The NBA may have overestimated the leverage it has over its players with this lockout business. This throws a chainsaw into the NBA owner's negotiating strategy. Lockouts are effective if you have a monopoly or near-monopoly over your labor pool. This had been true for most major American sports, specifically baseball, football, and basketball, since they were invented. But it's less true now for basketball than it has ever been. Basketball is the second most popular team sport in many parts of Europe and perhaps South America. Many of these teams have rivalries that run deep and owners with the resources to acquire expensive assets that might help them bully their rivals -- and perhaps show off their wealth to a few friends. And with the economy going well for the top 1/1000th of 1%, they might just pull the trigger.
While not all NBA players have the option to go abroad, its most important players will. The 9th man on an NBA bench has little leverage regardless. True superstars have infinite leverage, but also have the wealth and resources to avoid the most serious consequences of a lockout (not being able to pay the bills). It's the folks between those two categories that will determine what gets negotiated when.
Part of me thinks D-Will is bluffing. But if he's not, and if enough European owners are willing to bring on some foreigners to put on a show, NBA owners might find they were playing a trump card in a game where, in reality, there was none they had to play.
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Kenneth Faried and Denver's tolerance
Denver is my home. It is where I was raised, and where I have decided to settle. I know its strengths and weaknesses well. It is majestic in some ways, but mediocre and unimpressive in others. It has better weather than most realize and immediate access to phenomenal landscapes and natural playgrounds, as most know full well.
Culturally, though, it is a minor-league city at best. The music scene is sub par, and there is not much to speak of in arts and theater. The foodie scene is improving, but that's coming from humble beginnings.
As a citizen of Denver, I'm a fan of the Denver Nuggets. As a white male, this makes me an anomaly. Most white males favor the Broncos, Rockies, or Avalanche. I could come up with lots of theories for this, but the easiest one is that Denver is a pretty WASP-y city, and basketball is not exactly the WASP-iest of sports nowadays.
By way of example, John Elway is very Denver. Carmelo Anthony never was. Joe Sakic, though Canadian, was fully embraced by city. Alex English, sorta kinda. Todd Helton and Troy Tulowitzki? Check and check. The great skywalker David Thompson, Michael Jordan's hero? You'd barely know he played here.
And the most popular Nugget today? Chris Andersen. He of drug suspensions and 5.6 points and 4.9 rebounds-a-game fame.
In case you're not familiar with all these names, the popular ones in Denver are all white and the less-than-super-popular ones are black. Maybe that's an accident and maybe it ain't. But I have my suspicions.
The Nuggets drafted Kenneth Faried a couple of weeks ago. He will be a good Litmus test for the perhaps-burgeoning-in-cosmopolitan-character city and its ability to accept less WASP-y sports figures. He's a high-flying, super energetic, mega-intense rebounding machine. He holds the NCAA college basketball record for total rebounds collected in his career. He led tiny Morehead State, his alma mater, to the second round of the NCAA tournament.
But he's black. And he's a Muslim. And his mother is a lesbian (not sure exactly how those last two go together.) He's got crazy-long dreads. But if you separate out that stuff, he's exactly the same type of player as Chris Andersen, except he's probably better.
I can't wait to see how he's treated.
Culturally, though, it is a minor-league city at best. The music scene is sub par, and there is not much to speak of in arts and theater. The foodie scene is improving, but that's coming from humble beginnings.
As a citizen of Denver, I'm a fan of the Denver Nuggets. As a white male, this makes me an anomaly. Most white males favor the Broncos, Rockies, or Avalanche. I could come up with lots of theories for this, but the easiest one is that Denver is a pretty WASP-y city, and basketball is not exactly the WASP-iest of sports nowadays.
By way of example, John Elway is very Denver. Carmelo Anthony never was. Joe Sakic, though Canadian, was fully embraced by city. Alex English, sorta kinda. Todd Helton and Troy Tulowitzki? Check and check. The great skywalker David Thompson, Michael Jordan's hero? You'd barely know he played here.
