Chuck Schumer says both left- and right-wing blogs are too vicious and negative but the difference is: Left-wing blogs "have less credibility and less clout."

Excerpts from his interview with TNR's Isaac Chotiner:

CS: [One] thing the Tea Party does is threaten their fellow Republicans. They actually threaten them. If you punched in—I used to do this—“Marco Rubio” when we were doing immigration reform, nine out of ten hard-right blogs were negative on him: attack after attack after attack....

[T]here are some on the far left who just have a visceral hatred of Wall Street. It’s counterproductive.

IC: ... Is this a problem for your party?

CS: You don’t want to go after them for the sake of going after them. The left-wing blogs want you to be completely and always anti–Wall Street. It’s not the right way to be.

IC: So are the left-wing blogs as bad as the Tea Party ones in this case?

CS: Left-wing blogs are the mirror image. They just have less credibility and less clout.

ADDED: Kos bites back:

Left-wing blogs had credibility when they were helping Schumer's DSCC win control of the Senate. Now that we're criticizing Wall Street? No credibility! And we're just like the Tea Party, having cost Democrats a half-dozen seats and the Senate majority in the last couple of years.

Oh, you mean we haven't pushed the Democratic Party outside of the national mainstream? Weird, then. On the other hand, it wasn't bloggers trying to save Sen. Scott Brown's hide in 2012, like good ol' Chuck:

There is a good little story. [Looks to aide] I can tell this. I went to Scott Brown and said, “If you give us the sixtieth vote for the Citizens United rollback, we won’t go after you.”

If it was up to Schumer, he would've traded an entire Senate seat for one meaningless cloture vote on a bill that would've died a quick death in the House. God knows his Wall Street benefactors would've been thrilled at that!

From my perspective, intra-party relations have never been better. It seems odd that Schumer is trying to start an internecine war at this very moment, particularly with a tough 2014 up ahead. And as the number three Democrat in the Senate, his words carry outsized weight. But it's clear that the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party is feeling the heat from its resurgent populist wing: the Warrens, Baldwins, Browns and Merkleys.

Republicans are locked in their own bloody civil war. Schumer (and his Third Way allies) may have just signaled that we may be in for some bloodshed of our own. In fact, he appears eager to lead Wall Street's counter attack.

"Since 2008, the financial industry has changed the way it does business. Can the S.E.C.’s Mary Jo White control it?"

A great article in The New Yorker by Nicholas Lemann. Excerpt:

Banks and hedge funds hire high-priced computer engineers to write algorithms that can predict minor, transitory movements in the markets—for example, by continuously comparing the prices of stocks and derivatives. Then they place orders on the electronic exchanges, hoping to make a small amount per share. They rarely hold a position for long. Because companies’ algorithms are written to behave similarly, the way to make money in high-frequency trading is to get the order to the exchange ahead of the competition’s, by microseconds, which are millionths of a second. An electronic signal is transmitted from Cage 06504 to Cage 06505 a few hundred microseconds faster than an electronic signal is sent from Manhattan. Recently, James Barksdale, the first C.E.O. of Netscape, started a company called Spread Networks, which built a fibre-optic cable from New York to Chicago, in order to offer its customers a three-millisecond advantage in the time it takes an order to travel from one city to the other.

Fending off the genderistic nonsense about Janet Yellen.

"For years, the Federal Reserve has been led by men who had a scientistic view of monetary policy. These men – including Paul Volcker, Alan Greenspan, and Ben Bernanke... – viewed the job of running the country's economy as if they were dealing with chemical reactions or physics experiments," writes Kevin Roose, in a New York Magazine piece titled "Welcome to the Humanist Federal Reserve, Led By Janet Yellen."

[Janet Yellen] looks at the economy not just as a series of charts and figures, but as a moving, breathing organism, a collection of millions of people who are struggling to make their lives better today than they were yesterday.

Roose — who refrains from saying he attributes Yellen's difference to her gender difference — cites a Yellen speech at an AFL-CIO-sponsored conference that he says is "a remarkable look at the empathy she brings to policy-making." Empathy... visualizing the economy as a moving, breathing organism....

She... speaks about unemployment not just as an economic problem, but as a humanitarian crisis....

No matter what else it does, we know a Yellen-led Fed would use the tools of monetary policy to help millions of struggling Americans get back on their feet. And it's just one of the reasons I'm thrilled with the Yellen nomination.

This feels like gender-based claptrap to me, and I'm reeling in feelings from the furthest reaches of my female nervous system. Why wouldn't any bank official speaking at an AFL-CIO-sponsored conference include verbiage about the struggles of ordinary workers?

By the way, what is a "scientistic view"? Is it that way that men perceive? Wikipedia defines "scientism" as "a term used, often pejoratively, to refer to belief in the universal applicability of the scientific method and approach, and the view that empirical science constitutes the most authoritative worldview or most valuable part of human learning to the exclusion of other viewpoints."

Roose slathers Yellen in praise, but he's rolling out the usual stereotypes. Ironically, he's not female, and yet he's displaying some "woman's way of knowing" to arrive at a belief that Yellen will help people because she feels and cares. This reminds me of the murmurings about "empathy" and "heart" that burbled from Obama when he nominated Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court. She resisted the concept:

I can only explain what I think judges should do, which is judges can't rely on what's in their heart.... The job of a judge is to apply the law. And so it's not the heart that compels conclusions in cases. It's the law. The judge applies the law to the facts before that judge.

