Your humble blogger was taped Wednesday for PBS Newshour on Turkey Day. If you want a break from football, watch the show.
Most liveable alien worlds ranked BBC
As Work Goes Global, Will Holidays Disappear? Bloomberg
System that recognizes emotions in people’s voices could lead to less phone rage Gizamg. Or not. A patronizing automated response would piss me off even more.
The Future is Gray Bruce Krasting
Ireland demands debt relief, warns on EU treaties Ambrose Evans-Prichard, Telegraph
Will Greece unravel by Christmas? Michael Pettis
End the European Blame Game! Keynote at the British Foreign Press Association’s 2011 Awards Night Yanis Varoufakis
Generals Offer Apology for Violent Clashes in Egypt New York Times
Occupy Y’all Street: OWS Movement Takes Shape In Gainesville Huffington Post
Fiscal union is the only real solution Credit Writedowns
Live Blog for #Occupy Movement: Protests, Events Planned for Black Friday And Thanksgiving Firedoglake
Robocops vs. the occupiers Salon
Retailers Push Fed for Yet Lower Debit Fees New York Times
Greenberg is entitled to nothing John Gapper, Financial Times
Antidote du jour:
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Have an excellent Thanksgivine, Yves, and thank you.
Thanksgivine: Thanksgiving with a little bit of help from the vine. :-P
Happy Thanksgiving, Yves and everyone!
(And stock up on alka-seltzer, it looks like.) :-)
I have a basic question. My understanding from having read this blog for a while is that Banks in many cases didn’t properly under New York law convey the titles of many of the mortgages they diced up and sold. Does that mean that the investors that bought the securities can sue for their money back? If so why haven’t I heard about these lawsuits?
Thanksgiving
Sheeeesh.
We don’t do thanksgiving down in the southern hemisphere. It’s spring anyhoo. Nevertheless stuff a good one on me.
Did anyone see Obama pardon the Turkey? If only he cared as much for the citizens.
Better question: would any fool turkey be dumb enough to pardon NObama? Thing is, it’d take one helluva lot of stuffing to make him even remotely palatable. I seriously doubt his low-fat carcass would make decent dog food; although, what dogs have done to deserve such disrespect I don’t know. Sorry pooches!
Hi, I am Shawn Ambrose, a member of some financial communities. I am interested in doing a Guest Post on your site. Please let me know if you are interested.
Mail me at : shawnambrose4u[at]gmail[.]com
LOL
Consider the irony that the Occupy groups may be
“paving” the way for unemployed, dis-housed people
to be able to sleep in public parks and on pavement
(as all the shelters will be filled at some point ).
If so, that “paving job” started more than a hundred years ago.
OWS – today’s “Coxey’s Army’?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coxey%27s_Army
Happy Thanksgiving to all!
My comment above is referencing the Huffpost article
on “Ya’ll Street”, where the Occupiers don’t even
have the “freedom” to sleep on the grass, only
the pavement.
Glamour shot: Gorgeous turkey antidote du jour.
Happy every day, Yves. You deserve it. You’re a star!
Or a puffed-up American pol of whatever stripe, resplendent in all their finest buffoonery. See my colors, see me preen, ain’t I just the dandiest thing you’ve ever seen?
From the look of his neck and rather florid complexion, looks like the one in the photo is more than likely a Maleagris Gingrichus, which is quite common this time of year, especially in even years. That and the fact that his hackles appear to raised in self-righteous outrage. Oh but that all pols were so easy to read.
As they say on the Achewood forums- a chubby for this.
Syria, Iran and the Balance of Power in the Middle East is republished with permission of STRATFOR.
Bon Fête Dinde! Thankful for all you do!
FISCAL UNION IS THE ONLY REAL SOLUTION
I detect in our society a cultural bias for business as the leading conceptual framework that seeks to overtake rational discourse and replace it with commerce speak. That is typified by the sputtering right wing bloviators demanding results from our politicians as if they were EVPs of sales and that the president in the WH is the CEO of the USA and demanding to know what is going to done about the sinking value of our brand.
