‘Supersize’ lions roamed Britain BBC
Correlation is Not Causation, Part 1,345,649,303 Social Science Statistics Blog
liberty central’s civil liberties villain of the week: The Pentagon’s privilege review team Guardian. Police state watch:
Lawyers for Binyam Mohamed face the incredible prospect of a six-month jail sentence in America after writing a letter to President Obama detailing their client’s allegations of torture by US agents.
One in 10 Americans receiving food stamps Reuters
Tent cities pose challenges for US census Bloomberg
More Glib Press on FASB Housing Wire versus How the FASB aids and abets obfuscation by wonky zombie banks Willem Buiter
Equity-Bond Disconnect Redux Michael Panzner
Fed in Congressional Crosshairs — Part I WSJ Real Time Economcs
Fed Struggling to Win Over Investors Wary of ‘Sharks’ in TALF Bloomberg. Note that Tyler Durden had concluded that the most to be actually taken down on the TALF was vastly lower than the $1 trillion on offer, and he concluded its old $200 billion would probably have been sufficient. Nevertheless, this looks to be another Treasury Department miscue.
Antidote du jour:
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Re: liberty central’s civil liberties villain of the week: The Pentagon’s privilege review team.
Bad case of who is watching the watchers. Personal experience tells me that only pre-approved information reaches the ears and eyes of the president.
You have to remember lifers in the military out rank the leader of the country in their minds. Especially one of dubious origins and did not have the right punches on his ticket.
The Pentagon is the biggest and baddest mens club on he planet and don’t forget it.
Only members from west point or the citadel need to apply, although a few odd types are thrown in for camouflage.
skippy
Buiter article:
“The official excuse for this egregious pandering to the interests of zombie bank managers and unsecured creditors is that mark-to-market (or fair value) accounting is to blame for exacerbating banks’ capital problems and causes exacerbation of pro-cyclical and potentially systemically destabilising detrimental feedback loops between lack of market liquidity, distress asset sales, mark-to-market, margin calls, falling asset prices and lack of funding liquidity.
That argument makes no sense”
I would disagree that the arguement makes NO sense – I do agree with Buiter though, but because anytime you go around with inaccurate financial data, it gonna cause problems. And the more inaccurate, the bigger the problems…like now.
@Fresno Dan, said….Buiter article:
“The official excuse for this egregious pandering to the interests of zombie bank managers and unsecured creditors is that mark-to-market (or fair value) accounting is to blame for exacerbating banks’ capital problems and causes exacerbation of pro-cyclical and potentially systemically destabilizing detrimental feedback loops between lack of market liquidity, distress asset sales, mark-to-market, margin calls, falling asset prices and lack of funding liquidity.
Reality is so passé.
skippy
via Calculated Risk, a Treasury insider’s explanation of why Treasury did what, up to Jan 2009:
http://www.brookings.edu/economics/bpea/~/media/Files/Programs/ES/BPEA/2009_spring_bpea_papers/2009_spring_bpea_swagel.pdf
I wonder if the Pentagon’s Privilege Review Team, now recognizing, “the socio-political bases of their failures”, is trying to play on the “cultural and emotional vulnerabilities” of scamericans, and I also wonder if they are being advised by some sell out twit in academia …
Excerpt;
“Procuring Academics for Empire: The Pentagon Minerva Research Initiative
The Pentagon’s military strategists have recognized that they have suffered political losses, with strategic consequences in their recent military invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
. 03.31.2009
US military support for the Israeli invasions of Lebanon and Gaza, the US-sponsored Ethiopian occupation of Somali, the coup attempts in Venezuela (2002) and Bolivia (2008), have also failed to defeat popular incumbent regimes. Worse still, civilian, family, community and national networks have reinforced the anti-colonial movements providing essential logistical support, intelligence, recruits and legitimacy.
Pentagon strategists, recognizing the socio-political bases of their failures, have turned to willing accomplices in the academic world to provide intelligence, in the form of ethnographic accounts of targeted peoples, tactics and strategies in order to divide and destroy local and national loyalties. The Pentagon is contracting social scientists to develop ‘social maps’ to identify leaders and groups, susceptible to recruitment in the service of the empire. For example, Pentagon-contracted academic ‘field research’ is designed to demonstrate ways in which traditional religious practices and rituals can be harnessed to facilitate imperial conquest through cultural warfare discouraging subjugated peoples from giving their support to national liberation movements. Rather than confront the imperial occupier with a goal of re-establishing national sovereignty, ‘cultural warfare’ strategies direct people to focus on ‘local concerns’. These are a few of the Pentagon funded “research projects” taken up by the ‘academics in uniform.’
The Pentagon is seriously engaged in this military-academic empire building strategy, allocating almost 100 million dollars to contracting academic collaborators and funding multiple ‘research’ projects throughout the world against targeted states, movements and communities.
The “Minerva Research Initiative” (MRI)
The biggest, but not the only, Pentagon-funded empire building research program in the social sciences is dubbed the Minerva Research Initiative (MRI). The MRI has contracted scores of academics from the usual prestigious academic brothels, including the veteran academic hookers and ambitious neophytes among post-doctorates and graduate assistants. These ‘scholars for empire’ are currently engaged in at least fourteen projects. MRI money has attracted a wide assortment of university affiliated psychologists, political scientists, anthropologists, economists, professors of religious studies, public affairs specialists, labor economists and even nuclear physicists from MIT, Princeton, University of California at San Diego, and Arizona State University among others. This Pentagon largess provides what Science (Jan 30, 2009 p 576) (official journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science) calls a “banquet for a field accustomed to living on scraps.””
more here …
http://petras.lahaine.org/articulo.php?p=1776&more=1&c=1
Deception is the strongest political force on the planet.
i on the ball patriot
YS:
I agree with Buiter.
The antidote today is hilarious!
If that dove isn’t mooning those cats…please add the appropriate metaphor.
I’d say it’s tough to regulate a mere image.
The picture makes it look like it was Thanksgiving Day for those kittens.
By the way, was yesterday Valentine’s Day in cats’ world? I ask because 1) I don’t speak any cat language and 2) last night, my cat brought in a dead bird for me. And in another tragic case of unrequited love, I think I failed to be sufficiently verbal on that occasion, beside my hearty attempt to scream my lungs out, and perhaps because I un-enthusiastically put away the offering and wiped off the bloody libation off the floor, he was not seen in the house until this morning when I heard some scratching and whining sound in the backyard and let him in.
What is this? Take the upside but be protected from the downside?
If this is going to be applied to the finance sector, then shouldnt all industries benefit from the same?
Agree with Buiter.
Linda Lowell says “Not so. They are reiterating for the third time that “fair value is the price that would be received to sell the asset in an orderly transaction (that is, not a forced liquidation or distressed sale) between market participants at the measurement date.”
But there is no orderly market and there won’t be for a long time.
On this basis, I wish my bank would lend against the value of my home which will return to an orderly market some time soon…