“If you listen out for it, this tic has become a new divide in British public life: between the people who say ‘Look…’ and the people who say ‘So…’ ‘Look…’ is a badge of conviction, and it’s meant to signal sincerity, respect for the other point of view but a determination to do the right thing. ‘So…’ is mandarin-speak — it’s said to be a characteristic of almost everyone who works at the Bank of England — and it signals a resigned acceptance of the facts, whatever your personal preferences might be. Most academics, in my experience, now begin their seminar answers: ‘So…’ When my wife and I talk to our children, I notice that we tend to say: ‘So…’”
 — This is also true in the United States. Which one are you?

Noted American presidential scholar Pat Sajak compares Barack Obama to Bill Clinton and finds that — surprise! — the latter looks “presidential” while the current president does not. Here’s a fun thing to guess: Once President Obama is out of office and there’s another Democrat in the White House, what positive attributes will the conservatives who currently fulminate about Kenyan socialism discover in their attempts to diminish that future occupant? “Say what you will about Barack Obama, but at least he…” (Note: This assumes the world has not completely fallen apart and that there ever will be another Democrat in the White House.)

You know, this is the kind of thing that would actually get me to go see this movie. It tears you up inside. Watch it before they take it down.

“On a street of brownstones in Park Slope, Brooklyn — a run-down neighborhood politely described at the time as being “in transition” — one plane, a state-of-the-art jetliner, gouged long-lasting scars. The tail slammed down in an intersection. White-hot engines, smoldering cargo and badly burned bodies fell nearby. A stream of jet fuel touched off a fire that grew to seven alarms and destroyed 10 buildings and a church. Two men selling Christmas trees on a corner and a man shoveling snow were killed.”
 — If you live in New York, and have, for the past nine years, watched every airplane that passes overhead with a bit of secret dread, waiting for a sudden change in direction, a violent dive, ready to sound the alarm (and why wouldn’t you do this?), you might not want to read this account of when two planes crashed in mid-air over Park Slope. But I do/have/did. And I’m looking forward to the rest of the Times’ weeklong series on the disaster that happened 50 years ago this Thursday.

“We found that people from a lower-class background — in terms of occupation, status, education and income level — performed better in terms of emotional intelligence, the ability to read the emotions that others are feeling…. You turn to people, it’s an adaptive strategy. You develop this sort of heightened independence with other individuals as a way to deal with not having enough individual resources.”
 — Michael Kraus explains the findings of his recent study, which shows that rich people don’t understand how you’re feeling, because they don’t have to. They’re rich!

Ah, December, that special time when the right wing takes part in the annual tradition of shouting that a snow storm proves climate change is a hoax.

Apart from the sinister specter of socialism, the most common complaint raised against increased federal oversight of our financial markets is that it empowers aloof bureaucrats to “pick winners and losers” on Wall Street, and therefore defiles the essence of free-market competition.

But as Louise Story makes clear in a New York Times dispatch from the arcane battles over disclosures in the derivatives market, the real reason that investment banks resent government intrusion is that is too much, rather than too little, competition. They believe that picking winners and losers is clearly their job. Storey gamely tries to report on the doings of a nine-member conclave of New York-based banking executives that operates without any public mission statement, reports of its doings, disclosure of trader fees, or even official confirmation of the members’ identities.

Derivatives traders insist that they need all this secrecy to reinforce the central role of derivatives trades: to hedge investors against risk in market transactions that could leave their investments exposed to destabilizing price fluctuations. The nine bankers are members of a risk committee, which meets under the aegis of the InterContinentalExchange (ICE) Trust. That body functions under the new financial reform law as what’s known as a derivatives clearing house — a deceptively open-sounding moniker for a group sharing a monastic devotion to keeping its activities as far from plain sight as possible.

As Story notes:

In theory, this group exists to safeguard the integrity of the multitrillion-dollar [derivatives] market. In practice, it also defends the dominance of the big banks.

The banks in this group… have fought to block other banks from entering the market, and they are also trying to thwart efforts to make full information on prices and fees freely available.

Nor does the secrecy stop there. As investigative reporter Lucy Komisar writes, the ICE consortium was founded two years ago as an offshore concern in anticipation of the 2010 financial reform law. It keeps its corporate brassplate in the Cayman Islands, and many of the biggest players in the derivatives market sit on its board, including Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Bank of America. “ICE focuses on the market for credit default swaps, a form of insurance that protects investors against defaults in the bond market,” Komisar writes. “ICE’s member banks account for about 90 percent of the credit default swap market and are thus in position to steer business to ICE and help it capture a leading market share.”

