Willem Buiter, an eminent economist, has been the victim, so it seems, of a stalker.

Heleen Mees, once on the short list for Secretary of Finance, has been charged, and now jailed, for harassing Mr. Buiter and his family, in the aftermath of an affair between the two.

At first reading, it seems to be a “Fatal Attraction” situation.

You remember the movie?

Attractive, talented, overly intense mid-life career woman has a brief affair with a married man.

Once the hormones have run their course, married man (the palpably lecherous Michael Douglas) wants to move on.

But horny, opera-loving mistress (Glenn Close) wants “happily ever after.”

Love deteriorates swiftly into obsession (her) and revulsion (him).  The obsessed lover turns into a stalker prone to hanging out on her victim’s lawn who, ultimately, cooks his kid’s pet rabbit.

[The term “bunny boiler” has since entered the lexicon as a hip signifier of (a tad too) crazy love.]

The movie managed to appeal to both piety and prurience by mixing a morality fable (see what happens when you cheat on mommy? – frown) with x-rated scenes in elevators (see what happens when you cheat on mommy!! – smile) .

So is Willem Buiter just suffering the aftermath of “crazy love”?

Or is something more going on?

On this blog, I’ve said I think about 85% of everything going on in the major media in the West (and thus all over the globe) is related to intelligence. Most of it is a psyop or propaganda/ disinformation of some kind.  The rest is commercial pumping or gossip intended to overpower more significant news.

How does the Buiter story rate?

Well, it sets off all of my BS-detectors. Here’s why:

1. Buiter is not just any “eminent” economist. He’s the chief economist of mega bank, Citigroup, the home of former Goldman Sachs honcho and Treasury Sec, Robert Rubin.

Buiter has also chaired the World Economic Forum and been a member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee. He was also the chief economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

It doesn’t get more “elite” or connected than that.

Buiter has also been a professor at the London School of Economics, at Princeton, and at Yale. He’s written books. He’s voiced his opinions at a Financial Times blog and in articles in the major media.

Given that high profile, you’d think he’d take care of his private life a bit more.

2. Buiter is not just extraordinarily highly placed, he’s also been a vocal critic of the loose monetary polices of the Fed, more specifically, of Sir Alan Greenspan. Here’s a sample:

The Greenspan Fed: A Tragedy of Errors (April 8, 2008):

“………

1. The Greenspan Fed (August 1987 – January 2006) did indeed contribute, through excessively lax monetary policy, to the US housing boom that has now turned to bust

2.The Greenspan-Bernanke put is real. It is an example of an inappropriate monetary policy response to a stock market decline……….

3. Nonetheless, Buiter was no anarcho-capitalist, keen on defending finance capital even in its criminal  manifestations. He was smart enough to see through this brand of market fundamentalism as a ploy whereby finance capital seizes power.

In his now defunct blog at the Financial Times, Maverecon, he has a piece about Greenspan in which he attacks Greenspan’s “naive” belief that capital markets are self-regulating.

Notice, however,  that Buiter apportions only a part of the blame to interest-rate manipulation.

Instead of seeing opportunism and very likely malicious intent in what Greenspan did (it’s considered anti-Semitic conspiracy theory to even suggest malice in the Fed Chairman), he also palms off Greenspan’s misdeeds onto his (Greenspan’s) view of capital markets, ostensibly a “libertarian” view.

Actually, the idea that Greenspan was a  “libertarian” at any time in in his political life (as opposed to his youth) is so much disinformation put out by the mainstream press. As Ayn Rand immediately recognized, Greenspan, after his Objectivist phase, was nothing more or less than a careerist, more interested in power than in principle of any kind.

Despite this error, a large part of  Buiter’s analysis focuses – correctly, in my opinion – on “too big to fail” institutions and the problem of “regulatory capture.”

The latter term has been popularized by regulator William Black, as well as by Deep Capture blog, which supports Black’s approach strongly.

I’ll repeat once more that I support Black’s (and Deep Capture’s) work on regulatory capture and think Austrians do themselves a disservice by dismissing that analysis. Regulatory capture is much more than just froth floating on top of the ocean of interest rate manipulation.

So my point is not to denigrate Buiter’s work, but to say that in effect it constructed a via media between the Austrian critique and mainstream economics, making it very effective.

Yet, though he was mainstream enough to be given a visible platform in the major media,  Buiter spoke truth to power as he saw it. He launched a sustained attack on elite financiers and bankers.

He called them out even by name (links to follow).

In April 2008, he and his wife Anne Sibert, herself an eminent economist at Birbeck College, London, wrote a paper about the Icelandic banking crisis that was presented in July to the government of Iceland. It was considered too market sensitive to be presented publicly and was  kept under wraps until August (W. Buiter, A. Sibert, The Icelandic banking crisis and what to do about it, CEPR Policy Insight No. 26).

Buiter wrote about it in a post called “All in the Family” on his Maverecon blog in March 2009:

“My wife, Anne Sibert, has just been appointed an external member of the provisional Monetary Policy Committee of the Central Bank of Iceland (CBI).  The five-member provisional MPC has three executive or internal members:  CBI Governor Svein Harald Øygard, Deputy Governor Arnór Sighvatsson and Þórarinn G. Pétursson, the CBI´s Chief Economist, and two external experts, Anne Sibert and  Gylfi Zoëga. This Monetary Policy Committee will operate on a provisional basis, with formal appointments for the next five years likely to be made following national elections in Iceland in April.

Iceland’s largest three internationally active banks collapsed during the autumn of 2008; its currency collapsed and tight capital and foreign exchange controls are now in place.  That this was the likely outcome of Iceland’s unsustainable credit boom and banking sector over-expansion had been predicted in a paper by Anne Sibert and myself, written in April 2008 (for fruit flies, a shorter version can be found here).”