And the most popular Nugget today? Chris Andersen. He of drug suspensions and 5.6 points and 4.9 rebounds-a-game fame.
In case you're not familiar with all these names, the popular ones in Denver are all white and the less-than-super-popular ones are black. Maybe that's an accident and maybe it ain't. But I have my suspicions.
The Nuggets drafted Kenneth Faried a couple of weeks ago. He will be a good Litmus test for the perhaps-burgeoning-in-cosmopolitan-character city and its ability to accept less WASP-y sports figures. He's a high-flying, super energetic, mega-intense rebounding machine. He holds the NCAA college basketball record for total rebounds collected in his career. He led tiny Morehead State, his alma mater, to the second round of the NCAA tournament.
But he's black. And he's a Muslim. And his mother is a lesbian (not sure exactly how those last two go together.) He's got crazy-long dreads. But if you separate out that stuff, he's exactly the same type of player as Chris Andersen, except he's probably better.
I can't wait to see how he's treated.
Friday, June 3, 2011
Western Europe and Corruption
Sepp Blatter, Dominque Strauss-Kahn, and Jacques Rogge -- the heads of FIFA, the IMF, and International Olympic Committee -- come from three different countries (Switzerland, France, and Belgium), so I suppose I shouldn't dump them into the same laundry basket, but, I do. They're old, jowly white men with slick hair (fact); they come from (at least partially) French-speaking countries (fact), and they're in charge of major international organizations (fact). And they apparently can get away with doing whatever the fuck they want (opinion).
The first two have tried their luck getting into scandals, with varying degrees of success. Sepp Blatter may or may not have been involved in a bribery scandal to sell their World Cup to oil barons (Qatar). As of yet, the allegations haven't worked their way through the system. Unfortunately, "the system" (FIFA) is the same corrupt, dank netherworld that created the corruption in the first place (FIFA). They hired Kissinger to help them deal with the allegations. Yes, yes, I see. Hiring Kissinger to help your organization improve transparency is like hiring Caligula to help you enforce a government austerity program.
Dominique Strauss has had the misfortune of committing his alleged misdeeds in a jurisdiction where his name doesn't carry sovereign immunity. But he's living in high luxury while on house arrest, so things are ok for the time being. I don't pretend to have any insight into what happened with the maid in NYC, and I won't condemn him for rape just yet. But it is a catastrophic hypocrisy for the international monetary fund, the organization dedicated to enforcing austerity programs on the world's most direly indebted nations, to be living his lifestyle. It sends a compelling "fuck-you-lowly-pig-take-and-like-it" message that can only end badly.
These narrow rants aside, the exploits of these two doodlefucks raises a more important question: how come the Frenchies (or, perhaps more accurately, Western Europeans) are in charge of all the international agencies? France, Switzerland, and Belgium, adjoining nations, have less than 1/35th of the world's population, but they manage to control all the major international governing bodies. Surely, there are at least a handful of smart folks available from South America, Africa, North America, India, Japan, or China capable of managing these posts. But their names don't appear on the lists of candidates.
As someone who is gleefully unaware of how international politics works, this strikes me as confusing. Western European nations, despite (or perhaps because of) a millennium of imperial dominance, have managed to sweet-talk the smaller nations into supporting their candidacies against those of candidates from other nations, large and small. Other powers, such as the US, Japan, and China, are failing at building effective voting blocks to get the votes. So are smaller countries. I don't know why. But I know that oligarchies tend toward corruption, stagnation, and insularity, and that's what I think we're seeing out of these jowly old clowns.
The first two have tried their luck getting into scandals, with varying degrees of success. Sepp Blatter may or may not have been involved in a bribery scandal to sell their World Cup to oil barons (Qatar). As of yet, the allegations haven't worked their way through the system. Unfortunately, "the system" (FIFA) is the same corrupt, dank netherworld that created the corruption in the first place (FIFA). They hired Kissinger to help them deal with the allegations. Yes, yes, I see. Hiring Kissinger to help your organization improve transparency is like hiring Caligula to help you enforce a government austerity program.
