June 21, 2013
In finance, a “put” is a contract that gives its owner the right to sell something—a stock, a bond, a tanker of crude oil—at certain price, regardless of the price in the market. A put is a guarantee, basically, and when the markets are falling it can be invaluable. But the word is sometimes used in a more general sense.
Back in the old days, when Mark Zuckerberg was in high school and Alan Greenspan was in Foggy Bottom, there was something called “the Greenspan put.” It was a commitment on the part of the Fed to cut interest rates and print money whenever the markets or the economy stumbled. Although its existence was officially denied, many investors believed it was in place, and this belief helped sustain the great stock market bubble of the late nineteen-nineties.
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June 20, 2013
“[I]t’s high time that governments get together and decide some rules around this,” David Drummond, Google’s top lawyer, said in an online Q. & A. with the Guardian on Wednesday, which addressed the company’s challenge to the blanket secrecy that surrounds the U.S. government’s domestic-spying apparatus. “It’s really important that all of us give close scrutiny to any laws that give governments increased power to sift through user data.” In a motion filed earlier this week with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, which approves and denies (mostly approves) the government’s demands for personal information from telephone and Internet companies for national-security purposes, Google argued that it had the right, under the First Amendment, to publish details of the court orders it receives. As well as filing a legal motion in the FISA court, which operates according to its own rules, Google has petitioned the Justice Department for permission to disclose the number of FISA orders it receives, and how many personal accounts are covered under those orders.
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June 19, 2013
Ben Bernanke spooked the markets on Wednesday by confirming that the Federal Reserve is getting ready to draw down its policy of pumping tens of billions of dollars into the bond market each month—a strategy known as quantitative easing. After Bernanke spoke, the Dow closed down about two hundred points and interest rates rose slightly as the bond market sold off.
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June 18, 2013
From the damp, sleepy shores of Lough Erne, where Barack Obama and his fellow Western leaders have just finished up the annual G8 summit, it’s a long way to the bloodstained streets of Aleppo and Homs. But the civil war in Syria dominated the meeting to such an extent that it ended in failure. After two days of talks, the Russian leader Vladimir Putin refused to sign onto a communiqué explicitly calling for the ouster of Bashar al-Assad, which is what the other nations wanted.
With Moscow blocking a consensus, the G8 was reduced to releasing a bland communiqué that called for the establishment of “a transitional governing body with full executive powers, formed by mutual consent.” Does that include the consent of Assad and his cronies? After the meeting ended, David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, said it was “unthinkable” that the Syrian leader would stay in power. But Putin gave up precious little ground. In a closing press conference, he repeated that he was against arming the Syrian opposition, asserted that there was no proof Assad’s regime had used chemical weapons, and compared the rebels to the Islamist extremists who killed a British soldier on the streets of London last month.
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June 18, 2013
Later this week, or next week, the Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling greatly restricting, or even ending, affirmative action in admissions to public colleges. If this happens, it will be a great pity.
Set aside, for a moment, the explosive issue of black or brown versus white, which underpins much of the discussion about affirmative action. There are compelling reasons to make it easier for young people of all races from disadvantaged backgrounds to attend college. The University of Texas program at the center of this case did just that. Far from being ruled illegal, it should be embraced and promoted as a practical, merit-based model for other states to copy. Unfortunately, that seems unlikely.
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June 17, 2013
You will forgive me for not dwelling on the suggestion, raised by some blithering idiot last week, that Tiger Woods and his fellow-competitors would tear apart Merion Golf Club, a course often described as “venerable,” “vulnerable,” and “outdated.” The important thing is that, for the first time in more than thirty years, an Englishman—Justin Rose—has won the U.S. Open. From Northumberland to Cornwall, a nation rejoices.
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June 14, 2013
Yesterday, Jeffrey Toobin and I taped a segment about the Edward Snowden leaks with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, for his “GPS” show, which will be broadcast this weekend. You—and Jeff Zucker, CNN’s ratings-conscious president—may be disappointed to hear it didn’t come to fisticuffs; it was all very polite. Jeffrey reiterated his objections to Snowden’s behavior—he broke the law, he compromised national security, he fled to Hong Kong—and I repeated my argument that he has performed an invaluable public service.
Clearly, there are two sides to this issue. But, in light of the questions that have been raised about Snowden’s conduct—and not just by Jeffrey but by other liberal writers who might have been expected to be supportive, such as Josh Marshall, of T.P.M., and Kevin Drum, of Mother Jones—it’s worth expanding upon a few points.
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June 13, 2013
If you think the biggest story in media land today was Hillary Clinton’s comeback speech or the continuing fallout from the N.S.A. leaks scandal, you are living on Planet Zog. From New York to Los Angeles to Washington to London, virtually the only topic of conversation was the news that Rupert Murdoch is divorcing his third wife, Wendi Deng Murdoch.
As a former employee of News Corp.’s newspapers—earlier in my career, I spent seven years at the Sunday Times of London and two years at the New York Post—and as a longtime observer of the Murdoch empire, I’m as fascinated as anyone. But getting a read on what’s really going on, and what lies behind the divorce filing, is tough. After making a few calls and sending out a few e-mails, here is what I know.
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June 12, 2013
Over at Daily Comment, I’ve got another post up about the N.S.A.’s leaks scandal, but here let’s move on to a more important matter: the U.S. Open, which starts Thursday at the venerable East Course at the Merion Golf Club outside Philadelphia.
As the rain has poured down on the East Coast over the past week, softening the fairways and greens at Merion, players, golf traditionalists, and casual observers alike have been raising a dire question: Could the bombers who dominate the P.G.A. Tour these days obliterate the historic course, which opened in 1910 and holds a prominent place in golfing folklore?
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June 10, 2013
Is Edward Snowden, the twenty-nine-year-old N.S.A. whistle-blower who was last said to be hiding in Hong Kong awaiting his fate, a hero or a traitor? He is a hero. (My colleague Jeffrey Toobin disagrees.) In revealing the colossal scale of the U.S. government’s eavesdropping on Americans and other people around the world, he has performed a great public service that more than outweighs any breach of trust he may have committed. Like Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Department official who released the Pentagon Papers, and Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli nuclear technician who revealed the existence of Israel’s weapons program, before him, Snowden has brought to light important information that deserved to be in the public domain, while doing no lasting harm to the national security of his country.
Doubtless, many people inside the U.S. power structure—President Obama included—and some of its apologists in the media will see things differently. When Snowden told the Guardian that “nothing good” was going to happen to him, he was almost certainly right. In fleeing to Hong Kong, he may have overlooked the existence of its extradition pact with the United States, which the U.S. authorities will most certainly seek to invoke. The National Security Agency has already referred the case to the Justice Department, and James Clapper, Obama’s director of National Intelligence, has said that Snowden’s leaks have done “huge, grave damage” to “our intelligence capabilities.”
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