And Still I Persist » Credit Backlash

The real estate collapse isn’t over yet

bfwebster — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 09:57:33 +0000

It’s about to move into commercial real estate (emphasis mine):

Investors who bought into the deal were confident that real-estate manager Tishman Speyer would be able to greatly boost profits by raising rents in Manhattan’s sizzling apartment market. But today, the 56-building, 11,000-apartment property is suffering from a slowing New York economy, a lawsuit that has hindered the owner’s ability to convert rent-controlled units to market rentals, and the debt load.

Realpoint estimates that the property is worth only $2.1 billion now, less than half of the purchase price. By that measure, all the equity investors and many of the lenders, including Government of Singapore Investment Corp., or GIC; Gramercy Capital Corp.; and SL Green Realty Corp., are in danger of seeing most, if not all, of their investments wiped out. Hartford Financial Services Group, which bought $100 million of the debt tied to the property, said it has “sufficiently reserved for ths asset in the first half of this year.”

Ain’t we got fun? ..bruce w..

9/12 Rally liveblogging — kickoff meeting

bfwebster — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 13:10:28 +0000

Sandra and I are sitting here in the DC Armory, a venerable (not aging well) structure out by RFK Stadium. This is where this morning’s kickoff meeting for the 9/12 Taxpayer March on the Capitol is taking place.

This meeting is only for the truly committed. First, it’s taking place Thursday morning, even though the March isn’t until Saturday, and a lot of folks aren’t showing up until tomorrow. Second, the DC Armory is out at the #$@-end of nowhere here in DC — no offense to the fine people who live out here, but it’s not an easy place to get to.

It is a bit unnerving how well Sandra and I fit into the visual demographic of this group, which is to say, a lot of couples in their 40s to 60s, a bit hefty (apologies to all), and dressed casually (jeans, shorts, t-shirts, etc.). I suspect most of us here are either retired, self-employed, or willing to take a few days off from work to be here.

A solution to the financial crisis

bfwebster — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 14:41:57 +0000

Hope at last!

US To Trade Gold Reserves For Cash Through Cash4Gold.com

Makes as much sense as any of the financial plans coming out of Congress and the Administration these days. ..bruce w..

Global Economic Indicators Still Cold

Bruce Henderson — Thu, 14 May 2009 21:38:30 +0000

I honestly don’t blame the administration for talking up the economy over the past few months. I am sure they wanted to see if they could nudge Americans into coming out of the bunkers and buying again. It worked for George Bush after 9-11, maybe they can give it one more go?

Sadly, Sally and Joe Sixpack are tapped out. Any spare money they have is either going to pay off their debt or being salted away, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

While talk in the press as of late has been that some have seen “green shoots” of a nascient recovery, the larger indicators are showing a different story; a story of a prolonged and deepening crash around the world. Consider this story from the New York Times, Cargo Ships Treading Water Off Singapore, Waiting for Work:

One of the largest fleets of ships ever gathered idles here just outside one of the world’s busiest ports, marooned by the receding tide of global trade. There may be tentative signs of economic recovery in spots around the globe, but few here.

So many ships have congregated here — 735, according to AIS Live ship tracking service of Lloyd’s Register-Fairplay in Redhill, Britain — that shipping lines are becoming concerned about near misses and collisions in one of the world’s most congested waterways, the straits that separate Malaysia and Singapore from Indonesia.

The root of the problem lies in an unusually steep slump in global trade, confirmed by trade statistics announced on Tuesday.

The gathering of so many freighters “is extraordinary,” said Christopher Pålsson, a senior consultant at Lloyd’s Register-Fairplay Research, the consulting division of Lloyd’s Register-Fairplay. “We have probably not witnessed anything like this since the early 1980s,” during the last big bust in the global shipping industry.

The global shipping fleet lies rusting at anchor in the Malacca Straights, hoping one day to have cargo to cary. Many of these ships were built in the last 10 years by conglomerates and global funds hoping to cash in on the global trade boom they thought would never stop. Those ships were financed through large banks in Europe and the US. What do you think happens whey they can’t make the payments because there are no work for the ships? Subprime super tankers anyone?

No matter how much anyone tries to talk the economy out of the slump, the fundamentals are still showing the worst is yet to come. As we cored out whole industries and sent them over seas, we lost the ability to manufacture our way out of it. All we produce now is debt and crazy derivatives on debt. The market for them disappeared well over a year ago and won’t likely ever come back.

That other shoe? It’s still waiting to drop.

Wednesday’s a snooze day

bfwebster — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 06:15:34 +0000

We're coming for you.

MORNING LINKS

ITEM: Speaking of swine flu hysteria, this may be a good time to invest in pork belly futures – there may be a shortage soon.

ITEM: Yet another way in which Western Europeans are looking for the US to help them financially.

ITEM: Here’s a slideshow of items from the Michael Jackson Neverland Ranch auction. Some interesting, some amusing, some downright creepy. Hat tip to the Drunk Report.

OVERNIGHT LINKS

ITEM: With rising panic over the swine flu, here’s a statistic to keep in mind: about 36,000 people already die each year from flu right here in the US. It will be interesting to see how many actual swine flu deaths we have here in the US. Bet it won’t be 36,000.

ITEM: Or should I say “H1N1 flu deaths“? Just trips off the tongue, doesn’t it? Kind of like “man-caused disasters”. Hmm…maybe “porcine-induced disaster“? (For SK fans out there: yes, ‘trips’ was deliberate.)

ITEM: What is most telling about Arlen Specter’s party switch is not the move itself; it’s his blatant hypocrisy after denying such a switch just five weeks ago and proposing changes to Senate rules back in 2001 after Jeffords’ defection. But here’s the real kicker: Joe Biden talked him into the switch. It’s one thing to be persuaded by the charisma and rhetoric (if a teleprompter is handy) of Obama — but Joe Biden? It doesn’t say much for Specter. Of course, neither does this.

ITEM: The economic collapse has made wildcatters of us all:

In 1993, Chevron Corp. gave up the ghost and turned the field over to the city. “We go for big oil fields,” a Chevron spokesman says, and Whittier just “wasn’t economical.” Whittier, for its part, saw its legacy in President Richard M. Nixon — who attended college here when he couldn’t afford Harvard — and the city was glad to be rid of the pumps.

But then last year, as tax revenues plunged and oil crept up toward $150 a barrel, Bob Henderson, the town’s mayor, had a revelation.

“I was sitting at home, just idly thinking about this possibility of oil drilling and suddenly thought: ‘Oh, my God, when I purchased the old Chevron property, we demanded they give us the oil rights.’ ”

The demand was made so Whittier could convert the area into a wilderness preserve. Says Mr. Henderson: “It’s home to an awful lot of animals — bobcats, coyotes, hundreds of birds.”

Goodbye Bambi, hello oil rigs. Cha-ching!

