Cromnibus and the Swaps Pushout

White House insists things are good with Elizabeth Warren

President Obama apparently decided to support the omnibus budget bill late Thursday morning, December 11th. He supported the bill because Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told him the threat of a government shutdown in the first quarter of 2015 was otherwise a real one, and the President should act quickly to get that off the table.

The next few hours appear to have been hectic ones, as alliances formed and shifted both for and against the bill, across party lines. The bill came to be called "cromnibus," apparently for "Continuing Resolution Omnibus." [Personally my first impression was that the "cr" stood from "cram." Alas not.]

At 9:37 Thursday evening, the bill passed the House, 219 to 206. Obama and House Speaker Boehner had both kept enough of their troops in line to get the result they both wanted.

The Senate passed it on Saturday night, with a vote of 56 to 40. The 40 who voted "no" included both Elizabeth Warren and Ted Cruz.

The cromnibus was indeed crammed: with various goodies for various important political lobbies and constituencies. Of these one of the most symbolically resonant is a repeal of a provision of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 that had prohibited banks (beneficiaries not only of the 208 bail-out but in general of depositor insurance arrangements going back to the 1930s) from trading interest-rate swaps.

Kevin Yoder, the nominal author of the repeal amendment, isn't talking about it.

For those who came in late: an interest rate swap is a bet that one referenced index rate will go up or down relative to another. And no, in case you're wondering, interest-rate swaps didn't have a lot to do with the crises of 2007-08. But frankly -- or even doddly, they don't have a lot of social utility either. They are essentially gambling. And I understand that the federal government, which [again I should mention, insures depositors], might not want to let the bankers take depositors' money to Vegas with them for a fun weekend.

Anyway, the Obama administration invested a lot of energy and political capital in securing passage of Dodd-Frank. And then in working to get the necessary implementing regs through various agencies. Now they have made themselves complicit in the gutting of part of that ill -- a part with more intuitive appeal than much of it.

I have to say I am unsurprised at Senator Warren's reaction.

I also think we're seeing one of the issues of the Democratic primary campaign of 2016 take shape. Yes, I know, everybody thinks Hillary is a steam-roller and there won't be any primary campaign. But Hillary has associated herself quite closely with this administration. Four years in the top cabinet approach made that inevitable. Even now that she is in a position where she could distance herself she isn't doing so.

This leaves her open to challenge. It might be Warren who does the challenging. It might be someone else. We'll have to see.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

The Lyrics of "Live Like You Were Dying"

Back in 2004 Tim McGraw recorded the song "Live Like You were Dying." As a way of marking the one-decade anniversary of this song, I'd like to admit that a couple of the lines have confused me for years. I could use your help understanding them. In the first couple of verses, the song seems easy to follow. Two men are talking, and one tells the other about his diagnosis. The doctors have (recently? or a long time ago and mistakenly? that isn't clear) given him the news that he would die soon. "I spent most of the next days/Looking at the X-rays." Then we get a couple of lines about a man crossing items off of his bucket list. "I went sky diving, I went rocky mountain climbing, I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu." Then the speaker -- presumably still the old man -- shifts to the more characterological consequences of the news. As he was doing those things, he found he was loving deeper and speaking sweeter, and givin...

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave. First, Plato is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability. I only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable a...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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