MP’s wife guilty of stealing lover’s kitten Reuters (hat tip Buzz Potamkin). I hope the judge hits her with a huge fine that is partially refundable if she returns the kitten. But I bet she killed it. Someone nutty enough to pull that sort of stunt is probably plenty vengeful.
Remedy Is Elusive as Metallic Hips Fail at a Fast Rate New York Times. This is really horrifying.
Japan Finds Plutonium Far From Reactor Wall Street Journal
The Party Line – September 30, 2011: No Will, No Way: Nuclear Problems Persist, But US Fails to Seize Fukushima Moment Greg Levine, FireDogLake (hat tip reader Carol B)
How Long Does Your Wireless Carrier Retain Texts, Call Logs? PC Magazine
Poet’s corner: The battle for TS Eliot’s village Independent (hat tip Buzz Potamkin)
The Nuremberg Scripts Joe Nocera, New York Times
The due-process-free assassination of U.S. citizens is now reality Glenn Greenwald (hat tip reader barrisj)
Strikes hamper Greek rescue effort Financial Times
Rewarding C.E.O.’s Who Fail James B Stewart, New York Times
Investor Fear Over Morgan Stanley Sharpens New York Times. I was expecting to see blowback from the Eurocrisis to US banks…the markets and the economies are too intertwined for that not to happen. And like BofA, they barely squeaked through last time. This is the key part:
In another closely watched indicator of investor sentiment, the cost of buying protection against a default of Morgan Stanley bonds has soared. It now eclipses the cost of similar insurance on major French banks. Only a few weeks ago, the French banks came under heavy fire amid concerns that they were struggling to finance their operations.
Market nerves hit Morgan Stanley Financial Times
S.E.C. Faults Credit Raters, but Doesn’t Name Them New York Times. WTF? Rating agencies aren’t banks or brokerage firms, where there is a risk of a run if regulators publish certain types of derogatory information. Yet more proof of how the SEC is badly captured.
House Is Gone but Debt Lives On Wall Street Journal. This article is a smidge misleading. The banks want to scare people into paying their mortgages until they are bled white. So now we have an article on deficiency judgments. The part it neglects to mention is historically banks didn’t pursue borrowers who defaulted because the cost of going after them typically greatly exceeded what they might recover (you can’t get much money out of someone who is already broke). The exception? Defaults on second homes. Those have the highest odds of being strategic defaults. And lo and behold, the article focus on a default on a second home and has stats from his community (which is likely a vacation community). The other focus of the article is Florida, which is the #1 state in deficiency judgments (maybe due to a friendly bar?).I’m not saying homeowners should blow this issue off if they are considering defaulting, but you need to take articles like this with more than a pinch of salt.
New York Fed reveals Twist schedule Financial Times
BofA and JPMorgan sued over securities Financial Times
BAC to Charge $5 for Debit Card Use Fox. An anchor cuts up her card.
Markets Can Be Very, Very Wrong Paul Krugman (hat tip reader Scott)
Mark Ames: Koch, Hayek & “Ideas for Sale” Dylan Ratigan
Court case a reminder to Marines not to wear full uniforms during porn shoot McClatchy (hat tip Buzz Potamkin)
Antidote du jour:
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Comments are closed.
Thanks for the article about replacement hips. I guess as bad as mine may be I better keep it working if I can.
The Fukushima situation is only going to get worse. They are not being truthful with folk about where the core material that is no longer in containment is going……burning its way down through cracks and fissure in the earths crust where it is only a matter of time before it contaminates water supplies for a much larger region on its way to the center of our earth. They are also not being clear about the ongoing spewing of radioactive material into the upper atmosphere where it is being deposited all over the world…..in increasing amounts, with potentially no end in site.
I am still chuckling about the Marine doing porn article where the writer (tongue in cheek?) describes the multiple pages of “back story” about the sodomy porn case.
Yep. Problems with plutonium. Jesus.
As one of the commenters says here, http://ex-skf.blogspot.com/2011/09/ministry-of-education-maps-of-plutonium.html#comments:
It is revealing that they exclude the plutonium-241 isotope (half-life 14.29 yrs), as this decays into americium-241 which is commonly regarded as extremely dangerous in comparison even to plutonium.
