President Obama Endorses Ayn Rand Nation!

Well, almost.

In an interview in Rolling Stone with historian David Brinkley, Obama makes what are, I believe, the first comments he's ever made about Ayn Rand. And they're very much along the lines of my analysis in Ayn Rand Nation:

Brinkley: Have you ever read Ayn Rand?

Obama: Sure.

Brinkley: What do you think Paul Ryan's obsession with her work would mean if he were vice president?

Obama: Well, you'd have to ask Paul Ryan what that means to him. Ayn Rand is one of those things that a lot of us, when we were 17 or 18 and feeling misunderstood, we'd pick up. Then, as we get older, we realize that a world in which we're only thinking about ourselves and not thinking about anybody else, in which we're considering the entire project of developing ourselves as more important than our relationships to other people and making sure that everybody else has opportunity – that that's a pretty narrow vision. It's not one that, I think, describes what's best in America. Unfortunately, it does seem as if sometimes that vision of a "you're on your own" society has consumed a big chunk of the Republican Party.

 Of course, that's not the Republican tradition. I made this point in the first debate. You look at Abraham Lincoln: He very much believed in self-sufficiency and self-reliance. He embodied it – that you work hard and you make it, that your efforts should take you as far as your dreams can take you. But he also understood that there's some things we do better together. That we make investments in our infrastructure and railroads and canals and land-grant colleges and the National Academy of Sciences, because that provides us all with an opportunity to fulfill our potential, and we'll all be better off as a consequence. He also had a sense of deep, profound empathy, a sense of the intrinsic worth of every individual, which led him to his opposition to slavery and ultimately to signing the Emancipation Proclamation. That view of life – as one in which we're all connected, as opposed to all isolated and looking out only for ourselves – that's a view that has made America great and allowed us to stitch together a sense of national identity out of all these different immigrant groups who have come here in waves throughout our history.

Couldn't have put it better myself.

David Frum weighs in: "Good thing for him his email address is unpublished."

Tell me about it.

© 2012 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.
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My latest book is AYN RAND NATION: The Hidden Struggle for America's Soul, published by St. Martin's Press. Click here to order the book from Amazon.com, and here to order it from Barnes & Noble. Follow me on Twitter: @gary_weiss

President Carter Speaks Out on Wall Street

Meet the 44th President of the United States

President Carter announced today that he was declaring war on Wall Street.

In a meeting at the Oval Office attended by Treasury secretary W. Michael Blumenthal, Carter said "We should no longer allow banks to stray too far from their central mission of serving their customers.”

That's fine. Go right ahead and propose whatever laws and regulations you want. They won't get passed, now that corporate money can flood into the system almost entirely unrestrained, and he's lost his veto-proof majority in the Senate.

I forget who said it, a cable TV pundit I imagine, but somebody said a few months ago that if President Obama doesn't get health care reform passed he is going to go down in history as Jimmy Carter. The one-two punch Tuesday and today ensures it. It also means that financial reform is dead in the water.

So the big banks can breathe easy. I have no idea why the market tanked today. I hope it wasn't the jawboning on banks. Ain't happening.

© 2010 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

Obama Needs to Channel Richard Nixon

Nixon's the one to emulate.

I just listened to President Obama's latest pronouncement on the economy, delivered live on CNN. All good stuff, as usual. But with one element missing: Obama again didn't say anything that was particularly helpful to the markets. As a matter of fact, it may be unrelated but the market declined during his remarks.

What's missing is the kind of helpful nudge that came from none other than Richard Nixon in 1970, during the depths of what then seemed like a pretty deep recession. Nixon said: “Frankly, if I had any money, I’d be buying stocks right now.” The market soared.

Roger Cohen archly suggested in the New York Times in October that if Bush said that, "the market could tank in ways that would make this week’s one-day 777 point plunge look paltry." Maybe, but I'd like to see Obama give it a try. What has he got to lose? Things can't get much worse. Besides, he has only a 50% chance of being wrong.

UPDATE: Obama must be channeling me, because he talked up buying stocks (albeit in his usually carefully hedged manner) in an impromptu press briefing a couple of hours after this item appeared. I think that he needs to make that point again during one of his addresses to the nation, and he needs to sing out loud and strong "buy stocks!" Just as Warren Buffett did a few months ago, to no effect.

© 2009 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

Depression Mania

All this Depression talk is depressing.

President Obama tonight has a great opportunity to convince the country that we are not sliding into another Great Depression. Fat chance for that, but still we can hope.

Michelle Leder reports at Footnoted.org that she is impressed by "the number of companies that seem to be mentioning the Great Depression in their [10-K] filings." There's Caterpillar--well I guess that's understandable. I've never forgiven them for tearing down Tom Joad's shack in The Grapes of Wrath. But so has Prudential.

There are certainly advantages to some aspects of the Great Depression, I suppose. One could get a room in a flophouse for 5 cents. Riding the rails might be fun. But I must say that witnessing businesses croaking right and left leaves something to be desired so far.

The other day, for instance, the Journal Register newspaper chain declared bankruptcy. Years ago I worked in a bureau of the Hartford Courant, and my competition, and my competition was a paper called the Middletown Press. It was a fat, advertisement-filled newspaper without much investigative zeal but with a great franchise. It was gobbled up by the Journal Register chain some years ago, and now, like the rest of the news business, it's dying.

So Obama has a chance tonight to convince us that people are going to stop dropping like flies around us. I hope he succeeds, but I doubt he will.

UPDATE: He seems to have convinced the public, based on quickie polls after the speech, but not the market, based on early price action.

