Tuesday, February 2, 2010

The Politics of Risk Reduction

It is a mistake to reduce the gamma risk to how much government intervenes in the marketplace.

While the gamma is purely political risk volatility that cannot be avoided, the risk accumulates from management of economic fundamentals.

Deliberate, organized modeling for managing the alpha and beta risk volatilities causes the level of gamma risk. The more deliberately free market the economics (the more freely volatile the alpha and beta), the less the gamma risk.

The gamma risk should be applied to ensure a free-market economics in priority. Punctuated crisis events (and the need for elite risk management with dystopic tendencies) is absorbed by spreading, or pluralizing, the risk.

The means of spreading the risk rather than letting it accumulate is seminal to the current debate over budget deficits. The accumulation indicates a needed distribution from the accumulated benefit. If it is not, the gamma risk will be shifted to the future in the form of inflation, rising to a crisis proportion. The deflatonary crisis does not redcue the gamma, it increases it along with the budget deficit.

An algorythm of crisis management is locked in place and keeps us "Waiting for Godot" (a redemptive ontology that just happens and makes everything right despite the algorythm). Reduction of the gamma risk is reduced to the hopeful politics of a hopeless deliverance narrated into utopian mythapopeia that psychologically absorbs the risk.

According to the left, for example, the current crisis is the result of free-market economics. Alternatively, according to the right wing of the spectrum, the cure is the free-market economics that caused it. The ambivalence is the source of misunderstanding that supports the myth of a redemptive ontology that will diffuse the gamma risk when it reaches a critically massive proportion.

Instead, being cyclically managed, the gamma risk is conserved, recycled, in the form of a psychological affirmation rather than the confirmation of any empirical truth, hidden within the artifices of accumulated power that obstructs the practical ontology of free markets.

The mythapopeia includes the economics of the gamma risk, masking the practical ontology of self-salvation with the organized tautology of cyclical trend culminating in the ultimate power of determining the risk (the gamma risk).

Rather than waiting for salvation, ensuring the means for attaining it in the form of an accumulated gamma risk is the expression of freedom over a tyranny that only seems to be algorythmically inevitable and undaunting.

Risk Indicator Signals Support for Recovery and Resistance for Equity Values

The Obama administration's highly visible move into a nominally non-ideological policy space is manifestation of a gamma risk indicator dangerously overvalued.

The risk "bubble" (a measureable accumulation of otherwise diffused value) gives any third element outside the bivariate too much power to reduce the probability of the targeted outcome (the probable, predictable variation).

Gamma risk--the underlying risk that free-market mechanics will be modified, with the more modification yielding more accumulation of the value--is unavoidable. However, our binomial political system, instead of managing the risk to maintain a diffused value, will try to avoid it. The probability for continued accumulation is, then, still high, and this is where the investor finds reliable predictive utility--a technical indicator that cannot be manipulated into a false positive or negative. The risk is unavoidable--it is gamma.

For example, an analyst notices a popular trend for less government with the probable result (value) being an accumulation of popular sentiment for the Republican party. According to popular theory, that will reduce the gamma risk.

Rather than being reduced, however, the risk is increased, and because the risk value is unexpectedly inverted, it reaches a massive, crisis proportion.

The probability is then for realignment, but that will not reduce the gamma risk. At best, it will keep the risk from continued accumulation (like slowing job losses with a recovery package).

All along the way, the gamma risk is an easily measureable and predictable value largely ignored by the model of bivariate ideology, and it will continue to be ignored with highly predictable results.

While the popular sentiment for managing the gamma risk will retrace some of the accumulated equity value, it will be short-term because the value of the gamma risk has prior support. The value will be managed indirectly because managing it directly recognizes the risk and, especially, the source of the risk.

Indirect management means that the slope of a populist retrace will be long and slow (taking more time than a binomial party is likely to survive). Equity values will tend to dip in order to finance the recovery without inflation and reduce the excessive risk in the short term. The fundamental support the long slope provides will add volatility.

The accumulated, non-fundamental value will have to be shared, undergoing a short retrace with less funds available to push overvaluations. Consolidation of firms will occour in the dip to retrace the lost value longer term, and the gamma risk will have been conserved.

