Cup of Coffee: January 26, 2024

Good morning!

Today we have an item about an underwhelmed Las Vegas, we ask who is Manny Miami, we try to muster some sympathy for those poor banks, talk a lot about why corruption is the new hotness, discuss a small piece of valor that was stolen from me, and an early morning Wikipedia hole leads me to the tragedies of Alfalfa.

 The Daily Briefing

David Robertson signs with the Rangers

The Rangers and David Robertson have agreemeed to a one-year deal, worth around $12 million.

Robertson will be 39 come April, but he’s still effective, having posted a 3.03 ERA and a 78/25 K/BB ratio in 65.1 innings for the Mets and Marlins last year. The fact that he fell off in the second half might give one pause when it comes to a pitcher his age, but the Rangers’ bullpen could use some arms and Robertson still has an arm last I checked.

Joc Pederson to sign with Arizona

Joc Pederson’s tour of the NL West continues as he is reportedly in agreement with the Arizona Diamondbacks on a one-year deal with $9.5 million. There is some mutual option business for 2025 but those never get exercised so let’s not worry about that.

Pederson, 31, hit .235/.348/.416 (111 OPS+) with 15 homers for the Giants last year. The year before was his best, as he hit .274/.353/.521 (146 OPS+) with 23 home runs in 134 games. As usual, he does most of his damage against righties.

Defensively, he can only play the corners these days but with Lourdes Gurriel Jr. playing in left and Corbin Carroll in right, he’ll presumably DH against righties and perhaps spot-start in the field on occasion.

The A’s Vegas move is getting pretty damn depressing

Two fun datapoints regarding the Oakland Athletics’ impending move to Las Vegas. First up, this “anyone . . . anyone . . . ?” reception owner John Fisher and the A’s got after they were mentioned at a Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce meeting the other day:

As sports economist and Friend of Cup of Coffee J.C. Bradbury said yesterday morning, “Chambers of Commerce LOVE sports. It's members are the fan cohort that buys premium season tickets. This should have been John Fisher's crowd. We may be witnessing the death throes of the deal.” Here’s hoping.

Second up, John Fisher is seeking minority investors in the A’s. He’s saying it’s about “creating a connection with the community,” but that’s horseshit. This is almost certainly motivated by a need to supply $1.1 billion for his portion of the stadium’s construction. Most people in his position would go to banks or other financial institutions for such funding first because they wouldn’t have to give up equity in the team to do it. Which makes me think that banks and financial institutions aren’t particularly interested in this stadium project, so Fisher is out there with his hat in his hand.

Oh, and the stadium renderings which were supposed to be out ages ago are still not out and Fisher’s excuses for that seem to be shifting by the day.

Reminder: the Athletics could’ve stayed in Oakland where there is (a) an existing fan base; and (b) the money being offered for a new ballpark was like three times what the A’s are getting in Nevada.

Manny Miami

I don’t get my baseball news from Facebook because I actually wanna hear about it in something close to a timely fashion, but I will say that Facebook reports are more interesting. Like the way Fox Sports put out the news about Trey Mancini signing with the Marlins:

When you hover over “Manny Miami” it reveals a Facebook page for a realtor:

At this point I’d usually be expected to go on yet another rant about the degradation of sports media but, honestly, I’m glad this happened. “Manny Miami” is way better than “The Miami Marlins.” And Mancini seems like an engaging young man, so I’m sure he’ll make an excellent realtor.

Other Stuff

Won’t someone think of the banks?

Last week The Biden administration proposed a new rule that would curb overdraft fees for people who get into the red on their checking accounts. Such a thing might seem small to some people, but overdraft fees, which can quickly add up, are heavy punishments for people who are already struggling financially. Indeed, banks currently collect about $9 billion annually in overdraft fees, almost all of it from financially-strapped folks. The new rule proposed by the Biden Administration would would slash those fees by about $3.5 billion a year.

This is one of those policy decisions that has just about everything going for it. It’s outrageously popular, with 84% of Americans believing that bank fees are out of control. More importantly, it’s a good thing to do and will help reduce the suffering of vulnerable people.

Conservative columnist Megan McArdle, however, is concerned. For the poor banks:

If we cap overdraft fees, how will banks make up the lost revenue?

From profits, you say, and fair enough, but Patrick McKenzie, who writes the Bits About Money newsletter, points out that the reason your bank is so obsessed with getting you to sign up for paperless statements is that the profit margins on checking accounts are so thin, they can be meaningfully improved by saving the cost of 12 stamps a year. “Margins on small bank accounts are very thin,” he wrote recently, and “credit losses can easily be larger than several years of them.”

Now the government wants to make those accounts even less profitable.

It’s a cute trick to talk about how checking accounts have thin margins and aren’t profitable, as if all banks do is offer checking accounts. Looking at banks in general, though, would stop anyone who approaches this issue in good faith from offering such a silly argument.

J.P. Morgan made $49 billion in profits last year. The next three largest banks — Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citigroup — combined for an additional $55 billion in profits. Banks, overall, earned $1.3 trillion globally in 2022 and the estimate for 2023 profits currently sits at $1.4 trillion. U.S. regional banks haven’t done as well — many of them reported lower profits in 2023, largely due to one-time charges aimed at helping replenish the FDIC fund after it had to pay for the failure of Silicon Valley Bank — but they too are enjoying very profitable times.

All of which is to say: yeah, I think all of the banks can handle a collective $5.5 billion loss of overdraft fees. Hell, J.P. Morgan could absorb that itself with less than half of a single quarter’s profits.