That is, as Pu241 decays into Am241, the gamma radiation emitted increases significantly. This thing is just going to keep cooking and cooking. (“Decay” usually means “less”, but here, counterintuitively, “decay” means “more”, as in more, much more harmful gamma radiation.)
As for where the melted and exploded radioactive reactor cores are at, Unit 1 is spiking like crazy – and reached 512Sv/hr on September 30.
That’s right – 512Sv/hr in Unit 1 drywell – http://atmc.jp/plant/rad/?n=1
Bearing in mind that 6Sv exposure is considered lethal.
Catastrophe doesn’t even come close.
And notice that the focus is still on the reactors. God only knows what is happening in the Unit 1, 2, 3 & 4 spent fuel pools.
Notice, too, that the scale on chart has not been amended to take account of the higher Sv/hr reading.
Instead, the chart at http://atmc.jp/plant/rad/?n=1 plots “512Sv/hr” as “400Sv/hr”.
You could not make it up.
I usually don’t post anywhere but if anyone could provide me with a little education on the subject. On the Hayek and Koch article I seem to be missing something. If I remember Hayak correctly, volume two of his Law, Legislation and Liberty published in 1976, softly supported social nets. Although he does qualify that with the only time a govt. should step in when certain needs always result in concentrated market failures, he provided a few examples but the only one I remember was feeding needy children. Am I misunderstanding Hayek here or did he recant his views on later works?
As the article states, Hayek renounces his exceptions to private “free” market dominance of healthcare in the 1976 preface.
Regardless, whether Hayek “agreed” with the premise of social security and medicare, he allowed himself to be used as a tool by the Kochs to destroy same. All these libertarians are frauds — they act as if they don’t rely on society or other people while they use and abuse their workers, our roads, government handouts, the social contract itself which is what stops us from taking all their money away… oh yes, and police that protect them from the angry mob. But of course the one place libertarians just love government interference is in policing as even they fear the lawlessness they inflict on the markets if it were to infect public safety as well.
Libertarians are a bunch of crap-pants wanna-be tough guys. Pathetic, immature, childish fools that bury their heads in the sand and call it thought.
I read the article, but I thought the 1976 preference of The Road to Serfdom was referring to overly generous patterning and central govt. control of the economy, and not directly to a social safety net to provide services a market can not, a subject he followed up on later in the year in the second volume of Law, Legislation, and Liberty.
Secondly he never really hit me as a hard libertarian. Sure his ideas learn more to conservationism, but his stances on the minimum safety net were affirmative. However they were based more around the idea that they were a form of insurance from squalor/deprivation and he saw them as distinctively different from socialist states or tribal states as he called them. Again I really don’t know much about his personal life, really only what he wrote in Law Liberty and Legislation 1-3.
Yeah – I don’t recall – does he call for the dismantling of the Workmen’s Compensation programs, for those who suffer industrial accidents on the job, as such existed in Germany and Austria at the turn of the last century?
If not, why not?
I really don’t know. I remember coming across something about workers comp. programs, but I don’t remember enough to answer that question at all. And I think my questions would have been better in the other Hayek post, which I noticed after going through this one.
Yes, he did. I can’t find the references, but late in his career he scorched the conservatives.
You’ve got it completely backwards, the older Hayek was considerably to the right of the younger Hayek and repudiated many of his earlier positions. For instance, in 1960, in the Constitution of Liberty, in the chapter on “Social Security,” Hayek allows for a bare minimum social safety net only for those who absolutely cannot care for themselves (such as invalids, mentally-handicapped, those types); anything more, anything extended to those who could work and had a chance at making it, would inevitably lead to Stalinist tyranny, moral corruption, and shorter life spans for everyone. He moved even further right in the 1970s.
SS was peddled as social insurance back in the 30s, but quickly took shape as the type of program that Hayek predicted it would become. Hayek was for a social safety net of some sort, but he was not for a social safety California king sized mattress.
SS was peddled as social insurance back in the 30s, but quickly took shape as the type of program that Hayek predicted it would become. G.L.Piggy
Who cares? Government is the only 100% secure source of fiat since it can create it at will. Should retirement be based on less than 100% certainty? And how many private retirement funds have gone bust or been raided by management?
Hayek wasted his time attacking socialism when he should have attacked its root cause – fascism.