© 2009 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

President Obama Does Something Right

No CEOs in the cabinet. Hear hear!

"There was nothing quite like watching the daily work of geniuses like Carly Fiorina to make one hunger to have CEOs all up in our governments," says Jason Linkins in HuffPost. The business of America may be business, as Cal Coolidge said, but lately business sucks.

© 2009 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

Obama Confuses Markets With 'Wall Street'

I don't think there's much doubt that the Geithner Selloff yesterday was a reaction of the financial markets as a whole to Treasury's Paulson Lite bank bailout plan. So I was disappointed to see President Obama dissembling on that subject in an interview with ABC News last night.

"Wall Street I think is hoping for an easy out on this thing and there is no easy out," Obama told ABC's "Nightline" program when asked about the markets' negative verdict to the plan.

"Essentially what you've got are a set of banks that have not been as transparent as we need to be in terms of what their books look like," the president said in excerpts of the interview.

Essentially what you've got is Obama ignoring the vehement concern about Paulson Lite from investors--and the approval of the plan by Wall Street.

As AP pointed out in an article today,

Industry groups heaped praise on the proposal, which Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner unveiled in a speech Tuesday.

"We are encouraged by the creative and wide-reaching suite of programs outlined today," Tim Ryan, chief executive of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, said in a statement that endorsed each point of Geithner's plan.

"It's big, it's bold, it's tailored, it's targeted," crowed Scott Talbott, a lobbyist with the Financial Services Roundtable.

The news media has been, I think, a bit too gentle on the Obama administration on this vital issue. When Obama misrepresents something basic like this, the media needs to call him to account.

© 2009 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

Fixing the Financial System

Michael Lewis and David Einhorn have an essay in the New York Times today, "The End of the Financial World as We Know It," which is one of the very best I've found on the current financial mess and how not to repeat it.

Actually we already know one way out of the mess, which is already happening because of the change in administrations: get rid of the appalling head of the SEC, Christopher Cox. In recent days, Cox has actually admitted that one of the centerpieces of his agency's reaction to the financial crisis, its assault on short-sellers, was a crummy idea.

His excuse was, in effect, that he was too weak-kneed and cowardly to put up with pressure from the Treasury and Federal Reserve, which in turn were no doubt knuckling under to pressure from Wall Street. Read all about this disgraceful bureaucrat's mea culpa here.

Indeed, Lewis and Einhorn note that "The task [the SEC] has performed most diligently during this crisis has been to question, intimidate and impose rules on short-sellers — the only market players who have a financial incentive to expose fraud and abuse."

The prescriptive part of their piece, broken out separately here, makes several excellent recommendations, among them that the government simply nationalize banks that are otherwise "too big to fail."

Their two final observations are less ambitious:

Close the revolving door between the S.E.C. and Wall Street. At every turn we keep coming back to an enormous barrier to reform: Wall Street’s political influence. Its influence over the S.E.C. is further compromised by its ability to enrich the people who work for it. Realistically, there is only so much that can be done to fix the problem, but one measure is obvious: forbid regulators, for some meaningful amount of time after they have left the S.E.C., from accepting high-paying jobs with Wall Street firms.

[I'd add to that a restriction on jobs with public companies, as they are regulated by an increasingly narcoleptic SEC.]

and...

But keep the door open the other way. If the S.E.C. is to restore its credibility as an investor protection agency, it should have some experienced, respected investors (which is not the same thing as investment bankers) as commissioners. President-elect Barack Obama should nominate at least one with a notable career investing capital, and another with experience uncovering corporate misconduct. As it happens, the most critical job, chief of enforcement, now has a perfect candidate, a civic-minded former investor with firsthand experience of the S.E.C.’s ineptitude: [Bernie Madoff would-be whistleblower] Harry Markopolos.

Sure, but how likely is it that Obama is going to do that? His choice for SEC chairman, FINRA chief Mary Schapiro, was an appalling endorsement of the status quo. That does not bode well for future SEC appointments.

As Susan Antilla pointed out at the time, "Schapiro comes to the job with the mindset that financial industry members should be part of the policing process." Her appearing on the cover of the penny stock-pumping organ "Equities" magazine, which she went out of her way to heartily endorse, indicates to me that she is more part of the problem than the solution.

As the lamentable Schapiro appointment indicates, it appears that Obama has surrounded himself with advisors that makes any significant change in market regulation unlikely. Still, I'd be delighted to be proven wrong.

© 2009 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

Tim Geithner the non-Democrat

I've been reading with great interest talk that the New York Fed chief, Timothy Geithner, might become Treasury secretary under Barack Obama. Here's a Time article on the speculation, saying that "...Geithner, a Democrat, has experience at the Treasury."

That he does. However, the part about him being a Democrat is not correct. He is actually a registered independent, as I pointed out in my Portfolio article.

Not sure that really matters, but it needs to be pointed out, I think.

Obama gave what I thought was a cogent performance at his press conference today (at which Geithner was not present, which also may or may not matter). The media is picking apart his "mutt" and "seance" comments, ignoring that he is still showing tremendous powers of inspiration--which should, one hopes, calm the fears of the markets.

The stock market, nevertheless, went down during the press conference, which also may or may not have any significance. It did rally nicely afterwards.

© 2008 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

Does the Stock Market Hate Barack Obama?

Charlie Gasparino was criticized for a New York Post column a few weeks back saying that the market was afraid of Barack Obama's policies. At the time I thought he was wrong, but the market's action lately seems to be confirming that point.

The market today is down 5% so far, and Reuters talks about continued fear of economic slowdown. That's hardly a vote of confidence in the forthcoming Obama administration.

© 2008 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.