Economist apparently considers foolish gambles and massive fraud as "fun"

Only the Economist, with its article "Bigger, safer but duller", could consider the changes taking place within the hedge fund industry as a bad thing.

Formerly, hedge fund took investors' money and took it for a wild ride, leveraging it to absurd degrees and sinking it into obscure financial instruments. For those who had smart and/or lucky managers, the bets paid off big. But losers far outnumbered winners, as the numbers indicate -- hedge fund returns plummeted 19% in 2008, and are only slowly starting to recover.

The solutions, to summarize the article, are as follows. Hedge funds are much more transparent about their activities. They have also made it easier for customers to pull their money out if they deem the risk in the fund to be too high. Finally, hedge funds are offering additional, safer products for investors to sink their money into.

Yet these changes seem to disappoint the Economist, which states the following:

The increased cost of meeting the demands of institutional investors and regulators is tilting the industry towards ever-bigger firms. Investors already favour the larger, older funds, which they perceive to be safer bets. Most of the new money allocated to hedge funds in the second quarter went to those with assets over $5 billion.

The smallest hedge funds will struggle under these conditions. Some may seek to share back-office costs with larger funds in return for a cut of their profits. Others will liquidate or put themselves up for sale. The industry is already consolidating. On August 3rd, TPG-Axon, a New York fund, announced a merger with Montrica, a London outfit.

Whether this bulking-up will be good for the industry as a whole is unclear. The most glittering returns have often come from smaller, younger outfits, which are now being sidelined. Giant funds often struggle to find ways to produce outsize returns, because they are too big to move nimbly in and out of markets. Mr Druckenmiller said one reason he decided to close Duquesne was its burdensome size.

The Economist seems to idealize the old days in the same way the we have mythologized the Old West. Yet the Old West was a mean, desolate, dangerous place, and the old world of hedge funds was only better in the sense that millions of dollars were lost instead of thousands of innocent lives.

Sorry, Economist, but those free-wheeling days of yore weren't as exciting as you might like to think. Or, rather, they were exciting until all the big, risky bets caught up with everyone.

Spend, but spend wisely

Howard Fineman, who usually writes well on the ups and downs of the Obama presidency, drops the ball a bit with his latest Newsweek column, in which he portrays Obama's recent speech in New Orleans as a defense of "big" government and the role it can play in people's lives.

If you rearrange Fineman's column a bit, however, the main problem with Obama's approach is vaguy alluded to:

The last 18 months have seen a hurricane of legislative activity by Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress. From bank and auto bailouts to health care to financial-services reform, the bill-passing season produced literally thousands of pages of new law.

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More important, all of that macro-level legislating has done little, so far, to affect the economic lives of Americans as a whole. The unemployment rate is high, home prices and sales are shaky, the job market is bleak, and can-do confidence has gone missing.

And that's just the issue. What is odd is that Fineman doesn't consider Obama's approach to big government as the key problem here.

When the stimulus package was passed, the "Obama is a socialist" idea had not quite taken root. And, by all accounts, the stimulus did help the economy. The problem is that is was not large enough to actually stimulate additional economic growth. Rather, it provided a temporary palliative, as opposed to getting the machine running again.

Yes, the package was pared down in the Senate to appease Republicans. But one also has to wonder if Obama didn't push hard enough for a larger package because he had health care reform on the brain. No doubt he would he hesitant to spend too much knowing he had a trillion dollar policy program on the way.

And, of course, there are the problems with the health care bill, which seems more like a way to force Americans to enrich the coffers of the big insurance companies than it does a method to provide fair and equal access to health services for all. Again, a flawed bill ends up looking like wasteful spending, and the "socialist" moniker sticks even further.

And let's not forget the cap-and-trade climate change bill, which the Democrats simply allowed to die on the Senate floor, their political capital spent.

Obama's problem is not that he prefers big government. It's that he does big government badly, and hesitatingly, and with unfocused priorities.

The disppointment that is Barack Obama

After sucking up to him for way too long, treating him as if he were the second coming of JFK (remember that Brian Williams' series on NBC News that was essentially a love letter to the President and his family?), we're finally getting some serious criticism of America's 44th, as evidenced by this Newsweek article written by Michael Hirsh.

It's about time that this happened. As the mainstream media (and the so-called "progressive" blogosphere) fawned over Mr. Obama, they allowed a shadow narrative to take over that depicted the man as a Muslim, a non-American, a Communist, a Nazi, and everything else under the sun. That is to say, by failing to provide reasonable and measured criticism, they opened up a vacuum for a much more pernicious form of criticism.