But Hayek was still in support of a minimum state in 1979. Or at least he was in his books.
We are talking about Social Security and Medicare, which Hayek per above was against for the overwhelming majority of the population. The idea of a minimum state is consistent with no social safety nets.
No, I don’t.
Regarding Fukushima, France’s Le Monde yesterday reported that the Japanese government has revealed that plutonium has been found in the soil far beyond the Daiichi plant – several places in a zone 80 km away from the plant, in fact (linked article is in French):
http://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2011/09/30/du-plutonium-retrouve-hors-de-l-enceinte-de-fukushima_1580759_3244.html
Remember that the evacuation zone is (only) 20 km; the government is considering easing the restrictions on even that:
http://news.businessweek.com/article.asp?documentKey=1376-LRV2SI07SXKX01-2MJET5Q9E7SQQHBBBKS77708B3
So the Le Monde report quotes the Japanese science minister as saying that these are very small amounts of plutonium, as in “move along, nothing to see here,” but it’s hard to accept that as a valid evaluation under the circumstances.
The numbers on radiation near the plant as of today:
http://www9.nhk.or.jp/kabun-blog/500/96429.html#more
Gee, I see lots of “ND’s , that is , “Not Detected”, measures.
You say that they are lieing about that? What evidence do you have of this, beyond your suspicions?
And I note that all three reactor cores are now at less than 100 degrees centigrade:
“The temperatures at the bottom of the reactor pressure vessels (RPVs) of the damaged Fukushima Daiichi units 1, 2 and 3 have all been recorded as being below 100°C for the first time since the accident triggered by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, according to Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco). ”
From :
http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/indtalk.aspx
From the same source, it appears that you are wrong about them “considering” the lifting of evac orders; in fact, they HAVE been so lifted and modified:
“The Japanese government has lifted an evacuation advisory for five municipalities located between 20 and 30 kilometres from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The advisory covers Hirono town, Naraha town, Kawauchi village, Tamura city and Minamisoma city, all within Fukushima prefecture.”
But maybe you have evidence that that is not as they say, either!
“And I note that all three reactor cores are now at less than 100 degrees centigrade”
because the molten fuel has melted into the bedrock below? None of us have any evidence; only varying degrees of hearsay.
From the Le Monde article cited :
“La teneur en plutonium détectée cette fois est considérée comme très faible”.
Yeah, faible.
One more thing of interest to those concerned about the health effects of exposure to low doses of such:
“University of Massachusetts Amherst environmental toxicologist Edward Calabrese, whose career research shows that low doses of some chemicals and radiation are benign or even helpful, says he has uncovered evidence that one of the fathers of radiation genetics, Nobel Prize winner Hermann Muller, KNOWINGLY LIED when he claimed in 1946 that there is no safe level of radiation exposure. ”
(emphasis added by aet)
From:
http://esciencenews.com/articles/2011/09/20/umass.researcher.points.suppression.evidence.radiation.effects.1946.nobel.laureate
Perhaps some are un-necessarily worried now, as a result of that deliberate falsehood.
Who are you working for aet? And how much are you paid to write this crap?
My problem is not refutation of fact, it is the TOTAL suppression of information and admittance that we are going through a China Syndrome event and as all that radioactive slag hits water it is back belching “lots” of radioactivity up into the air short range and all over the world.
We can’t address a problem that none admit exists….just like our global socio-economic train wreck.
IMO we should also try to keep OccupyWallStreet in our conversation, and do what we can to help.
Are they directionless? Most assuredly.
Do they add to awareness and conversation about our financial oligarchy? for sure!
I’ll be in NYC next weekend, and plan to stop by. You can also donate to them.
By their feeds, sounds like it’s cold and rainy out there. They can always use dry socks, umbrellas, chairs, and FOOD too.
You can donate on their website, and it’s tax deductible.
You can also order pizza or other food for them, such as the “Occu-pie”.
We should be part of the solution!
“You can donate on their website, and it’s tax deductible.”
Gotta link?
Fore sure!
https://occupywallst.org/
You can hit the “Donate” button and donate $$$, in tax deductible way… but it does reroute you to another website. (I think it’s legit)
Or you can do what I did: send food/blankets to their UPS box.