Dominique Strauss has had the misfortune of committing his alleged misdeeds in a jurisdiction where his name doesn't carry sovereign immunity. But he's living in high luxury while on house arrest, so things are ok for the time being. I don't pretend to have any insight into what happened with the maid in NYC, and I won't condemn him for rape just yet. But it is a catastrophic hypocrisy for the international monetary fund, the organization dedicated to enforcing austerity programs on the world's most direly indebted nations, to be living his lifestyle. It sends a compelling "fuck-you-lowly-pig-take-and-like-it" message that can only end badly.
These narrow rants aside, the exploits of these two doodlefucks raises a more important question: how come the Frenchies (or, perhaps more accurately, Western Europeans) are in charge of all the international agencies? France, Switzerland, and Belgium, adjoining nations, have less than 1/35th of the world's population, but they manage to control all the major international governing bodies. Surely, there are at least a handful of smart folks available from South America, Africa, North America, India, Japan, or China capable of managing these posts. But their names don't appear on the lists of candidates.
As someone who is gleefully unaware of how international politics works, this strikes me as confusing. Western European nations, despite (or perhaps because of) a millennium of imperial dominance, have managed to sweet-talk the smaller nations into supporting their candidacies against those of candidates from other nations, large and small. Other powers, such as the US, Japan, and China, are failing at building effective voting blocks to get the votes. So are smaller countries. I don't know why. But I know that oligarchies tend toward corruption, stagnation, and insularity, and that's what I think we're seeing out of these jowly old clowns.
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Thoughts on Osama
*When September 11th happened, I was living at home to save money while I was working as a bartender at a golf course. I didn't have the most rigorous schedule, so I woke up late. When I did, my mother told me that the Twin Towers had collapsed.
I told her that was impossible. Having worked as a temp a few months previously at the Sears Tower in Chicago, I understood that buildings this size weren't just buildings -- they were cities of people, each going to work everyday, most of them with jobs that were boring as hell. I couldn't grasp a city falling from the sky, much less two. But that's what happened.
I had a dentist appointment that day, to get a root canal, I believe. I called to see if it was canceled, and they asked me why. I told them about what had happened, and they said things would go ahead as planned. When I arrived at the dentist, a good three or four hours after this crap had gone down (I remember the Pentagon had been hit before I left home, and the Pennsylvania flight had crashed as well), no one seemed to act as if anything was different that day. In fact, when I sat down and the chair and told the dentist what had happened, he acted mildly bemused.
"Whoever it is," he said, "I hope they don't have anything against dentists."
That might have been the most poorly timed joke I have heard. I have not been back to that dentist since.
*As I said, I worked at a golf course that summer, as a bartender. You'd be amazed how many people still went golfing that day. The manager of the restaurant and I kept sneaking off to watch events on TV, but the customers were streaming in. By the time I started my shift, the attacks had started nearly 8 hours before. There were lots of dicks that day who wanted to keep their tee time, which was annoying. But what was more annoying was how many of them acted like nothing had happened that day.
*Osama's dead now, I hear. Bully for us. I'm as thrilled as anyone. But I'm not inclined to call it a Democratic victory. There's some things that, by politicizing, you show yourself to have no tact or appreciation for their significance. Let's just says it's an important event, give our neighbor a fist pump, and move on.
*I think Obama was right not to release the photos of Osama. I'm sure they would have been gruesome, and they wouldn't have proven anything to those who are not inclined to believe it.
I told her that was impossible. Having worked as a temp a few months previously at the Sears Tower in Chicago, I understood that buildings this size weren't just buildings -- they were cities of people, each going to work everyday, most of them with jobs that were boring as hell. I couldn't grasp a city falling from the sky, much less two. But that's what happened.
I had a dentist appointment that day, to get a root canal, I believe. I called to see if it was canceled, and they asked me why. I told them about what had happened, and they said things would go ahead as planned. When I arrived at the dentist, a good three or four hours after this crap had gone down (I remember the Pentagon had been hit before I left home, and the Pennsylvania flight had crashed as well), no one seemed to act as if anything was different that day. In fact, when I sat down and the chair and told the dentist what had happened, he acted mildly bemused.
