Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

I wrote here in December about some philosophically weighty litigation, the  Jevic Holding  case. Now the Supreme Court of the United States has weighed in, so it is time for an update. This is a 6 to 2 judgment, with an opinion for the court by Justice Breyer, and a dissent written by Justice Thomas, for himself and Alito. The gist of the case is the conflict in bankruptcy law between the absolute priority rule (APR) and a practice known as the structured dismissal. The bankruptcy court in this case issued a structured dismissal even though it  meant stiffing the possessors of a judgment debt, which would normally have priority over some of the debts the structure does pay.  That debt came about due to a class action of 1,800 truck drivers over Jevic's violations of the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN). Jevic was a New Jersey based trucking company, the object of a leveraged buy-out by Sun Partners in 2006. The 'leveraging' thing wa...

I'm a little bit late to the fair with this one. But apparently there was a scandal last year involving Dov Charney, the founder and at the time the CEO of American Apparel. There were lots of allegations of misconduct against him., compiled by the chairperson of the board, Colleen Brown preparatory to firing him. Harper's includes an excerpt from Brown's report in its Readings section  in the October issue, without further comment. So will I. This is an excerpt of the excerpt, which does nonetheless manage to give a sense of the degree to which power corrupts (or attracts the already corrupt). "Former American Apparel employee Michael Bumbliss, who managed the Malibu retail store, alleged that Charney  'dove at [him], grabbed [his] throat, with both hands,  and began to squeeze.' Charney 'proceeded to scoop up and attempt to rub dirt on [Bumbliss' face.' Employees at the company's La Mirada facility lodged complaints after Charney repeat...

The Winter 2013 issue of Cato's Letter (a publication of the Cato Institute) carries a meditation by Charles Murray on the value, or rather on the over-valuation, of the B.A. degree in the U.S. at the present. Indeed, he calls it a "bubble." The word "bubble" is surely inexact. Bubbles in the economic sense involve commodities that are readily transferable. It is because they are transferable that they become over-valued in a very specific way. I can sell you my tulip bulb, or my dot-com company stock, or my mortgage derivatives' portfolio, simply because you are a greater fool than I am. You might buy them in the expectation that you can find someone even more foolish. Thus, we both make use of the ready transferability and the transaction is quickly concluded. This continues until the over-valued commodity is in the hands of the greatest available fool, after which point by definition it can not continue, and the bubble bursts. I  can't give y...

WSJ story Tuesday, vaguely sourced by plausible, tells us that the London Whale, Bruno Iksil, "once confided" to a certain colleague, "that when he wanted to avoid questions from supervisors about his trades, he sometimes would start discussing a mathematical term, equation, or other technical jargon, to confuse and end the conversation." He'd get free rein/reign because his bosses were afraid of hearing his explanation of  the analytical expression of a Lévy distribution one more time? Aaaaah.