Links 8/13/08 (and Antidote du Jour)

Clumsy young ‘face obesity risk’ BBC

Cooking and Cognition: How Humans Got So Smart LiveScience

Olympic ceremony singer faked performance Financial Times

The Reagan Myth: Conservatives and Greed ataxingmatter

Securities Market Remains Jammed, a Year Later Vikas Bajaj, New York Times. An update on the securitization market.

China’s slowdown to continue Asia Times but keep in mind What export slowdown? Brad Setser

Stage two of the gold bull market is just beginning Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Telegraph

Countrywide/BofA Merger Impacts California Defaults Paul Jackson

56,000 People – and One Guest Blogger – Can’t be Wrong Credit Slips. From last week, but worth reading. On the proposed credit card reforms.

Lessons from Japan’s Bank Crisis Ed Harrison, Credit Writedowns

Antidote du jour:

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6 comments

  1. doc holiday

    This is the look of denial related to the recent $30 billion Fed engineered Bear Stearns bailout — which is soon to be linked to the next Fed strategy to use covered bonds as a new synthetic attempt to repackage worthless securities and thereby generate the illusion of liquidity and safety. That dog and pony show will obviously enrich select banks that for some reason, need more cash to burn through…

    This hangdog-puppy-dog-look is part of a denial strategy, designed to distance truth and reality from the smelly mess and hangover left behind from that reckless weekend where fraud and collusion were fused together in an orgy of deceit.

    The additional complications of the embarrassing under-the-table web spun out by the Fed/JPM/Blackrock partying, left behind an unremovable stain, which in reality is an illusion, i.e, Blackrock is purported to be liquidating what amounts to financial feces. The act of liquidating the by-products of fraudulent conveyances, or floating liens may enable the morph-like characteristics of this magic show, but no matter how you repackage and rearrange, reorganize and substitute this stinking mess — it still stinks like fraud!

    See Crap Like This: (“Surely the creditor would not enter into a financing arrangement secured by collateral fixed on a particular date, when the collateral by its nature would be constantly changing.”).
    Essentially, a floating lien on inventory and accounts receivable is presumed because the collateral is viewed in aggregate as a shifting body of assets.

    See Also: Solvent or Insolvent – That is the Question
    http://www.michaelgoldman.com/ so…vent_or_not.htm

    The fair value of an asset is usually determined based on a market approach and/or an income approach. The income approach involves discounting the future cash flows from the assets at a risk-appropriate discount rate.

  2. Ginger Yellow

    It seems to me that it would be prudent for banks to be set up to act as landlords in these situations, thus avoiding the need to sell in a foreclosure during a falling market. Obviously it would mean retaining exposure to the assets, but it would surely save money in the long term. Maybe the long history of rising house prices in the US meant it didn’t seem to make sense, but in Europe housing is much more cyclical with steep falls quite common, and the banks are still very reluctant to sit out the downswings while earning rent.

  3. doc holiday

    This beagle is mine.

    I have a new theme in my thinking this morning:

    Bear Stearns Was Too Big To Fail — So It Was Saved With Fraud?

    The story of bailing out a failed, mis-managed bank like Bear Stearns that relied on fraud, corruption, bogus non-GAAP accounting, un-regulated derivatives, misrepresentation, etc., etc, is a story centered around the phrase collusion.

    The failing wall street fantasy in place today is totally reliant on the mechanics of being pulled along by the SIFMA-lobby-like groups whom act as locomotives that connect FASB-like policy fraud to front running accounting rules which are not law, which are not regulated, enforced or practiced. Theses rules of fraud are written by the pirates themselves who then delay, then abuse, then re-engineer on-the-fly fixes used for offsetting previous rules that distort, confuse and conceal the true intent of The Greater Fraud. This is the basis of our Las Vegas style financial system now which is fueled by chaos.

    The delivery of new improved rules are highly correlated to the re-packaging of derivatives that grow into CDO-squared-QSPEs renamed as subsidiary entities that thrive as if in a witness protection program. This FASB-like madness is designed to expand and evade disclosure detection, to cloak money laundering and fraud — but that requires the legal authority of promulgated solutions which can be touted as helping to contain fraud and make the accounting world a safer and better place…

    These FASB-like casino bosses are like cancer bosses that initiate cell mutations which connect and liberate the forces of collusion in a chain reaction explosion of ubiquitous distortion. This disease presents itself now in many situations, where taxpayers are told that certain organized criminal activities are now too big too fail, and “we” must save these crooks at any cost. Save them for what, jail?

    This is like offering another live body to a vampire or giving a parasite a new host to invade, or giving cancer another chance to finish the job at hand.

    The small word “we” used by these filthy pirates is about saving “them” and it has nothing to do with saving The Constitution, or law, or honesty, or making America a better place for taxpayers — this about saving all the mechanisms and conduits used by these cancer cells to take more and more of what “we” have, so that more and more people will have less!

  4. Anonymous

    New choices:

    Bear Stearns — "Too Big To Fail" — Saved By Fed Fraud?

    Bear Stearns Fraud, Bailed Out By Fed Fraud?

    Bear & Fed Use Fraud Bailout?

    Too Big To Use Fraud?

    Fed & Bear Share Bed Of Fraud?

    Bear Is No Goldilocks In Fed Fraud?

  5. Anonymous

    According to the ceremony’s musical director, Chen Qigang, Miss Lin actually lip-synched “Ode to the Motherland” to the voice of another girl after the politburo decided her own singing was not good enough.

    The replacement singer, however, was deemed not attractive enough to grace the world’s television screens.

    “I think all China’s viewers and listeners should understand that was a matter of national interest,” Mr Chen said in an interview with Radio Beijing.

  6. Dave Raithel

    Finance? What I know of finance? I know nothing. But food and cooking … anybody remember Marvin Harris?

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