Daniel Lubetzky

Earlier today at a rally when John McCain asked, "Who is Barack Obama?", a supporter shouted back, "Terrorist."

And at a rally led by Sarah Palin, when she mischaracterized a New York Times story as pointing to an alliance between Obama and Bill Ayers, someone screamed "Kill him."

Neither McCain nor Palin have actually advocated such actions or said that Obama himself is a "terrorist," but they and their campaign have certainly engaged in smear campaigns creating enough innuendos to cause an atmosphere where such rants would not be totally unexpected.

This eerily reminds me of the atmosphere before Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in Israel.  Far-right Israelis had been engaging in a campaign of vilification against Rabin for months.  Right-wing politicians had done nothing to discourage extreme incitement or death threats against Rabin.  Posters filled the walls across Israel with horrifying statements and dehumanizing captions against Rabin.  Extremist Rabbis said Rabin was betraying Jews and was cursed to death.

Then came Yigal Amir, the assassin who shot Yitzhak Rabin at point blank.  When asked, he said he was inspired to kill Rabin to avenge the Jewish people and prevent him undermining Israel.

Suddenly after Rabin’s chilling assassination, everyone was against dehumanization and incitement.  Everyone had condemned such vitriol all along.  Everyone loved Rabin, the martyr and hero.  It was unclear how all those posters got posted on the walls, or who had made all those calls into radio stations with threats against Rabin.

Before Rabin’s fate presages Obama’s, McCain and Palin – and in particularly Sarah Palin, whose hateful accusations earlier today were only little short of the more fanatical ones out there – have the responsibility to draw the line and demand from their followers a civil discourse based on the issues, recognizing the patriotism of their counterpart, instead of raising suspicions about Obama’s commitment to America, as Palin explicitly did throughout her rally earlier today.

If something happens to Obama, not only the McCain campaign but also all the "swift" teams and fear-mongering groups that are crossing the line will share in the responsibility for creating the environment that caused some fanatical follower to avenge the American people.

Robert Frank provides an elegantly simple explanation of the individual and collective behaviors & motivations that cause asset bubbles, and the means to prevent them.

[Read more →]

I find NYTimes columnist Frank Rich to be very insightful except for his obsessive Democratic bias. It makes many of his stories predictably partisan, reflexively anti-Republican. That said, this one contains some particularly interesting comments about the campaign.

[Read more →]

Ben Stein has a good article pointing out the dangers of following Treasury Secretary Paulson’s unfettered lead in bailing out his former employees and peers.

[Read more →]

Brad Stone wrote an interesting article that speaks to societal differentiation between success from building something and risking your own skin to achieve it, vs. enrichment from financial engineering risking other peoples’ money.

[Read more →]

Seeing Alaska Gov. (and McCain Vice-Presidential nominee) Sarah Palin be interviewed by Katy Couric gave me a strange sense of deja vu.  Where had I heard this before?  Then it came to me…

Here is the CBS News interview – discussing her foreign policy experience:

And here is what I had heard before:

Miss Teen USA South Carolina contestant.

Any similarities?

Following the trend where comedians (Stewart, Colbert) tend to be the best at undoing all the spin and exposing the raw political reality, David Letterman’s reaction to McCain’s cancellation of his visit to the show provided the best analysis of the situation.

The Christian Science Monitor provided a good recap here – quite funny actually.

[Read more →]

For a newspaper with editorials as sophisticated and generally on target at least as free markets economics is concerned, it was surprising to read an editorial about "speculators" with such fallacies in logic as the one here. 

Amidst all the finger pointing against speculators, the Wall Street Journal regularly asserts that speculators do not have an impact on the rise in oil prices because they do not hold on to the physical goods and do not play any significant role in setting pricing.

But in an example of an over-reaching argument that undermines its core argument, now they cite evidence that speculators actually did have an impact in reducing prices in the latest period under study. 

Lo and behold, the CFTC found that index traders and swap dealers actually reduced their stake in crude oil futures as prices spiked. The number of contracts held by these investors betting that prices would increase — the net long position — fell by 11%, and more were shorting oil than going long over the six-month period. In other words, index traders and swap dealers were driving the future price of oil down.

But if this is indeed the case, then the possibility that speculators can have the opposite impact is alive and well – and it just so happens that the study and data they analyzed covered a period where speculators started laying off the market!  This coincides with what has actually been happening of late – with prices coming down, and it may buttress the argument that speculators did have a role in the initial astronomical rise of oil prices.

I don’t know if speculators are indeed behind the roller coaster ride of commodity pricing.  And prior posts in this blog have pointed to arguments against blaming them.  I just found it entertaining that the very Wall Street Journal would have such fallacy of logic.

Another argument they make in the same editorial is that because futures contracts are matched – buyer with seller – and one loses if another wins -these contracts have no impact on price. But the fundamental laws of demand & supply remind us that the aggregate of these matches is indeed what creates the balance that sets prices. 

Who is writing these editorials?!

[Read more →]

Hollywood has for many years taken for granted people who speak languages other than English.  It is the most annoying thing to listen to actors break their teeth as they pretend to speak in "Spanish" – or French, or Hebrew, or Russian – and I gather any other foreign language.  It is bad enough that foreigners tend to be the villains, but at least let them be legitimate sounding villains!

I wonder if this results from carelessness from the Directors, or if desperate actors claim they "speak" a language and nobody bothers to ask a native to check it.

It’s even sillier when movies like Vantage Point (which we just wasted 90 minutes watching) try to philosophize about the arrogance and blindness of American foreign policy, all the while using actors that don’t nearly resemble the nationalities they pretend to represent. I guess Hollywood figures most Americans won’t notice. 

But this is what worries me about America.  As globalization continues, more people across the world are learning English and learning about other cultures, but Americans are not investing enough into learning about other cultures and countries.  This will have very real implications for American competitiveness.