Having neither been abated or avoided, with the objective being, at this point, for government to spend less, but not too much less to avoid a double dip, the risk, and the manifest double dip, will be shifted to the future.

A current high level of excessive gamma risk bodes bad for equity valuations. A declining value is a buy signal. A rising value, sell.

Quants (whether left or right wing) fail on the accumulation of gamma-risk value because the variable must be hidden to prevent "the risk" being technically corrected into a distribution. The working hypothesis is: the more value accumulated and consolidated the less the gamma risk with an accumulation of power. The hypothsesis and the analytical models derived from it are entirely wrong and will fail a predictive utility.

Measuring the gamma risk is a measure of deviance from the free-market model of pluralism. As the risk accumulates the stability of a free-market ontology diminishes. The legitimacy of power--the means of rewards and deprivations--must be managed by an administrative elite that compounds the primary elements of power into a third analytical model: the bureaucratic model that adjusts the level of gamma risk.

For example, former treasury secretary, Paulson says there was no indication of a housing bubble. He told President Bush the risk was low when it was excessively high.

Whether prime or sub-prime, the alpha and beta risk to home equity and loan values was accumulating along with the benefit of an accumulating capital that resulted in a liquidity crisis. The gamma risk accumulated to a dangerously high level and presented as "the bailout" that avoided "the systemic risk" (the gamma risk).

The gamma risk was not avoided, it was shifted to the future where it is being politically bivariated to manage it into an alpha and beta economic measurement of risk. Market valuations will be determined by the allowable variation of the risk dependant on an easily predictable bivariation of variables punctuated by a crisis of ignorance, deliberately modeled to recurrently ignore an excessively accumulated gamma risk.

Saturday, January 30, 2010

Cognitive Dissonance or Political Change

Psychology of Bivariation


Flip-flopping between Democrat and Republican regimes poses as political change. This artificial pluralism presents a psychological condition known as cognitive dissonance: believing one thing and saying or doing another.

As the president faced his party's bivariate with reciprocating recriminations, was it a political polemic toward a practical understanding of fundamental differences, confirming a bivariate party system is a credible mechanism for continuous improvement, or the expression of a psychological condition that presents as a debilitating dilemma symptomatic of being ideologically conservative but practically liberal?

The debilitation presents with the inability of the two parties to agree on how to control costs and deliver services. Being the essential variables for the conflicted psychological state, the dissonance reaches a point of inflexion with the president's unusual confrontation with his counter party being a micro manifestation of a macro trend.

Cultural pressure to believe conservative values, chief among them that laissez-faire capitalism provides the greatest good, is very strong. Practical experience, however, demonstrates a strict adherence results in crises, like The Great Depression, and now The Great Recession.

The polemic essentially revolves around the dissonant values of theory and practice, and the president's expression of the dissonance indicates what the psychosis demands--the need to decide and relieve the dissonance.

Bivariation functions to ensure the decision is liberal or conservative, which perpetuates the dissonance to a point of apathetic and anomic distraction. The distraction is interpreted to be the verified consent of the governed (or, as Republicans are now saying, "bringing power closer to The People").

Depth of the crisis has driven the distraction to a point of inflexion. The president has demonstrated a broader need to dispell the dissonance with an appropriate cognition.

Independents will be at the forefront of a pragmatic ontology unfolding in an age of reason and the scientific method. It is an inevitability that ideologues knowingly fear will depose the psychological benefit of feeling powerful by denying the consent of the governed and depriving the promise of a peaceful prosperity to the point of dissonance and distraction.

The only "hope" for ideologues is, for example, the recent Supreme Court decision that affirmed money is protected speech. It will take a lot of money to persuade The People that resolving the cognitive dissonance is a bivariate choice.

With a sense of lost investment, dissonance tends to abate with how much The People have sacrificed, or suffered, for false beliefs and disconfirmed legitimacies. Since, however, the source of corporate money and the accumulative size of the public debt to abate the suffering and secure the distribution of wealth and power is the cumulative source of the dissonance, neither buying it out or starving it out will prevent, but abet, the inevitable.

A persistent third element, the independent element, will break the bivariate and the psychological barrier to change we really need.