I just sent 20 blankets… and I feel better. It’s cold out there at night. (I’m not sure if you can officially deduct if you send stuff to them… but I’m doing it anyway).
From the webpage above:
Mail
The UPS Store
Re: Occupy Wall Street
118A Fulton St. #205
New York, NY 10038
Money orders only please, cannot cash checks yet. Non-perishable goods only. We can accept packages of any size. We’re currently low on food.
====
Gee thanks Sarge, I needed that!
Good for you! I’m gonna see about donating food. :)
You can follow them live via their own camera(s) link ( not an MSN video feed) plus Comment from around the world.
http://www.livestream.com/globalrevolution
As a two time cancer survivor, I was declared ineligible for all metal hips and got the tried and true Teflon jobs (Feel the lubricity!).
Good luck comes in strange ways…
Wool socks, time for a trip into Boston.
Just an update from Yves earlier campaign against Wisconsin gov Scott Walker…
It looks like the man in the oval office is taking a page out of Walker’s play book and asking federal workers to contribute more to retirement…
http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/house/182413-obama-plan-asks-federal-workers-to-contribute-more-to-retirement
Hmmm…. Wonder where Big O got that idea from? Of couse, Wisconsin state workers and teachers STILL have more collective bargaining power than all of the federal employees working under Obama, despite Obama’s grandstanding about Walker being unfair to the unions about 6 months ago.
It has become clear to me that if you want your pension to be there, you’ve got to extract it from the employer one day at a time. And the union. And whoever else wants to hold onto it.
re: Investor Fear Over Morgan Stanley Sharpens
From the article: Investors are now paying $449,000 a year to insure $10 million of Morgan Stanley bonds against a possible default in a sparsely traded market in what are called credit-default swaps.
So what is the state of CDS’s? I’ve some idea of the role they played in recent years, for example with GS and AIG, but has anything changed? They were insurance without the regulation, and were sold without regard to having sufficient reserves to pay off in case of major defaults. Is that still the case?
Take a guess…
The CDS serve as price discovery for bonds of similar maturity. CDS, via arbitrage, come pretty close to determining the cost at which a bond will be issues. The spreads getting high means no one wants to lend money to them And financial firms are money junkies.
Re: metal hip implant failure
All metal hips have been touted as the latest & greatest in replacement devices by some practicing doctors with deep ties to industry. Medical device manufacturers co-opt an orthopedist’s credentials & convert them into proselytizers. Industry appeals to practicing doctor’s outsize egos by recruiting them to join their in-house research team. Doctors on the research team get credit for helping to design new implant devices and are paid to travel the world and vouch for it to other doctors. Once part of industry’s in-crowd, how likely is that orthopedist to “hear” a patient’s complaints, admit the implant has design defects and re-replace a patient’s hip?
It’s amazing that the Times-Titanic can write a whole article about ‘metal’ hip replacements, without identifying what the metal is. Only in an earlier August article is it spelled out that the metal in question is an exotic alloy consisting of 28% chromium, 6% molybdenum and 65% cobalt.
Other metals are also used in prostheses: stainless steel (18% chromium, 2% molybdenum, 12% nickel, 68% iron) is one; titanium (as strong as steel, but with 60% of its weight) is another.
Do stainless steel and titanium prostheses also have problems, or only cobalt-chrome? If you’re upgrading your skeleton with engineered parts, best to find out more than an Old Grey Bag Lady muttering ‘plastic good, metal b-a-a-a-a-d-d-d-d-d!’ can tell you.
I wish I could ‘like’ comments.
due-process-free assasinations–kinda makes all this talk about death penalty cases moot.
The so called assassination that is now a reality is such a joke. More existential acid reflux in the order of what kind of a people are we now that we have crossed this horrible bright line, oh , the loss of innocence, of the loss of faith, oh oh!!! Except for the public assassinations
of labors leader and union organizers for almost 200 years, except for the killings of civil rights leaders from the African American community, the Native American community. Except for the state sponsored public executions of John and Bobby Kennedy, except for the state sponsored Medgar Evans and MLK assassinations. Except for the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa, except for the students at Kent and Jackson State killed by military firing squads, except for the 10’s of thousands more who are beaten senseless and killed off without much public notice, except for all of that going, who the fuck cares about some terrorist cell leader in a cave? Fuck him and all of this phony high minded states man ship. The entire Republic is being gang raped and tortured every night on the evening news, oh yea, and the Onion has crossed the line.
