Just came across this, since I was out of the country in October: 

Here is The Washington Post covering the story about AIG and the credit default swaps that underlay the crash in October, acting as though they were the first ones on it. No mention of the dozens of people in the alternative press, and in alternative investment newsletters and offshore news, who have been writing about this for years!

Read  The Crash: What Went Wrong and then go and look at my pieces at Lew Rockwell about two months ago, including Three Card Capitalists (October 1, 2008)

Putting Lipstick on an AIG  (September 19) and The Paulson Putsch. (September 25)

One of them, the more “leftish” sounding one, got linked a lot. The other two, more “rightleaning”, hardly got linked though they got passed around through email and fax among some southern Republicans with political connections, and I got a lot of private email (and some public). I swear even Newt Gingrich sounded like he was chanelling it the next day on TV when he suddenly started calling Paulson un-American, after praising him just a day or so before.

Now notice how the Post has slanted the pieces to make Rubin (Obama’s team has a quota of Rubin clones) look like the “good guy” while scrupulously avoiding calling him one of the good guys outright. Even the Post couldn’t go that far,  since after all Rubin is being sued – presumably not for his goodness – and people who follow these things have no great opinion of him at all.

Then notice the book that the Post recommends people read –   Richard Bookstaber’s “A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds and the Perils of Financial Innovation” which is from the industry itself. Naturally, the “machine” is blamed. The structure. The way things work.  

Not that I dislike Bookstaber’s book, I don’t. Here is an excellent review of it, by the way. 

Bookstaber is right about risk management too.

But risk management is not the whole story. You can’t just look at structures and techniques. You have to look at who’s behind them.

You don’t want to demonize anyone, true. But events are created by actions taken by individuals, and if you don’t look at them like that,  you don’t really understand what’s happening.

This is the problem (for me) with a lot of socialist analysis. It is heartfelt, well meant but analytically weak, because the objects of the analysis are not units in a calculation or cogs in a machine. They are human beings, organic, dynamic, opaque creatures.  And the structures we like to analyze are only “instantiated” in them… as a social theorist like Anthony Giddens might put it….They have no separate existence apart from them.

That’s all for now, while I go and do some research into where else I can put my little stash of winter nuts before the bear eats it all up…