Now for my theory of an elite take-down:

It was later that same year,  in the summer of 2008, that a pulchritudinous, multi-lingual ultra-feminist lawyer and doctoral economics student, Heleen Mees, approached the eminent economist for help with her dissertation (I’m not sure in what capacity).

Ms. Mees would have been 39 then. Buiter would have been 58. That is not unheard of, certainly, but are ultra feminist theoreticians prone to taking up with men twenty years older than they are, who are, moreover, married with children? I don’t know. Perhaps they are.

But there is not only a large age gap, there is an ideological gap. Mr. Buiter is a liberal.

Ms. Mees seems to be a radical, who wants quotas for women mandated by the state. She has argued that 35% of top jobs should be set aside for women. She has attacked women who stay at home and do not take up independent careers:

“Women’s contribution to the Dutch economy is around 27%. A raw estimate shows that if women would work a bit more outside the home and thus increase their contribution to the Dutch economy to, say, 35%, this would generate an additional 11% in GDP growth, some €60 billion per year. Women would still be working only half as much as men outside the home. With the extra money women would generate, the government could take care of the aging population and still have billions to spend on education and childcare.” (The Cost of the Gender Gap)

Note: Finance capital is a major supporter of gender set-asides in the work-place.

Radical feminist lawyers I’m sure have jumped into bed with men of differing ideology, but let’s add it to the oddities in this case.

So not only does Ms. Mees approach Mr. Buiter, a prominent and very married man 20 years older than she is, to help her, she boldly dedicates her thesis to him (“For Willem – May You Live in Interesting Times”), even though a lawyer, even a feminist lawyer, would know that her own credibility might suffer if her professional achievements were intertwined with her sexuality.

“Women on Top” – the female empowerment group she founded – was surely not intended to represent the sexual modus operandi of women who reach the top.

Now take a look at Ms. Mees’ thesis, “Changing Fortunes: How China’s Boom Caused the Financial Crisis,” published last year, 2012.

It is an argument that the financial crisis was the result of a savings glut caused by the Chinese.

But when I read an article from 2011, Ms. Mees is definitely blaming loose monetary policy for the financial crisis,

In fact, at least in that article, Ms. Mees blames the financial crisis solely on monetary policy, and dismisses entirely any narrative about the misuse/criminal use of financial instruments and the misbehavior of the rating agencies.

In other words, Ms. Mees, remarkably, for someone of her gender feminist proclivities, seems to be blaming the government solely for the financial crisis and dismissing any criticism of bankers, financiers, and regulatory bodies.

A pure Austrian position from a statist.

Now isn’t that interesting? Whereas Mr. Buiter blames and attacks major financiers and bankers (including Mr. Paulson), in addition to interest rate manipulation, Ms. Mees does not.

She dismisses regulatory capture.

That, as I’ve blogged before, is a hall-mark of the financial establishment, some part of which embraces Austrian theory out of its own self-interest. Ms. Mees, you can be sure, is not blaming the Federal interest rate policy because of any hatred of government.

Even more interesting, Ms. Mees has contributed frequently to the Soros-funded Project Syndicate website…….

Returning to the love-affair, if such it was, we don’t know much so far about its history, but it seems that it was some time in 2010 that Ms. Mees began emailing Mr. Buiter in a harassing fashion.

That would be the year  Mr. Buiter left his bureaucratic posts and became the chief economist of Citigroup.

In 2011, the emailing escalated. From July of 2011, more than a thousand emails were sent to Mr. Buiter, including explicit self-portraits, erotic offers, and even subtle and overt threats to him. It seems that it was fear for his wife and kids, who also got emails, that finally pushed Mr. Buiter to go to the courts and get a restraining order.

One of the emails was a picture of dead birds. “Fatal Attraction” with an added overlay of “The Birds”?

Seems a little “stagey” to me.

And a thousand emails, some with naked women in them, would seem as if someone were trying to entrap Mr. Buiter? That is, if there ever was a “relationship” that was not set up by Ms. Mees in the first place.

Now another oddity: Didn’t Ms. Mees, an attorney and scholar who specialized in gender issues, know she was engaging in criminal behavior? Why didn’t she stop after Mr. Buiter sent her a cease and desist letter in February 2013?  She is, I repeat a 44 year old activist lawyer and PhD economics scholar/teacher at some of the world’s most prominent universities, a polyglot comfortable in 5 languages, including Mandarin, the published author of several influential books, an outspoken feminist, a fit attractive woman with a major media platform.

That is a life of self-discipline that is hard to reconcile with the complete loss of control shown in the emails.

And yet another strange aspect of this strange business is that Ms. Mees, a lawyer and NYU professor, doesn’t have $5000 for bail and needs a legal aid lawyer?

Even if she doesn’t have money herself, doesn’t she have friends and family who can spring for the money? She did move in rather well-educated professional circles.

But what if Ms. Mees wants to go to jail to get maximum mileage from the whole scandal?

That would also be psychologically in keeping with someone who wants to destroy an ex-lover.

But it is also what someone who wanted to get Mr. Buiter for other reasons might do. Keeps the story in the public gaze.

Another thought occurs to me.

If someone wanted to publicly diminish Mr. Buiter, provoking him into asking for a restraining order would make sense. It puts Mees’ raunchy emails into the public domain.

Forcing the situation into the legal realm also and more crucially makes Mr. Buiter’s own private emails a legitimate target for legal discovery.

If someone did “take down” Buiter in retaliation for his criticism of certain big names, there is precedence for it.

Remember what happened to Eliot Spitzer when he started getting too close to some of the financiers/bankers (Hank Greenberg, Hank Paulson) whose misdeeds shaped the financial crisis?

(To Be Continued)