I just ordered "Big Short," by Michael Lewis. I watched his 60 Minutes appearance and still wasn't sure if I would buy the book although it was a horrifying tale to be sure.

Felix Salmon convinced me otherwise in his review:

Amazingly, despite the fact that the book is so one-sided, it also functions as a peerless guide to exactly what went so very wrong in the credit markets generally, and the mortgage markets in particular, over the course of the last decade. It's not easy to explain synthetic subprime-backed collateralized debt obligations, but Lewis does an excellent job on both the micro level -- what these thing are, and how they worked -- and the macro level -- how the market in such exotica helped to destabilize the entire financial system.

Most impressively, Lewis has backed up his story with an enormous amount of old-fashioned reporting, spending a lot of time with the characters in his book and their families, as well as getting the important complex financial details correct. (Not everybody will understand the grittiest of the details, of course: that's inevitable. But everybody will be gripped by the book's narrative, all the same.) The Portfolio story on which this book is based was a great tale which was sometimes a bit fuzzy on the finance; the book is an even greater tale with the facts nailed down.

The result is that rarest of beasts in a world drowning in financial-crisis books: a new book which actually breaks news.

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There's lots more where that came from: this is an assiduously-reported and beautifully-written book. There aren't many reasons to be happy about the global financial crisis, but here's one: that it brought Michael Lewis back to his roots, to produce what is probably the single best piece of financial journalism ever written.

Felix adds much more to his review here. He's really an excellent resource of information. I'm not an economist and too many people on line act as if they are, but I'm doing my research and learning.

You can grab a copy here or any place else that you like. Michael Lewis sat down to discuss with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show last night, you can see the interview here:

I just got back from DC after a whirlwind trip (Saturday to Tuesday). I hate flying cross country; it really bothers my injury. But I thought it would be interesting to go to the Dept. of Treasury with a bunch of bloggers and kick it with a host of Treasury officials including Tim Geithner. It was an "off-the-record" meeting and I think that made the participants more relaxed to speak freely, but did they say anything they might not have because it was supposed to be off the record? I doubt it.

I brought up the fact that they were losing their political capital on the CFPA if they move it to the Fed because the public wants it to be an independent agency with actual power. Unfortunately, they seemed to think that as long as it had the teeth they wanted, they weren't--and the public shouldn't be--concerned where it was housed. And then of course some members brought up that the Senate (Dodd and Corker) still had to work out their issues first anyway and they intimated how problematic the Senate has been. I pushed the point that it does matter where it's housed, especially to the American public.

Another issue brought up is one many bloggers have talked about: Republicans do an incredible job with messaging. And the Obama White House has been terrible framing their priorities. The Treasury officials admitted that they weren't very good at getting their message out there. Some seemed resigned to it, while others admitted there was a pressing need to get better at it.

Felix Salmon of Reuters has a very good piece up about the meeting:

I can’t quote what anybody said, even anonymously, but I can tell you that the message from Treasury was that financial reform is not dead in the Senate, and that in fact on some matters, including derivatives reform, there’s real hope that the Senate can put something together that’s even stronger than what the House passed. I’ll believe it when I see it, but the general idea seems to be that so long as something gets out of committee, the final bill might actually have some teeth.

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More generally, I came away with the impression that life at Treasury is not much fun, on a day-to-day basis, and that the stresses of trying to set economic policy in the face of strong opposition from both the banking lobby and the Republican party are wearing on the officials there.

We really need to keep the pressure up on this issue. The CFPA is too important.

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(h/t Video Cafe)

Yes, it's tiresome, but we still have to report on the CCM. (Conservative Comedy Movement)

Sarah Palin went on Leno's new-old-show and really had me laughing.

Leno asked Palin what she thinks about joining the media by becoming a Fox News analyst. Palin told Leno that she's there to build trust in the media. "I think that the mainstream media is quite broken and I think that there needs to be the fairness, the balance in there. That's why I joined Fox." Leno laughed.

