Like other regular viewers of CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street,” I was saddened to learn that Mark Haines, the show’s longtime co-host, passed away unexpectedly last night. I’ll miss watching him on weekday mornings. I always enjoyed his direct, no-nonsense approach to interviews. Indeed, this morning, Haines’s CNBC colleague Joe Kernen said that one of the most valuable things he learned from him was not to relent when an interviewee tried to evade a question. That doggedness provided some memorable on-air moments, including this one. It gets really interesting at 4:50.
Tragedy struck Japan this morning. It will be some time before we know just how many lives the tsunami took, and how much damage was done. But pundits are already saying dumb things.
Larry Summers, who should know better, committed the economists’ cardinal sin this morning: he fell for the broken window fallacy. The sunny side of the destruction is that it will boost the economy. Just think of all the jobs that will be created by the rebuilding process!
Over at the Daily Caller, I gently correct Summers. Natural disasters are bad for the economy. All the rebuilding activity in the next few years will only get Japan back to where it was. If the tsunami had never happened, all that energy could be put to creating new wealth. Disasters are just that: disasters.
Tonight at 9pm CNBC will investigate the horrors of illegal gambling . It will doubtlessly delve into the shady underground economy of gambling, where billions of dollars flow from hand to hand and international borders, where “contracts” are enforced with violence, and innocent small fish are victimized with no legal protection available. I just hope that the report takes note of why illegal gambling is dangerous and I certainly hope that the report highlights why illegal gambling is shady and why victims have no legal protections, namely because the activities *are illegal*.
When the report makes its way to discussing online gambling, which they’ll undoubtedly claim is illegal despite the fact that there are no active federal laws banning Internet wagering (except for sports betting), let’s just hope they also talk about how the Department of Justice has been using the pseudo-ban on Internet gaming to persecute and extort money from legitimate Internet casinos that happen to be based outside the US.
People like to gamble and they aren’t going to stop because the government tells them they can’t–clearly they can. But they shouldn’t have to stop. Most of the ills associated with gambling can be directly tied to the fact that it has been forced underground, but even disregarding that fact, it isn’t for the government to tell citizens what to do so long as they aren’t harming anyone else.
Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) appears to be working in tandem with the Obama administration on making executive pay subject to shareholder votes. That seems fair enough; shareholders deserve some say over companies in which they have a stake. However, as CNBC “Squawk on the Street” host Mark Haines noted in an interview wiht Rep. Frank this morning, the nature of such ownership complicates things.
As Haines noted, many public company shares are in the hands of large institutions — he mentioned mutual funds specifically — not “mom and pop” owners saving for their retirement. Those funds invest their assets on behalf of somebody else, namely individual investors, who are removed from corporate shareholder decision making by virtue of going through sucn an intermediary. What was surprising to Haines making this point was Rep. Frank’s reaction. He did not address this specific point, got agitated, and ended the interview.
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