naked capitalism

Antidote du jour:

By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

Let’s dispose immediately of the administration’s canard that the Federal Exchange’s problems were caused a happy excess of visitors all trying to log in at once; I posted on my encounter with the dreaded security questions bug 38 minutes after the Exchange launched at midnight, October 1. ObamaCare wasn’t marketed like Black Friday, so if a system can’t handle the load at 22 minutes before one in the morning, it can’t handle any load and can’t even have been seriously tested. And let’s not worry about the administration’s transparent attempt to distract us with hit counts from the only metric that really matters: Sign-ups; estimates there range from ~51K at the top to 5K at the bottom; either way, not enough for the PR guys even to try to fake making Obama look good. Or for HHS to release the official figures.

By Nathan Tankus, a student and research assistant at the University of Ottawa. You can follow him on Twitter at @NathanTankus (https://twitter.com/NathanTankus).

If you’re reading this you probably already know a lot about Naked Capitalism. What you may not know is the crucial role it plays in a subculture I’m involved in–that of Heterodox Economics.

By Matías Vernengo, Associate Professor, Department of Economics, University of Utah. Originally published at Triple Crisis.

Economic historian Carlo Cipolla famously noted that human beings fall into four basic categories: the martyr who takes an action and suffers a loss while producing a gain to others; the genius or prodigy who takes an action by which he/she makes a gain while yielding a gain also to society; the crook (and liar too) who takes an action by which he/she makes a gain causing others a loss; and the stupid person who causes losses to others while deriving no personal gain and even possibly incurring losses. At first glance, the shutdown of the government and the looming debt-ceiling crisis seem to indicate that we are dealing with idiots, the likes of Michele Bachmann, Ted Cruz, Louie Gohmert, Steve King, and other Tea Party Republicans.

I’ve always been a big believer in the importance of the comments section,. You correct me, give ideas and information, catch typos (aiee!) and make my work and that of the other bloggers better. Your reactions this week took that up a level.

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Lambert here: Most coverage of ObamaCare (ACA) policies available through the Exchanges, especially Democratic-friendly coverage, has focused on the price of polices, rather than their value. This post by Dromaius focuses on value, and shows why the distinction between “in-network” and “out-of-network” coverage is important. At least in the case tested here, insurance companies are shown to “narrow” their networks, and hence coverage available to their policyholders, to exclude specialties like oncology, cardiology, internal medicine, and neurology.

Yves here. With the deficit showdown consuming so much media attention, a lot of important stories are not getting the attention they warrant. One is a case before the Supreme Court, McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, which many have called Citizens United 2.0. Bill Moyers and his guest, Yale Law School election and constitutional law professor Heather Gerken, discuss how this case has the potential to further erode campaign finance laws and increase the already considerable influence that monied interests have on politics.

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In the hostage negotiations otherwise known as the budget deal, the movement on Thursday, that of the Republicans meeting with Obama and offering the idea of a limited extension of the debt ceiling with some thin conditions attached, is indeed progress. But don’t confuse progress with much progress.

On Thursday, a former bank examiner at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Carmen Segarra, filed a suit (embedded at the end of this post) against the New York Fed and several of its employees alleging, among other things, improper termination. The complaint is a doozy and some of the additional details supplied by Segarra to ProPublica make an already ugly picture look even worse.

By Dan Kervick, who does research in decision theory and analytic metaphysics. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives

Evan Soltas is hoping that President Obama’s appointment of Janet Yellen signifies a new administration commitment to jobs and economic growth.

Unfortunately, Soltas seems to be one of those folks who is convinced that our failures over the past five years have much to do with a monetary policy that has been insufficiently “accommodative”. That’s just another version of the “if you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail” thinking. If you think the Fed has to fix the economy, sure, you’d think the Fed hasn’t done enough. But the Fed isn’t in a position to pull us out of this ditch, and Yellen should quit enabling the idea that it can.

Thanks to your generous and speedy responses, we’ve met our first three targets: upgrading site support and hosting (which should help us come up with better solutions to our ongoing war with spambots; we think we may have solved the problem that had us completely missing from Google searches for over a month), nice ex-post facto honoraria to our loyal guest bloggers, and travel/conference expenses and coverage. And we are more than half way towards our goal of 1000 contributors for this fundraiser.

This is Naked Capitalism fundraising week. 495 donors have already invested in our efforts to shed light on the dark and seamy corners of finance. Join us and participate via our Tip Jar or another credit card portal, WePay in the right column, or read about why we’re doing this fundraiser and other ways to donate, such as by check, as well as our current goal, on our kickoff post. And read about our current target here

The two sides in the budget staredown have finally agreed to talk.