Sat, Mar 28 2009
HOW MUCH TRASH IS THERE IN SPACE?
Computer rendering of trackable objects in low orbit
Fri, Mar 27 2009
SUBPRIMES: A FABLE
Sub-prime mortgage asset-backed securities primer: an apt analogy Heidi is the proprietor of a bar in Detroit. In order to increase sales, she decides to allow her loyal customers - most of whom are unemployed alcoholics - to drink now but pay later. She keeps track of the drinks consumed on a ledger (thereby granting the customers loans.Word gets around about Heidi's drink now pay later marketing strategy and as a result, increasing numbers of customers flood into Heidi's bar and soon she has the largest sale volume for any bar in Detroit
By providing her customers' freedom from immediate payment demands, Heidi gets no resistance when she substantially increases her prices for wine and beer, the most consumed beverages. Her sales volume increases massively.
A young and dynamic vice-president at the local bank recognizes these customer debts as valuable future assets and increases Heidi's borrowing limit. He sees no reason for undue concern since he has the debts of the alcoholics as collateral. At the bank's corporate headquarters, expert traders transform these customer loans into DRINKBONDS, ALKIBONDS and PUKEBONDS. These securities are then traded on security markets worldwide. Naive investors don't really understand the securities being sold to them as AAA secured bonds are really the debts of unemployed alcoholics. Nevertheless, their prices continuously climb, and the securities become the top-selling items for some of the nation's leading brokerage houses.
One day, although the bond prices are still climbing, a risk manager at the bank (subsequently fired due his negativity), decides that the time has come to demand payment on the debts incurred by the drinkers at Heidi's bar. Heidi demands payment from her alcoholic patrons, but being unemployed they cannot pay back their drinking debts. Therefore, Heidi cannot fulfill her loan obligations and claims bankruptcy. DRINKBOND and ALKIBOND drop in price by 90 %. PUKEBOND performs better, stabilizing in price after dropping by 80 %. The decreased bond asset value destroys the banks liquidity and prevents it from issuing new loans. The suppliers of Heidi's bar, having granted her generous payment extensions and having invested in the securities are faced with writing off her debt and losing over 80% on her bonds. Her wine supplier claims bankruptcy, her beer supplier is taken over by a competitor, who immediately closes the local plant and lays off 50 workers.
[Author Unknown]Thu, Mar 26 2009
MY KINDA GAL
Girl With Very Big Gun Busts Myths
Thu, Mar 26 2009
THE WHEELS ON THE BUS GO ROUND AND ROUND
Fed Begins Buying U.S. Treasuries
By Bill Bonner
03/25/09 London, England Write in your diary…save today’s newspapers…remember what you did today. Most historians won’t even notice, but today is a big, big day.
Today is the day the Fed begins buying U.S. Treasuries. Britain is doing it already. So is Japan. Why shouldn’t we? What’s a few trillion extra…just between friends?
The scope of the project is immense.
Do you remember how it works, dear reader? When you buy a U.S. Treasury bond, you pay for it with real money – or, at least as real as dollars get. Money changes hands. No net increase in the money supply. But when the Fed buys a Treasury bond it creates the money to buy it…and thus the money supply increases. It’s called “monetizing the debt” – or converting debt into currency. Given the size of upcoming Treasury purchases, the total size of the U.S. monetary base is expected to increase 500% in the months ahead.
Is there any doubt what this will mean to the dollar? To the price of gold?
Thu, Mar 26 2009
TIME TO HAND OVER THE KEYS AND SHUT UP
What if women ran the world?
By Mark Lange, The Christian Science Monitor
San Francisco – It is getting harder to escape the sense that most of the trouble in the world – whether it's coming out of the Senate, a mortgage lender, or a tank turret – can be traced to one overriding problem: too many men steering. Had our economic, domestic, and foreign policy been more informed by women, we might be enjoying a safer ride.
Doubt it? Here's a test. Would any of the women you admire have set up a healthcare system as byzantine, costly, and underperforming as America's? Or a financial system where mortgage lenders don't have to care about being paid back? Or a bailout that spends $1 trillion in public money to subsidize the purchase of junk debt from the same geniuses that generated it?
It may be time for guys to hand over the keys, ask for directions, and sit (quietly, please) in the back seat for a while.