ITEM: And pirate attacks have made heroes of us all:

Tayler and the others rushed to the railing and also saw what he described as five or six men sitting in a roofless pirate boat. One started climbing a rope to the deck beneath them. “He was already halfway up,” says Tayler. One passenger screamed: “Pirates!”

Without hesitation, passengers began to grab whatever they could find around them. “We immediately began throwing tables and deck chairs at the rope,” said Tayler. One hit a pirate scaling it. He fell off and the boat turned around, Tayler recalls.

The skirmish between the passengers and the pirates lasted for several minutes, he says. Suddenly, the pirates opened fire — Tayler says he counted three salvos of 25 to 30 rounds each.

Again and again, the pirate boat would approach the ship and disappear under the stern, only to reemerge. Tayler and his fellow passengers continued to throw chairs despite the gunfire. One passenger was shot in the leg and one bullet grazed the head of a crew member. The armed security staff finally turned up six to eight minutes into the skirmish, passengers claim.

Good for them.

ITEM: And the continuing market in credit default swaps (CDSs) may yet again make paupers of us all:

Wall Street looks to be quietly making gains in its attempt to keep regulatory interference to a minimum in a $30 trillion derivatives market at the heart of the financial crisis.

The fact that I haven’t even mentioned the name of the market yet speaks to one of the main reasons Wall Street is winning: it is benefitting from the fact that Main Streeters and their representatives in Congress are too bored by the topic to do anything about it.

Credit default swaps, or CDS — there, I said it — are a really geeky business. They are essentially promises by one party to pay another, if some third party should fail to pay its debts.

ITEM: Quick, which car manufacturer do you think will be #1 in global new car sales ten years from now? I’ll bet you weren’t thinking of this one.

ITEM: Speaking of manufacturing, here’s one of my all-time favorite SNL commercials. The best part is watching Sam Waterston struggle to keep a straight face.

ITEM: And finally, this is just too cool for words:

One man, living his dream.

Thanks for stopping by! ..bruce w..

Thursday spurning

bfwebster — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 06:15:03 +0000

Atlas drowned.

OVERNIGHT LINKS

ITEM: I figured that Janet Napolitano had some kind of security credentials beyond being a Democrat from a border state who was current on all her taxes. It doesn’t appear so (the credentials, that is; not the taxes; hat tip to the Drudge Report):

In an interview broadcast Monday on the CBC, Ms. Napolitano attempted to justify her call for stricter border security on the premise that “suspected or known terrorists” have entered the U. S. across the Canadian border, including the perpetrators of the 9/11 attack.

All the 9/11 terrorists, of course, entered the United States directly from overseas. The notion that some arrived via Canada is a myth that briefly popped up in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and was then quickly debunked.

Informed of her error, Ms. Napolitano blustered: “I can’t talk to that. I can talk about the future. And here’s the future. The future is we have borders.”

Indeed we do. Here’s a bit more sober account, but it doesn’t make her look any better. And here’s yet more head shaking from Up North.

ITEM: Speaking of security gaffes, the message from the Politico to Obama over security issues is: you can’t have it both ways:

President Barack Obama’s attempt to project legal and moral clarity on coercive CIA interrogation methods has instead done the opposite — creating confusion and political vulnerability over an issue that has inflamed both the left and right.

In the most recent instance, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair acknowledged in a memo to the intelligence community that Bush-era interrogation practices yielded had “high-value information,” then omitted that admission from a public version of his assessment.

That leaves a top Obama administration official appearing to validate claims by former Vice President Dick Cheney that waterboarding and other techniques the White House regards as torture were effective in preventing terrorist attacks. And the press release created the impression the administration was trying to suppress this conclusion.

The president, who has said he wants to focus on the future rather than litigate the past, also opened himself to distraction and attack by retracting the earlier assurance by top officials that they had no plans to prosecute lawyers for former President George W. Bush who approved the “enhanced interrogation” program.

Note to the White House: this is reality, not a Hollywood film (“Dave”, “The American President”) or a TV series (“The West Wing”), where high ideals and good intentions, mixed with charisma and good looks (rugged or smooth) magically solve knotty domestic and international problems in 60 to 120 minutes. The Presidency of the United States is a tough, demanding, and unforgiving job, with lots of lose-lose situations. George W. Bush had far more executive experience coming in than did you, Mr. President, and he still managed to make any number of mistakes, both strategic and tactical. After 100 days, you appear to be in over your head, and things appear to be getting worse, not better.

ITEM: Maybe this is the approach that Pres. Obama should take.

ITEM: Speaking of things getting worse, they are for the New York Times. The NYT has $1.3 billion in debt and only $34 million in available cash (there’s another $240 million, but that’s set aside for debt payments). Hey, I know! The NYT can pull an Obama and find ways to cut an entire $100,000 in expenses; that’ll make everything better, won’t it? (For the math impaired [which includes the White House]: $1.7 trillion : $100 million ~:: $1.3 billion : $100 thousand.)

ITEM: Speaking of math impaired, it’s a good thing that — as VP Joe Biden solemnly informed NATO — only 5% of the Taliban is incorrigible, because otherwise they’d control the whole Middle East by now:

Pakistan’s Taliban have seized control of another district in the country’s northwest just 70 miles from the capital after consolidating their hold on the Swat valley following a peace deal with the government, according to local government officials and residents.

The latest Taliban advance into the Buner district has spurred fears that the controversial accord, which allowed the militants to enforce Sharia law in Swat, has emboldened them to expand their influence.

Militants have been moving into Buner since the Swat peace deal was signed in February. But starting Tuesday night they seized control of the entire district, which has a population of more than one million people, local government officials and residents said. Heavily-armed militants, streaming in from Swat, occupied government offices and set up their own checkposts. Terrified residents fled their homes.

Of course, the Taliban will have to deal with that old bugaboo, public backlash. After all, when they controlled Afghanistan, it was clear how much regard they had for world opinion. Meanwhile, the folks at Stratfor are pretty sure that things are going to get ugly in Pakistan.

ITEM: Speaking of tyrants who oppress, you know that book that Chavez gave Obama? Here’s a brisk fisking of it.

ITEM: Speaking of south of the border, it appears that Obama is losing Mexico.

ITEM: Speaking of fisking, here’s a wonderful example by Kevin Williamson of an editorial by Sen. Bernard Sanders (I-Finland), in which Sen. Sanders attempts to defend socialism. Here’s my favorite quote from Williamson’s piece:

A critic once asked Milton Friedman what he thought about the fact that Sweden has basically no poverty, and Friedman answered: We don’t have many poor Swedes in America, either.

