September 30, 2008 at 2:01 am · Filed under del.icio.us
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"They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed her head against an iron bed and knocked her out cold. Her cellmate, Alice Cosu, thought Lewis was dead and suffered a heart attack.
Additional affidavits describe the guards grabbing, dragging, beating, choking, slamming, pinching, twisting and kicking the women.
Thus unfolded the Night of Terror on Nov. 15, 1917, when the warden at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia ordered his guards to teach a lesson to the suffragists imprisoned there because they dared to picket Woodrow Wilson's White House for the right to vote.
For weeks, the women's only water came from an open pail. Their food–all of it colorless slop–was infested with worms."
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"Hedge funds are preparing to return between 10 per cent and 50 per cent of their assets under management to investors who want their money back at the end of yet another quarter of dire investment performance.
One prime broker said: “Many funds will have to close. There were a flood of redemption notices at the beginning of the quarter but many investors said they wouldn’t actually withdraw the money if performance improved. It hasn’t.”
One hedge fund said: “We’ve produced 15 per cent returns for 10 years. This year has been bad and our funds under management have been reduced from $2billion to just $300m. This is decimation.”"
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"Clearly, these are not your everyday sharks. Great Whites think alike and because of their size, they all think BIG. The Feds know this and are going to loan them (indefinitely) any amount of money they want – whenever they want it – at 2% or less so they can turn around and loan this money to you and I and every business in America at newly restrictive but higher "credit rates". How did the Feds solve the world's biggest credit crunch? They gave its perpetrators an offer they couldn't refuse. And this is euphemistically called re-liquefying.
Now, the crew who's angry about all this can ask themselves the alternative. What else could have been done? Wall Street could have sold the American financial industry to the Arabs for $1 trillion, a fee about equal to ARAMCO's 1H2008 oil profits. Or they could have sold it to Singapore, or China, or some of the fat cats in India or Japan. Instead, the U.S. Treasury bought it, rotten fish heads and all."
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"Do you see, Thomson Reuters? Do you see? If you don’t settle this nonsense in a fashion that leaves Zotero intact, the open-source software development world will fear to interoperate with you. If EndNote isn’t already dead, this will kill it, because our little project is hardly the only one of its type. We are legion, and you have shut yourself away from us. You have no one to blame for this suicidal course but your own legal and executive team.
And if you take away Zotero, trust me, Thomson Reuters: it won’t be EndNote that I switch to."
September 29, 2008 at 2:00 am · Filed under del.icio.us
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Not quite refined enough to catch everything, and a bit over-general still. Need to clean up the categories a bit, maybe.
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ummm… anybody remember the, ummm… Old Lighthouse? In Ann Arbor? Landlocked Ann Arbor?
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September 27, 2008 at 2:00 am · Filed under del.icio.us
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"The Center for History and New Media release "a new beta version of Zotero to the general public" on July 8. Reuters adds, "A significant and highly touted feature of the new beta version of Zotero, however, is its ability to convert – in direct violation of the License Agreement – Thomson's 3,500 plus proprietary .ens style files within the EndNote Software into free, open source, easily distributable Zotero .csl files.""
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"Top White House officials were told in early 2002 about harsh measures used by the CIA to extract information from suspected al-Qaeda terrorists in the agency’s secret prisons, according to an account given to congressional investigators by the office of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
The details of the controversial program were discussed in multiple meetings inside the White House over a two-year period, triggering concerns among several officials who worried that the agency’s methods might be illegal or violate anti-torture treaties, according to separate statements signed by Rice and her top legal adviser. . . ."
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"I don’t know the answer to these questions. But, the arguments made by people who believe in the so-called “PPT” are interesting. If true, it would serve to explain a lot of the irrational market action we all observed over the past years. One thing I do know. Dow Jones’ Marketwatch reported that China has announced new regulations that order Chinese banks to temporarily not lend money to American financial institutions, because of the danger of default."
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""According to one GOP lawmaker, some House Republicans are saying privately that they'd rather "let the markets crash" than sign on to a massive bailout.