I'll bet Yellen fends off the genderistic nonsense in just about exactly the same way.

"Lehman Brothers failed 5 years ago, and the statute of limitations for most federal crimes is 5 years..."

"... so the retrospectives are full of recountings of the fact that no one important has been prosecuted over what happened...."

If you could convict Ken Lay over things his subordinates did and his own "we won't stop trying to save this company and I'm confident we will succeed" statements, it's pretty surprising that not a single banking CEO has faced a similar fate. 

But no jail time doesn't mean nothing... the government is looking to civil, rather than criminal penalties....

"A good hacker can get full access to Nasdaq.com in a couple of days with the ability to do almost whatever he wants..."

"... such as push an announcement that Facebook shares have dropped 90% (which) could cause havoc on the stock exchange.... It is quite frightening when you think about it. I discovered these vulnerabilities in just 10 minutes with a Firefox browser without any special tools or software."

"My father, who has barely any formal education, but is whip smart, told a story to me right after the market crashed."

"He said that when he was starting his business in the late 70s, his accountant told him that if he just invests X percentage of his monthly income in an IRA, he will be a millionaire by the time he retires. My dad said to him, 'Bullshit. There is no way that the powers-that-be will let a poor schlub like me become a millionaire.' He was right, and will work until the day he dies."

I'm cherry-picking from a big discussion because of the way it's written, not to endorse the viewpoint.

"The Dow Jones industrial average... rose more than 120 points in morning trading on Tuesday, surpassing its previous record close..."

"... of 14,164.53, which it achieved nearly five and a half years ago, as well as its record intraday high, set around the same time, of 14,198.10."

“Central banks do matter. Central banks have always mattered,” said David Rosenberg, a chief economist at Gluskin Sheff and Associates, who started work as a Wall Street economist on the day of the 1987 stock market crash. “So long as the Fed is in an accommodative mode and the economy is out of recession, the odds are that you will have a bull market.”

That’s not to say that the Fed’s largess is the only reason stocks are up. Company profits, which theoretically provide the basis for investing in stocks, have also surged. “Corporate earnings have been doing very nicely, thank you,” said Alan S. Blinder, professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University. In aggregate, companies in the S.&P. 500 have not reported a decline in earnings since the third quarter of 2009.

The stock market says "sequestration will not happen."

According to Jim Cramer on "Meet the Press" this morning:

I do think that the stock market itself is saying this isn’t going to happen. The defense index on Wednesday, it is all-time high. That says sequestration will not happen. The fact that the stock market is doing well despite the fact the gasoline prices are much higher, that’s hurting the consumer, payroll tax holiday goes away, that’s hurting the consumer. Again says that maybe something is not-- not drastic. Nothing drastic will come of this. Even despite the scare-- scare tactics, government by freak out. How right is that? I still feel pretty good.

"The European cap-and-trade system has slid into near meaninglessness as Germany bickers on the sidelines."

"Hopes that the election in Lower Saxony might resolve the high-level bickering were misguided. Now Europe's carbon market has hit a new low."

Energy-heavy industries and coal-dependent countries like Poland argue against market intervention in the [European Emissions Trading System (ETS)] while noting that higher carbon prices leads to higher energy costs that result in a burden on businesses while European economies remain weak. The arguments against intervention may be working, as Germany -- which also harbors deep concerns about the burden cap-and-trade could have on industry -- continues to stall, and the ETS remains mostly useless. A failure on backloading would likely drop carbon credits to a level only slightly above penny stocks.

"This should be the final wake-up call," said EU Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard, according to wire reports. "Something has to be done urgently...."

(Via Instapundit.)

"The anti-fragile is beyond the resilient or robust."

"The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the anti-fragile gets better and better." On that theory:

1. Build cities that won’t just withstand super storms, but gain from them....

2. Let banks fail and abandon economic stabilization practices....

3. Eat like a caveman....

4. Workout like an Olympian. Sleep like a college kid....

5. Be a doer not a thinker....

The author... points to the idea that rich countries have high levels of education and literacy. Therefore, there’s the belief that education leads to wealth, when actually the opposite occurs—countries get rich, and then they get educated. Since studies show that education does not equal GDP, to be anti-fragile, first have skills, and then obtain formal education.

An example given is, “The merchant profession has lots of variance. A dentist has very little.” Although parents want a life of stability for their children, Taleb’s theory would put the odds of success on the merchant in an unpredictable world. “College insulates students from downsides,” he says, “but also prevents brilliance.”

In terms of theory, doing is convex and study is concave. Taleb asks, “Can you study chemistry for a formula for the perfect hummus?” In cooking you can get a big gain from an error (adding lemon or garlic) but you only find out by trial-and-error.

Taleb’s philosophy is also hopeful about our country's mediocre global math and science scores, which he believes, “don’t capture the effectiveness of our citizens on the world,” because we are a country of risk-takers and entrepreneurs.

Here's the book: "Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder," by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (who, according to the linked article is "a notorious jerk." Well, he's got his own way of talking, which I love. (Just bought the book, too.)