Thanks Paul for a well redirected perspective on the MSM highlighted killing of the day.
While you mentioned the sanctioned killings in the US there are also an unreported number of killings that happen all over the world on a daily basis in support of America’s Imperialism. Hopefully America’s empire will die quickly now that there seems to be some public awakening……lets hope and work hard to insure we don’t get more repression.
Don’t tell me you really can’t see the difference between the president claiming the right to assassinate American citizens far from any battlefield and without due process and the incidents you mention. They are all terrible events, but none of the ones you mention are publicly government sanctioned hits, and despite the terrorist acts you mention that may well have had some government support, they were certainly not publicly approved by anyone in government. Now, apparently, its ok for the president to unilaterally declare someone an enemy of the state and have them assassinated without due process. The constitution, specifically the 14th amendment (ya know the one that gave ex-slaves citizenship) specifically denies the government the right to do so. Obama has committed an irrevocable breach of the most sacred constitutional right — to be free from murder by our own government. So please stop minimizing what he has done.
Antidote: my wife wanted me to ask who cut off his horn?
Again, is there any evidence Apotheker failed as HP CEO? He was there under a year, and announced his strategic plan less than a month before he was fired.
Or did he instead fail as a politician, outmaneuvered by the better-connected Meg Whitman, who is on the HP board, pals with the CFO, and unemployed since her failed gubernatorial bid?
NC should be less concerned here about pay packages, and more concerned that HP, one of the biggest employers in the US, has dumped Apotheker, a lifelong liberal and former leftist protester in Europe, in favor of Whitman, who embodies California’s angry extreme right.
Discussing the details of Apotheker and Whitman misses the larger problem, the takeover of public corporations by a large cadre of ignorant and ruthless professional managers. They pretend that generic business knowledge is all that is required to run any company, and anyone or anything that contradicts this view is immediately expelled. They believe that the only real expertise is financial, that discussing technology interferes with properly running a company, and that they must be geniuses because they and everyone at their level makes a ton of money.
People who operate successfully in this environment are good at interpersonal relationships but have little or no empathy (or indeed have psychopathic or narcissistic personality disorders), are more clever than wise, are politically savvy within organizations, are completely detached from (or studiously ignorant of) the consequences of their decisions, and went to the right schools and/or know the right people. They surround themselves with sycophants and spend their lives being “important”.
Sadly, the people who would be excellent leaders are systematically excluded. Occasionally one or two manage to get through and actually run something big, but the rarity of this event provides the illusion that there aren’t many good leaders out there. The shortage, however, is not of good leaders but of the twisted creatures that thrive in the bizarre world of corporate executives.
The citizenry respects CEOs and corporate board members because they assume you can only get to those positions by being very talented. This is true, but the chief talent is being a clever pr**k who intentionally doesn’t give a d**n about employees or customers.
People assume that large corporations make a ton of money because of the CEO. Actually most corporations have one or two core businesses that provide all the cash and operate autonomously with no assistance from (or sometimes despite) the C-level leadership. The bulk of these corporations are futile and expensive attempts to replicate those successes. If you ran the company efficiently the resulting high profits would go to the shareholders (or even, God forbid, leak out to the employees or back to the customers.) When a new CEO comes in they first cut back a lot of that extra bulk, increasing profits, and then spend a ton of money on new futile endeavors and worthless acquisitions. All to justify their vast compensation.
What a travesty.
Yes, and those self-same egotistical fools, not being satisfied in carting away tens of millions – if not more – in ill-gotten or fraudulent gains from companies they’ve run into the ground, later have the hide to run for public office claiming that “the government needs to be run like a bidness”, and they are just such a person to achieve this. The Megster was thoroughly crushed in her bid for CA governor, now she’s doing a return engagement as guest CEO of HP, while the ghosts of Bill Hewlett, Dave Packard, and Lewis Platt hover over the smoking ruins of a once-great US corporation. Feh to the third power!
“They pretend that generic business knowledge is all that is required to run any company, and anyone or anything that contradicts this view is immediately expelled.”