But nowhere is the creeping biz mindset more evident than in the discussions about the Eurozone and the EU. It is more often than not proclaim by the business journalists and trading community, that someone will just up and leave. Greece will leave, Ireland will leave, even mighty Germany or France will leave because they don’t want to be the suckers stuck with the check from everyone else at the all you can eat buffet of the Eurozone.
But the political world has absolute differences from the business world. In particular the much discussed concept of sovereignty. While business partners split, sue one another, and large corporations merge or dissolve at the drop of hat, if the shareholder value warrants of course, the state does not does so without some terrible event, usually a war, to liquidate its strictly defined boundaries. And to be clear, not all scholars even recognized that a properly named set of territorial lines even constitutes a sovereign state in many cases. What does Ireland or Greece really know as nation about any prolonged periods of self determination as compared with the UK, France or Germany, itself split and now reunited?
The whole concept of surrendering sovereignty may have traction in the USA, or the core of Europe, which corresponds to the richest, most militarily powerful former empires, but what does it mean to countries recognized by the UN but have weak central governments and not much history of ruling itself? Failed states are at the other end of the spectrum of sovereign states. They are clearly not all politically equal in the same way there is a wide disparity in wealth between the 1% and the 99%.
I will let you read and think about Abe Lincoln, as he contemplated the nature of the United States politically vs viewing it through a business framework contractually. Here is an excerpt from his 1st inaugural address:
“I hold that in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution the Union of these States is perpetual. Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments. It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination. Continue to execute all the express provisions of our National Constitution, and the Union will endure forever, it being impossible to destroy it except by some action not provided for in the instrument itself. 12
Again: If the United States be not a government proper, but an association of States in the nature of contract merely, can it, as a contract, be peaceably unmade by less than all the parties who made it? One party to a contract may violate it—break it, so to speak—but does it not require all to lawfully rescind it? 13
Descending from these general principles, we find the proposition that in legal contemplation the Union is perpetual confirmed by the history of the Union itself. The Union is much older than the Constitution. It was formed, in fact, by the Articles of Association in 1774. It was matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was further matured, and the faith of all the then thirteen States expressly plighted and engaged that it should be perpetual, by the Articles of Confederation in 1778. And finally, in 1787, one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution was “to form a more perfect Union.” 14
But if destruction of the Union by one or by a part only of the States be lawfully possible, the Union is less perfect than before the Constitution, having lost the vital element of perpetuity. 15
It follows from these views that no State upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union; that resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally void, and that acts of violence within any State or States against the authority of the United States are insurrectionary or revolutionary, according to circumstances.”
http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres31.html
Lincoln is appropriate on this Thanksgiving Day as he proclaimed and helped to firmly establish this wonderful national holiday as a tradition which celebrates a humble expression of our mortal nature in the giving of thanks.
HAPPY THANKSGIVING DAY!!!
Paul Tioxin, thanks for this thoughtful comment framing Lincoln’s words. What a genius. Who has such an orderly mind today, and the courage to speak it, come what may?
Occupy Wall Street Library Destroyed 11-15-2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTkUjQwHf4I
“Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen.”
(“That was but a prelude; where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people also.”) – Heinrich Heine
From my cousin’s kid who is a platoon leader overseas – “I hope everyone stays safe over the holiday and tell all
those kids on Wall Street we said hello from Afghanistan.”
regarding holidays
regardless of where you live or what your faith may or may not be
the concept of pausing and giving thanks to a divinity or simply stopping for a small bit of time to reflect upon your blessings or even to reflect that it could be worse is and/or can be a unique and widely held act that not only can be done by all humans and on a purely basic personal level i suspect is probably good for your mental health
Granted, although ideally such a pause occurs more than one day a year. And without being marketed to in the process. Kinda takes the luster off the concept to have holidays designated as the officially sanctioned day for [fill in the blank] emotion/action, especially when the overriding emotion/action is always, first and foremost, consume, consume, consume.
Although, you really have to admire the whole Thanksgiving/Christmas marketing scheme in particular as well. One day of non-stop football (with it’s by now ubiquitous marketing links to “our troops defending our freedoms,” aka our imperial war machine) and food until you pop, followed by another day of equally gluttonous shopping for “irresistible holiday deals,” many marketed the previous day while we were in our highly suggestible post-feast soporific hypnotic state.
