Yearly Archives: 2013

Wolf Richter: NSA Pricked The “Cloud” Bubble For US Tech Companies

Yves here. It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving bunch. As soon as Glenn Greenwald started to reveal the extent of NSA snooping, Ed Harrison remarked via e-mail that one of the casualties would be cloud-based computing models. Wolf Richter catalogues the damage so far. And who would trust any of the proprietors, given how obliging virtually all Silicon Valley players have been when it comes to indulging the pet needs of the surveillance state?

Links 8/6/13

More American Stasi: US Drug Agency Fabricates Cover Stories for Data Collection, Including from “Intelligence Intercepts”

In a weird but more disturbing analogue to chain of title abuses, where banks would forge signatures and fabricate documents to remedy the failure to transfer assets properly to securitization trusts, Reuters reported today that the Drug Enforcement Agency would doctor up where it got evidence from so it could use it in court. Now why would the DEA bother to go to all that trouble? Chorus: Because if a decent defense lawyer found out where it came from, it would in most cases be inadmissible.

How Police All Over the US Grab Cash, Cars, Even Homes from the Innocent

Just as government corruption and private sector looting have exploded in the last thirty years, so too have police shakedowns. Iin some places, such as a stretch of road in East Texas, civil forfeiture is a mechanism for local cops to separate people with out of state or rental license plates from their jewelry and cash. In other places, cars and even homes are the objects of the official seizures.

To End the Eurozone Crisis, Bury the Debt Forever

The Eurozone’s debt crisis is getting worse despite appearances to the contrary. How can we end it? This column presents five major options for reducing crisis countries’ debt. Looking into the details, it seems the only option that is both realistic and effective is for countries to default by selling monetised debt to the ECB. Moral hazard aside, burying the debt seems to be the only way we can end the crisis.

Austerity Claims Victory in Europe

Yves here. Even though Delusional Economics has moved into a guardedly positive stance on Europe, the “recovery” is halting enough in Europe that there are still quite a few analysts on the other side of the fence.

Links 8/5/13

On the SEC’s Too Little, Too Late “Fabulous Fab” CDO Victory

Narrowly speaking, it’s good that the SEC won its case against ex-Goldman staffer Fabrice Tourre for his role in marketing a toxic CDO to bond insurer ACA. But let’s not kid ourselves as to what this verdict amounts to.

ObamaCare’s Relentless Creation of Second-Class Citizens (5)

By lambert strether of Corrente.

And we go to Happyville, instead of to Pain City. –Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

In this series, we’ve been looking at how ObamaCare, through its inherent system architecture, relentlessly creates first- and second-class citizens; how it treats people who should be treated equally unequally, for whimsical or arbitrary reasons. It’s all in the luck of the draw! If you live in the right place or have the right demographic, you go to Happyville. If you don’t, you go to Pain City.

Monday DataDive: Second Quarter GDP and Revisions, June Income and Outlays

By rjs, a rural swamp denizen from Northeast Ohio, and a long-time commenter at Naked Capitalism. Originally published at MarketWatch 666.

This week saw the 14th major revision to our national income and product accounts since 1929; we’ve taken a brief look at what that means… Then, in reviewing the major revision to first quarter GDP, we find that what we felt was an aberrant build in farm inventories was not only left in place, but became larger; and the contribution of larger farm inventories has now increased to 80% of the first quarter GDP growth… And then, in reviewing the first estimate of 2nd quarter GDP, we find that the new BEA method of adjusting nominal GDP using chained 2009 dollars resulted in some unrealistic changes to consumer spending contributions…. Finally, we review the June personal incomes and outlays report and find that real incomes fell in but real spending rose nonetheless..

Links 8/4/13

Global Political Risk: Surveying the GIPSI

By lambert strether of Corrente.

Here’s another in my series of quote dumps on protests by country; this time, I thought I’d focus exclusively on the GIPSI ~~PIIGS, so-called~~ [See here; here and discussion here]; the southern tier of Europe that is in such distress. Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain. Since Europe is about to close down for the month of August — imagine, a month’s vacation! — I thought this would be a good time to take stock. What I’m seeing from my vantage point: Many strikes, some marches and demonstrations, nothing at all like the indignados, and above all no sense of a “European idea” from the ground up. And yet painful austerity is imposed on all from the top down, and the powers that be use the same playbook everywhere. It’s very curious. The grinding down seems relentless and continual, and yet every so often there is a spark, as in the successful, and to an extent European, resistance to the closing of the Greek broadcaster ERT. I’d love to be wrong on this, but I think the lack of coherence is the story right now. Things correlate in a crisis, and the grinding down is not a crisis.

Rajiv Sethi: The Spider and the Fly

By Rajiv Sethi, Professor of Economics, Barnard College, Columbia University. Cross posted from his blog

Michael Lewis has written a riveting report on the trial, incarceration, release, and re-arrest of Sergey Aleynikov, once a star programmer at Goldman Sachs. It’s a tale of a corporation coming down with all its might on a former employee who, when all is said an done, damaged the company only by deciding to take his prodigious talents elsewhere.