"For the sake of the altar of the free market system, do you accept a Great Depression?" the member asked.""
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"The underlying resistance to Paulson’s latest and most expensive attempt to unlock financial markets comes down to what Fed Chairman Bernanke yesterday referred to as “market psychology.” Congress and Main St. are annoyed that Paulson is spending government money on silver bullets that never reach their intended target. Now that his gun has run out of bullets, he’s trying to scare America into giving him a nuclear warhead."
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"The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling in full battle rattle, helping restore essential services and escorting supply convoys.
Now they’re training for the same mission — with a twist — at home.
Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months, the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks."
September 25, 2008 at 2:30 am · Filed under del.icio.us
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"And Mr. McCain has a special advantage to bring to any such investigation — many of the relevant witnesses are friends or colleagues of his. In fact, he can probably get to the bottom of the whole mess just by cross-examining the people riding on his campaign bus. So the candidate should take a deep breath, remind himself that the country comes first, pull the Straight Talk Express over at a rest stop, whistle up his media pals, and begin."
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"…Fifth, fulfilment of this last misgiving, in the shape of abrupt disappearance of the buying demand throughout the country, this particular phenomenon being prolonged through a period of months and sometimes years."
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"I'd love for somebody explain why it is apparently unthinkable for America’s taxpayers and borrowers to declare their independence from the current crop of moronic incompetents now masquerading as financiers. Remember, this is the same group of guys who misallocated credit (their supposedly core competency) on a scale unknown in human history.
How exactly did these bozos get to be so indispensable? Isn't this indispensability entirely in the minds of Bernanke and Paulson? And doesn't that make them, in the most polite terms imaginable, captured regulators?"
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""Forget all this chatter about whether or not she knows what the Bush doctrine is. That's trivial. The real disturbing thing about Sarah is her mind-set. It's her underlying belief system that will influence how she responds in an international crisis, if she's ever in that position, and has the full might of the U.S. military in her hands. She gave some indication of that thinking in her ABC interview, when she suggested how willing she would be to go to war with Russia."
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"But perhaps that also explains why there has been so little public outcry about it. We love the idea of the small town, but we don't really want to live there, facing a choice between the night shift at Wal-Mart and the army. The war is being fought by people from those place we invoke as part of our national mythology but whose reality we have otherwise largely forgotten. Places we barely notice as we zip by on the bypass."
September 24, 2008 at 3:33 am · Filed under del.icio.us
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"We have said before that this program is an inefficient, covert way to recapitalize the financial system. If I were a foreign central bank, I'd have a lot more confidence if the US imposed regulatory reform, took over dud banks, got rid of top management, and then did the good bank/bad bank split. That's a model that has worked and could be modified and improved. But for some unknown, the powers that be are refusing to employ formulas that have worked and prefer their own home-cooked brew."
September 23, 2008 at 5:55 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
I’m still reading Woody Holton’s Unruly Americans
, and I’m struck by the incessant similarities between Recent Events and those in the period immediately after the Revolutionary War in the US.
More detail to follow, but without being pessimistic about it at all, I find myself returning to a sequence of questions that has popped into my Highly Paid Futurist’s head in each of the last five socioeconomic shocks:
- What are the chances that a Constitutional Convention will be convened in the next decade?
- Under what circumstances will state or regional secession be considered by one or more US states?
- How many “nations” (scare-quoted on purpose, since I’m suspicious the term may come to mean something new) will there be in North America in 12 years?
As I said, I’m not too worried about these things. But the increasing scale of these shocks, ranging from the Oil Crisis, to the Savings & Loan debacle, to the LTCM bailout, and now this… the HPF in me keeps wanting to use the word disintermediation.
And I don’t mean in the context of a business plan.
September 22, 2008 at 3:30 am · Filed under del.icio.us
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"But not everyone did better. Workers, in real terms, did not get a share of the profits from the boom, their wages stagnated over this time period. So why should they pay for the bailout? This is nothing more than The Little Red Hen run backwards, they ate the bread first and now the hen is asking "Who will help me pay for the bread?" It shouldn't be those who weren't allowed to sit at the table.