But Mr. Hirsh get many things right here. The best points come at the end of the article:

There was so much passion and ambition in Obama’s words about fixing the economy [when taking office], and so much dispassion and caution in his policy choices. Early in the Democratic primaries, in January 2008, Obama had stunned many of his supporters by praising Reagan as a transformational president—a contrast to the eight years of Bill Clinton, Obama added cuttingly. Reagan, Obama said, “put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.” Yet at what would seem to be a similar historical inflection point—what should have been the end of Reaganism, or deregulatory fervor—President Obama seemed unprepared to address the deeper ills of the financial system and the economy. Several officials who have worked with the Obama team said the president’s heart was in health care above all else. “He didn’t run for president to fix derivatives,” says Greenberger. “And when he brought in Summers and Geithner, he just thought he was getting the best of the best”—good financial mechanics, in other words, who would “get the car out of the ditch,” to use one of Obama’s favorite metaphors.

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All of these challenges required a fundamental rethinking of the U.S. and global economy. Yet those who were most aligned with the “progressive” side of the Wall Street reform issue remained, for the most part, on the outside of the administration looking in. Among them were Brooksley Born, the former chairwoman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. Summers and Geithner, by contrast, had been acolytes of Bob Rubin, the former Clinton Treasury secretary who, along with then–Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, had presided over many of the key deregulatory changes in the ’90s. And they convinced Obama that the financial system they themselves had done so much to nurture was, on the whole, fine. As long as there were greater capital reserves, leverage limits, and more regulatory oversight, Wall Street could remain intact.

The thing is that anyone who was looking at the issues seriously at the time could see that Mr. Obama was pushing for health care reform at exactly the wrong time. Remember how he wanted the bill passed by the end of summer '09? He pushed way too far in the wrong direction while the dissident voices of the unemployed and underemployed grew stronger.

Health care reform is seriously needed in America (and it still is, since the bill that did pass was so flawed). Yet, in the midst of such a great economic crisis, it could have waited. If Mr. Obama had gone on television and said, "Look, I know I promised you health care reform, but the economy is in the gutter, so we need to deal with that so you can get working again," I guarantee you that 99.9% of the population would have agreed with him.

Now we have a flawed health care bill, a rather feckless financial reform bill, an economy that is still in the doldrums, and a president that has spent a huge amount of political capital to achieve little. Not impressive.

Nobody's borrowing, nobody's buying

There's a good article on MSNBC today about the dire state of the economy, written by John Schoen. The prognosis given is grim:

The economy is still growing, but just barely. The latest wave of downbeat economic data, including Friday’s report on gross domestic product, has renewed fears that we could be headed for the second half of a “double dip” recession.

It is even possible that the apparent economic recovery is a mirage, and that the recession that began in December 2007 never really ended.

Increasingly it seems that the unprecedented measures taken in 2008 and 2009 to revive the economy are not working because the recession is unlike any this country has seen in the past 60 years.

Our modern economy is underpinned by two activities -- borrowing and buying. Financial institutions make money off of the borrowing. Businesses make money off of the buying. Increasingly, the burden of borrowing and buying has fallen on the consumer. Consumer spending makes up the vast majority of the American economy, and, as the events of the past few years have shown us, it's pretty important that they borrow - and borrow prudently - as well.

Yet in both of these areas, the American economy is coming up short. On the consumption end, Mr. Schoen states the following:

There are other reasons to suggest that this recovery may not be like any since World War II because the causes of this recession were different — both in the nature and scope of the contraction. Other postwar recessions typically were characterized by drops in demand. In time, lower consumption created pent-up demand which brought higher levels of output, increased hiring and an upward cycle of growth.

The current recovery has been marked by an unusually weak pickup in demand. And the latest GDP data show that pickup is fading.

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Consumer spending, which has typically led recessions to recovery, has been further dampened by the persistently high unemployment rate.

On the borrowing end, the Fed seems to be running into what is apparently called a "liquidity trap". This interesting and alarming conundrum is explained as follows:

"A liquidity trap it's basically when you try to push people to take more risks; you try to push banks to lend more; you try to push companies to to invest more and and they tell you no thank you," he [Mohamed El-Erian, 'CEO of PIMCO, the world's largest bond investor'] said. "So you're pushing on a string. Monetary policy can no longer force people to do things."

In other words, neither of the economy's two primary functions are operating as they should in order for a normal recovery to take hold.

Seriously, though, what did the business media really expect was going to happen? American consumers were falling increasingly into untenable debt during a decade when employment and average income barely moved. While federal relief packages have since removed some of the debt burden, far too much of it remains. Meanwhile, the employment situation has become markedly worse.

It's amazing how the media's portrayal of this recession has evolved. First is was the Second Great Depression. Then suddenly we were supposedly in a typical recovery phase. Now the mood is gloomy again. This erratic narrative only tentatively matches up with the actual state of the economy. But things are bad now. At least they have that right.