Good comment. They also force it down the chain of command, which means scores of people with years of industry specific experience end up under ignorati managers who already know everything they need to know.
They’re not just looting, they’re wrecking too.
Google Leo Apotheker. Whatever his faults, he is not your standard die-cut MBA.
The Independent’s Poets Corner. The battle for East Coker. Very sweet article. Kinda got lost in it. We hold our histories so close to our hearts. It seems a shame to think of it all as layers of archeology. I thought the plea against development was too civil. In a time when efficiencies of scale are needed more than ever and dictate that people live in big cities, developments in small, scenic towns, done for the sake of a few real estate developers, does come across as almost totally irrational. Not to mention unethical which is the politely omitted argument.
Kurgman’s gone off his meds again. And boy, is he pissed:
OY! One can just imagine the padded walls of Kurgman’s cell dilating and contracting to the rhythm of his breathing as his psychotic delusions grip him. Nurse, please administer 10 mg of Thorazine intramuscularly — we’re feeling a little fragile!
Kurgman’s hyperventilatory rants have two things in common with those of the fundamentalist curmudgeons who sometimes harangue passersby at 42nd Street and 8th Avenue with a bullhorn, urging them to repent for their sins: (1) it’s terribly dated, flawed, repetitive material; and (2) the rather alarming word salad is not for the audience’s benefit, but rather to expiate the speaker’s own demons.
Having signally failed at the task of achieving enlightenment (economic or otherwise) in this lifetime, the popeyed Kurgman runs a grave risk of being reincarnated as a dung beetle, such that he can perform an equally repetitive task — endlessly rolling them little brown balls — without having to disturb the rest of us. To a dung beetle, they taste like M&Ms.
A “Fair and Balanced” observation.
Jim,
Your dung beetle analogy for Krugman is too good to limit to just him. Can we expand it to include the rest of the economic shills?
Even the marginally moral ones like Delong and Thoma continue to defend the snake oil facade of faith based capitalistic fascism for the global inherited rich.
Let them be Dung Beetles!!!!
Yeah. Krugman… The only thing he’s got going for him is that he’s been consistently right for the last 10 years.
LOL, a most excellent analysis!
It is better to spend money like there’s no tomorrow, than to spend tonight like there’s no money. [Traditional Irish toast]
Slainte!
Failed C.E.O’s who got paid.
It’s like these C.E.O’s shorted themselves on the side???
Can you do that – short yourself?
Anyone can get small…
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=small&defid=1759477
Thank you, Yves, for all you do to help to keep the important issues and development in the public’s eye.
I want to also share this link from a reporter living in Athens on the social devastation happening there. The social breakdown is the result of misguided austerity measures whose main goal is to save banks from realizing losses on ill-advised loans:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/greece/8799364/Greece-is-slipping-into-the-abyss.html
Joe Nocera in the Times-Titanic, pounding a tired old drum:
“G.I.’s have one stock question,” reads Burson’s very first script [reporting on the Nuremberg trials]. “Why can’t we just take them out and shoot ’em? We know they’re guilty.”
Again and again, Burson’s scripts try to answer that question. Because “the guilt of the German leaders should be carefully documented.” Because “we of the four nations are devoted to law and order.” Because “our system is not lynch law. We will dispense punishment as the evidence demands.”
Led by the Americans, the Allies were insistent that the Nazi defendants be treated fairly; Burson’s pride in that ethos shines through on every page. This postwar idealism was one of the Greatest Generation’s finest qualities.
God, American propaganda is so crude. Where were the war crimes trials for Britain’s Bomber Harris, who exterminated civilians by the tens of thousands? Or the world’s first and worst nuclear terrorist, Missouri’s mad haberdasher, who knocked off a hundred thousand souls with a single mushroom cloud?
Oh, I forgot: soi-disant good guys are exempt from prosecution! That’s ‘postwar idealism’ for you, from the self-anointed Greatest Generation. I projectile vomit in your general direction!
“Why can’t we just take them out and shoot ’em? We know they’re guilty.” As of yesterday, this is now the official policy of president Barky O’Murderer, even for US citizens.
Bad timing, Joe Nocera — you’ve been embarrassingly upstaged by events!