So I would increase taxes progressively, and I would do it in proportion to the changes in the distribution of income over this time period. And I like this a little better than Luigi Zingales' solution for precisely that reason, it puts the burden directly on those who benefited from the boom."
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"Further, the word confidence keeps coming up, we must restore confidence in the American financial system. It is not enough that we hand over our money, we must hand over our trust as well. Surely, then, if this is a new era of trust, there should be no problem with requiring sellers to disclose at precisely what value the assets for sale had been booked on their financial statements, with criminal penalties for misstatement. We should be able to evaluate, in the light of day, how forthright financial institutions have been in representing their true condition to potential investors and the public-at-large. We may find that some have played things relatively straight, while others survived by sleight-of-hand and exaggeration. The former group will have earned our confidence. The latter will have earned something else."
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"This proposal is an expensive boondoggle and should be opposed by all. As one bit of evidence here, how many noticed that mortgage rates went up on the day the deal was announced? Here is a graph for Fannie 30-year fixed-rate mortgages (click to enlarge):…"
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"The public doesn’t like a blank check. They think this whole bailout idea is nuts. They see fat cats on Wall Street who have raked in zillions for years, now extorting in effect $2,000 to $5,000 from every American family to make up for their own nonfeasance, malfeasance, greed, and just plain stupidity. Wall Street’s request for a blank check comes at the same time most of the public is worried about their jobs and declining wages, and having enough money to pay for gas and food and health insurance, meet their car payments and mortgage payments, and save for their retirement and childrens’ college education. And so the public is asking: Why should Wall Street get bailed out by me when I’m getting screwed?"
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WANT MARACAIBO ESPECIAL NOW
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"A key element here, though, is the connectedness of generations. Not everyone has children, for example, and Barro's mechanism works by putting the utility of children as an argument in the parents utility function. In the 1980s, in response to Barro's paper, I remember seeing a seminar given that attempted to estimate intergenerational connectedness. I can't remember exactly what the paper found after all these years, but the main point is that measures of connectedness exist. [In answer to the question, are bonds net wealth?, many people who have examined the empirical work take an intermediate position and use 50% as a rule of thumb, i.e. that 50% of bonds are net wealth, the other 50% is offset through anticipated tax liabilities)."
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"Bruised by stock market losses, Americans bought houses. The mortgage industry used securitised bonds to ensure that the people who initiated the mortgage did not worry about getting paid back; risk was packaged and sold to others. This time Mr Greenspan did not just stand aside. He said repeatedly that housing was a safe investment because prices do not fall. Home owners could wait out any downturn. Is it any surprise that so many people thought if the world’s financial genius held this view it must be all right?
Even as things went completely wild, Mr Greenspan dismissed those who warned that a new bubble was emerging. It was just a case of a little “froth” in a few areas. Later, after waiting until 2007, two years after he left office, he conceded that “froth” had been his euphemism for “bubble”. “All the froth bubbles add up to an aggregate bubble,” he told the Financial Times."
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"While behavioral performance did not differ between groups, Zen practitioners displayed a reduced duration of the neural response linked to conceptual processing in regions of the default network, suggesting that meditative training may foster the ability to control the automatic cascade of semantic associations triggered by a stimulus and, by extension, to voluntarily regulate the flow of spontaneous mentation."
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"The sooner you “drop out” of the speculative economy and its abstract concerns, the sooner you will be able to create and provide real value for the people all around you, and the better position you will be in to get what you need for yourself and your family.
This is not bad; it is good. The pain that people are about to go through now is not the product of the speculative economy’s failure, but its former and intentional unjust success."
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"From adversity always seems to come a little opportunity. The Ann Arbor Chronicle – “the community newspaper and town hall” – is somewhat the way I remember the news, it just isn’t folded as tightly as my papers. The difference is I didn’t get paid anything to write this column and you didn’t pay anything to read it, so we’re even. I don’t like to owe anybody anything."
