This post is supposed to be a kind of “catch up” post, where I write about a number of small things that I thought were interesting, but weren’t worth a full post.

1) The government can’t fund everybody. The recent backup in the US treasury note market is a great example of that.  As the demands for funds now in exchange for funds later has increased, Treasury interest rates have risen.

I have several biases, but one of them is that the Government can’t unilaterally create prosperity.  It can create conditions that encourage economic activity, through predictable and fair laws, but it can’t make us immediately better off through deficit spending, or tax-and-spending.  The Government does not know what is needed to a better degree than its citizens do individually.

But let the government fund or guarantee everybody.  When they do that, there is just one overleveraged credit that matters, and it will fail, taking us with them.

2) Equity Private is one clever lady.  Fair value accounting primarily exists to deal with investments that are as volatile as equities. How are publicly traded equities valued?  At market.  How about volatile assets where the value is derivable from market prices?  They should be valued at pseudo-market.  If we were back in the old days, and all of our assets were bonds, we wouldn’t need fair value accounting.  Even if we did it, the values wiould not vary much.