All of which is merely meant to kick off yet another epic annual 30 day plus binge of holiday and post-holiday consumption with only vague (and now totally superfluous) connections to the pseudo-religious holidays that provided its initial justification. Talk about spin! Hey, no one ever accused Madison Ave execs and their techniques of being any thing less than remarkably effective.
Once upon a time commerce stopped for holy days.
Now holidays are about commerce.
Posters from the #Occupy movement –
http://occuprint.org/Posters/Posters
Fiscal union is the only real solution
Indeed, if the “fiscal union” is a Germanic one, it would be no solution. It would be the final nail in the coffin in terms of growth in the region. And in terms of democracy as well.
In any event, at this point, I can’t see any scenario other than the one where Germany will end up being the unfortunate villain in the historical context. The tragedy is that underneath all of this lies not exactly evil or greed, but simply atrociously bad macroeconomics…
To be fair, as a Japanese, I do understand (somewhat) the German view point when it comes to macroeconomics. Japan certainly shared some of their premises, at least until it “sinned” by accumulating the astronomical amount of government debt to survive the lethal post-bubble hangover.
But I don’t know why they are THAT persistent in that “price stability + fiscal tightening = growth” fantasy. Do you even need Keynes to go “Erm, really?” about that? It’s not exactly “baffling,” but just astonishing.
Politics and economics are surely always intertwined, so the problem is not simple, but this total mix-up of macro and micro, which we observed in the birth of and rationale for all those financial alchemical instruments in Wall Street as well, is so glaringly displayed in this German psyche as well. And THAT is what disturbs me.
We live in an asymmetric world.
There is 1 Thanksgiving day.
In a non-leap year, there are 364 Thankstaking days.
I think we should have 182 Thanksgiving days, 182 Thankstaking days and one day for doing nothing.
I am thankful I can post here everyday.
Dear Yves,
I join with all your regular readers in wishing you a very Happy Thanksgiving, and in expressing my admiration for what NC is accomplishing in terms of educating its readers on an ongoing basis. I feel privileged to have discovered NC, and to forward links/posts to friends. You are a (real-life) heroine to me!
Beautiful bird! So sad to kill them.
But perhaps they live on in the humans that eat them.
Maybe we should let all the turkeys free range for our own sake?
I look forward to:
And the wolf will dwell with the lamb, and the leopard will lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little boy will lead them. Isaiah 11:6
And the wolf, leopard and lion will die lingering deaths of starvation, leading to the disappearance of all their kind.
YS,
Great to see you on the PBS New Hour.
You are so right: Where there is a will there is a way.
They got Al Capone on “mail fraud”.
Unfortunately, law is now all confusion, smoke and mirrors, and PR!
Thank YOU!
Varoufakis’ speech sounds good but misses the point in a couple of important ways. When he says, “Crises confirm everyone’s prejudices, locking us ever more firmly into the same mindset that produced them in the first place,” that sounds like insight, but it really isn’t. It is really a riff on everybody does it (hence everyone is to blame) and leads naturally to his conclusion that the “blame game” serves no purpose and should be abandoned.
But is it really just another prejudice to maintain that 2 + 2 = 4 when so many others are arguing that it is anywhere from 6 to 60? This is what happens when the kleptocratic angle is left out. Add it back in and Varoufakis’ statement makes no sense. The 99% were, in fact, not doing it. Everyone is not equally to blame. Yes, it is an over generalization to talk about Greeks and Germans, but letting the 1% off the hook for the crises they have created, mismanaged, and multiplied? Why? For the 1%, there is something to be said to ridicule the “blame game”, but for the 99%, it goes by another name. It’s called justice.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/07/election-2012-news_n_1080725.html#175_a-formal-plan-to-break-up-the-banks
Huntsman will say ‘break up the banks. a little’. The Overton Window has shifted. Keep pushing!
I interviewed at Voxify several years ago. They had then and still have a system that monitors voice- and button-based systems for irritation levels, and bounces you to a person when you appear annoyed. Apparently works very well.
But, yes, “calm down dear” would definitely lose an airline sale.