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Links 5/18/11

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Scientists Cast Doubt on TSA Tests of Full-Body Scanners Common Dreams

Journalist held over article on Facebook hacking Brisbane Times

Ben Stein Watch, DSK edition Felix Salmon

In Japan Reactor Failings, Danger Signs for the U.S. New York Times

Fresh Tales of Chaos Emerge From Early in Nuclear Crisis Wall Street Journal

IMF warns EU debt crisis may still spread to core Reuters

Juncker is confusing everybody with his loose talk on “reprofiling” Eurointelligence

The eurozone after Strauss-Kahn Martin Wolf, Financial Times

They’re onto us MacroBusiness. All four big Australian banks were downgraded.

Emerging Markets Might Name Strauss-Kahn Heir Simon Johnson, Bloomberg

F for Fail Menzie Chinn, Econbrowser (hat tip reader Thomas R)

Consumers Come to Terms with Frugality Credit Writedowns

Signs show strategic default on the decline Housing Wire

Lowenstein Lets Wall Street Off the Hook Columbia Journalism Review (hat tip Richard Smith)

Activists Cross Moat to Storm JPMorgan Chase Shareholders Meeting Dave Dayen, FireDogLake

Maiden Lane puts pressure on MBS market Housing Wire

Fed seeks annual US bank stress tests Financial Times

Putting “trust” back in American housing finance Chris Whalen, Reuters

Still too many latent triggers of next crisis John Plender, Financial Times

Antidote du jour (hat tip Richard Smith)

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31 comments

  1. dearieme

    It’s easy to dislike the American “perp walk” of people not yet tried – but if that’s the habit, he should suffer it too.

    What I really loathe is the triumphalist predictions re any
    male on trial that if he’s convicted and jailed he’ll spend his time in jail being raped by violent black men. Put aside the racism – if your American sentencing is too light, hang and flog some of the bastards. But do punishment properly, judicially, not by crime in jail.

    1. Valissa

      What? You don’t believe the police’s theory of how he did himself in?

      I don’t either. If this was an episode of either CSI or Criminal Minds it would be more realisitc. CSI most likely would have a murderer disguising their financial motivation with religious imagery, while Criminal Minds would supply a juicy serial killer storyline.

      1. Philip Pilkington

        *Whispers* It was Dominique Strauss-Kahn! He’s a Satan-worshiper and he nailed this guy up good. It’s a conspiracy by an evil elite that are against Strauss-Kahn’s admirable mix of liberalism, social democracy and devil worship. Spread the word… *Whisper*

  3. DownSouth

    Re: “IMF warns EU debt crisis may still spread to core” Reuters

    The article begs the question: ‘Is there no end to extend and pretend?’ When the only solution offered to relieve excessive debt is piling on even more debt, one has to wonder when this house of cards will finally come tumbling down.

    And here we see neoliberalism come face to face with its archenemy, democracy. One will have to give. It’s either rule by multinational corporations, or rule by a democratic majority. Since neoliberalism is never imposed except by violence, it will be interesting to see how this all ends. Will a bloodbath be unleashed on the periphery countries, as is now being done to Mexico, in the defense of neoliberalism? Or will a democratic community emerge with enough virtue and honesty so that it can withstand the onslaught of the dictatorship of corporations?

    1. Doug Terpstra

      On “the only solution offered to relieve excessive debt is piling on even more debt,” here’s FDR:

      “Primarily this is because rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and have abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men. True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence….The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.”

      And some of us were foolish and gullible enough to see FDR in Obama. (Cue the sickening thud of forehead hitting block wall forcefully and repeatedly).

      1. Hugh

        The appeal to confidence, which FDR points out, is interesting. Obama’s economics team of Rubin, Summers, and Geithner have always tried to sell the notion that the primary problem in the financial sector is not systemic fraud and criminality but confidence.

        1. Valissa

          This book was all the rage with the WH gang a couple of years ago… because psy-ops is always easier than real work.

          Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism, by George A. Akerlof & Robert J. Shiller

  4. Valissa

    re: Simon Johnson article

    “Presumably any contender, at least for now, would need to placate the Europeans with a promise to continue generous bailouts for a while.”

    That line goes so well with this headline…

    Geithner: No ‘Magical Thinking’ to Fix Deficit http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-18/geithner-says-u-s-can-t-use-magical-thinking-to-tackle-budget-deficit.html

    I can imagine a thought balloon alongside Geithners statement something like… ‘magical thinking got us into this mess and I haven’t figured out how it can get us out yet, but I’m working on it.’

