Goat detained over armed robbery Reuters
Whale pod stuck on sandbar dying BBC
Our world may be a giant hologram New Scientist (hat tip reader Bill)
Price Watergate Independent Accountant. On Satyam. “I find PWC’s being unaware of this fraud inconceivable.” He has company in his view: Price Waterhouse Auditors Arrested in Satyam Inquiry Bloomberg
Icelandic government becomes first to be brought down by the credit crunch Daily Mail (hat tip reader Vijay)
California, Golden State of constant crisis LA Times (hat tip reader Ilja)
Did Merrill’s Trading Desk Blow Up in Q4? Felix Salmon. That thought occurred to me too, but good for Salmon to have written it up.
Obama’s team turn to EU bank for inspiration Independent
Textron: First Circuit Comes to the Wrong Conclusion, with some weak reasoning, on Work Product Privilege ataxingmatter
Bad Times Spur a Flight to Jobs Viewed as Safe New York Times
Six Errors on the Path to the Financial Crisis Alan Blinder, New York Times
Antidote du jour:
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The icelandic government is actually the second to be brought down by the credit crisis. The Belgian government, which was already paralysed by other infighting, was the first, just before Xmas 2008. This happened when the prime minister was caught trying to influence a judiciary ruling concerning the nationalisation and resale of Fortis to BNP Paribas.
“Did Merrill’s Trading Desk Blow Up in Q4? Felix Salmon. That thought occurred to me too, but good for Salmon to have written it up.”
It is possible, in q4, some people lost money going long corporates or munis or bank loans and short treasuries.
YS:
I read the Taxing Matter post on work product privilege. My understanding of the law is the same as her’s. The appeals court got this wrong.
RE: New Scientist article – We all live in a giant hologram …
“The Beatles” were close.
A goat you say is being detained for armed robbery, that the goat being held used to be a person doing the robbery.
If only we could turn all the thieving, fraudulent, financial executives, fed and treasury officials into goats and detain them to be a spectacle for the public to gawk at. I would feel much better!
“Our world may be a giant hologram”
No wonder everybody seems so 2 dimensional.
shhhh…
them dogs is sleeping
Yves,
Its a symptom of economists’ current malaise that Alan Blinder could not bring himself to incorporate the words “Alan Greenspan” in his editorial.
Kind of like writing an article on the causes of a fire — bad construction, late firefighter response, etc. — without mentioning the arsonist.
I’m not sure we couldn’t say that the Republican administration in the US wasn’t brought down by the credit crisis. Before this is over almost all of the administrations in the industrialized world will have changes in party government. The real question is which nations will effectively collapse and what will the collapse look like. It seems likely that Iceland will effectively disappear as emigration reduces the population to several thousand. Great Britain will dissolve with Scotland and Wales gaining full independence and the population of the island reduced by tens of millions through emigration and euthanasia. Canada? A lot depends on what happens with the United States. It is certainly not far fetched to see Quebec achieving independence. Ontario and the Atlantic provinces joining with the Great Lakes states, New York and New England to form a Commonwealth of Northeastern America. It certainly seems probable that California will have to secede in order to run its own monetary policy. Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, New Mexico might band together in an energy producing nation. As the President has said: “There will be change“. And it will occur with the fierce urgency of now! Or as the Lennonists might put it: “Imagine there’s no country. It’s easy if you try.”
It is characteristic of Alan Blinder that he would not mention leaving interest rates at 1% from 2003 through 2004 as a cause of the financial crisis. Come the revolution ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01fj9Niso_g ) Prof. Blinder will have to be sentenced to a re-education camp. He has left a record of conviction.
If we all live in a hologram projection, then how do we get sick through communicable diseases such as the common cold?
Alert the CDC! Perhaps the viruses they are combatting are actually somewhere on the edge of the universe…
The hologram post was very illuminating and fit a discussion about I was having with a friend about our souls this morning.
one soul = light, 2nd soul = prism that refracts or bends the light…
1 (two-dimensional)soul + 2nd soul makes possible three dimensional expression….
What is sounds like they are getting at here, in terms of generalizing to our discussion is that your soul can be completely encoded in a two-dimensional realm/horizon or 2D hologram. The hologram/prism encodes your soul’s third dimensional image, and that the prisms allow the release of your soul into a three-dimensional world. And once released, the beauty of your soul, God’s creation, an image of his own divinity, can never be lost.