ITEM: Speaking of socialism, here’s our daily creeping socialism/fascism alert: Some members of the Congressional Oversight Panel — unelected, unconfirmed, but very much at the heart of the financial bailout — apparently want to expand their mandate:

The COP argued that historical lessons show that the most effective response to banking crises has involved a combination of ousting “failed management” and liquidating banks. The April report takes on the Treasury’s responses in these areas and questions how effectively it has implemented its goals in dealing with the crisis. The report essentially argues for nationalization on the grounds that, under government reorganization, bad assets can be removed, failed managers can be ousted or replaced and business segments can be spun off from the institutions. “Depositors and some bondholders are protected, and institutions can emerge from government control with the same corporate identity but healthier balance sheets,” the report argues, parroting a position that has been staked out by many prominent economic pundits.

Clearly, this is Elizabeth Warren’s particular crusade against the banks, since a majority of panel members dissented from the direction the report took and two refused to sign off on it at all. Her letters to Secretary Geithner and Chairman Bernanke stop just short of attacking them for trying to restart the market for asset-backed securities. These markets have been an important part of the financial intermediation system for decades, funding student loans, consumer credit and small businesses. But Professor Warren has had a long-standing antipathy to consumer credit markets.

ITEM: You know that big flap over the NSA “leak” of alleged wiretapped conversations by Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice). Well, there’s a whole lot more to that story than meets the eye.

ITEM: Meanwhile, Mike Adams gives the lowdown on ten free speech rules at the UNC campus. For example:

5. Rights do not compel responsibility. The notion of responsibility is antithetical to the notion of collectivism. Notions of responsibility help to advance capitalism, which help to advance oppression. In other words, it is irresponsible to advance responsibility because it is responsible for a lot of group oppression.

And where do these rules come from? Well, Gay Patriot has some ideas.

ITEM: Six months ago — before the election — Arthur Laffler wrote an article on the burgeoning economic crisis. He was dead on about how the US Government would likely botch its efforts to “help”:

But here’s the rub. Now enter the government and the prospects of a kinder and gentler economy. To alleviate the obvious hardships to both homeowners and banks, the government commits to buy mortgages and inject capital into banks, which on the face of it seems like a very nice thing to do. But unfortunately in this world there is no tooth fairy. And the government doesn’t create anything; it just redistributes. Whenever the government bails someone out of trouble, they always put someone into trouble, plus of course a toll for the troll. Every $100 billion in bailout requires at least $130 billion in taxes, where the $30 billion extra is the cost of getting government involved.

If you don’t believe me, just watch how Congress and Barney Frank run the banks. If you thought they did a bad job running the post office, Amtrak, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the military, just wait till you see what they’ll do with Wall Street.

Amen, brother. Amen. Hat tip to Samizdata.

ITEM: Happy Earth Day! This little reminder from Kevin Williamson (again) does much to explain both the US environmental movement and Sen. Arlen Specter (depends-PA).

ITEM: And here’s one more item for Earth Day. I had forgotten about this video — I sent it out to my “Link o’ the Day” mailing some months back — but Ace (at Ace of Spades) dredged it back up:

Actually, it’s sort of how I feel about the burgeoning deficits.

Wednesday earning

bfwebster — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 11:00:25 +0000

Federal budget go boom!

MORNING LINKS — yeah, I’m up early

ITEM: Jim Lindgren over at the Volokh Conspiracy does the simple investigation that no news organization (except possibly Fox) seems willing or able to do. His finding: states with the highest unemployment rates have high tax and unionization rates, while states with the lowest unemployment rates have low tax and unionization rates. Like the fact that small cars are less safe than large cars, this is not a big surprise to anyone who thinks about it for a few seconds, yet it is almost never discussed in the mainstream media and the mere suggestion of this obvious connection makes liberals’ heads explode.

ITEM: Jennifer Rubin points out the reasons for buyer’s remorse on Obama among independent and conservative voters. And it’s not like the Left is exactly happy with him, either.

ITEM: “Why is venture capital under assault?” I raised that same question two weeks ago. It still makes no sense.

ITEM: I wasn’t aware that the Obama Administration was doing this much micromanagement of GM. Calling John Galt, calling John Galt . . .

ITEM: An article on why the tea party protests will continue:

Here is an interesting set of facts. If the government increased the top tax rate from the current rate of 35% to 100% (yes, that’s right 100%), it would only collect an extra $400 billion this year. In other words, confiscating all the income that is currently taxed at 35% would not raise enough revenue to cover any of the annual deficits projected in the next 10 years. There is no way that tax hikes on the rich alone can pay for proposed spending in the current budget.

Hence the photograph above.

ITEM: The Sun labored mightily and brought forth a tiny sunspot yesterday, which is vanishing even as you read this. And the overall trend is quiet. Too quiet.

ITEM: Speaking of idiots and science, I wasn’t aware that the latest Dan Brown movie, “Angels and Demons”, posits a terrorist group with a kilogram of antimatter. As the poster points out, if you’ve got that, you’re already wildly rich, so there’s no need to threaten anyone. Of course, given the historical idiocies in The Da Vinci Code, I shouldn’t be surprised at scientific idiocies in Brown’s other works.

OVERNIGHT LINKS — I stay up late browsing so you don’ t have to.

ITEM: Keith Hennessey uses some simple examples to show the bogus nature of the “savings” that Obama is projecting over the next several years, making the actual deficits worse than the projected ones:

Suppose I bought an iPhone yesterday for $500.

Suppose I argue that I will save $2000 this week, because I intend to refraining from buying an additional iPhone today, nor will I buy one this Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday.

Suppose I plan to buy a new flat screen TV tomorrow for $1500.

Can I claim I that have paid for my TV by cutting other spending, and that in addition I will be saving $500 this week?

This is what the Administration has done with war costs in their budget.

ITEM: Speaking of budget problems, public universities — dependent upon help from now-declining tax revenues – are looking at substantial tuition increases, while private universities — more subject to market forces — are looking at some of their lowest tuition increases ever. However, this article doesn’t address the issue that Glenn Reynolds keeps raising: has the high availability of Federal student loans and grants for years created a “higher education bubble”?

ITEM: In the meantime, the US Treasury under Tim Geither keeps giving what can only be described (charitably) as conflicting information regarding banks and bailouts. After letting it be known over the weekend that banks could only repay bailout funds “if such a move is in the national interest“, Geithner now says that the Treasury Department is “depending upon banks to return $25 billion of the bailout funds they received last year.”

Isn’t that called a “squeeze play“?

ITEM: Speaking of Treasury, it appears that firms participation in the PPIP toxic asset program “may be subject to executive compensation caps after all.” Megan McArdle things this means the end of PPIP — after all, who in their right mind would accept the Federal government setting compenstation levels (possilbly after the fact) in exchange for being allowed the privilege of buying toxic assets? As McArdle says,

There is clearly enormous regulatory risk for anyone who chooses to get involved with any of these programs.

