Gingrich Campaign Lives and Dies on TV: The Ticker

The new politics is looking pretty old right now.

First, the advent of social media was supposed to change everything. Then the onslaught of this year's Republican debates -- 13 so far -- changed everything even more, enabling the underfunded, disorganized campaign of Newt Gingrich to shoot to the top of the polls on the basis of his debating prowess and free media exposure.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission may not look like a warm-and-fuzzy regulator to you, but to discerning investment advisers, it is as loveable as a government agency can be.

The Boston Consulting Group said last week that, given the choice of having the Securities and Exchange Commission or a self-regulatory group such as the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority oversee them, investment advisers would take the SEC. In fact, they were so anxious to have the agency continue to be their watchdog that 59 percent said that even if SEC oversight cost them twice as much as Finra charged, they would prefer the SEC as their regulator.

Only in Japan. It’s something we expatriates say to relay the Alice-in-Wonderland quality that can color life in Tokyo, particularly where politics and business are concerned.

The Olympus Corp. (7733) scandal is Exhibit A. Rarely does a financial tale carry so much intrigue -- clueless executives, hapless regulators, compliant bankers, billions of missing dollars, gangsters, exotic-sounding book-cooking techniques like “tobashi.” The Japanese way of doing business has rarely been under such intense global scrutiny.

If you enjoy theater of the absurd, it's hard to beat the Securities and Exchange Commission's press release today about the agency's lawsuits accusing six former Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac executives of securities fraud.

The caption immediately below the main headline says: "Companies Agree to Cooperate in SEC Actions."

I once asked Christopher Hitchens to write his own obituary. This was after his cancer diagnosis, and in thinking ahead -- it’s what editors are supposed to do! -- I decided that there was no one I would rather read on Hitchens’s death than Hitchens. I also decided, somewhat self-justifyingly, that there was no one less likely to be offended by such a morbid request.

He declined. But he was characteristically gracious about it, saying that another editor had already made the inquiry (I had put her up to it) and explaining that, when he wrote obituaries, what he liked to do was first read what everyone else was saying, then give his take. Which wouldn’t be possible in this instance. As usual with Hitchens, he had made a difficult argument to counter.

When statisticians use the term "sample selection bias," they are referring to a flaw in the selection process that influences the outcome of a study and produces distorted results.

That phrase came to mind just now when I turned on the radio and heard the news anchor say that consumer prices were unchanged last month after falling by 0.1 percentage point in October. In both cases, a decline in energy prices offset increases elsewhere.

China has 1.3 billion people and 10 percent economic growth and wage increases, putting the most populous nation on the cusp of a "Henry Ford moment."

In recent years, China took a page from the industrialist who built Ford Motor Co. In 1914, Ford doubled the average automaker's wage to $5 a day, making his Model T more affordable to them. It provided a model for a stable workforce that formed the core of the U.S. middle class, and now it's offering one to an economy that eventually may eclipse America's.

It's a declaration that any Tea Partyer would find reassuringly familiar:

"America is in peril. The welfare of American men and women and the future of our youth are at stake. We dedicate ourselves to the preservation of their political liberty, their individual opportunity and their character as free citizens, which today for the first time are threatened by government itself."

If recent data are any indication, the state of the U.S. economy isn't quite as awful as expected.

Economists at Macroeconomic Advisers, a consulting firm, estimate that the U.S. economy grew at a blazing 17.1 percent annualized rate in October, driven in large part by inventory investment and net exports. They expect annualized growth for the whole fourth quarter of 2011 to be a more moderate 3.7 percent. That's still up from a previous forecast of 2.7 percent, and from 2.0 percent in the third quarter.

In the flawed beauty contest unfolding among sovereign debt issuers, Australia is among the least ugly contestants.

That's hardly the impression one gets perusing the local media. There, it's all about how Prime Minister Julia Gillard is wrecking the economy, high taxes are destroying prosperity, and China's slowdown is an omen of gloom and doom Down Under.