With such an enormous shared stake in overseeing the US derivatives market, why should ICE be incorporated in the Caymans? The company itself won’t say, not surprisingly, but it’s a safe bet that it’s headquartered there for the same reason that most other offshore concerns land on the Caribbean atoll: to evade American tax law. US regulators treat the security deposits that most derivatives traders collect on their trades as loans, and the proceeds of them are therefore taxable once they’ve completed their heady runs through global trading markets and are repatriated within American borders. Like many such holding operations, the ICE Trust is perfectly legal — but its perch atop the emerging regulatory structure of the derivatives market doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that we are on the verge of a new age of financial transparency.

Nor, as Story observes, does the apparent membership of the ICE risk committee (two sources confirmed the lineup of big-ticket investment bankers to her, even if ICE itself would not) suggest that conflict-free oversight of the roughly $60 trillion global derivatives game is the committee’s prime directive. Some risk-committee members sit on the boards of the other two clearinghouses, run by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and NASDAQ, and some serve on the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, which sets the rules for global derivatives trades. Small wonder that a Justice Department spokeswoman tells Story that federal prosecutors are looking into “the possibility of anticompetitive practices in the credit clearing, trading and information services industries” — and that the Justice probe is one of the seemingly limitless list of subjects that ICE and the other two clearing houses offer no public comment on.

When backers of the ICE risk committee can be prodded into public speech, they say that the group is so reclusive because the stakes of its operations are so high — and that it can’t invite other market players to sit in because they can’t meet the forbidding capitalization requirements for membership. (No, they won’t disclose that number either, but trust them — it’s big.)

The grand irony in all this, as Story notes, is that the opaque, offshore ICE operation was conceived as an instrument of financial reform, hectically executed on behalf of the regulators putting the legislation together before the toxic deals in the housing sector spread further across the vast derivatives market.

And it’s not as if the take-charge committeemen for ICE had to be schooled in keeping their traps shut. The entire derivatives market is set up to maximize secrecy, as that’s the essence of its fee-and-profit-making model:

In most cases, buyers are told only what they have to pay for the derivative contract, say $25 million. That amount is more than the seller gets, but how much more — $5,000, $25,000 or $50,000 more — is unknown. That’s because the seller also is told only the amount he will receive. The difference between the two is the bank’s fee and profit. So, the bigger the difference, the better for the bank — and the worse for the customers.
It would be like a real estate agent selling a house, but the buyer knowing only what he paid and the seller knowing only what he received. The agent would pocket the difference as his fee, rather than disclose it. Moreover, only the real estate agent — and neither buyer nor seller — would have easy access to the prices paid recently for other homes on the same block.

And of course, since the underlying assets in most derivatives trades are basic commodities like fuel and food, this speculation can wreak havoc on ordinary consumers’ cost of living even as it handsomely bulks up the traders’ bottom lines. Derivative swaps were what permitted the brave new traders at Enron, for instance, to cut off power to California homes during the early-aughts wave of blackouts there — and use the artificial scarcity to keep driving up their fees. Derivatives speculation was likewise the driving force behind the punishing 2008 spike in oil prices — even as global demand for oil dropped by 5 percent that year.

So yes: Welcome to the new era of Obama-engineered financial reform. As with the White House’s kindred capitulations on tax cuts for the rich, there’s little for the rest of us to do but await the inevitable moment when we pick up the check.

Chris Lehmann is the author of Rich People Things.

“The well-staffed offices, the air of self-conscious seriousness shading into pomposity, the tendency to file what from a British point of view always seemed several hundred words too much — all these features of American papers were underpinned by the easy money of monopoly-based classified advertising.”
 — Here is a fascinating lengthy analysis of the financial matters of British and English newspapers which ends in… a call for a universal micropayment system for news consumers. This is my problem with journalists basically? In the time it took to research and edit this story, everyone involved could have partnered with two good engineers and BUILT AND LAUNCHED A UNIVERSAL MICROPAYMENT SYSTEM. (And then already not have had anyone sign up to use it.)

With a blowout win over Bradley on Wednesday night, Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski won his 877th basketball game in Division I, passing Adolph Rupp for third best in NCAA history. He’s now right behind Dean Smith and a few dozen back of his former coach and mentor, Bob Knight. It is a remarkable milestone, made all the more so by the fact that most of those wins have come in an era that has evolved from four-year recruits to an NBA-like rotating roster of young talent. In fact, Krzyzewski has won all four of his national championships in just the last 20 years.