"Whoever it is," he said, "I hope they don't have anything against dentists."
That might have been the most poorly timed joke I have heard. I have not been back to that dentist since.
*As I said, I worked at a golf course that summer, as a bartender. You'd be amazed how many people still went golfing that day. The manager of the restaurant and I kept sneaking off to watch events on TV, but the customers were streaming in. By the time I started my shift, the attacks had started nearly 8 hours before. There were lots of dicks that day who wanted to keep their tee time, which was annoying. But what was more annoying was how many of them acted like nothing had happened that day.
*Osama's dead now, I hear. Bully for us. I'm as thrilled as anyone. But I'm not inclined to call it a Democratic victory. There's some things that, by politicizing, you show yourself to have no tact or appreciation for their significance. Let's just says it's an important event, give our neighbor a fist pump, and move on.
*I think Obama was right not to release the photos of Osama. I'm sure they would have been gruesome, and they wouldn't have proven anything to those who are not inclined to believe it.
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Online gambling vs. the Grand Casino
The US Department of Justice has put an end to online gambling in the US.
Meanwhile, the US Department of Justice has yet to file an indictment against any of the players from the major financial institutions who caused the 2008 financial crisis. No one from Lehman Bros, Bear Stearns, JP Morgan, Goldman, AIG, or Countrywide has seen the inside of a criminal courtroom because of their actions. And while I don't have inside information on any of these firms, I find it difficult to fathom, given the hundreds of billions that were lost, that there wasn't a single person who made false representations at those firms to try to earn a little coin.
But at least we know people can't play online poker anymore. Way to go after the low-hanging fruit, DOJ! Very impressive.
Meanwhile, the US Department of Justice has yet to file an indictment against any of the players from the major financial institutions who caused the 2008 financial crisis. No one from Lehman Bros, Bear Stearns, JP Morgan, Goldman, AIG, or Countrywide has seen the inside of a criminal courtroom because of their actions. And while I don't have inside information on any of these firms, I find it difficult to fathom, given the hundreds of billions that were lost, that there wasn't a single person who made false representations at those firms to try to earn a little coin.
But at least we know people can't play online poker anymore. Way to go after the low-hanging fruit, DOJ! Very impressive.
Monday, April 11, 2011
Default: US vs. Ireland
I am a citizen of two countries: the United States and Ireland. For both countries, issues related to budgets have plopped themselves down at the front doorstep of the political debate. Ultimately, the debates have little in common. The Irish debate is largely involuntary, whereas the US has voluntarily chosen to make great political theater over a debate that, for now, only depends on itself. But the differences between the two are illustrative of when these debates are meaningful, how they evolve, and what each can expect from each. I'm not working today, so I will discuss each.
Sadly, I have no constructive solutions for either. Both countries will default, just as the sun will burn out one day. But, much as with the sun, I make no prediction of when it will happen. I just hope I'm somewhere else when these things go bad.
First, Ireland and the US got into trouble with their budgets in very different ways. In Ireland, it was really one bad decision that led the whole thing: Irish PM Brian Cowen's 2008 announcement that Ireland would guarantee all of its bank liabilities, regardless of size, seniority, and the nature of the creditor. This was dumb and foolish, but his critics fail to respect that there was a reason he did it. If he hadn't, Irish banks would have collapsed in weeks if not days, capital would have fled Ireland immediately, and the country would have sunk into depression that dwarfs what it is suffering now. The closest analogy to what it would have experienced would be what happened Iceland. The only problem is that Ireland is a part of a monetary union and Iceland was not. Ireland cannot let its currently go semi-worthless in an effort to quickly pay off debt. To Ireland's chagrin, its currency, the Euro, has grown stronger over the past few months. This makes Ireland's impossible-to-pay-off debt even more impossibler to pay off. Bummer.