I get that McArdle is arguing that the banks won’t simply absorb the reduction in overdraft fees by accepting a tiny reduction in their massive process and would instead, gouge the money from customers in other ways. Or that they would, possibly, end free checking or refuse to offer checking accounts to poor people. But why should one assume that’s both inevitable and unstoppable? Last I checked banks were regulated in this country. If the government can stop them from exploiting poor people with punitive overdraft fees it can certainly stop them from finding an alternative means of exploiting folks to make up for it.

How the Roberts Court has gutted anti-corruption laws

The New York Times Magazine has a story about how political corruption is on the rise. That rise is the direct result of the Roberts Court gutting both campaign finance laws and anti-corruption laws themselves in the most irresponsible of ways.

Indeed, in an opinion overturning a corruption conviction, Justice Roberts actually wrote that, “[G]overnment regulation may not target the general gratitude a candidate may feel toward those who support him or his allies, or the political access such support may afford. Ingratiation and access . . . are not corruption. They embody a central feature of democracy . . .” Which, for as fancy as those words may sound (a) basically legalizes graft as a fundamental right; and (b) is about the most intentionally naive thing written about how politics works that I have ever seen.

The result, per the Times and, really, per anyone who watches politics even a little bit closely:

These rulings have placed various types of graft outside the reach of the federal fraud, bribery and extortion statutes. The justices have freed politicians to trade cash for favors, so long as what they do in return isn’t a formal use of official power; they have lowered the legal risks of rigging the bidding process for lucrative state contracts; they have sanctioned the revolving door between politics and industry to protect the interests of, as the court put it, “particularly well-connected and effective lobbyists”; and they have granted officials freer rein to profit from undisclosed conflicts of interest — a position that is particularly notable given recent revelations about Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s accepting vacations and extravagant gifts. Taken together, all this amounts to court-ordered retreat from the anticorruption norms enshrined in law during the 20th century.

The framing device for the story is the prosecution of my old client, Larry Householder here in Ohio. Householder, as those who followed the story know, rammed through a massively expensive taxpayer bailout of a nuclear plant owned by the company First Energy in exchange for massive contributions to a dark money entity he controlled. He used that money to consolidate political power and take the House Speakership.

Given the precedents created by the Roberts Court, the argument Householder and his lawyers are no doubt going to make on appeal is “yeah, I did a big favor for this company that paid millions to benefit me in exchange, but that money didn’t go directly into my pocket, I just used it to gain political power, so it’s totally fine.” That is something anyone, prior to 2014 or so would consider to be laugh-out-loud funny. I mean, it’s a classically corrupt quid pro quo. But based on the previous rulings of the Roberts Court, there’s a non-trivial chance that Householder will be let off the hook because, hey, this was just about “ingratiation and access” and that’s basically free speech. Never mind that First Energy also straight-up bribed other public officials with cash in their pockets and absolutely would’ve done so for Householder if he preferred that to the dark money payoffs.

I’d like to think that we do not live in a country in which depositing one’s bribe money into one sort of bank account is legal and depositing their bribe money into another sort of bank account is not, but I’m pretty sure that’s the sort of country we live in. All of which amounts to just another datapoint supporting my broader thesis that we are living in the waning, corrupt days of the falling American Empire. It’s just that not too many people have noticed it yet.

Stolen Valor

One more thing from that New York Times corruption story, emphasis supplied:

Around a bend in the Scioto River, a little under a mile from the Ohio Statehouse, the F.B.I.’s Columbus office inhabits an unremarkable brick midrise. There, in 2018, agents on the public-corruption squad watched Householder’s return to politics warily. The feds had investigated him once before. After Householder became speaker the first time, agents in Columbus learned of allegations that he and his aides were running pay-to-play schemes out of the speaker’s office — kickbacks from campaign vendors, bribes in the form of political contributions. The agents had little experience in public-corruption cases, and nothing came of the investigation. The experience was a catalyst, soon after, for the formation of a squad dedicated to rooting out public corruption. This time they would be ready.

This is stolen valor. Nowhere is it mentioned that the deft legal defense of Craig A. Calcaterra Esq. is what allowed Larry to skate back in the mid-2000s. I mean, sure, I did privately question what the hell those agents thought they were doing at the time because I was certain an indictment was gonna come at some point even if it didn’t. But I’ve just chosen to assume that their seeming ineptness was a function of my powerful presence and unmatched legal acumen intimidating them as opposed to their inexperience.

[Editor: ]

What?

[Editor: ]

Shut up.

Alfalfa’s Brother

Yesterday morning, in the 5-10 minutes after I sat down on the couch with my coffee but before I was fully alert, I found myself on the Wikipedia page for Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer from the old “Our Gang”/”Little Rascals” shorts. As I sit here right now I could not tell you why I was on his page even if you held a gun to my head but there I was.

Everyone knows that poor old Alfalfa was shot in killed in 1959, when he was only 32 years old. But a thing I did not know was that his older brother Harold (a) was also in several “Our Gang” films as well, usually as a background player, with the character name “Slim”; and (b) In 1967 Harold Switzer FREAKIN’ MURDERED A GUY and then took his own life right afterward. Harold was in the laundromat business at the time and a dispute with one of his business partners had escalated into violence.

There’s no real point to this other than the fact that learning that the murdered Alfalfa’s brother himself murdered a guy jolted me awake yesterday morning and I wanted someone else to know about it.

Have a great weekend everyone.

Make a Comment