It’s entertaining to contrast the purple prose of the East Coker/TS Eliot article with P Krugman’s spare prose and witty ending. Methinks Eliot would have preferred the latter.
“Greece may never be able to pay off its huge debts, but its bonds, long scorned by investors, are suddenly being gobbled up by hedge funds.”
Greek Bonds Lure Some, Despite Risk
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/29/business/global/hedge-funds-betting-on-lowly-greek-bonds.html?_r=1
I thought this was a good article, even if it is a couple of days old.
“It’s Going to Get a Lot Worse”: ECRI’s Achuthan Says New Recession Unavoidable http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/going-lot-worse-ecri-achuthan-says-recession-unavoidable-141929160.html
It’s worth listening to the whole interview clip. The text summary below is very mild mannered in comparison.
James Stewart – a really terrific writer but has provided TERRIBLE financial advice in his columns over the past few years – maybe it’s not the same person? – so glad he’s writing for the execrable NYT these days and not the WSJ so I don’t have to skip anything in the WSJ these days except Peggy Noonan.
The GFC as a product of growth, size itself the problem:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/25/crisis-bigness-leopold-kohr
Kohr is new to me. Just add a dash of Tainter and we’re getting warm.
Banks are crooked be they big or little but the bigger they are the crookeder they can be since there is less chance that their liabilities will be redeemed by competing banks.
When we learn to do money ethically then we will have learned to do it stably too, I would bet.
“Every week Max Keiser looks at all the scandal behind the financial news headlines.”
Salacious, smirky, propagandistic (source=Russia), meme-hopping financial lingo, peppered with some interesting gems of information… ya gotta love Max Kesier and his perpetually stoned sidekick, propagandist Stacy Herbert.
In the second half of today’s segment he interviews Roseanne Barr about #occupywallstreet and her political aspirations. Episode 191 http://rt.com/programs/keiser-report/barr-191-keiser-wallstreet/
If you are in the mood for more Max Keiser, I also recommend this still relevant show from last week which focuses on the Greek situation… Episode 187 http://rt.com/programs/keiser-report/episode-187-max-keiser/
I recommend a good strong drink as an accompaniment… skaal!
ya gotta love Max Kesier and his perpetually stoned sidekick, propagandist Stacy Herbert. Valissa
And I do.
F Beard…you really are an enjoyable forensic-debating partner…nay, not an adversary, but an intellectual stimulus.
All the best,
barrisj
Look, shiny blue lights in the Pacific. A little relief for you, Yves.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0930-red-tide-20110930,0,3610014.story
For years I wa a loyal and prolific poster on “The Agonist” website, where many bloggers first broke into the game, and then went on to founding their own website, including amongst others. But, was such a revelation, that after so-o-o-o-o many years of post-Boosh apathy, I must confess that I found- as it were – my home, and must pay humble obeisance to Yves Smith for allowing those of us of essentially non-economic background a forum for ventilating our most fervent views on what we reckon are the most manifest issues facing much of humanity today – the so-called “human face” of neoliberal, neofacist,top-down, corrupted “populism” that has given rise to…e.g., the utter disgrace that is the Obama administration today. Surely to “God”, there must be alternatives for all of us below the 99 percentile-level economically who are scrabbling-out an existence that doesn’t depend on an inheritance to keep heads above water, or a big win on the PowerBall draw, or “El Gordo”, whatever, to just – you know – pay the bills and get on with it. Well, more power to OWS and their brethren…as they used to say in my day…”Power to the People”!
For me it was Media Whores Online and Atrios, then NoWarBlog, then for the post-Iraq hangover I slummed at sites related to issues du jour that got my goat, principally Mondoweiss in and around the time of Gaza, before the GFC lifted me out of a lifelong boredom with and suspicion of anything economic or financial or anything involving numbers at all really.
The GFC made me feel a bit like Christopher Hitchens after 911, when he wrote of a feeling of exhilaration, finally understanding what the enemy was and the enormity of the task of defeating it. But while his vision was a mirage, mine has been made solid by instructive visits to sites like this one, where I have found that many of the hitherto almost separate species of finance types, people interested in and involved with money, actually have hearts and souls to go with all those brains and are as keen as I am (and far more able) to see the game changed.
It is one of the few encouraging developments I’ve seen in the last few years, but boy is there ever a long way to go.