When asked about the "beautiful" Tea Party movement, Palin described it as a group of "many, many independent people, not excessively partisan, not one side or another." Palin acknowledged that if the movement were to become a political party that it would probably hurt Republicans.

As part of her stand-up routine, Palin told Leno's audience she planned to speak at a gun-rights convention: "Be there or else," she warned them.

She's single handedly going to build back the trust in our media by joining the propaganda arm of the GOP. Then she branded the teabaggers as basically non-partisan. OK, I'll bet her five pounds of salmon on that one. Even she is issuing warnings to the teabaggers not to form a third party. Don't worry Sarah, only a few from the arch-conservatives will branch off on their own to capitalize on the cash they can make. The rest will neatly fold into the GOP.

The opening to the movie version of Hitchhiker's Guide, not as good as the BBC version, imo, but then this movie version had a bigger budget. It turns out** that's not always a good thing in entertainment.

**Douglas Adams in The Salmon of Doubt: “Incidentally, am I alone in finding the expression ‘it turns out’ to be incredibly useful? It allows you to make swift, succinct, and authoritative connections between otherwise randomly unconnected statements without the trouble of explaining what your source or authority actually is. It’s great. It’s hugely better than its predecessors ‘I read somewhere that...’ or the craven ‘they say that...’ because it suggests not only that whatever flimsy bit of urban mythology you are passing on is actually based on brand new, ground breaking research, but that it’s research in which you yourself were intimately involved. But again, with no actual authority anywhere in sight.”

Open thread below.

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Sean Hannity devoted to the entire hour of his Fox News show Thursday to a special reported titled "The Valley That Hope Forgot," all about the water crisis in California's San Joaquin Valley that many right-wingers -- including Sean Hannity -- are blaming on the diversion of water to maintain the fishery on the San Joaquin Delta.

It's actually a classic case of resource juggling: Giving water to the farmers in drought years might keep farmed produce turning, but it would destroy the fishery that supplies millions of fish -- and not just the delta smelt -- to the oceans and ultimately to our food supply. For the time being, the fish have won in the courts. Moreover, there are signs the water is returning to the valley on its own, since the recent drought appears to be subsiding.

Still, Hannity was more interested in demagoguing than in producing an accurate portrait of the situation, let alone helping find a resolution. He blamed the high unemployment rate in the San Joaquin Valley on the lack of water for farmers, and blamed that solely on the delta smelt lawsuits.

Near the end of the show, he had on his usual Intended Liberal Victim, for whom he could reserve such deep journalistic questions as "And I just want to know: How did you get your priorities so screwed up in life? What happened to you?"

But the Intended Victim, a fellow named Zeke Grader of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations, actually bit back, pointing out how callous and indifferent Hannity was toward the plight of the people on the coast who have traditionally made their livings by fishing salmon, both commercially and recreationally.

Judge for yourself, but it seemed to me Grader got the better of this exchange. Hannity was left to sputter insults at Grader instead of actually addressing his main point: That defending the fishery is a matter of defending people's livelihoods, too. It's not fish vs. people; it's people vs. people.

Doug Obeggi at the Natural Resources Defense Council has a good piece explaining why the whole "delta smelt" claim is a red herring:

First, Endangered Species Act protections for delta smelt aren't just about a tiny fish. Nor are those protections only about protecting the Bay Delta estuary, the largest estuary on the west coast of the Americas, home to migratory birds on the Pacific Flyway, to magnificent salmon that migrate past the Golden Gate Bridge through the Delta, and to numerous native fish and wildlife.

Moreover, as local economists have pointed out, the recession, not the lack of water, is the cause of the economic downturn in the San Joaquin basin.

And what about the California/Oregon coastal fishermen? The folks whose salmon catch we depend on for food just as much (if not more) than we do produce from the San Joaquin? Well, because of previous mismanagement of the river, the salmon fishery from the Central Valley has seen an unprecedented collapse -- forcing a halt to the California salmon fishery generally.

A California commercial fisherman named Mike Hudson wrote a piece describing what life has been like for people in his line of work:

I’m pretty proud of doing a good job at it.

