Yes, but....

But the resulting uproar, in Washington and on Wall Street, has largely obscured a simple truth of the marketplace. Yes, Morgan lost big — but, as Mitt Romney has pointed out, someone else won. And that someone or, rather, those someones, turn out to be Boaz Weinstein and a wolf pack of like-minded hedge fund managers.

But the "resulting uproar" was not over the fact that there were winners and losers, but over the fact that (1) a systemically important institution had lost a couple billion (more? less?), and that accordingly there are consequences for the financial system and for the real economy that are are considerably magnified, (2) that the loss revealed that JP Morgan did not have control over its derivatives book, which again, is a magnified problem with the company in question is a systemically important one, and (3) that they had made these losses because they had turned their CIO, responsible for hedging investments and thereby reducing risk, into a high-stakes gambling shop.

The "simple truth of the marketplace" was not "largely obscured," but almost wholly irrelevant to the "resulting uproar." If Azam Ahmed does not realize this,[1] he should be on a different beat.

[1] The thing is, he probably does realize it. The line just sits there irritating me, a sloppy entry into his main feature: an obsequious piece of fluff on hedge fund managers.

Nocera's banging on...

... it's good to see a j'accuse series; we get so little of that these days from the press.

As I chronicled on Saturday, it was her acceptance of plane tickets a year or so ago that had caused his first suspension. The N.C.A.A. had ruled the tickets an “improper benefit,” and had ordered him to sit out six games and pay a $100-per-month fine to repay the tickets. What more, she wondered, could the N.C.A.A. want?

A lot, it turned out. Tanesha is a single mother raising four children on a small salary. The N.C.A.A. investigators viewed her circumstances as a cause for suspicion, not sympathy. For instance, she owns a car. Where did she get the money to pay for it, they asked? How did she pay for her home? And so on.

Concluding that she had no choice but to cooperate — otherwise, her son would surely pay a severe price — Tanesha turned over her bank statements, as the N.C.A.A. demanded. Four N.C.A.A. investigators pored through her financial records and conducted interrogations in Aurora, seeking “evidence” that she was getting money from “improper” sources. (Tanesha declined to comment.)

When the investigators saw a series of cash deposits in her bank account, they demanded to know the source of the money. She told them: Friends had given her money so that she and her children could have a joyful Christmas. The investigators said they didn’t believe her; they felt sure that she must have gotten the money from an unscrupulous sports agent or some other party outlawed by the N.C.A.A.

stenography

There was a blow up of sorts today about the NYTimes public editor asking whether the Times should correct inaccurate facts (known politely as falsehoods) asserted by interviewees in their articles. Of course, they already do. They just don't do it for the American powerful.

Hajji Ahmad Fareed, a former member of Parliament, said the images confirmed to him that America was against Islam. The Americans "will never be friends with us and never bring peace," he said. Americans have urinated "on our holy Koran," he said, and have now done so "on the bodies of our Muslims." Mr. Fareed was referring to an erroneous report in Newsweek in 2005 that American soldiers at the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had thrown a Koran into a toilet. The report prompted protests and riots in many parts of the Muslim world. The worst was in Afghanistan, where at least 17 people were killed.

 This point, I see, has been made, better, and time-lier, by Greenwald.

abecederia

I do like their appalling brashness, their cavalier determination to exit the field of good, honest, investigative journalism. Enough of that. Sorry. The scandal recalls, and it is always worth recalling, A Very British Coup. We do not yet seem to be at the stage where Perkins found himself [1], but let's face it, Gordon Brown was no Harry Perkins.



[1] Past tense for fiction?

The President writes a children's book...

... and Fox News make asses of themselves.

Original headline (as indicated by the URL):

Obama Praises Indian Chief Who Killed U.S. General

Then, of course, we get

Editor's Note: Headline has been corrected for historical accuracy.

with the new headline

Obama Praises Indian Chief Who Defeated U.S. General

Now I don't care about the President's book. But this is some pretty petty stuff. This is referring to Obama's inclusion of Sitting Bull in Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters, which is a tribute to 13 Americans presented to children.