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January 09, 2009
Clients, and the psychology of the Madoff affair.
Trust is only earned in a deeply personal way--it cannot be garnered and granted by someone else.
See "The Gullible and Bernie Madoff" at Neil Senturia's The Baby Blog. Senturia, a well-known Southern California entrepreneur and consultant, argues that "every gullible act occurs when an individual is presented with a social challenge". Put another way, it's a Groucho Marx thing: Madoff's most raving fans were investors he at first ignored; if he and his organization had pitched them, and asked them to join "the club", the investors might have ignored him.
Senturia: "Beware of doors that only open with a secret knock."
Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 03:32 AM | Comments (0)
January 07, 2009
Update: Sweet Caroline
According to a blog yesterday at The Economist, new polling shows that Caroline Kennedy's quest for Hillary Clinton's New York U.S. Senate seat is in trouble. This is strange and somewhat sad news. Here's a smart and decent if private woman who, ironically, didn't correctly ramp up for and manipulate the political press coverage her own family first turned into an art fifty years ago. Excerpt:
It's about the lousy image that Mrs Kennedy has presented, and her inability to deal with a suddenly skeptical press corps that had only ever treated citizen Caroline as a princess.
Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 03:47 PM | Comments (0)
January 06, 2009
Franken: Good enough, smart enough--but not there yet.
Stuart saves Minnesota by 225 votes. Writer-actor-funnyman Harvard grad Al Franken (color him a big bold D) is certified as winner and declares victory. But now ex-Dem incumbent Sen. Norm Coleman (R) has a week to challenge the Minnesota election board's decision. We think Coleman will meet that deadline before this post is done. See NYT, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Boston Herald. Watch for the Senate to delay seating Franken.
Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 12:49 AM | Comments (0)
January 05, 2009
111th Congress: The Hill watching the watchers.
See, e.g., the Los Angeles Times and Bloomberg. The House Financial Services Committee takes a stab today at the SEC's past monitoring of the Madoff funds' business and investment methods, which some SEC employees had allegedly regarded as "questionable" and off the wall. SEC’s inspector general David Kotz, among others, get questioned.
Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
Force-starting the economy: one way out?
See at Reuters "Japan's Yosano Says Quantitative Easing May Not Work". In "quantitative easing", governments flood the banking system with new money to promote lending; it generally happens when lowering "official" interest rates doesn't do anything because rates are close to zero. But doing that now, when you're already in debt up to your wazoo, doesn't make that much sense to WAC?, and hey we majored in English. But people like Japan's finance minister and Tel Aviv's Shalom Hamou--who commented here recently via a press release which is now all over the Net--are worried.
Allman Brothers perform "One Way Out", former U.S. national anthem circa 1971/traditional philanderer folk ballad.
Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 12:28 AM | Comments (0)