At least I was until two years ago, when excessive water diversions from our rivers and Delta totally destroyed our industry. In 2004, the Bush Administration issued new permits to allow the Delta pumps to export more water. And as these water exports increased, salmon numbers collapsed. So commercial fishermen, recreational fishermen, Tribes, and environmental groups like NRDC joined together and sued to invalidate those permits, and we successfully won better protections for California's endangered salmon and other fish.

The damage was already done. Thousands of commercial salmon fishermen like myself are now out of work. Our boats stay tied to the docks along the entire California coast all the way into Oregon while tens of thousands more good jobs are lost in businesses that surround our fishing industry. Closing the salmon fishing season affects everyone from processors laying off their fish cutters to marine fuel docks and commercial tackle shops closing their doors. How do you think the local grocery store in Bodega is doing now that all of a sudden 100 hungry commercial fishermen don’t stop by any more to purchase groceries for their next trip and thousands of recreational anglers don’t come to their community any more because there’s no salmon to be caught? Not good.

The Department of Fish and Game estimated that the closure of our commercial salmon fishery cost the state 279 million dollars and nearly 2,600 jobs in 2009, and that’s a conservative estimate at best.

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Far-right, religious zealot and GOP hack Ben "Larry Craig was framed" Stein has finally been purged from the New York Times:

Ben Stein's TV ads for a scuzzy "free" credit product have finally caught up to him: The New York Times has fired Stein as a Sunday business columnist for violating ethics guidelines.

Stein was pilloried online for his endorsement of the bait-and-switch operation, which offers a free credit score but charges an outrageous $30 per month to see the credit report behind the score. As Reuters blogger Felix Salmon pointed out, consumers can get a free online report under federal law.

The Times' issue, though, is that Stein has violated its ethics policy, which states "it is an inherent conflict for a journalist to perform public relations work, paid or unpaid." Salmon blogged about that issue, too. It's surprising that it hasn't come up until now; Stein has been a regular contributor to the Times for four years, and is quite recognizable to TV audiences. After playing a high-school teacher in the 1986 movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off (R.I.P. John Hughes), Stein went on to host two shows on Comedy Central, including the Emmy-award-winning Win Ben Stein's Money, and a show on VH1. He also frequently appeared in cameo roles on sitcoms like Seinfeld.

Read on...

Stein?....Stein?....Stein?....

Via Wonkette: (h/t BillW)

It’s that time of year again, and the Hill is looking for 2008’s crop of ambitious, savvy whippersnappers to make up its corps of summer interns! They’ll get to organize back room deals and schmooze with the fat cats, but mostly, they’ll learn that running America isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. And if you’re a summer intern for Idaho Sen. Larry Craig, who knows what else you’ll be forced to do?

Our good senior senator from Idaho is an important man in Washington and wields power that reverberates nationwide. Just ask the salmon of Idaho River — they know what’s up. So what are the massive qualifications a young sprite needs to work for such a man? Read on...

I am curious to know what kind of response the Senator gets. I have to hand it to Craig, he stuck it out and has been an entertaining burr in the GOP saddle, but somehow I don't see many Republicans lining up to have their kids work for him. Stranger things have happened...

David Goldstein has been watching closely the tainted gluten/melamine story, and he has even more disturbing news:

During an ongoing media teleconference call, USDA/FDA officials have revealed that melamine-tainted "protein concentrate," imported from China, contaminated fish meal manufactured in Canada. The tainted fish meal was then distributed to an unknown number of fish farms in the US and Canada.

Other revelations:

• 50,000 swine have been quarantined in Illinois due to suspect feed.
• The tainted "wheat gluten" and "rice protein concentrate" at the center of the pet food recall, was actually misrepresented as such. Further tests have determined that it is wheat flour, adulterated with melamine.

UPDATE:
FDA refuses to reveal how many fish farms and in which states. But you can be pretty damn sure that NW farmed salmon is likely on the list.

More from David: FDA = Faith-based Dining Administration?