Forget gender politics; just look at results. Our computer-based fantasy financial instruments have erased perhaps 45 percent of the world's wealth. We've waged two wars at the same time for six years at a fully loaded cost in the trillions. And we've managed the simultaneous implosion of what amounts to most of the male industrial complex, from banks to newspapers to automakers.
Women's effectiveness as decisionmakers is well documented, even if it isn't entirely accepted by either gender.
An MIT study of female leaders running village councils in India found that by objective measures (building better wells, taking fewer bribes) women ran their villages better. American women are about to eclipse men in sheer payroll numbers – and they're now majority owners of nearly half of the private companies in the country. Yet somehow the average working woman still devotes much more time to child care and housework.
What's clear is that, on average, men overestimate their IQ while women underestimate theirs. And that may be a clue, in terms of effectiveness: While decisiveness and risk-taking matter, hubris (too often male) creates problems. Humility and collaboration (more often female) solve them. What explains the difference?
It could simply be a matter of emotional need, reinforced by generations of gender stereotyping. Seeking competition and challenge, guys do tend to cast things in shades of conflict: defaulting to a win/lose, right ("my") position versus wrong ("yours"). On this point, scientists, who are mostly men, disagree. But there's no doubt that social stability is compromised by masculine habits such as hostile takeovers, and paying enormous retention bonuses to men who've driven a business into the ground and have already left.
The difference could be evolutionary. Primordial hunters (men) had to make rapid decisions and act on them, right or wrong, but quickly. Chase that bunny! Club that rival! Run away! Gatherers (women), meanwhile, needed an awareness of the larger context – knowing which berry bushes would ripen when, how to keep the kids from clonking each other with rocks, and generally holding the tribe together and getting things done.
Or, in a world where our reverence for stature remains primitive, it's possible women just have to be more creative, collaborative, and clever when they average five inches shorter and 27 pounds lighter than men.
But it's also possible that even men are ready to learn that women make better leaders than they know. A Pew Research survey last year showed that the public rates women equal or superior to men in seven of the eight qualities they value most highly in leadership. The results were striking on the questions of honesty and intelligence, which registered as the two most important characteristics of leadership, and which lately have been in relatively short supply. On these dimensions, women were more than twice as likely to be rated superior to men – by both women and men.
Male cognitive patterns of linear, command-and-control thinking are no longer optimal – either with Gen-Y talent in the workplace, or with geopolitical conflict around the world. We're heading into an era when we need leadership that enlists self-interest in support of the larger outcome – less transactional and more transformational. Rather than punishing failure or reinforcing conflict, motivating progress.
Many question America's standing and role in the world. Whatever we might do to mitigate climate change will be completely swamped unless we can positively engage India and China. Complex and interconnected questions of nuclear prolifer-ation, resource scarcity, and interconnected human demands will put an unprecedented premium on collaboration and cooperation.
As women ascend as leaders in policy and business, the decisions they make will be more accountable to a wider array of interests, stakeholders, and outcomes. By example, they will teach us to lead less through positional authority and more through positive influence- with more of a bias toward informed action and a clearer connection between everything we know, and all we have to do.
• Mark Lange is a consultant and former presidential speechwriter.Mon, Mar 16 2009
REALITIES
Mon, Mar 16 2009
LEGACIES
Mon, Mar 09 2009
THE HYPOCRISY OF CNBC
Fri, Mar 06 2009
OBAMA NOCHANGE
Fri, Mar 06 2009
RUPUBLICANS RUSHING RELIGION
Wed, Mar 04 2009
THE NEW OLD FACE OF THE GOP
Famous drug junkie and fat rich white boy Rush Limbaugh is stirring up the shit for ratings.
"The Administration is enabling me. They are expanding my profile, expanding my audience and expanding my influence. An ever larger number of people are now being exposed to the antidote to Obamaism: conservatism, as articulated by me. An ever larger number of people are now exposed to substantive warnings, analysis and criticism of Obama's policies and intentions, a ‘story’ I own because the [mainstream media] is largely the Obama Press Office.”
The bigger, the better, agreed Democrat James Carville. “It’s great for us, great for him, great for the press,” he said of Limbaugh. “The only people he’s not good for are the actual Republicans in Congress.”
Awwww... Rush is bad for repuglicans. Cosmic justice prevails! Bwahahahahaha!Tue, Mar 03 2009
THE END OF THE WORLD
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