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Confirming the Corporate

While the Republican party is touting its role to now lead the way of bringing government closer to The People, the Supreme Court has given more confirmation that the corporation is a person with inalienable rights, like the right to free speech expressed through purchasing power in the media markets.

As we proceed with a clear need for bureaucratic power to cut through the stasus of bivariate politics, the corporate will be annointed with the task. Both devil and savior, it will be the continued tautology of the good and efficiently benevolent private sector versus the evil and disfunctionally malevolent public sector always looking to rob us all of our wealth.

There is nothing new about this conservative narrative turned into deliberate reality. What is new is a comedic convergence of the two parties into a bogus competition for the populist element.

The neo-conservative element, now gaining support from the highest echelon of the judiciary, is becoming the well-established standard for deviation. The old conservative way of assuaging populist sentiment with the always failed expectation of trickle-down economics is completely passe'.

Arguing that the call for a reduced budget deficit is largely a function of reduced spending, or less government, rather than the need for tax increases is recognizably old-school conservative, but independents recognize its lack of credibility.

In order to gain credibility, the conservative message has to merge with a populist message like President Obama's. His State of the Union speech tends to support the hypothesis.

The president declared amnesty for corporate bureaucrats that have engaged in a clearly criminal-like behavior. Combined with the support of the Supreme Court, this is the formula for injustice and an arrogant impunity to the extreme.

As a too-big-to-fail corporate continues to consolidate, all this government support will prove to be inimical to civil society with the civil service in Ivy-League to administer a legitimacy of power neo-conservatively transformed. The promise of both parties to bring power closer to The People will be accomplished with a corporate crush regarded as the right to self-determination with the power of The People reduced to an inalienable predestination.

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

State of the Union

After having been diverted by a Pelosi-Emanuel agenda, President Obama restated the platform he was elected on: reversing the policies and programs that caused the current economic trend that is still getting worse despite the getting-better rhetoric.

While there are plenty of signals for a recovery, the economy is still getting worse and directly correlates with a Pelosi-Emanuel agenda.

Until the causal factors are reversed, the economy will continue to trend deflationary. Republicans will favor a top-down stimulus program despite the pro-populist State of the Union critique.

Consistent with the effect of a bivariate organizational technology, the Democratic majority will be blamed for a top-down, socialist, government planning program that supports the deflationary trend.

Who or what is to blame for the state of the union will be confused by design. The bivariate accountability will be conserved along with the current deflationary trend.

Whether the independent voter is actually swinging right or not is not critical. It does not matter because the system is bivariate.

What will stop and reverse the deflationary trend in a most timely and efficient manner is being sidetracked with a Pelosi-Emanuel agenda and a bivariate gaming strategy that invariably results in unpopular mandates.

Until we see, not just hear about, adminstrative resolve to reverse the deflationary trend from the bottom up financed from the benefit accumulated from the top down, the trend will not reverse without gigantic budget deficits and an accumulating debt burden. Populist sentiment (the gamma risk) is calling for a technical correction by non-political, bureaucratic, administrative means in genuine public service, not an endless bivariate harangue that conserves the top-heavy distribution of power at middle class expense.

Without recognizing that the current deflationary trend is a cost that created a benefit, the trend will be slow to reverse and, of course, impossible to prevent.

Reinvestment of the accumulated benefit from the bottom up, like writing down the principle of devalued home foreclosures with the TARP funds, would effectively reverse the deflationary trend, the accumulative debt burden (the empirical value of the gamma risk), and the accumulative size (the need) for government.

Bivariate Analysis

Americans expect pluralistic process to ontologize a legitimate outcome. The result is intended to be government and business (political-economy) by consent in which conflict is resolved by peacefully cooperative effort.

Psychologically there is a multifarious order of intention that creates a highly complex environment that tends to reduce to a manageable, directable, controllable, number of variables which also reduces to an ontology of legitimacy (the notion that things are just naturally the way they are despite the best or worst intentions). A binomial organizational technology is intended to accomplish that reduction.

The reduction, however, does not reduce the complexity. It shifts it to another part of the equation outside an area isolated for manipulation. A gamma risk then accumulates outside the isolated area.

