A few things

For starters, thanks and praise to Jonathan Moore AKA JMo, whose blog is touted at right.  After I had complained about Blogger/Google being too slack to offer a way to extract a blog to something one could hold locally, he noted that Google did “expose the metadata” in its RSS feed, and he quickly cooked up a Python script to let me expropriate the means of production.  Full on righteous.

 

In other news, after months of luxuriating in the slack traffic of people visiting the blog via Google images to the post where I mocked Joe Biden’s ridiculous hair.  I have since removed that post to force my traffic numbers back down so as to infuse me with the desire to earn my unique visitors the old fashioned way:  by writing something interesting.  So I’ll be trying to do that again.

 

But not today.  Instead, I’ll tell you about my reading of the testimony before Congress of one Harry Markopolos, the Boston-based finance guy whose been trying to make Bernard Madoff’s life a living hell for years, but failing, but is now having his 15 minutes of fame.  And then some.

 

So Markopolos offered up some ideas for reforming the SEC, most important amongst which are

·         SEC staff are desparately underqualified, undertrained, underequipped with print and technology resources and underpaid

·         The SEC doesn’t even let its staff go to conferences to keep up with things

·         The SEC should be made entrepreneurial, with good base pay and bonuses for collars they make

 

All told it’s pretty damning and cogent, but he goes overboard I think in advocating that SEC people should be paid like bank employees, with a lot of pay in bonuses.  They should undoubtedly be paid better, but the idea of entrepreneurial agencies rubs me to wrong way.  People should elect to work for regulators like they elect to non-profits or police departments, for other reasons.