Daily Reading: July 10, 2012

Today's best from around the web.

Leftist rag.

Today's Must Read

Matt Yglesias, lucid economics writer extraordinaire, gives a nice explanation of the LIBOR scandal. Perhaps defenders of a deregulated financial industry should adopt "LIBORty or Death" as a new slogan: 

The real issue is just that international finance has become a ruthlessly competitive game in which firms relentlessly seek newer and bigger profit opportunities. At the same time, important swathes of the system are stuck in the days of the old boys’ club where important measures were handled essentially as gentlemen’s agreements. Setting the Libor through a fairly informal submission system and then using it as the basis for global interest payments created a massive arbitrage opportunity: Anyone who was willing to game the gentlemen’s agreement could arrange vast, riskless profits. And today’s cutthroat finance is nothing if not brilliant at arbitrage.

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Dany Byman lays out the (awful) options for Syria:

The initial hope that Bashar al-Asad would go the way of Egypt’s Mubarak and Tunisia’s Ben Ali was not foolish – it was just wrong. Bashar’s regime was pressed hard, and many informed observers saw him as (here I’m quoting the technical term used by a colleague I won’t name) “toast.” For at least the last six months and probably the last nine, however, such optimism was starry eyed. Syria is a grinding stalemate, with the regime unable to subdue the demonstrators while the opposition is too weak militarily and divided politically to triumph. Meanwhile, the violence escalates. So what to do?

At the Harvard Business Review blog, the case for the "General Manager":

At one time general managers were at the center of the action. Two decades ago, organizations were designed around stand-alone business units, so all managers had to understand finance, technology, manufacturing, sales, marketing, strategy, human resources, and more. To get this broad exposure, managers were given a variety of functional roles, eventually assuming leadership for a small business unit. If successful, they then were given responsibility for increasingly larger businesses. However starting in the 1980's, many companies evolved to "functional" structures to cut costs and reduce duplication. The transition consolidated those support functions which were common among the BU's.

David Frum shows behavioral economics at work in Britain.  

Prototypical David Brooks column, with a great diagnosis and a meaningless platitude of a prescription:

"Richer kids are roughly twice as likely to play after-school sports. They are more than twice as likely to be the captains of their sports teams. They are much more likely to do nonsporting activities, like theater, yearbook and scouting. They are much more likely to attend religious services. It’s not only that richer kids have become more active. Poorer kids have become more pessimistic and detached. Social trust has fallen among all income groups, but, between 1975 and 1995, it plummeted among the poorest third of young Americans and has remained low ever since. As Putnam writes in notes prepared for the Aspen Ideas Festival: “It’s perfectly understandable that kids from working-class backgrounds have become cynical and even paranoid, for virtually all our major social institutions have failed them — family, friends, church, school and community.” As a result, poorer kids are less likely to participate in voluntary service work that might give them a sense of purpose and responsibility. Their test scores are lagging. Their opportunities are more limited."

And Kevin Drum picks Brooks apart...