Although bivariate reduction is a good way to conserve the stakes in the guise of change and legitimate pluralistic process (two-party politics for example), the gamma risk will emerge to affect the isolated variables because the actual, practical, span of control is not sufficient to maintain the isolation. Thus there is the tendency for an authoritarian regime to become progressively more autocratic and dystopic despite the best original order of intention, and thus the need to always ensure an ontological legitimacy in priority (in the prior order of intention), preferably a pluralistic one.

The third-party element that has emerged into our binary party system with the intention of plurality (a beta-risk volatility) is a complexity that the new administration and congressional leadership is not sophisticated enough to plan for or manage.

The planned effect of a bivariate system is to conserve the stakes through the appearance of pluralistic process and soften the thrid party element by captive co-optation. Instead, the effect has been to harden and strengthen the resolve of a genuine opposition.

Deviation from the planned bivariate effect may be beyond the clever capabilities of both parties to manage without having to actually share power. The probable result is a progressively more autocratic aspect to public process in order to control the progressive march of genuine pluralism.

Despite the obvious limitation of a bivariate system to be genuinely representative by design, the new congressional leadership nevertheless made it quite clear that their agendae is mandated, imperative, by the consent of the governed, with a clearly, categorically binomial, winner and loser. Apparently not, however, and they will continue to struggle without the simplicity of what they consider consent for the autocracy of there better, progressive judgement and authority.

Since the bivariate party system is recurrent by design, the latest imperative is reminiscent of Newt Gingrich's social contract theory. The "contract with America" following the realignment of 1994 is the archetype of an authoritarian resistance to a genuine consent and what a bivariate system is designed to do. It is necessary to construct a contract-like legitimacy in addition to the guaranteed Constitutional legitimacy of government by consent. The implication, of course, is that whatever the new congress mandated was binding with the public's trust of its better judgement. These modifications to inherent rights are nothing but the product of deceit and immediately indicates a bad intent that earns the public's distrust.

On the economic side of the macro equation is, as well, a categorical imperative that is reduced to a simplified span of control. Firms that are categorically too big to fail are the clear and uncontrovertible winners whose government support for command and control is clearly imperative despite the consent of the governed. This is where intentions render with the highest order of complexity. Strange inversions appear as unintended ontologies and the variables reduce to the gamma risk. The risk is managed with all manner of rhetorical device to explain the contradiction between theory (like tax breaks for big business always leads to general prosperity) and practice (The Great Recession).

For the analyst, recognizing the organized ontology beyond the teleology of any ideological bias provides high predictive utility.

For example, going forward, the investor should expect the gamma risk to present as both high political and economic volatility. The risk was always there (and if you follow these articles, I have been tracking the risk), but it is constantly being methodically (algebraically) isolated. While it appears, then, to be minimized, it is not. It is being maximized and accumulated until it reaches a crisis proportion.

The motive toward crisis and resolution is an ontology: the struggle for dominance mitigated by the necessity for cooperation to solve common problems. If the problem is the distribution of rewards and deprivations (the political-economic equation), resolution reduces to the assessment of the gamma risk. The amount of value gained, or rewarded, on that risk can be safely repressed or expressed (the degree of allowable, observable presence) without relinquishing the goal of dominance. The binomial calculus of winning or losing is still reflected in the reduction to binary management of systemic risk (a bivariate analysis), like being too big to fail in which both business and government cooperate to conserve, or stabilize, the cost to benefit and the distribution of rewards and deprivations.

Being able to dictate market preferences by operation of government without consent of the governed is what bivariate party leadership is intended, and likely, to accomplish.

Independents are providing the pluralism necessary to correct for value in the marketplace that is accumulatively retributive (what causes the need for government empirically expressed with an accumulating burden of debt, like a budget deficit). The gamma risk on that accumulated value does not have to present as more autocratic command and control of free markets (monetizing the debt and consolidating industry and markets with middle class, discretionary income, reducing the ability to choose). Instead, it can be to ensure a free-market mechanism in priority by government authority (by consent of the governed).

Rather than selected by systematic default of legislative mandate and administrative authority, be it public or private, winners and losers are elected by popular consent (by the force and empirically ontological legitimacy of democratic process).

If the political marketplace remains bivariate (and teleological), industry and markets that consolidate to support an inelasticity will benefit at the expense of everyone else (the accumulated value at risk). Interjection of a third element reduces the probability of sustaining that benefit. The value is retributive and presents in the form of an increased gamma risk.

