You Can't Stop Us!

COLUMBIA, Mo. -- A line of ordinary folks in green "Event Staff" shirts stood facing the Missouri student section late Saturday.

"You can't stop us!" the students chanted, and every time they did, one of the green shirts would glance back at the thinner line of actual law enforcement officers behind them with a look that pleaded, "You've got this, right?"

Even if his colleagues couldn't stop the outpouring of raging hormones from the stands, University of Missouri police officer Dustin Moyer had his assignment locked down tight. Moyer, a five-year veteran of the force in his first season as Missouri coach Gary Pinkel's gameday bodyguard, predicted Saturday's result two weeks earlier. Not long after the Tigers beat Colorado, Moyer began formulating a plan.

"He was real serious," Pinkel said. "He said, 'I want to know how you want to get off the field when we beat Oklahoma."

And the goal posts went to Harpo's.


Read more: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2010/writers/andy_staples/10/24/oklahoma.mizzou.insider/index.html?eref=cfg#ixzz13HkBE0b9

Mizzou Has a Defense!

Great game. Mizzou out did OU in effort and conditioning. The "easy" game is over now. On to the tough game next week in Lincoln.

More Texas Music

I've posted some new songs over on the left. More Texas music from The Texas Tornados, Raul Malo and Flaco Jimenez, and Ry Cooder and Flaco Jimenez. All three are one sort of Texas music or another. You'll notice that several of the tunes I've posted were recorded at Gruene Hall, a Texas hill country music venue that has been operating forever. Everyone and anyone in Texas music has performed here.

Engines of Growth

I read an article in the NYT today about the decline in small businesses in Greece due to the government's austerity program. Consumer demand has cratered due to the recession and has been exacerbated by the forced decline in government workers and pensions. While it's unlikely to ever be as bad in the US, it's ironic that small businesses are often held out as the engine behind economic growth and it's exactly those businesses that are hardest hit by austerity programs. The Greek government's response has been to promise to funnel cheap funds to the small business sector. One has to wonder at the sheer idiocy of these programs. If businesses are failing because they can't sell their products, why do they want to borrow any money, cheap or otherwise? The thinking of policy makers who push these opposing and harmful policies is impossible to understand. There is a body of economic theory that stretches from Malthus and Mill through Keynes to the present day that provides us with the ability to understand what is going on in the economy. Our leaders ignore it at our peril.

Life in America

LZ Granderson on discrimination.

Do People Really Think This is Worth the Risk?

Kevin Drum has collected political and scientific information on climate change. Frankly this scares the hell of me. But then I'm not much of a gambler, even with events that will only affect my great grandchildren. The real irony here is that if the projections are true, the beneficiaries of our lack of action will be Russia and China. The GOP must have a discount rate approaching infinity.

QE2--What Are the Choices?

Ed Dolan has a very good post today where he succinctly lays out the two major alternatives open to the Fed if they do engage in additional quantitative easing. As he points out, the principal issue with the most aggressive strategy is whether the Fed has the ability to dial it back once further easing has had its desired effects. For my part, I'd go for the more aggressive approach, otherwise we risk the same response we had with the fiscal stimulus: "it doesn't work." Then we'd be living in a world where our only recourse would be austerity--the economic equivalent of the 18th century medical practice of bleeding.

Too Big to Fail, Again

Simon Johnson makes the point that it may be time for another stress test for the largest banks. The last one was largely a farce--for the reasons another one may be necessary now. Several of the big banks (Bank of America, in particular) may have outstanding exposures to the mortgage market that were not recognized in the first stress test. Some of these banks (Bank of America, in particular) are already in a precarious capital position. It's likely that few people anticipated that we would be faced with a looming "too big to fail" crisis this soon after the last one. The likelihood that major banks will have to buy back a significant portion of the mortgages they originated (thereby increasing their capital requirements) is high enough that hedge funds have begun to buy up depreciated mortgage paper. They expect that they will be able to put much of it back to the originating banks at par. In the financial reform bill, the Republicans shot down a proposal that would have created a fund financed by the banking system that could have been used if the worst occurred. They falsely labeled it as a bail out of too big to fail banks. Now we may looking at the prospect of the largest bank in the country facing insufficient capital with few options remaining for the government.

Robert Skidelsky and the Economics of Austerity

A very lucid description of how the current economic problems are world wide in scope and why current proposals in the developed countries are going to hurt rather than help. More on the economics of austerity by Robert Skidelsky.

Keynes and Friedman--Fellow Travelers

I recently mentioned to a correspondent friend that I thought in light of the idiocy that passes for a lot of macroeconomics these days, I saw more in common between Keynes and Friedman than either of them has with the New Macro. Here's a good example from Brad DeLong who still reads what our predecessors had to say about economic theory.

Read DeLong's post here.