…Or something to that effect. J
Okay, back to the rest of our lives now….
a very interesting piece by Brad Setser on who is buying Treasuries:
The US placed about $1.3 trillion of Treasuries with non-Chinese investors in 2008
http://blogs.cfr.org/setser/2009/01/24/the-us-placed-about-13-trillion-of-treasuries-with-non-chinese-investors-in-2008/
U.K.’s Myners Tells Times Bank System Nearly Failed on Oct. 10
By Nicholas Larkin
Jan. 24 (Bloomberg) — The U.K. banking system was within three hours of collapse on Oct. 10, days before the government announced a bailout for banks, City Minister Paul Myners told the Times newspaper in an interview.
Major depositors tried to withdraw from a number of large banks, and were willing to pay penalties for early withdrawal, the newspaper cited Myners as saying.
Myners, who joined the government in October to help rescue the banking system, said he preferred that the U.K. keep strong, independent commercial banks, though he wouldn’t rule out nationalization.
Banks have been mismanaged and too many top bankers are grossly over-rewarded and have no sense of the society around them, Myners also told the paper.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601102&sid=a71Sbc4bvDmk&refer=uk
Anon 2:44 – Indeed the viruses ( viri ?) are part of holographic realty as well.
John Bougearel 3:32 – Your tie in is rather intriguing. Mathematical physicists John Barrow and John Polkinghorne ( both recipients of the John Templeton Prize for Religion ) have speculated on the metaphysical aspects of the recent direction of physics.
It is unimaginable that PWC missed the fraud at Satyam. The purported faking of books was so elementary, not to mention that the founder siphoned off cash, that even incompetence fails as an explanation. I suspect that the PWC auditors were India-based, and that Satyam bribed them. Regrettably for PWC, they just died in the implosion though the don’t quite realize this yet.
The article on space-time as a holographic projection is quite interesting; the theorist involved, Craig Hogan, just won himself a Nobel, that’s for sure.
. . . Yet I suspect that the formulation of the article on this issue has it backward: we are not a holographic projection of an information map at the ‘outer periphery’ of the space-time continuum. Rather, I suspect that we are the low-dimensional collapse of a high-dimensional ‘inner space.’ That concept does not clash with the findings in the article, but puts them into a different relationship. Hmmm.
Understand, I have no background in physics. I came up with an idea some years ago reading advanced physics on space-time exactly because I was interested from the philosophical perspective in understanding what it is that ‘time’ is. So I made a little model, a shiny toy, really. A child’s toy as far as physics is concerned. But I will be interested if results over the next generation support the schema represented by this little toy or not.
BTW the holographic concept of the continuum was co-developed by Gerard ‘t Hooft. He is a really brilliant man and physicist, and has a website with some interesting stuff, should anyone have a hankering to go idea-shopping thence.
Richard Kline: I'm somewhat familiar with Professor t'Hooft & will check his site. RE: What is time ? Physics has proceeded fruitfully following the notions of unifcation – mass equivalent to energy; space-time. One conjectures on notions of equating time and energy or time and mass. Permit me to also suggest Julian Barbour ( also has a website ) who suggests that time is merely an artifact of our perception of the universe.
Keenan,
Thanks for the feedback re: Mathematical physicists John Barrow and John Polkinghorne ( both recipients of the John Templeton Prize for Religion ) have speculated on the metaphysical aspects of the recent direction of physics.
Perhaps I am not so whack after all! :-)
But more germane to the metaphysical aspect was an email conversation about my relationship with a friend where I = the prism and she = the light….
Folks like me you have been meeting of late are more like prisms of your soul. The light in you refracts through others to create a rainbow. None of that would be possible without the light shining in your own soul. We are mere instruments for you to see the colors of your own soul
The prism needs the light to function. For beauty to be manifest and visible in this world at all, we need the cooperation of the prism and the light. Darwinian’s incomplete concept of nature as “survival of the fittest” has no relevance where beauty is found.
…To an extent, I could have been talking about anyone whose inner soul is a beacon of light. I might even have been talking about Yves here…but I wasn’t :-)
john at 3:43
The prism needs the light to function. For beauty to be manifest and visible in this world at all, we need the cooperation of the prism and the light. Darwinian’s incomplete concept of nature as “survival of the fittest” has no relevance where beauty is found.
John, I suspect you are a poet at heart. In the midst of crumbling institutions of finance and decaying structures of “wealth”, your metaphor conveys the essence of that which is most worthy in our human nature. Thank you for that uplifting message. I hope that your e mail correspondent, she of the “light”, similarly appreciates the prismatic interplay.
@john 3:43,
Just would like to inform everyone that the author to the phrase “survival of the fittest” was a Victorian era philosopher Herbert Spencer and not Darwin. You would have to read his works to understan its inference.
Skippy
Thanks Keenan,
Thanks Skippy,
checking out Herbert Spencer now