ITEM: Speaking of economics, Sen. John Kerry (D-France) he wants to hold Senate hearings on how to save the newspaper industry, or at least his home town paper, the Boston Globe. On the other hand, Dana Milbank reports that the House Judiciary Committee (wha…?) held hearings on the same subject, and they were less than productive:

The dominant sentiment of lawmakers was indifference; most of the 14 subcommittee members didn’t show up. The task of leading the hearing was left to Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), who chairs the relevant subcommittee but seemed not entirely prepared for the job. He twice misidentified the ranking Republican member and introduced a panel of witnesses by saying, “Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye. . . . Come forward and assume the position.” Johnson then directed reporters in the room to stand but assured them that “you will not have to assume the position.”

At one point, Johnson asked whether there were “any spies” in the audience. “Don’t forget that torture was once ruled legal,” he said. And he alarmed attendees when he asked if someone would “call the physician’s office . . . because we have several people who have developed a sudden case of colorblindness.” (Eventually, people realized he was referring to witnesses ignoring the red light on their time clocks.)

Kinda gives you confidence in the future of America, doesn’t it? Jeff Jarvis, however, gives Sen. Kerry his own opinion on “saving newspapers”:

Senator, thank you for inviting me to speak at these hearings. But, with respect, I believe you are investigating the wrong issue from the wrong angle and in any case, I am not sure what role you and government should have in this matter.

Newspapers are going to die. That is wrenching, of course, for employees – not just journalists but the rarely mentioned pressmen, drivers, and classified ad takers – who will lose their jobs, and the stock- and bond-holders who are losing their investments in these failing and over-leveraged companies.

But this upheaval is no different from that overtaking automakers, auto dealers, retail chains, banks, airlines, music companies, and soon other media sectors that are suffering and dying in a reshaping of the economy that is more profound than a mere financial crisis and more fundamental even than a recession or depression. We are undergoing a millennial transformation from the industrial, mass economy to what comes next. Disruption and destruction are inevitable.

ITEM: Speaking of journalism, in a move reminiscent of Jesus’ parable of the unjust steward, the Society of Professional Journalists has decided to oppose any attempt to reinstate the so-called Fairness Doctrine.

ITEM: And speaking of Sen. Kerry, he must still be smarting from not getting the Sec’y of State position he was anticipating: he’s visited Pakistan and is now criticizing the Obama Administration’s approach:

Just back from a visit to Pakistan, Sen. John Kerry says the Obama administration’s plan for that volatile country, rolled out last month with great fanfare, “is not a real strategy.”

“Pakistan is in a moment of peril,” Kerry, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said during a session with USA TODAY reporters and editors. “And I believe there is not in place yet an adequate policy or plan to deal with it.”

The real pain for Kerry probably wasn’t Hillary Clinton getting the job he wanted; it was likely hearing that Joe Biden had been offered that slot as well.

ITEM: Kerry is not the only one critiquing the Obama Administration. Former Sec’y of State Henry Kissinger spends several paragraphs acknowledging Obama’s “kumbaya/mea culpa” diplomacy before making his real point:

Proliferation is perhaps the most immediate illustration of the relationship between world order and diplomacy. If North Korea and Iran succeed in establishing nuclear arsenals in the face of the stated opposition of all the major powers in the U.N. Security Council and outside of it, the prospects for a homogeneous international order will be severely damaged. In a world of multiplying nuclear weapons states, it would be unreasonable to expect that those arsenals will never be used or never fall into the hands of rogue organizations. A new, less universal approach to world order would be needed. The next (literally) few years will be the last opportunity to achieve an enforceable restraint. If the United States, China, Japan, South Korea and Russia cannot achieve this vis-à-vis a country with next to no impact on international trade and no resources needed by anyone, the phrase “world community” will become empty.

North Korea has recently voided all concessions it made in six years of talks. It cannot be permitted to sell the same concessions over and over again. The six-power talks should be resumed only if Pyongyang restores the circumstances to which it has already agreed, mothballing its plutonium reactor and returning international inspectors to the site. When those talks resume, the ultimate quid pro quo must be the abandonment of the Korean nuclear weapons program and the destruction of the existing stockpile in return for normalization of relations at the end of the process. Since the outcome affects all neighbors of North Korea, and since the Korean nuclear program threatens them more than it does the United States, calls to place the emphasis on bilateral Korean-U.S. talks amount to a call for isolating the United States.

You tell them, Henry.

ITEM: Speaking of nuclear terrorism, even David Ignatius — no arch-conservative he — thinks that Obama’s approach to the so-called “torture memos” has done damage within the CIA:

Sad to say, it’s slow roll time at Langley after the release of interrogation memos that, in the words of one veteran officer, “hit the agency like a car bomb in the driveway.” President Obama promised CIA officers that they won’t be prosecuted for carrying out lawful orders, but the people on the firing line don’t believe him. They think the memos have opened a new season of investigation and retribution.

The lesson for younger officers is obvious: Keep your head down. Duck the assignments that carry political risk. Stay away from a counterterrorism program that has become a career hazard.

Yeah, that will help us when “rogue organizations” get their hands on nuclear devices from Iran or the Norks. Keep that photo at the top of the post in mind.

ITEM: And speaking of repressive regimes, Fidel Castro rose from his deathbed to set the record straight on Obama’s conversation with his brother Raul:

Fidel Castro said Tuesday that President Barack Obama “misinterpreted” his brother Raul’s sentiments toward the United States and bristled at any suggestion Cuba should free political prisoners or reduce official fees on money sent to the island from the U.S.

Raul Castro touched off a whirlwind of speculation that the U.S. and Cuba could be headed toward a thaw in nearly a half-century of chilly relations last week, when he said Cuban leaders would be willing to sit down with their U.S. counterparts and discuss “everything,” including human rights, freedom of the press and expression, and political prisoners on the island.

I think this is Fidel’s way of saying “I’m not dead yet.”

ITEM: Broke? Unemployed? Your mortgage underwater? Try looking for gold underwater instead:

Not since the Great Depression have so many hard-luck people been lured by prospecting, hoping to find their fortune tumbling down a mountain stream. The recession and high gold prices are helping to fuel the latest gold craze, especially among workers who have lost jobs.

“I guess there’s always hope. At home, I don’t have any right now,” said Steve Biorck, a concrete finisher who headed west because construction work dried up in Tennessee. Now he spends days standing knee-deep in an icy creek coaxing gold flakes from a swirling pan of gravel.

ITEM: We all know — or should know — the difference between causation and correlation. But it should give one pause for thought that (a) the Earth has been cooling down for nearly a decade now and (b) the Sun is very, very quiet:

The Sun is the dimmest it has been for nearly a century.

There are no sunspots, very few solar flares – and our nearest star is the quietest it has been for a very long time.

The observations are baffling astronomers, who are due to study new pictures of the Sun, taken from space, at the UK National Astronomy Meeting.