    The Martin Wolf article was basically uninteresting and a rehash of old points. Bummer to waste one of my count of free articles for the month on something that lame.

    Both the euro and US so-called financial elites seem lamer and lamer by the week and they all see to have a bad case of MT (magical thinking). I vote no-confidence in them all and look forward to the next market crash.

    1. mangy cat

      compromise solution to bridge european vs emerging country for next imf dg: turkish economy minister?
      guess not with greece so top of mind

  6. Waffenembargo gegen den Mann

    ”
    TSA won’t make the scanners available for independent testing by outside scientists.

    The machines, which are designed to
    ”

    All-s you need is a dressing room like the ones in department store. Person takes off everything. Cameras photo full-frontal everything. OCR-software analyses everything in sight. Hey! If OCR, Optical Character Recognition can read in 9 separate languages, you can bet that it can be hacked to read in 9 different-weapon-scan. It’s a piece of cake. During scan hunan personnel can rifle through the clothing for anything of value. For anything to laugh at.

    Gopher it
    !

  8. Susan Truxes

    Good article by Chris Whalen (Putting Trust back in American Housing Finance). We seem to be getting closer to answers. California Supreme Court is coming down on classic legal lines (article May 12). And funny aside in the article about Juncker confusing everybody on Greece’s debt restructuring in the Bild Zeitung. Apparantly Greece can’t fund-raise by privatizing real estate because “there is no coherent register so that in many cases it is unclear who the owner of a piece of land really is.” I wonder, if the Greek banking authorities buy and sell mortgages without clear title, maybe we could use Greece as our model! Somebody quick tell the NYFRB.

  9. kevinearick

    France is in a wee bit “O” trouble and Germany is not far behind.

    The Re-Shuffle

    You know you have reached the peak of the consumption half-cycle when the truth is ruled verbal abuse subject to imprisonment, and the bred sexists are throwing each other under the bus (IMF), because they can’t change their behavior in real time and they have no other out.

    The chauvinists are all out, the feminists are all in, and this is where the witch trials begin, war is initiated, and the polarity of Family Law is swapped during the ensuing melee. Anyone left in the big cities or isolated towns dependent on distribution are idiots, want to go down with the ship, or both. In any case, they should not be expecting assistance.

    The velvet glove has mapped out all the migration pinch points and placed them “under construction,” and the false military is already ramping up for when that glove comes off. At this point, if you have any functioning brain cells, you should have your choice of homes to occupy. Think about you basic needs – energy, soil, and clean water.

    This is the empire’s last gasp for breath. Watch Saudi Arabia on the downhill slide and false durable goods orders for QEIII. In the investment half-cycle, fundamentals predominate. In the consumption half-cycle, misdirection prevails. Your misdirection algorithm doesn’t care which way prices are going; it only cares about relative change, plus or minus. Your algorithm is going to put its “invisible hand” on the empire’s head and push it under for the last time. You beat the casino by betting on misdirection to occur.

    There is nothing nastier than a grandma, except a grandpa that encourages you to apply at McDonalds. The limousine liberals are much nastier than the conservatives ever thought of being. I kept our girl away from the other black holes for 6 weeks so she could get a re-start and what do you suppose she did? Went back to a small town, dependent on distribution, and controlled by her fellow feminists, which threw her under the bus in the first place. Surprise, surprise, like bugs to a light (oncoming train).

    The deck is about to be re-shuffled. You want to be ready for that first deal, which will be the only “fair” one relative to instantaneous time, at that moment when there is 0 volts in the neutral line. Manage that moment; compounding will do the rest for you. At some point soon, one of those replacements is going to blow up the wrong/right component on the global IC chip, start a chain reaction, and it’s going to be all over, except the wailing and gnashing of teeth.

    Under Caesar, and there is always a Caesar under development, possession is 9/10s of the law. The other 1/10 is relative. Gotta love quantum physics; it’s like death and taxes.

      1. kevinearick

        That’s what they said when I told them to plant tobacco and pot out back and forget about paying the mortgage, three years ago … and look what happened.

