Greenspan's mistake

Alan Greenspan: "I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms."

What his mistake really is is to believe that organizations behave like people do. There is no such thing as "self-interest of organizations." It might have existed at some point in the past, but in the era of high mobility of information, financial resources, and those individuals in decision making roles (various types of CEOs and such), perceived individual interests of decision makers do not coincide with those of the rest of the organizations even of their owners and so decision makers make decisions in their own perceived self-interest and move on to a different client/victim.

In addition to the ever increasing mobility of resources, another factor contributes to this new way of running business. It is the fact that the ownership of most organizations today is diluted, it is spread among huge multitude of small owners who (1) are too busy with their principal life supporting activity and/or are not educated and/or informed enough to study the issues and thus make quality decisions and consequently (2) delegate their decision making power of stockholders to the select few (either very large individual stockholders who are mostly doing just fine these days, or various funds where decisions are again made by the technocrats).

So, old Greenspan's mistake is not to take into account the effect of technological advances which changed the landscape of capitalism profoundly and continue to change it.

Political signs

I wonder if there is a city/county (Tallahassee/Leon) ordinance covering display of political signs. Do you know anything about it?

I had a presidential campaign sign displayed in front of my home for a few days only to wake up this morning and see it missing. I hope someone took it in order to display it in his or her yard :-) I see these signs displayed in my neighborhood and I do not think I violated any ordinance covering the display any differently than my neighbors have done whose signs are still up. Of course, one obvious possibility is that someone just did not like seeing my sign and decided to take it down. But, I am looking for other explanations. It was not the wind or any other act of nature, I am fairly sure of that.

What do you think?