The Sun normally undergoes an 11-year cycle of activity. At its peak, it has a tumultuous boiling atmosphere that spits out flares and planet-sized chunks of super-hot gas. This is followed by a calmer period.

Last year, it was expected that it would have been hotting up after a quiet spell. But instead it hit a 50-year year low in solar wind pressure, a 55-year low in radio emissions, and a 100-year low in sunspot activity.

Of course, the AGW proponents rush to say that there’s no link between the sun and climate change.

ITEM: Speaking of buffoons, New Hampshire State Democratic Chair Ray Buckley called last week’s Tea Party demonstrators “an unhinged mob.” Trust me, Ray — you haven’t seen unhinged yet.

Wednesday prawns

bfwebster — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 09:00:25 +0000

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Remember -- the future depends upon you.

MORNING LINKS

BREAKING NEWS: The American crew on that ship hijacked by Somali pirates has retaken control of the ship. A reminder to the world: don’t screw with Americans.

ITEM: Two books you really, really should read are Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan, both by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. These are outstanding works that deal with the real-world implications — such as the massive financial meltdown that we’re in — of human ignorance or misunderstanding of probability. Both books were written before the meltdown; Taleb now talks about how to avoid a repeat performance. Example:

6. Do not give children sticks of dynamite, even if they come with a warning. Complex derivatives need to be banned because nobody understands them and few are rational enough to know it. Citizens must be protected from themselves, from bankers selling them “hedging” products, and from gullible regulators who listen to economic theorists.

ITEM: You should also read (and it will only take a few minutes) Joshua Stanton’s piece over at the New Ledger on “The Myth of Soft Power: Ten Effective, Non-Military Options Obama Won’t Use Against North Korea“. Example:

7. Expand U.N. sanctions to ban the sale of North Korean gold — some of it likely mined in concentration camps — on the international markets. Even if China blocks U.N. sanctions on North Korean gold sales, most of this gold is sold in the capitals of U.S. allies Thailand and the United Kingdom. Thus, bilateral diplomacy would be an effective alternative to the U.N.

ITEM: Great news! The ceiling credit card interest rate has been lowered to 12.5%! Oh, wait — that’s over in Taiwan. Here in the States, Congress is atttempting to raise payday loan interest rates to 391%.

ITEM: Obama is losing, or at least annoying, John Dickerson over at Slate. The reason: Obama’s propensity to use exaggeration and overstatement (and, let’s face it, though Dickerson is too polite to put it in these terms, outright lies) in characterizing his critics and watchdogs (emphasis mine):

He’s also a nuance-free exaggerator. In Turkey, he told students, “Some of my reporter friends from the States were asking, ‘How come you didn’t solve everything on this trip?’ ”

A politician is always on safe ground charging that the press has gone overboard. But no one was asking that question.

Nor was anyone saying what Obama said some people were saying in his press conference last month: “We did a video, sending a message to the Iranian people and the leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran. And some people said, ‘Well, they did not immediately say that we’re eliminating nuclear weapons and stop funding terrorism.’ ” No one said that. But it helped Obama make his pitch for patience.

For me, that’s a sign of intellectual dishonesty (or, at least, laziness) and indicates that Obama may think that his arguments and actions can’t stand on their own merits. Note that other people were pointing out this same tendency in Obama’s comments well before the election last fall.

ITEM: Like it or not (and a lot of people don’t), your Social Security number has become, in effect, your universal identifier. But for most of us, our SS card is a flimsy, plain piece of paper buried in a file or drawer somewhere. So the design firm Frog has proposed a 21st century Social Security card that incorporates photographic, anti-forgery and biometric features. But they seriously need to work on their marketing; their name for this proposal is the “Troika” card, a word that has strong (and negative) Cold War-era connotations.

ITEM: How bad is the mortgage fraud crisis here in America? So bad that the Feds just indicted a group of 24 people down in San Diego led by a street gang member for at least $9 million in mortgage fraud in the 2005-2008 period. Like Willie Sutton said, it’s where the money is (or was).

ITEM: Speaking of fraud, here’s a bit of news to reassure a public wondering where all this stimulus money is going (emphasis mine):

The federal government will soon send more than $300 million in stimulus funds to 61 housing agencies that have been repeatedly faulted by auditors for mishandling government aid, a USA TODAY review has found.

Yeah, that’s going to work out well, don’t you think? And Treasury’s creation of the P-PIP Fund may open the door to lots more financial shenanigans.

ITEM: Speaking of piracy, it appears even the Somali pirates want to test President Obama. This is the first ship with an all-American crew that the Somali pirates have seized. Coincidence or opportunity? You decide. Of course, this comes just as Joe Conason tries to argue (with a straight face) that Obama represents an extremists’s nightmare.

ITEM: Creeping socialism/fascism alert: I somehow missed this little gem from Treasury Sec’y Tim Geithner:

“Accordingly, we recommend that all advisers to hedge funds (and other private pools of capital, including private equity funds and venture capital funds) with assets under management over a certain threshold be required to register with the SEC. All such funds advised by an SEC-registered investment adviser should be subject to investor and counterparty disclosure requirements and regulatory reporting requirements. The regulatory reporting requirements for such funds should require reporting, on a confidential basis, information necessary to assess whether the fund or fund family is so large or highly leveraged that it poses a threat to financial stability.”

Yeah, regulating venture capital funds is going to help stimulate the economy. Talk about a flight from investment, and right when we need it the most.

ITEM: Creeping socialism/fascism alert (part 2): Steve Malanga has a well-written piece on the “reawakening of corporatism” thanks to the Obama Administration:

But a version of corporatism also emerged in the 1920s in Fascist Italy, where Mussolini conceived of syndicates in numerous industries composed of labor leaders and businessmen helping direct the Italian economy in the service of Fascism. Hitler’s solution was more thorough, to eliminate those organizations and associations within Germany that opposed him and to smother individualism by instituting a corporatist regime of forcible coordination among trade unions and business groups.

As chilling as these authoritarian versions of corporatism sound today, in the 1930s they found admirers in the U.S., where the ravages of the Great Depression provoked public longing for a safer, more thoroughly planned economy without as much resistance and debate from recalcitrant business leaders or opposition party members who opposed the New Deal. Even today one occasionally hears a longing for a benign version of this elaborately planned economic world in phrases like “getting the trains running on time,” or in a recent column in the New York Times which suggested that Hitler’s wartime buildup amounted to a successful government stimulus in Depression-era Germany.

Oh, and if you haven’t read Liberal Fascism and The Forgotten Man, you should.

OVERNIGHT LINKS

ITEM: Tired of all the bad news? Wish that things could be like this instead? (A distinct leftish bias, but I’m willing to take the bitter with the sweet. Hat tip to Metafilter.)

ITEM: Speaking of humorous fantasies — with Bush out of office, the market for Bush-bashing jokes, web sites and paraphernalia has plummeted. Of course, they could always start to make fun of Obama . . . naaah.