  10. Valissa

    OMG… talk about an unconscious desire for self-destruction, thanatos… a text-book example…

    London School of Economics psychologist: Black women are less attractive than whites and asians http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/8521854/London-School-of-Economics-psychologist-Black-women-are-less-attractive-than-whites-and-asians.html

    Not surprisingly, according to another article:

    London students condemned the academic today and called for him to be fired. University of London Union senate members passed an emergency motion this afternoon demanding his dismissal.

    http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23951328-black-women-less-attractive-storm-at-lse.do

    1. MyLessThanPrimeBeef

      It may have something to do with aesthetic imperialsm – a rich man’s wife is always prettier and a rich woman’s consort is always more handsome.

      At its height, Roman matrons and patrons were highly sought after by the barbarians.

      It’s the same with any empire. The barbarian will say it’s love, but he or she has been aesthetically brain washed.

      If I have to guess, I would say, look for more movies, sexy symbols and idols from China in the future. ‘Oh, Attila, you are so, so…attractive.’

      1. Martin Finnucane

        The emperor’s sister would be a handsome catch:

        However, Valentinian’s sister Justa Grata Honoria, in order to escape her forced betrothal to a Roman senator, had sent Attila [as in, ‘the Hun’] a plea for help—-and her engagement ring—-in the spring of 450. Attila, not unreasonably, interpreted her message as a proposal of marriage. He accepted, asking for half of the western Empire as dowry. When Valentinian discovered the plan, only the influence of his mother, Galla Placidia, convinced him to exile Honoria rather than killing her. He also wrote to Attila strenuously denying the legitimacy of the supposed marriage proposal. Attila, not convinced, sent an embassy to Ravenna to proclaim that Honoria was innocent, that the proposal had been legitimate, and that he would come to claim what was rightfully his.

        http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Attila_the_Hun

  11. Valissa

    Smoke and Fire: Why France Was Silent About Strauss-Kahn’s Womanizing http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2072209,00.html#ixzz1MjS7wAcq

    The official, Anne Mansouret, repeated the allegations made by her daughter Tristane Banon during a 2007 TV program about how a well-known politician [Strauss-Kahn’s name was bleeped out] tried to overpower her with a sexual embrace. What took so long for Mansouret to back up her daughter and name Strauss-Kahn? She told French TV that she had dissuaded her daughter from filing charges because Strauss-Kahn was en route to greatness — and derailing the ascent of a fellow Socialist Party official would be bad form. She also said that because Strauss-Kahn’s second wife was Banon’s godmother, blowing the whistle on the alleged attacker would create rifts within Mansouret’s circle of family, friends and intimates.

    A Paris attorney who specializes in defending victims of sexual violence, who didn’t want to be named, says he has “an entire pile of complaints” from women who say they were attacked by Strauss-Kahn. Like Pierrat, he says last weekend’s news evoked déjà vu. And like Pierrat, he says he has a consistency of accusations against Strauss-Kahn. “It’s all so similar,” he says. “The lock thrown on the door, the pulled or ripped undergarments, the physical force that turned violent as resistance mounted, all of it.

  12. Philip Pilkington

    Anyone see Cantor say that he’s gonna block Dodd-Frank for oil speculators? And here’s me thinking I might finally be able to fill my tank for once…

    http://bit.ly/kmVthr

    1. Francois T

      Cantor is this kind of supremely arrogant Washingtonite who truly believe that he can get away with anything, because that is the way it is and that’s that.

      It is good to bear in mind that this is the same guy who promise Nethanyahu he would run interference against Obama if the President was not sufficiently “in line” with the diktats of the AIPAC faction in DC.

      When you stop to think about it, what we have here is basically a US Senator telling a foreign political leader that he will his help government to the detriment of his own country.

      How arrogant (I was about to write “treasonous”) is that?

  13. Philip Pilkington

    Oh yeah, and I came across this a while ago. The ECB monetary policy game — woooo!

    You’d better make sure that you don’t favour fiscal over monetary policy, though — otherwise you’ll find yourself consistently exploding the Eurozone. But hey, you can’t be doing much worse than the current EuroLeaders, can you?

    (Disclaimer: Music may be worse than the Eurovision)

    http://www.ecb.int/ecb/educational/html/index.en.html

  15. Francois T

    Re: Still too many latent triggers of next crisis

    This article begs the question: Is there ANY other way out of this mess than another big bad crisis that would, this time, mobilize many more people to force the political elites to do what ought to be done instead of what they did to protect their steaks and their cursed donors?

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