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Mon, Jul 06 2009


HEAD SPOOK GETS SPOTLIT

I'm sorry, but this is just funny as all hell. No wonder the west continually has "intelligence lapses".

British spy chief's cover blown on Facebook

LONDON (Reuters) – The wife of the new head of Britain's spy agency has posted pictures of her husband, family and friends on Internet networking site Facebook, details which could compromise security, a newspaper said on Sunday.

Sir John Sawers is due to take over as head of the Secret Intelligence Service in November. The SIS, popularly known as MI6, is Britain's global intelligence-gathering organization.

In what the Mail on Sunday called an "extraordinary lapse," the new spy chief's wife, Lady Shelley Sawers, posted family pictures and exposed details of where the couple live and take their holidays and who their friends and relatives are.

The details could be viewed by any of the many millions of Facebook users around the world, but were swiftly removed once authorities were alerted by the newspaper's enquiries.

"There were fears that the hugely embarrassing blunder could have compromised the safety of Sir John's family and friends," the newspaper said.

Publishing the story on its front page and the pictures on a double-page spread, the Mail on Sunday said the information "could potentially be useful to hostile foreign powers or terrorists."

It was the latest in a string of security blunders, lapses and leaks by British officials that have embarrassed the government of embattled Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

posted by JDoe at 10:23:31 AM | link |

Tue, Jun 30 2009


YODA ROUBINI PROGNOSTICATES

Nouriel Roubini, responding to 'what will happen if we (the goobermint and Masters of the Universe) don't handle things well'. He cites many factors, but this caught my eye:

"“The Fed is now embarked on a policy in which they are in effect directly monetizing about half of the budget deficit,” he said. The public debt is going up, and the federal government is covering about half of that total by printing new money and sending it to banks. “In the short run,” he said, “that monetization is not inflationary.” Banks are holding much of the money themselves; “they’re not relending it, so that money is not going anywhere and becoming inflationary.”

But at some point—Roubini’s guess is 2011—the recession will end. Banks will want to lend the money; people and businesses will want to borrow and spend it. Then it will be time for what Roubini calls “the exit strategy, of mopping up that liquidity”—pulling some of the money back out of circulation, so it doesn’t just bid up house prices and stock values in a new bubble. And that will be “very, very tricky indeed.”"

and

"“We’ve been growing through a period of time of repeated big bubbles,” he said. “We’ve had a model of ‘growth’ based on overconsumption and lack of savings. And now that model has broken down, because we borrowed too much. We’ve had a model of growth in which over the last 15 or 20 years, too much human capital went into finance rather than more-productive activities. It was a growth model where we overinvested in the most unproductive form of capital, meaning housing. And we have also been in a growth model that has been based on bubbles. The only time we are growing fast enough is when there’s a big bubble.

“The question is, can the U.S. grow in a non-bubble way?” He asked the question rhetorically, so I turned it back on him. Can it?

“I think we have to …” He paused. “You know, the potential for our future growth is going to be lower, because of the excesses we’ve had. Sustainable growth may mean investing slowly in infrastructures for the future, and rebuilding our human capital. Renewable resources. Maybe nanotechnology? We don’t know what it’s going to be. There are parts of the economy we can expect to lead to a more sustainable and less bubble-like growth. But it’s going to be a challenge to find a new growth model. It’s not going to be simple.” I took this not as pessimism but as realism. "

So that tells me, based on a lot of other stuff from Roubini and other sane econowonks, that it's time to start looking for bargains now, with an eye towards purchasing next spring or summer, then riding the next bubble up.

Because you know the greedy bastards will fuck it up. They always do.

posted by JDoe at 02:18:34 PM | link |



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