Annie Lowery becomes the second person I’ve heard make the suggestion that we shouldn’t call the Somali pirates “pirates”

At one point, the pirates seemed a welcome distraction. Not so much any more — people are dying, Somalia is a failed state. Second, as others have suggested, we should stop calling them pirates and start calling them something like “maritime terrorists,” to end any remaining romanticization.

I don’t really understand the appeal of this suggestion. What the Somali pirates are doing—hijacking ships at sea through force and threats of force—is exactly what “pirate” and “piracy” have always referred to. “Terrorism” is a pretty different concept. If some Palestinians were to blow up an Israel-bound cruise ship, I would want to call those guys “maritime terrorists” which would denote an activity pretty different from simply robbing the cruise ship.

Insofar as people have overly romantic ideas about pirates, they ought to be disabused of those notions. I recommend Under the Black Flag as an interesting exploration of the fairly grubby reality of “classic” pirates along with the romance that nonetheless managed to attach itself to their exploits.

Lots of fun stuff on Wikipedia:

I had known that Eastern European and Scandinavia were high-suicide areas, but hadn’t realized that China and India were even higher.

Tyler Cowen says it’s hard to really think of a practical way to control the compensation of bank executives. And on one level, I’m sure it is. But lots of things are hard. And I don’t genuinely believe that the reason we allow these obscene levels of compensation is that the top people are putting time and effort into this problem but it turns out to be just too dang hard.

One thing to keep in mind is that norms and pure positional competition seem to play a large role here. European executives are well-paid, but not nearly as well-paid as American executives, and the main reason seems to be that that’s just how it is and there’s a path-dependence to it. So measures to curb socially destructive levels of compensation don’t necessarily need to be airtight to be effective. What would be needed would be some consistency of purpose from the top to try to shift the norms and incentives and so forth in steady ways over time and get you into a new equilibrium.

The last set of leaks to The New York Times had everyone in a cozy-but-nonsensical scenario whereby the Obama administration was going to say that everyone passed their stress test by the miracle of promising to bail out anyone who’s in trouble. But in today’s article conflict rules the day as “Showdown Seen Between Banks and Regulators”.

The key issues seem to be that bank CEOs now regard themselves as badly underpaid and thus want to talk a lot about giving the taxpayers our money back and thus being able to pay themselves higher salaries. Though as in all of these stories nobody seems to actually want to give the money back. But beyond that, I really don’t hear any financiers say that they’re so eager to stop making mere millions of dollars and go back to making tens of millions of dollars that they’re willing to give up the even more valuable set of government guarantees of their businesses that are keeping things afloat. Also the banks that have lost tons of money on investments continue to prefer not to acknowledge those losses. After all, it would be hard to justify continuing to pay an executive tens of millions of dollars for leadership that amounts to losing tons of money. As a business proposition, it makes much more sense to ignore the losses and instead of having adequate capital to cover your debt obligations, just keep relying on government guarantees all the while whining that the government is being too mean to you.

It’s worth understanding the value of these guarantees. Absent the guarantees, many banks would be going out of business immediately. We wouldn’t be hearing about how company x is profitable or company y needs TARP funds. We’d be hearing about bank runs because company x owes people much more money than it has.

It’s not surprising to learn that cities across the country are responding to recession-induced revenue shortfalls by raising all kinds of fees. It is, however, disappointing to see which fees are being raised. Economists have long argued that certain kinds of fees, such as congestion charges for accessing crowded roads at peak hours, or higher parking rates in scarce-parking areas, could do a lot to improve life in many American cities, towns, and suburbs. But status quo bias and political reluctance to embrace revenue-raisers has lager deterred politicians from seeking such fees. A dramatic financial crunch that makes painful measures absolutely necessary would seem to be the ideal time to impose some fees that, though people are initially skeptical, would ultimately prove broadly beneficial. Instead we’re getting stuff like this:

After her sport utility vehicle sideswiped a van in early February, Shirley Kimel was amazed at how quickly a handful of police officers and firefighters in Winter Haven, Fla., showed up. But a real shock came a week later, when a letter arrived from the city billing her $316 for the cost of responding to the accident.

It just doesn’t make sense to be looking to this sort of thing in the first instance when so many more appealing possible sources of revenue are still on the table.