Links 11/4/08 « naked capitalism

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Links 11/4/08

I am now very upset with Blogger, this was set to run at 6:00 AM!

Saving Wild Salmon, in Hopes of Saving the Orca New York Times. Trivia: I was told in Alaska that there are two types of orcas: resident (which stay in the same general area) and transient (which don’t). Only transient orcas hunt whales. Transients also don’t breed with residents. I asked if that were so, why weren’t they considered separate species and never got a good answer.

Questions Emerge over Hope for Homeowners Diana Golobay, Housing Wire. The much ballyhooed housing bill of July is not only producing underwhelming results, but more important, it appears that investors in mortgage securities are rejecting the level of mortgage reduction that the legislation required for a refi.

Goldman fund loses $990m after 10 months Financial Times (hat tip reader Scott), Impressive in a perverse sort of way.

Facing up to crude realities. A Q&A with Jon Rigby, energy strategist at UBS. His views are pretty mainstream, but well argued.

Lehman Good-for-Retirement Notes Worth Pennies for UBS Clients Bloomberg

SocGen profits fall 84 per cent on Lehmans write-offs Independent

The World Tires of Dollar Hegemony Paul Craig Roberts

Economist Makes Up Stories About Social Security Dean Baker

The cost of resolving financial crises Luc Laeven, VoxEU

Antidote du jour. This hippo is eating its birthday cake, so forgive the table manners:

7 Comments:

tyaresun says:

November 4, 2008 at 6:33 pm

The table manners are much better than Paulson.

dearieme says:

November 4, 2008 at 7:32 pm

On the telly here in Britain we see people queueing for hours to vote for your next president. Why? I mean, how is it that it takes so long? I’ve seen elections here, in Australia, in NZ. I’ve never seen enormous queues.

Yves Smith says:

November 4, 2008 at 7:41 pm

dearieme,

I can only tell you what the hold up is in New York. You go to your polling place, you then get in line for your district. They look up your name in book with Xeroxed copies, then you sign by your name and go vote. The looking up your name bit and signing takes a surprising amount of time. And no verification of who you are. They didn’t even ask me to tell them what my address was.

In past years, they haven’t had enough voting machines and that also would produce waits, but this year they gave us two rather than one for our little district. We have the old-fashioned mechanical kind with toggles and a big lever you pull at the end to register all your picks, so the equipment was familiar to all but new voters.

Steve says:

November 4, 2008 at 8:04 pm

Why would you link the Paul Craig Roberts piece? It is filled with inaccuracies much of it easily disproven by stuff your blog has discussed or linked to.
- Iceland and Hungary are endangered not by “toxic American derivatives” but by outlandish amounts of debt and foreign exchange exposure in those countries
- These toxic American derivatives were invented in Europe and while very popular in America, European banks were eager buyers of ours and originators of their own, creating their own asset bubbles.
- The world remains highly eager to finance our debt (of course this could change)
- China has little room for complaint. They’ve refused USA’s requests to let the yuan appreciate which would have lowered the CA deficit and thus borrowing.
- There’s a good chance Russia (and possibly even China) is entering a crisis of its own and will be in no position to dictate terms.

His main point “The World Tires of Dollar Hegemony” might well be true. But he fails to prove that the world has a good reason to be tired of the dollar. It could just as easily be political. And at the end of the day there’s a reasonable chance the dollar will emerge more dominant than ever.

Anonymous says:

November 4, 2008 at 8:25 pm

Yves said-

“I asked if that were so, why weren’t they considered separate species and never got a good answer. “

A bona fide answer from someone who should know on both an empirical and technical level.

I can assure you that when I’m strolling down 5th avenue in my scruffy garb, I note many many females who would never ever breed with me. This does not mean genetically our chromosome cannot undergo recombination under the proper conditions (such as me winning the power ball lottery).

The whales are of the same species because under the correct conditions; you’d have to ask the whales what they think of the whole matter, probably social, their chromosomes will recombine.

Obviously the migrating whales think very highly of themselves.

-super geek-

Matt Dubuque says:

November 4, 2008 at 8:49 pm

W/respect to Orcas, the data is by NO means complete as to whether these orcas interbreed. The only serious answer is we are not positive.

In terms of being a different species, the mere fact that they may not interbreed is irrelevant. The definition is based on whether, if they did, they would have fertile offspring.

Furthermore, the difference between species and variety is far from settled. See the pathbreaking work of Karl Lewontin and also Lynn Margulis.

Matt Dubuque

doc holiday says:

November 5, 2008 at 12:26 am

Re: “I am now very upset with Blogger, this was set to run at 6:00 AM!”

That makes two of us dude, I was there and ready and then, what happened? I don’t know if I should even be here, so WTF should I do? Obviously a little taste of the LHC, yet again!

Your fellow American, as always,

DH

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