (agenda 21?), but then the whole conversation got sidetracked for a good while into stuff about the differences between socialists and progressives and so on…

   When the conversation finally got back around to the economy, Paul seemed to have lost his original train of thought.

   What strikes me as interesting are two things: the first is one of Patrick’s questions which Paul was seemingly getting too carried away to pay attention to (i.e. how do we know when malinvestments have been liquidated*?), and the second one goes back to Paul’s original train of thought on when the economy might collapse in relation to some particular event or condition he had in mind…

   *On that question it seems to me the obvious answer is to define a malinvestment as a business whose income stream begins to dry up once consumer spending is no longer fueled by borrowing, although given systemic price distortion, this “definition” would have to be considered against the more general problem of teasing out signal from noise in all prices and thus also income streams.

   Posted by mike on 29 June 2011 at 07:42pm