Such staggering achievement on the sideline (and yes, writing this sentence pains me tremendously, but it’s true) puts Krzyzewski in the conversation as one of the great coaches in any sport. And each of these signpost wins cements his legacy, additionally burnished as it is by uber-successful forays into international basketball, poverty relief and self-aggrandizing leadership centers.

Ironically, about the only thing Krzyzewski apparently fails at is teaching anyone else how to produce winning basketball teams. For all his success in basketball and life, Coach K has been an utter failure at creating successful coaches from his assistant ranks. Unless by “successful” you mean “successful at losing your job.”

Quinn Snyder’s hysterical flameout at Mizzou, Bob “The Builder” Bender’s dead end at Washington, Tommy Amaker’s disappearing acts at Seton Hall and Michigan and now Johnny Dawkins’ less-than-stellar start at Stanford represent a glaringly barren coaching tree. When the biggest bloom on your bush is a be-turtlenecked Mike Brey, you have to just sort of shrug, I suppose.

But no one names practice facilities and scholarships after your ability to birth coaches as good or better than you are. If so, the Herb Sendek Memorial Rec Center on the campus of Miami (OH) University would be jamming all winter. Instead, it’s a place that doesn’t exist. Still, Sendek has a whopping eight former assistants in the coaching ranks at the Division I level. And while none of them have the coif of the former Dukie wunderkind Snyder (nor the “one of his players creepily involved with the school president’s wife” track record), they represent the most florid tree among active coaches.

Sendek himself is a throwback coach, preaching a system approach that places a premium on teamwork and discipline, not individual brilliance. It’s led him to a good career to date, but doesn’t appear well suited to grand-scale success, in part because of a dearth of elite talent. The only two times in which a Sendek-led team made it past the first round of the NCAA tournament, his teams were led by All-American players (Julius Hodge and James Harden). But what assistant coaches learn at the flank of their benefactors is not necessarily mimicry. Coaches develop their own styles once they are allowed to institute their own systems and controls. Several among the “Sendek Eight” are good examples of this, but most clearly Thad Matta at Ohio State.

Matta’s case is an interesting one. In his 10 seasons as a head coach, Matta has won six conference titles and has never failed to crack the 20-win barrier. His 2007 team made it to the championship game, and he’s only missed the NCAA tournament one time — the year after Greg Oden and Mike Conley left and his boys took home the NIT. But Matta doesn’t come across as one of the game’s better coaches. Respected, yes, but not really for his coaching ability so much as for his ability to bring in top tier talent. In a way, he’s almost faulted for bringing in some of the best prep talent in the nation year-in and year-out and not doing more with them. The question remains whether Matta is doing anything more with that talent than it could do on its own.

When you hear the basketball punditry rave about an Izzo or a Calhoun or a Pitino or a Roy Williams, it makes sense. After all, those guys are all current or sure-fire Hall of Famers, and all of them are considered great recruiters who can also coach. But when names like Mike Montgomery, Tom Crean, Jamie Dixon and even Brey elicit breathless mentions by game announcers, it’s puzzling. It appears to stem from the theory that winning with less talent translates as “great coaching.” But last time I checked, recruiting the best players on the floor was as integral an aspect of collegiate coaching as coaching scrubs to success was.

Squeezing more out of less is, of course, an old school metric of coaching ability. It was always the thing defenders of Temple’s John Chaney trotted out as proof of his coaching greatness. I should know; I was one of them. Chaney’s career was marked by his ability to give last-chance kids that last chance, and to teach them life skills as well as basketball ones. But Chaney was also a stubborn system coach, and whatever their talent level, Chaney’s teams always had the appearance of overachieving. Chaney was never able to crack the Final Four barrier, falling in the Elite Eight five times in a 516-win Temple career. There was no denying his ability to coach a game, but while Chaney had recruited a few All-American players — Mark Macon and Rick Brunson come to mind — too many slipped away. Imagine if Chaney had been able to keep Rasheed Wallace, Rip Hamilton or even Kobe Bryant home? Obviously, those are big what ifs, but it’s hard to imagine a Final Four-less career with a couple of those names in the Temple annals.

If the logarithm for success in college coaching is complicated at best and never the same in any situation, recruiting the best players is simply not a part of the equation you can just dismiss.

