CHINESE SOUVENIR. Osama bin Laden statuette. "Questionable taste" is an understatement.

HIGHLY APPROPRIATE. An Indian basketball team calls itself the Fighting Whities. (via Obscure Store)

YOU CAN NEVER HAVE too many Alexandra Pelosi links. This one's from the LA Times.

BLUE SKY LAWS. "Robert Musil" suggests that the federal repeal of state blue-sky laws took away an important countervailing force in the IPO world and was partially responsible for the dot-com bubble. I disagree.

(1) The bubble and its bursting corresponded precisely to the Federal Reserve's monetary policies in 1999-2000. A better explanation might be the overreaction to the concern that there would be a run on the banks in late December 1999 because of Y2K problems (remember Y2K?): the Fed pumped an inordinate amount of cash into the economy, and that cash needed somewhere to go. Even if "Musil" is right that Blue Sky commissions would've put a wrench in Net IPO plans, the economy is probably better off today that that money did go into speculative Internet stocks instead of blue-chips and real estate. The resulting dislocation only affected the speculative investors, and the value investors were not only left untouched, but cleaned up. Japan's still recovering from its bubble of ten years ago, and our bubble seems to have had negative effects for two years at most. When the Fed realized in early 2000 that it had overheated the economy, it had to slam on the brakes of monetary supply. The first shock to the dot-com world (the U.S. v. Microsoft opinion), combined with a lot of people having to sell stocks to pay capital gains taxes in April 2000, started the inevitable descent.

(2) Simply put, people wanted to invest in the Internet in 1998-2000. If that investment had not come from IPOs because of Blue Sky commissions, basic economics tells us it would have come from somewhere else. Several blue chippers ended up writing off hundreds of millions of dollars in Internet investments; that figure would've been in the billions but that the expense of investing in the net world prevented Borders from buying Amazon or United from buying Priceline at their peaks. The blue chip stocks then would have pitched themselves to the market as net plays, and that's where the money would've gone.

(3) Point two is more than a theoretical counterfactual. Enron made its money in the energy world. It lost its shirt trying to be a broadband player. The real casualties of the dot-com era are not the evanescent dot-com stocks that shot up to triple-digit figures and now sell for pennies on the dollar of their peaks: those stocks had small floats, so the "losses" affected the perception of Jeff Bezos and Michael Saylor's largely imaginary wealth far more than it affected investors in the market. The minute Bezos would have tried to liquidate his Amazon holdings in the larger market is the minute the Amazon.com bubble would've burst. It only took a handful of enthusiastic investors, enthused by The Motley Fool's success in AOL and subsequent pitching of Amazon, to pump the price of the stock so high because of the limited supply. The real losses came in broadband, where huge company after huge company invested billions of dollars to build next-generation networks and now discover they have expensive overcapacity that can't generate the revenue to pay the interest payments. That's nothing new: the 19th century US economy was wracked much more severely by railroad overbuilding.

(4) I'm skeptical the Blue Sky commissions would have made a difference. The dot-com bubble was hardly the first stock market bubble in American history, or even in the second half of the twentieth century. Boonton Electronics Corp.'s first day of trading priced at a 150% increase to its IPO price, then quickly doubled again. Within two years, it was down more than 80%. Same with Geophysics Corp. of America, IPO'ed at 14, trading at 27 its first day, peaking at 58, dropping to 9 the next year. But the president was Kennedy, rather than Clinton. There was the conglomerate boom and bust of the 1960s, the concept-stock bubble of 1968-71, the "Nifty Fifty" bubble of the early 1970s that saw PE ratios on blue-chip stocks soar to near triple-digit levels, and the biotech bubble of the 1980s--a bubble that looks in retrospect identical to the tech stock bubble in everything except pervasiveness. Blue Sky laws did nothing to stop these bubbles, and they wouldn't have stopped the most recent one. And that's before you consider the drag on the economy that multiple regulatory schemes had.

GEORGE W. BUSH, male model. Or not, but the 1980 J.C. Penney catalog is still trippy.

FOR THE LIFE of me, I don't know why this woman in Vancouver linked to me, but I'm honored. I think. Also recently linking to me: Bob Owen and Ben Sheriff. I've long admired Walter Olsen's Overlawyered site, so I'm definitely pleased to get a shout-out from him.

THE "Tribute of Light" seems a bit less dramatic than the original proposal.

LATE SHIFT II anti-climax. Letterman stays.

WAITING FOR THE RED CROSS. I doubt we'll hear any press conferences about the following report from Al Qaeda caves:

Beheshti also said he saw a Westerner held captive: a tall, blond man with a military-style haircut who had been stripped naked and beaten with sticks.

FROM THE WASHINGTON POST:

[The] 1989 earthquake found Bruce Stephan on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. That was his 1984 Mazda in one of the day's famous pictures, dangling, seemingly impossibly, from where the bridge's upper deck had collapsed onto the lower one. He clambered to safety.

Twelve years later, he escaped the WTC attacks.