ITEM: And if you’re in the mood for some bad news — that is, besides all the items below — here’s a little something to worry about. However, the Bad Astronomer weighed in on it about a year ago, and we’re all still here.

ITEM: And yet more bad news — or, better said, sad advice to the successful. (Hat tip to Rand Simberg.)

ITEM: Well, the Obama Administration is now saying that “the government has spent, lent or set aside more than $4 trillion through the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.” The mind boggles, and the unborn children weep.

ITEM: Keith Hennessy, who raised concerns about the lack of “free market” references in the G-20 summit statement, gives Obama credit for directly addressing the need for free trade while speaking in France, no less.

ITEM: VP Joe Biden says that former VP Dick Cheney is “dead wrong” on the safety of the United States. If I had to pick one or the other to protect the US — or, frankly, to carry out any task requiring executive competence — I’d pick Cheney, and not Biden. ‘Nuff said.

ITEM: Not everyone is buying the attempted rehabilitation of Eliot Spitzer. And why is it that only Democrats get this kind of pass? I’m surprised Obama hasn’t nominated Sandy Berger for some key position.

ITEM: Glad to see that someone continues to raise questions about Larry Summers and his income from Wall Street. And it’s the Washington Post doing it. I’m telling you — the WaPo is making the New York Times look like the Obama lapdog that it is. On the other hand, Woman On Fire Megan McArdle puts together a reasonable defense of Summers, though that may just be to tweak Glenn Greenwald (who had two New York Times Bestseller books!*).

*OK, in all fairness to Glenn, if any of my books had made the NYT Bestseller lists, you can be sure it would be mentioned prominently on this blog.

ITEM: Proof by assertion is no proof at all. Stephen Morris assures us up front that

Despite blunders in the appointments process, Obama has shown a wisdom, intellectual clarity and moral humility that Jimmy Carter lacked, and that augurs well for dealing with the tremendous threats to US and Western security.

But he fails to provide any convincing evidence to that end, beyond his own admiration for Obama and his own wishful thinking. Stephen Morris is an Australian who, as far as I can tell, didn’t actually live here in the US during the Carter Administration. I’m an American who did (and was in the workforce with a wife and children to support). Beyond that, I have yet to see “wisdom, intellectual clarity, and moral humility” on the part of President Obama since his inauguration; quite the opposite, I’d say.

ITEM: Just a “helpful reminder” that the United States income tax code is already one of the most progressive taxes in the world. But Congress and Obama don’t think it’s progressive enough, apparently.

ITEM: Best headline of the overnight links: A Nuclear Hedge Against Aliens.

ITEM: Camille Paglia keeps making excuses for Obama himself, though she excoriates his staff. I sense, however, that she will not always remain so forgiving of the One. And, God bless her, she remains intellectually honest:

Yes, something very ugly has surfaced in contemporary American liberalism, as evidenced by the irrational and sometimes infantile abuse directed toward anyone who strays from a strict party line. Liberalism, like second-wave feminism, seems to have become a new religion for those who profess contempt for religion. It has been reduced to an elitist set of rhetorical formulas, which posit the working class as passive, mindless victims in desperate need of salvation by the state. Individual rights and free expression, which used to be liberal values, are being gradually subsumed to worship of government power.

ITEM: Mark Liberman over at Language Log takes David Brooks to task over his misreading of alleged scientific findings. Or, better put, Liberman finds a third-party cartoon that does the deed.

ITEM: Gerard Vanderleun nails the main advantage (obvious in retrospect) of newspapers over new media:

Meanwhile, Jeff Javits over at BuzzMachine posts the keynote talk that he thinks the “angry, old, white men” at the Newpaper Assocation of America meeting should get (but won’t):

You blew it.

You’ve had 20 years since the start of the web, 15 years since the creation of the commercial browser and craigslist, a decade since the birth of blogs and Google to understand the changes in the media economy and the new behaviors of the next generation of – as you call them, Mr. Murdoch – net natives. You’ve had all that time to reinvent your products, services, and organizations for this new world, to take advantage of new opportunities and efficiencies, to retrain not only your staff but your readers and advertisers, to use the power of your megaphones while you still had it to build what would come next. But you didn’t.

You blew it.

That’s just the warm-up. Definitely worth reading.

And remember — vote for prawns! ..bruce w..

Tuesday dawns

bfwebster — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 09:00:18 +0000

Dawn is a feeling...

AFTERNOON LINKS! Yes, there are actual afternoon links!

ITEM: Maybe it’s because he paid all his taxes — actor Kal Penn (of the “House” TV series and the “Harold and Kumar” movies) joins the White House staff.

ITEM: President Obama visits Baghdad. Good for him, and I mean that in all sincerity. My son Jon (CPL Webster, USMC) just finished his tour of duty in Iraq in February, and he’s likely to be in Afghanistan by the end of the year. And I’m glad — and again I mean this sincerely — that Pres. Obama was given as warm a welcome by the troops there as was President Bush on each of his visits to Iraq.

ITEM: So, how is the economic upheaval affecting law firms? Pretty harshly, by all accounts (emphasis mine):

Look, with minor exceptions, the reality is that M&A work is dead. Real estate work is non-existent. Putting aside bankruptcy, in every historic bust, litigation was the work that saved the day. But when we talk to law firms about litigation even in the patent world, I’m being told clients are cutting back. They’ve decided to cut back on the volume of prosecution work and are postponing any litigation they can. You can bring a lawsuit and prevail at trial but still not be assured of winning because today you don’t know whether you will be able to collect on the judgment.

One of our clients – a leading and successful IP boutique – told me that one of their very best long-term patent clients has decided to put off all their outside legal work except what is absolutely necessary to preserve the asset value of the corporation.

Let me summarize this way: Clients are pushing the reset button. They are insisting on smaller teams for their litigation and corporate work. We’ve heard a lot about this in the last few weeks. Clients are redesigning the value paradigm.

Much of the work that went outside they no longer deem to be of the same value. Work once viewed as essential is now viewed as elective. Work once viewed as high in value is no longer needed or is viewed as much less in value and warranting a much lower price. Commoditization is spreading to more and more work. It may well retreat some in the long run but in the short run it will operate with force.

FRESH MORNING LINKS! Now with less pork!

ITEM: Best headline of the day: “New Media vs. Gnostic Bureaucracies”. It also happens to be an outstanding article; here’s a key passage:

News media enterprises today are subject to market forces and are facing consequences – the destruction of many recently prosperous enterprises and types of enterprises.

But the modern nation-states – and the supranational organizations like the United Nations — are stiflingly bureaucratic. They are less subject to market forces than are businesses, and in reaction to the current economic panic – a crisis of abundance, not of scarcity – the big governmental and intergovernmental bureaucracies are opportunistically seizing more power.

