Yearly Archives: 2013

Former CIA employee, most recently Booz Allen employee Edward Snowden was already the intel community’s biggest nightmare, and now this:

Mary Jo White Institutionalizes Deutsche Bank Protection Racket at the SEC

The Financial Times has caught a significant revolving door that its business press peers have largely overlooked.

Mortgage Delinquencies Down….But a Record 843 Days to Foreclose

Yves here. While most investors and analysts were busy fixating on the Fed’s taper and the unemployment report and the Abenomics roller coaster, some important housing market news slipped under the radar.

Links 6/9/13

Sheila Bair: Everything the IMF Wanted to Know About Financial Regulation and Wasn’t Afraid to Ask

Does anybody have a clear vision of the desirable financial system of the future?

Obama Defends “Big Brother” Powers

The NC commentariat has already done a deep dive into the IT and practical issues surrounding the NSA surveillance program leaks from Glenn Greenwald and the Guardian. This Real News Network interview with Paul Jay looks at the Administration’s initial response to those revelations. It’s a useful piece to circulate to friends and colleagues who might be unduly receptive to the “this is all done for your safety” claims. I suppose it’s useful to have Obama make it explicit he thinks that his interpretation of security needs comes before upholding the Constitution.

Links 6/8/13

Could the Verizon-NSA Metadata Collection Be a Stealth Political Kickback?

By Patrick Durusau, who consults on semantic integration and edits standards. Durusau is convener of JTC 1 SC 34/WG 3, co-editor of 13250-1 and 13250-5 (Topic Maps Introduction and Reference Model, respectively), and editor of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) standard at OASIS and ISO (ISO/IEC 26300). Originally published at Another Word for It.

Why Verizon?

The first question that came to mind when the Guardian broke the news on NSA-Verizon phone record metadata collection.

Here’s why I ask:

The Jobs Report Covering May 2013: About As Good As It Is Going To Get And Still Too Insufficient By Far

By Hugh, who is a long-time commenter at Naked Capitalism. Originally published at Corrente. A complete archive of Hugh’s reports can be found here.

The short version: May is usually a strong month for job creation. So while seasonally adjusted job creation is reported at 175,000, it actually increased by 885,000. This puts the January-June job creation period in line with and slightly better than the last 3 years. The problem is that this is still a very slow growth rate insufficient to deal with the enormous ongoing shortfall in jobs. And the quality of jobs being created remains crap.

Update on Site Performance Issues

Site performance has been lousy for the last week or so and absolutely terrible for the last 36 hours.

I think we have it fixed for now.

Mr. Market’s Temper Tantrum Over Fed Tapering Talk

Lordie, the market upset we’ve had over the past week plus over Bernanke using the T, as in “tapering” word, is escalating into a full-blown hissy fit. We now have the Wall Street Journal and other finance-oriented venues telling us how unbelievably important today’s job report is. Huh? One jobs report is just another in a long series of data points.

So why has this one been assigned earth-shaking importance?