The United States has not made one bad decision or even many bad decisions to get where it is today. Its entire existence is now, and has been for a long time, incompatible with a healthy fiscal equilibrium. But the root cause of this, its position as the only legitimate world super power, will prevent these problems from haunting it any time soon. This is because the United States still maintains a disproportionate share of net world demand (approximately one quarter). Its creditors (local treasury holders, Japan, China, international banks) would all suffer as much if not more than the US would if it were to stop funding American excess. So they keep funding it to keep their own economies humming.
Ireland has promised to fund bank liabilities so large that it would required to allocate all of its tax revenue for the next three to four years, at a minimum, to pull off the job. Fortunately for the Irish, firing every teacher, police officer, public servant, disbanding the armed services and reneging on every other government obligation from pensions to public services is not politically feasible. So Ireland is making small accommodations to its creditors and should be able to pay off the interest on its debt, at least for now. But this is akin to someone with 30,000 euro in annual income and 100,000 euro in debt making the minimum payments on its credit cards: It only delays the day of execution. Ireland will never pay off the principal. Default is the only option. The only question is when, the terms, and the time it will take to restore the faith of the bond markets after the fact. Ireland will get booted from the EU, return to the Punt, and eventually become healthy once again (though it may take time).
For the US, the question is more complicated, as the dollar is the world's reserve currency, and so any slight movement in the value of its debt (the dollar) has an enormous impact on the world economy. Default, which typically creates some of the biggest foreign currency movements that can happen, would be cataclysmic if it happened in the US.
Also, the US has the ability and the desire to devalue its currency. By devaluing its currency, the US can do what Ireland cannot do as of yet: make the debt easier to pay off in real terms. If the dollar is worth less in real terms (the dollar has lost 20% of its value relative to the Euro in the last 8 months, and as much 50% of its value relative to some commodities, such as silver.
For now, the choice about which items to cut from the federal budget are simply that: choices. Democrats prefer to cut less and Republicans prefer to cut slightly more, opting to trim the ever-shrinking discretionary spending budget, specifically those related to programs it finds ill-conceived or undesirable (health care and planned parenthood). But even if Republicans were to cut the entire discretionary spending budget, dumping everything from parks to federal funding of education to guarantees for home loans, the US still wouldn't be close to balancing the budget.
At the moment, neither party has proposed a significant reduction in defense spending. But, unfortunately, it's such a large percentage of the budget (approximately 60%, depending on how you define these things) that it's not possible to get there any other way. And not all the other stuff is optional. For example, approximately 5% of our budget goes to the judicial branch. Firing all judges and staff means no system of law, which means chaos? Think the SEC is bad now and that corporate types already can rob and steal with impunity? Cut their budget in half, and it will only get worse.
There's just not that much slack in the budget, and the only way to make the math work is to make the quality of every type of public service fall off a cliff. That means little to no unemployment insurance, drastically worse medicaid (and it's already pretty bad), worse conditions and equipment for the military, compensating our teachers even more poorly while making conditions much worse, to name just a few. These things are all, also, untenable politically.
These things will not happen by choice. They will only happen when our creditors refuse to fund our debt. And when that happens, cutting all branches of the government will be mandatory, rather than discretionary.
But this will probably not happen all at once. Japan's debt is more than twice as large as ours, as a percentage of GDP. And yet they still issue more debt.
History tells us that reality will set in sooner or later, just as the sun will some day die. Unlike the sun, however, I've got a feeling I'm going to have a front-row seat for this disaster. And it ain't gonna be pretty.
Sadly, I have no constructive solutions for either. Both countries will default, just as the sun will burn out one day. But, much as with the sun, I make no prediction of when it will happen. I just hope I'm somewhere else when these things go bad.
First, Ireland and the US got into trouble with their budgets in very different ways. In Ireland, it was really one bad decision that led the whole thing: Irish PM Brian Cowen's 2008 announcement that Ireland would guarantee all of its bank liabilities, regardless of size, seniority, and the nature of the creditor. This was dumb and foolish, but his critics fail to respect that there was a reason he did it. If he hadn't, Irish banks would have collapsed in weeks if not days, capital would have fled Ireland immediately, and the country would have sunk into depression that dwarfs what it is suffering now. The closest analogy to what it would have experienced would be what happened Iceland. The only problem is that Ireland is a part of a monetary union and Iceland was not. Ireland cannot let its currently go semi-worthless in an effort to quickly pay off debt. To Ireland's chagrin, its currency, the Euro, has grown stronger over the past few months. This makes Ireland's impossible-to-pay-off debt even more impossibler to pay off. Bummer.