The bureaucracies have a shifting parasite-host relationship with the social engineer, the “international development professional,” and the other types of soulless technocrat whom the late Samuel Huntington called “Davos Man” and Frederick Wilhelmsen called “the egomaniac, lusting gnostically to dominate all existence.” Just contemplate what has taken place in Washington the past two months, and at the Group of 20 Summit in London last week, where Chinese totalitarians, Russian authoritarians, cosmopolitan eugenicists, and Western “democratic” socialists strained to stitch together a Frankenstein monster from the jumble of formaldehyde jars holding the maimed remains of capitalism.

As the saying goes, read the whole thing.

ITEM: Robert Avrech, over at Big Hollywood, recounts his encounter with a stalked woman in a gun shop in Culver City (CA):

“I can’t believe I’m here. I’ve been against guns and violence my whole life.”

I let this pass. Now is not the time for a self-righteous lecture.

ITEM: Defense Sec’y Robert Gates seeks to expand the government payroll by 39,000 while reducing private sector defense contractors. He’s cutting some key weapons programs as well:

Gates also proposed canceling some of Boeing’s missile defense programs, including one to equip a modified 747 aircraft with a laser that can shoot down missiles soon after they’re launched, saying the program “has significant affordability and technology problems and the program’s proposed operational role is highly questionable.”

Boeing would also be hurt because it makes one-third of the F-22 fighter jet and the Pentagon plans to stop ordering additional aircraft. Gates would also cancel the Air Force’s program to build a new search-and-rescue helicopter, which had been awarded to Boeing. And it would not order more of Boeing’s C-17 cargo planes. Boeing could also see a military satellite program, known as TSAT, end.

Didn’t we go through this with Clinton? And didn’t we really, really regret it when 9/11 happened? I already quoted Santayana a few days ago, so I’ll quote Benjamin Franklin instead: “Experience is a dear school, but fools will learn at no other.”

ITEM: And if Obama appears to be repeating Clinton’s mistakes with the military, he likewise seems to be repeating Jimmy Carter’s mistakes with geopolitics:

Rarely has a Presidential speech been so immediately and transparently divorced from reality as Mr. Obama’s in Prague. The President delivered a stirring call to banish nuclear weapons at the very moment that North Korea and Iran are bidding to trigger the greatest proliferation breakout in the nuclear age. Mr. Obama also proposed an elaborate new arms-control regime to reduce nuclear weapons, even as both Pyongyang and Tehran are proving that the world’s great powers lack the will to enforce current arms-control treaties.

ITEM: Speaking of not learning from experience or history, the Associated Press now wants to go after “content pirates”. Good luck with that; after all, the RIAA has been so successful in its efforts to date.

ITEM: Creeping socialism/fascism update: Investor’s Business Daily raises the on-going issue as to why the Obama Administration won’t let banks give back TARP funds — is it to maintain control over these institutions?

ITEM: I considered embedding this Onion video, but I thought it might be a bit too, ah, graphic for some of our readers: “Hot new video game consists solely of shooting people point-blank in the face.“ I did find it hilarious, though, particularly in its skewering of the more pretentious side of the video game industry.

ITEM YOU PROBABLY WON’T SEE ELSEWHERE IN THE MSM: The Washington Times reports that the Bush Administration’s African AIDS effort saved 1.1 million lives.

OVERNIGHT LINKS

ITEM: Creeping socialism/facism alert: Remember the Phoenix police? The ones who seized the computer of a blogger critical of them? Well, now they’re detaining photographers for allegedly violating Homeland Security statutes by allegedly taking photographs of a Federal building (the photographers stated they were actually shooting in the opposite direction). When the photographers asked what statute they were violating, the policeman said, “Google it.” Hat tip to the Drunk Report.

ITEM: From various accounts, the US is planning to send Italy far more than the $50,000 reported on wire services as emergency aid in the aftermath of the major earthquake outside of Rome. But a reader over at the Corner at NRO e-mailed Jonah Goldberg with an interesting question:

If Italy accepts their bailout money, will Obama have the power to remove [Italian Prime Minister] Berlusconi?

Good question.

ITEM: Speaking of Obama and Europe, some of the commentators over there are less than impressed with his oratorical prowess:

… am I alone in finding him increasingly to be something of a bore?

His performance at the first press conference in London with Gordon Brown featured moments in which he sparkled – his riff on loving the Queen was a high-point. But most of the serious answers that I listened to were interminable, windy and not very impressive. At points there were pauses so long that it appeared he had simply lost his train of thought.

Today, we were treated to another set-piece Obama speech, and my didn’t he go on a bit? The crowd in Prague was huge, and initially wildly enthusiastic, but what he served up was not any more impressive than his damp squib in Berlin last year. Is there a computer which churns this stuff out for him? . . .

Empires rising and falling, destinies being defined and a Golden City standing as a monument to unconquerable spirit… goodness, what a ham. When he really gets going he’s worse than Tony Blair.

But Obama was only warming up. “When I was born,” (Everything usually leads back to him, you’ll notice)… “the world was divided, and our nations were faced with very different circumstances. Few people would have predicted that someone like me would one day become an American President.” (Him again)…

“Few people would have predicted that an American President would one day be permitted to speak to an audience like this in Prague. And few would have imagined that the Czech Republic would become a free nation, a member of NATO, and a leader of a united Europe. Those ideas would have been dismissed as dreams”. (Not by Ronald Reagan they wouldn’t have been, when most of Obama’s Democrat friends thought the then US President’s robust approach to the Cold War made him a loony on the loose).

ITEM: As for the continuing crisis, this graph apparently is quite popular all over the net:

The key take-away from the graph above is to note the series of “bounces” in each bear market, where the stock prices rise for weeks or even months before declining again and to an even lower level. The big dispute right now is whether the market has hit bottom or whether it’s just going through a temporary rise. I have no clue, but then, I have no stocks. Or bonds.

As for the overall historical trends, this chart — covering 140 years — shows the ups and down over time:

The takeway here is: stocks go up and stocks go down. The overall trend is up, but that trend is measured in decades.

Ain’t we got fun? ..bruce w..

Monday yawns

bfwebster — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 09:00:12 +0000

Time to get up and moving....

MORNING LINKS — get ‘em while they’re fresh

ITEM: “Should war be a game?“ is the fatuous subhead of the day, from an article talking about a new videogame recreating the battle for Fallujah (Iraq). The reporter shows no awareness that wargames have been around for centuries and that most of them do indeed “use actual events as a backdrop” and “follow a historical timeline.” In fact, once you set aside abstract wargames such as go and chess (and specialty wargames, such as those with a contrafactual, science fiction or fantasy setting), that’s what the majority of wargames are intended to do.

ITEM: There are no mulligans on the Internet — once you publish something out there publicly, you’ve largely lost control of it. Between Google caches, screen captures, and the Wayback Machine, it’s hard to “recall” a public posting.