Just ask Tubby Smith, who, after winning the national title in a thoroughly stellar job coaching another coach’s recruits in season one at Kentucky, was never able to reach the same heights, principally because of poor attention to recruiting. Smith was rightfully lauded for his on-court coaching skill, his off-court works, his good sportsmanship and his squeaky clean program. But he seemed to take extra pride in his ability to find diamond-in-the-rough recruits like Kelenna Azubuike, Gerald Fitch and Chuck Hayes, like a scout digging up some Fernando from the dusty fields of Mexico.

But despite a few impressive regular seasons, Smith, like Chaney, also couldn’t get past the Elite Eight, where too often teams with future NBA draft picks had an extra gear, one more made shot, one extra clutch rebound, than his diamonds in the rough did. As the coach at blue-blooded Kentucky it never made sense why Smith struggled to land the best recruits. It started to seem intentional. Much was said about Smith’s unwillingness to “play the game,” meaning the AAU circuit kabuki dance some coaches excel at. But Smith wasn’t being paid $3 million a season to avoid that game or any other game. He was being paid that much to win that game, as well as every other game. That was his job. Guys like Matta play the AAU game, and they play it well.

And yet, it’s not enough just to win the recruiting game. Because unless you can harness that talent — in Matta’s case six first-round picks in the last five years — guys like Matta will continue to get less credit.

Coaches dismissively regarded first and foremost as “recruiters” are not new to the college game. I recall distinctly my father waving away Hall of Famer Denny Crum’s coaching ability as “rolling the ball out there and letting ’em play.” Clearly, you don’t win 675 games, two national titles and three National Coach of the Year awards by “rolling the ball out there,” but the sentiment stuck that Crum’s superior athletes were capable of winning games that his own strategy could not, games that broke down into playground basketball. It becomes a situation where you’re expected to win more because of the players you’ve brought in.

This is now the domain of Kentucky coach John Calipari, who has taken the mantle of best recruiter in the nation and run with it. Much like Crum, Calipari has an elite stable of thoroughbreds whose skills favor the flashy over the fundamental. And yet, like Crum before him, Calipari’s results speak to a much greater skill than just teaching the best way to bounce pass and to run the picket fence: teaching winning basketball.

Of course, Crum learned up close as an assistant the value of coaching the best talent you could get. Missing from most of the hagiographic memorials of the late John Wooden was the fact that the UCLA coach enjoyed the luxury of coaching most of the best players in the country for a decade, thanks to a combination of his own massive reputation for winning, a sublime location to recruit to and boosterism run amok. All the talk about Pyramids of Success and teaching future Hall of Famers to tie their shoes is nice, but take a few of those guys off the roster and the results are bound to be dramatically different. This isn’t to denigrate the successes of Wooden, far from it. It’s to say that recruiting the best players possible and then getting those players to buy into the program and perform at the highest level is by definition great coaching, not a deficiency of it.

Which brings us back to Krzyzewski. It’s hard to remember now that for his first few years, Duke under Krzyzewski had been decidedly mediocre, if not bad. Then Krzyzewski broke through with a McDonald’s All-American in 1983 (Dawkins), followed by two more the next season. After a pair of second-round tournament losses, the program caught fire, winning 37 games before losing to Crum’s more talented and athletic Louisville team in a nail-biter in 1986. That began parallel runs of excellence for Duke’s head coach and his program.

From 1985–90, the Blue Devils went to four Final Fours in five seasons. In that same span, they also raked in blue chip recruits, nabbing 10 McDonald’s All-Americans. These two runs are, clearly, not unrelated. And yet until Duke took home the 1991 title with a team featuring a remarkable six Burger Boys, Coach K was regarded as the Marv Levy of college hoops — a nice guy that everyone thought was great for the game who “coached guys up,” hoops parlance for getting the most out of less. It seems laughable that one could have six prep All-Americans and be coaching the less talented team, but that was the way it appeared. So what turned Coach K from a very good coach who couldn’t win the big one to soon the all-time college basketball wins leader? It wasn’t recruiting. It was winning with those recruits.

So the next time an announcer goes on and on about Brey or Dixon — or like Dick Vitale did on Saturday about how, having just nabbed his first high school All-American, Crean’s Indiana program reminds him of Duke’s right before Dawkins arrived — remember that until those coaches are not only bringing in Matta-caliber players with regularity but actually winning with them, they’re just another bunch of nice guys in colorful turtlenecks sweating it out until the day the axe falls.

Originally from Kentucky, JL Weill now writes from Washington, DC. His take on politics, culture and sports can be found at The New Deterrence and on Twitter.

Photo by columbuscameraop, from Flickr.

Here you will find a picture of a squirrel hugging a meerkat. Awws all around.