The United States has not made one bad decision or even many bad decisions to get where it is today. Its entire existence is now, and has been for a long time, incompatible with a healthy fiscal equilibrium. But the root cause of this, its position as the only legitimate world super power, will prevent these problems from haunting it any time soon. This is because the United States still maintains a disproportionate share of net world demand (approximately one quarter). Its creditors (local treasury holders, Japan, China, international banks) would all suffer as much if not more than the US would if it were to stop funding American excess. So they keep funding it to keep their own economies humming.
Ireland has promised to fund bank liabilities so large that it would required to allocate all of its tax revenue for the next three to four years, at a minimum, to pull off the job. Fortunately for the Irish, firing every teacher, police officer, public servant, disbanding the armed services and reneging on every other government obligation from pensions to public services is not politically feasible. So Ireland is making small accommodations to its creditors and should be able to pay off the interest on its debt, at least for now. But this is akin to someone with 30,000 euro in annual income and 100,000 euro in debt making the minimum payments on its credit cards: It only delays the day of execution. Ireland will never pay off the principal. Default is the only option. The only question is when, the terms, and the time it will take to restore the faith of the bond markets after the fact. Ireland will get booted from the EU, return to the Punt, and eventually become healthy once again (though it may take time).
For the US, the question is more complicated, as the dollar is the world's reserve currency, and so any slight movement in the value of its debt (the dollar) has an enormous impact on the world economy. Default, which typically creates some of the biggest foreign currency movements that can happen, would be cataclysmic if it happened in the US.
Also, the US has the ability and the desire to devalue its currency. By devaluing its currency, the US can do what Ireland cannot do as of yet: make the debt easier to pay off in real terms. If the dollar is worth less in real terms (the dollar has lost 20% of its value relative to the Euro in the last 8 months, and as much 50% of its value relative to some commodities, such as silver.
For now, the choice about which items to cut from the federal budget are simply that: choices. Democrats prefer to cut less and Republicans prefer to cut slightly more, opting to trim the ever-shrinking discretionary spending budget, specifically those related to programs it finds ill-conceived or undesirable (health care and planned parenthood). But even if Republicans were to cut the entire discretionary spending budget, dumping everything from parks to federal funding of education to guarantees for home loans, the US still wouldn't be close to balancing the budget.
At the moment, neither party has proposed a significant reduction in defense spending. But, unfortunately, it's such a large percentage of the budget (approximately 60%, depending on how you define these things) that it's not possible to get there any other way. And not all the other stuff is optional. For example, approximately 5% of our budget goes to the judicial branch. Firing all judges and staff means no system of law, which means chaos? Think the SEC is bad now and that corporate types already can rob and steal with impunity? Cut their budget in half, and it will only get worse.
There's just not that much slack in the budget, and the only way to make the math work is to make the quality of every type of public service fall off a cliff. That means little to no unemployment insurance, drastically worse medicaid (and it's already pretty bad), worse conditions and equipment for the military, compensating our teachers even more poorly while making conditions much worse, to name just a few. These things are all, also, untenable politically.
These things will not happen by choice. They will only happen when our creditors refuse to fund our debt. And when that happens, cutting all branches of the government will be mandatory, rather than discretionary.
But this will probably not happen all at once. Japan's debt is more than twice as large as ours, as a percentage of GDP. And yet they still issue more debt.
History tells us that reality will set in sooner or later, just as the sun will some day die. Unlike the sun, however, I've got a feeling I'm going to have a front-row seat for this disaster. And it ain't gonna be pretty.
The Budget Debate, Illustrated
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Michael-Ramirez-040511-pie.png
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