Terry McAuliffe won the Democratic Party's nomination for Governor earlier this month, setting up an autumnal show-down with Republican nominee Glenn Youngkin. There was no suspense in the Dem primary, McAuliffe won with 62% of the vote, and the second-place finisher got only 19% . Nobody was biting nails. McAuliffe is an old-school political hack, who guaranteed the loan that the Clinton's used to buy their nice new house in Westchester County (pictured above) when they were ready to move out of their leased Pennsylvania Avenue place in DC. He almost immediately thereafter became the head of the DNC and is credited with valuable modernization of the fund-raising machinery there. He also had a big part in running HRC's campaign in 2012. His opponent, Youngkin, is a former CEO of The Carlyle Group, one of the biggest private-equity management firms in the world. He played a big part in Carlyle's transformation from a partnership into a publicly traded ...
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One can hardly act surprised that Mr. Outgoing is not going to be at the inauguration of his successor this year. There have been surprisingly few comments about the LAST time that happened. So it is worth being explicit. The last such snub took place in March 1869, when Andrew Johnson left town ahead of the festivities for incoming President Ulysses S. Grant. Andrew Johnson (pictured here) and Donald Trump share a lot else for the history books, too. Each was impeached by the House during his first-and-only term in office. Each defeated the prosecutors of that impeachment in the Senate and completed his term. And now, we see that each has declined to stick around for the ceremony that would formally end that term. This means that Bill Clinton is the only impeached and tried President who did show up for his successor's inauguration, that of George W. Bush, in January 2001. And that situation was different. Clinton was impeached in his second term in office. So he se...
On Monday, the day before the US election day, newspapers carried obits of Janet Reno, President William Jefferson Clinton's attorney general. Apparently she succumbed due to complications of Parkinson's disease. May she rest in peace. The obits of course all necessarily discussed the US raid on the Branch Davidian compound on April 19, 1993. A mass murder difficult to forget or forgive, but perhaps you dear reader will think that sort of thing too common a consequence of statism for further reflection here. What I would like to remind you of now, though, out of the long fall-out from that event, was her assertion, apparently aimed at protecting her boss, that "the buck stops here, with me." It completely reversed the significance of the old Truman sign. After all, the point of the sign on HST's desk saying the buck stops here was developing the then astonishing consequences of the fact that Truman was the President of the United States. And buck-stopp...
Back in 2007, as Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and several others were maneuvering in anticipation of the Democratic Party's upcoming presidential primary campaign, Alfred Knopf brought out a book by Pulitzer Prize winner Carl Bernstein, A WOMAN IN CHARGE, about Hillary's life. Here's a fascinating passage, describing the inner workings of the Clinton administration in early 1994. "Many of Bill Clinton's top aides felt that Hillary was impatient when listening to their criticisms [and that Ira Magaziner was acting as her bulldog]....Magaziner infuriated the president's aides when they learned he was meeting privately with the Clintons in the White House residence and urging them to make important decisions without consulting either the [health care] task force or the economic team. Hillary's stature with Bentsen and even her old friend Shalala was deteriorating. "The president seemed caught between his wife and his advisers. More often...
We have travelled a long way. A look back is a good way to end a journey. We began with a discussion of some of the concepts essential to any discussion of contemporary finance. Why do stock prices move? Do they move randomly? We discussed the fact that modern finance theory has long used the bell curve as a randomness base line. Related to this, we said that the efficiency of markets, built as it is upon their liquidity and transparency, as well as the fact that a lot of very smart people are looking for an edge in competition with one another, is an adequate explanation for random movements, but that inefficiencies of inefficiencies of markets, which show up as skewed or otherwise non-normal curves, require other explanations. From there we moved to the questions: how stock options derive their value? And, what are the defining facts about bonds, either corporate or sovereign? We also discussed accounting, and so the balance-sheet difference between stock...
President Obama recently appointed a new White House counsel, W. Neil Eggleston. This appointment did not require Senate confirmation, but it did kick up a bit of a fuss, and put the late financier Marc Rich back in the news. On his way out the White House door in January 2001, President Clinton pardoned Marc Rich, then a fugitive after criminal convictions under tax laws and the trading-with-the-enemy statute. Eggleston, portrayed here, had worked in the White House early in the Clinton administration but was back in the private sector while the Rich pardon was under consideration. He became involved in the fall-out from that pardon in a peripheral way. I don't care about Eggleston, but the very idea of an Eggleston-Rich connection, and thus an Obama-Rich connection, has stirred up the usual hound dogs. My own view of Rich, I have to say, is a fairly sympathetic one. One of the connections that made it possible for Rich to create a spot market in physical oi...
I'm sorry, but I don't understand intelligence-agency type controversies unless they are put into terms any moviegoer can grasp. Petraeus wasn't Bond, James Bond. He was M, the boss of this country's answers to Bond. M, if married, obviously can't mess around on the side, since that would give Goldfinger a really good tool for blackmail. Of course, if everybody knows about something, it is no longer material for blackmail. David Letterman told the world about the indiscretions he had committed, disarming his blackmailer in one televised blow. Likewise, I don't see how anyone could blackmail Bill Clinton with the news about Monica Lewinsky, since we have already all been thoroughly sated with that. So the problem with Petraeus wasn't just that he couldn't keep a secret, but that he could neither keep his affair a secret nor effectively be open about it. That is the zone of blackmail-ability. Am I getting this so far? Anyway, you can watch so...