ITEM: Will Collier quotes Michael Kinsley with approval on the decline and fall of print newspapers. Key quote from Kinsley: “You may love the morning ritual of the paper and coffee, as I do, but do you seriously think that this deserves a subsidy?”

ITEM: TOTUS comments on David Axelrod’s rants on the Sunday morning talk circuit: “Axelrod decided that instead of explaining Big O’s performance, he’d just spend time ripping into former Vice President Dick Cheney.”

ITEMS: Courtesy of Rachael Lucas, here are two stories that reaffirm why I love dogs: Jasmine the rescue dog (who acts as surrogate mother for wildlife); and Sophie Tucker, the Robinson Crusoe of dogs.

OVERNIGHT LINKS — it’s a brand new week, folks!

The near-daily what-if-Bush/McCain-had-done-this item comes courtesy of Ace of Spades:

“There’s a lot of — I don’t know what the term is in Austrian — wheeling and dealing, and people are pursuing their interests, and everybody has their own particular issues and their own particular politics,” [Obama] said in response to an Austrian reporter’s question.

Austrian? This from a Columbia/Yale Law grad? I’d argue jet lag, but he’s been over there for what, a week?

ITEM: Y’know, given how much Sun has been struggling for the past several years, and after the whole Microsoft-Yahoo debacle, it probably wasn’t a wise move for Sun’s board to get fussy about what IBM was offering, particularly when that offer was apparently quite well above Sun’s current stock price. Sun is now likely to find itself in Yahoo’s position: stock price continuing to decline and no more suitors.

ITEM: Obama is losing…some African-Americans. But not very many.

ITEM: Obama lost Reason pretty soon after his inauguration, but they keep firing away anyway.

ITEM: Obama is losing…Republicans! No, really!

ITEM: In a bold, critical move at a time of crisis, the Obama Administration wants to limit…tourism to Antarctica. Because, you know, those 5 million square miles of (mostly) ice are in serious danger of being damaged by the 30,000 or so visitors each year (most of whom are on cruise ships).

ITEM: Creeping socialism/fascism update: Geithner warns that executives in other industries receiving bailout money could be replaced as well. Even Robert Reich seems a bit ambivalent about this possibility.

ITEM: Creeping…something…update: An effort to replace the Electoral College with a popular vote total for the Presidency — without actually amending the Constitution — is gaining ground. I’m personally appalled.

ITEM: An interesting analysis of the current financial crunch vs. previous popped bubbles (e.g., the dot.com bust):

What we’ve offered in our discussion of this crisis is the back story to Mr. Bernanke’s analysis of the Depression. Why does one crash cause minimal damage to the financial system, so that the economy can pick itself up quickly, while another crash leaves a devastated financial sector in the wreckage? The hypothesis we propose is that a financial crisis that originates in consumer debt, especially consumer debt concentrated at the low end of the wealth and income distribution, can be transmitted quickly and forcefully into the financial system. It appears that we’re witnessing the second great consumer debt crash, the end of a massive consumption binge.

That’s the closing paragraph, but the whole article is worth a read to see how the authors reached that conclusion.

ITEM: Speaking of boom and bust — the IT sector is queuing up at the “stimulus” trough.

ITEM: And I thought the US was the one with the crumbling, inadequate infrastructure. Actually, I suspect the US has the best infrastructure in the world, especially given the vast expanse of the US (#3 or 4 in the world) and the relatively low population density (hint: the US is #177 on the list).

ITEM: As my old boss Tony Gibson likes to say, when times get tough, cash is king:

Andy Beal, a 56-year-old, poker-playing college dropout, is a one-man toxic-asset eater–without a shred of government assistance. Beal plays his cards patiently. For three long years, from 2004 to 2007, he virtually stopped making or buying loans. While the credit markets were roaring and lenders were raking in billions, Beal shrank his bank’s assets because he thought the loans were going to blow up. He cut his staff in half and killed time playing backgammon or racing cars. He took long lunches with friends, carping to them about “stupid loans.” His odd behavior puzzled regulators, credit agencies and even his own board. They wondered why he was seemingly shutting the bank down, resisting the huge profits the nation’s big banks were making. One director asked him: “Are we a dinosaur?”

Now, while many of those banks struggle to dig out from under a mountain of bad debt, Beal is acquiring assets. He is buying bonds backed by commercial planes, IOUs to power plants in the South, a mortgage on an office building in Ohio, debt backed by a Houston refinery and home loans from Alaska to Florida. In the last 15 months Beal has put $5 billion to work, tripling Beal Bank’s assets to $7 billion, while such banks as Citigroup and Morgan Stanley shrink and gobble up billions in taxpayer bailouts.

ITEM: In terms of actual coverage and editorial criticism of the Obama Administration, the Washington Post is eating the New York Times‘ lunch. It makes me wish I were living back in DC just so I could subscribe to the WaPo’s print edition. In the meantime, the blogosphere’s own Ed Whelen takes AG Holder and the Obama Justice Department to the woodshed.

ITEM: Mark Liberman over at Language Log dissects another media (mis)reporting of a scientific study.

ITEM: Speaking of scientific insight — increased CO2 means more plants grow and produce more oxygen! Who could have foreseen that? Maybe, oh, most junior high students? And speaking of global warming….

ITEM: Finally, if there can be “cool spells in a warming world“, doesn’t that likewise mean there can be warm spells in a cooling world?

ITEM: I think that the Japanese plan for dealing with their declining population is just to replace themselves with robots.

ITEM: Scary product idea of the day. (I like Gerard’s name for it: the “Sigorney”.)

ITEM: Also courtesy of American Digest, a European equivalent of “Improv Everywhere”. I dare you to watch this and not just grin:

And Still I Persist » Credit Backlash

The real estate collapse isn’t over yet

9/12 Rally liveblogging — kickoff meeting

A solution to the financial crisis

Global Economic Indicators Still Cold

Wednesday’s a snooze day

MORNING LINKS

OVERNIGHT LINKS

Thanks for stopping by! ..bruce w..

Thursday spurning

OVERNIGHT LINKS

More links in the morning, maybe. ..bruce w..

Wednesday earning

MORNING LINKS — yeah, I’m up early

OVERNIGHT LINKS — I stay up late browsing so you don’ t have to.

More links as the day goes on, maybe. ..bruce w..

Wednesday prawns

MORNING LINKS

OVERNIGHT LINKS

And remember — vote for prawns! ..bruce w..

Tuesday dawns

AFTERNOON LINKS! Yes, there are actual afternoon links!

FRESH MORNING LINKS! Now with less pork!

OVERNIGHT LINKS

Ain’t we got fun? ..bruce w..

Monday yawns

MORNING LINKS — get ‘em while they’re fresh

OVERNIGHT LINKS — it’s a brand new week, folks!

More links during the day, maybe. ..bruce w..