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"…But those who speak for the Princes of Wall Street–well, they really believed that the Princes earned their fortunes by virtue of their virtue–their intelligence, their nerve, their skill, and their willingness to run great risks for great rewards. The idea that there is a public safety net to catch the Princes when they all fall off the tightrope at once–that they are not actually rugged Randite individualists running great risks–that they are people in the right place at the right time with enough low animal cunning to cover themselves with glue and then step outside at 57th and Park or on Canary Wharf as the money blows by so that a bunch of the money sticks to them–well, this strikes those who speak for the Princes of Wall Street on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal or in Investors' Business Daily as a betrayal of the moral order."
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"Our regulators have been stunningly inept. The up-tick rule has been abolished. Niggling distinctions between "abusive" naked short-selling and acceptable naked short-selling become the basis for a tentative approach to possible regulation. A state official, Eric Dinallo of the NY Insurance Department, was the only regulator to come to the defense of MBI, when he finally wrote an article in the Financial Times, noting the illegality of Ackman's defamatory attacks.
Meanwhile, the huge credit default swap industry, a totally unregulated business of insurance, continues as an arena of toxic machinations. Here, in total obscurity, bets are placed: which of the remaining financial companies should be the next victim? Would you be comfortable if strangers could legally place bets on your longevity? Or on whether your house would burn down?"
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"What to do? Not to socialize capitalism with bailouts and subsidies that put taxpayers at risk. If what's lacking is trust rather than capital, the most important steps policymakers can take are to rebuild trust. And the best way to rebuild trust is through regulations that require financial players to stand behind their promises and tell the truth, along with strict oversight to make sure they do.
We tell poor nations they have to make their financial markets transparent before capital will flow to them. Now it's our turn. Lacking adequate regulation or oversight, our financial markets have become a snare and a delusion. Government only has two choices now: Either continue to bail them out, or regulate them in order to keep them honest. I vote for the latter."
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"At the same time as questions of labor were disappearing, economics began to elevate the status of investors' financial claims, insisting that owners of this form of property had rights equal to those of owners of real goods, such as land or factories. Even something as ephemeral as "good will" became recognized as property."
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via http://growabrain.typepad.com
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"The Republicans are playing to voters' identity. The Democrats are campaigning on their economic interests. The outcome of this year's election will ride on whether or not a segment of the working and middle-class electorate in economically-devastated states will support a ticket whose candidates pretend to be the cultural allies of the people or a ticket whose candidates are challenging (at least in part) the failed economic policies that should be the real source of bitterness at the grassroots. "
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"The list of reasons the financial system is unsound grew massively today, by the tune of a $1.2 trillion taxpayer funded bailout designed to bail out the wealthy at the expense of the poor.
Earlier today Paulson had the gall to state "this will cost the tax payer less than the alternative".
No one bothered to ask why it should cost the taxpayer anything at all."
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September 21, 2008 at 11:02 am · Filed under Tidbits of nanohistory
A strange juxtaposition this morning, when I picked up the library book I’ve been reading: Woody Holton’s Unruly Americans. And here I am, opening to Chapter 3, and reading about what? The financial crisis of speculation, loss of faith in lending and credit, the complaints by creditors against State governments for piecemeal enforcement of credit laws and tacit relief of debts and the growing outrage by individual debtors owning government bonds and lands whose value plummeted and who were therefore hard-pressed to make their payments in devalued currency.
In 1783-1787, that is. And look what that got us: a brand new government, run according to completely new rules. Because of course up until that point the United States was “run” by the Articles of Confederation.
A fascinating book in its own right, it starts off with a bang by dismissing all the mythology surrounding the Founding Fathers, the “rights of man” and all that diverse crap that Republicans, Democrats and Libertarians have conflated with the document at hand. It was about economics; about lending, credit, landlords and tenants. About banking, about law enforcement, and about (in some real sense) balance.
But in light of this weekend’s foreboding sense of doom, an interesting analogy might be drawn. I’m going to spend a few hours finishing it, and see what kind of perspective might arrive.
Too often history goes unnoticed when current events overshadow people’s memories.
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