Managing the gamma risk and conserving the accumulation of retributive value is, therefore, a function of keeping the system bivariate.

The retributive value continued to accumulate after the so-called realignment of 2008-09. The increasing gamma risk presents as uncertainty. Events like the Massachusettes realignment of the open senate seat was a predictable indication of an impending reduction of the gamma risk and a distribution on the value that supports it--a secular recovery.

The tendency to bi-variate fulfills the natural tendency to both dominate in conflict and cooperate toward the practical application and legitimacy of that end. There is also a psychological dimension to the practical legitimacy that presents analytically. If that dimension is not included, events present with unexpected inversions.

Predictive accuracy is easily diminished within the psychology of an analytical technique. The added complexity of that dimension to analyses can be reduced to an assessment of the gamma risk. That risk is most likely bivariately reduced with a third element containing all the value of that risk predictably present at any particular time.

Extrapolating, then, from the psychology of analytical technique, the probability the leadership of the two parties will be responsive to the third, independent element is nearly zero.

There is significant security in the bivariate structure of power to conserve the stakes and "avoid" the risk of an additional distribution of power. The expectation for change we really need will fail. The gamma risk will then default (isolate) to its intended place in the bivariate equation. The values on that distribution will be conserved disproportionately and will re-present in the next election cycle as a strangely inverted populist conservatism. The gamma will then be accumulated to a point of inflexion. The risk is more likely to then be taken than avoided causing the necessary distribution on the consolidated value.

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Failed Expectations

A policy platform that relies on the hope for change will more than likely result in a failed expectation. The Obama administration has not failed the probability.

Throughout his campaign President Obama did, however, qualify the hopeful rhetoric with practical policy alternatives that were described as socialist by the opposition. Now that those alternatives have, for the most part, not been executed, the hope is lost, the expectation failed. It is a simple analytic. It has nothing to do with the failure of policy. It was not executed. Policy was conserved, which now defines the independents that voted for him as the opposition.

The evidence suggests a neo-conservative gaming strategy perpetrated by the Democratic leadership.

Since a populist Republican party, renewed with a "compassionate conservatism," is something only the most credulous could possibly believe, it is incumbant on the opposition to provide that credibility. The Republican party is now poised to take up the populist mantle (having gone full circle, from tragedy to farce).

The strategy, gaming the Republican opposition into isolation, cleverly gives a cooperatively conservative program an adversarial appearance, also giving what the voters voted for a false empirical confirmation. It is, at this point, a failed confidence game that is not confirmed by the evidence of an improved economy or any change of the factors that are identifiably causal. That element of the scheme is not very clever and is now in damage control. The result is to force the president into applying the gamma risk, suggesting the timing of the recovery.

The stakes are only marginally at risk at this point with the failure being mainly a failed strategy in a game of strategy between ideological opponents with the same primary goal in mind--accumulating power and keeping it. Obama's middle class task force will likely reduce the gamma enough to keep the risk contained within a safe proportion. A distribution on the accumulation must occur in the short term to maintain the proportion of accumulated power to consent.

Analyses of why the Obama administration has nominally "failed" is a dizzying maelstrom of endless possibility that mirrors the strangely inverted image of its real success.

A useful reduction to the fundament is in order.

While Obama clearly identifies reducing the rising cost of healthcare being critical to economic welfare and a sustainable recovery, independents do not consider rendering a mandatory policy a reliable means of controlling costs. If costs keep rising even when the demand has been falling throughout the Great Recession, what happens when it is mandatory?

Dispense with all the noise and the political gaming and get down to the realpolitique of increasing the "discretionary" spending that control costs in a free-market fashion instead of commanding (mandating) costs in an auhtoritarian fashion. Supporting what is too big to fail over the discretion of the populace is an indiscretion that is not difficult to calculate either politically or economically.

The Hamiltonian model is in a serious challenge here. Obama's approach has a clearly Federalist aspect that supports the conservative element rather than resists it.

It will be interesting to see how the logic of independents collectively acts to control public policy in a more Jeffersonian fashion, rendering political gaming a function of popular expression rather than an emblem of ruling class power with the risk of failed expectaton practically assured to an endless sea of debate.