mars 2011
59 billets
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U.S. Spy Agency Is Said to Investigate Nasdaq... →
The National Security Agency, the top U.S. electronic intelligence service, has joined a probe of the October cyber attack on Nasdaq OMX Group Inc. (NDAQ) amid evidence the intrusion by hackers was more severe than first disclosed, according to people familiar with the investigation.
The involvement of the NSA, which uses some of the world’s most powerful computers for electronic surveillance and...
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Bradley Manning, Barack Obama and the National... →
In 2006, Sandy Levinson and I predicted that the next president, whether Democratic or Republican, would ratify and continue many of President George W. Bush’s war on terrorism policies. The reason, we explained, had less to do with the specific events of September 11th, and more to do with the fact that the United States was in the process of expanding the National Security State created...
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Greenspan squanders his final reserve of... →
Thank you, internet: Henry Farrell and his commenters have all the snark so desperately required in response to Alan Greenspan’s ludicrous op-ed in the FT. And they’re not alone: as Alex Eichler notes, “everyone is laughing at Alan Greenspan today”. Greenspan could hardly have made himself look like more of an idiot if he’d tried, not only because the “notably rare exceptions” construction is so...
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Austerity Games, Here And There →
Meanwhile, in Britain, via Yves Smith, people have been digging into the details of the government forecast, and finding that it relies on the assumption that household debt will rise to new heights relative to income.
Why? Because the only way the economy can avoid taking a hit from government cuts is if private spending rises to fill the gap — and although you rarely hear the austerians...
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New Republic Editorial on Cutting the Deficit in a... →
There’s a game of chicken going on with the budget and whether or not the government will shut down. I think everyone has written a lot about the need to expand the short-term deficit in terms of government spending and tax cuts, not contract the government through painful cuts that will cost GDP and risk the recovery.
So instead, I’m going to enlist the liberals of the 1930s; maybe this cool...
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The biggest lie in British politics →
Here’s the lie. We are in a debt crisis. Our national debt is dangerously and historically high. We are being threatened by the international bond markets. The way out is to eradicate our deficit rapidly. Only that will restore “confidence”, and therefore economic growth. Every step of this program is false, and endangers you.
Let’s start with a fact that should be on billboards across the land....
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Brazil to annex Portugal? →
Portugal’s debt problems would be resolved if it were annexed by its former colony Brazil. This idea offended many Portuguese readers after Lex floated it. Lex’s Edward Hadas defends his reasoning with John Authers. (3m 52sec)
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The history of US finance in one very, very long... →
The NY Fed’s Liberty Street Economics blog on Friday flagged an epic testimony to graphic design and American financial history. It’s a looooooong chart showing what happened in the US economy between 1861 and 1938, painstakingly drawn by L. Merle Hostetler, former director of research of the Cleveland Fed.
Over forty or so pages, Hostetler provides an annotated tour from the Civil War to the...
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A Recent Exercise in Nation-Building by Some... →
It was worth a smile at breakfast that morning in February 2006, a scrap of social currency to take out into the world. Michael Porter, the Harvard Business School management guru, had grown famous offering competitive strategies to firms, regions, whole nations. Earlier he had taken on the problems of inner cities, health care and climate change. Now he was about to tackle perhaps the hardest...
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Comment Québec a PAYÉ 10 millions en redevances... →
C’est difficile à croire, mais c’est vrai. Même si les minières ont extrait pour une valeur de 6 milliards en minerais du sous-sol québécois en 2009, le ministère des Ressources naturelles n’a reçu aucune redevance, en fait il a dû verser 10,3 millions $ aux minières. (…)
Bon, en clair, les minières ont versé trop d’argent en 2008 (43 millions $ en droits miniers) et elles ont procédé à...
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Portugal Said to Need as Much as $99 Billion in... →
A bailout for Portugal may total as much as 70 billion euros ($99 billion), said two European officials with direct knowledge of the matter.
A financial lifeline would be between 50 billion euros and 70 billion euros, said the officials who declined to be named because the issue is confidential. Portugal has not yet asked for a bailout. The figures remain preliminary, the officials said. Royal...
Mother Jones magazine on Tumblr: The best... →
motherjones:
You should, like, strongly consider applying to work for this guy:
We want to add some talent to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune investigative team. Every serious candidate should have a proven track record of conceiving, reporting and writing stellar investigative pieces that provoke change….
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The Understatement: Digital Subscription Prices... →
understatementblog:
Here are the annual prices of a variety of services, all of which allow users to access the service from the web and across multiple devices with a single unified subscription. See if you can pick out which one is the outlier:
Full sized chart
As Frédéric Filloux and others…
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How Germany can avoid a two-speed Europe - Soros →
The arrangements imposed by Germany protect the banking system by treating the currently outstanding sovereign debt as sacrosanct; they also put all the burden of adjustment on the debtor countries. These arrangements are reminiscent of the international banking crisis of 1982, when the international financial institutions lent the debtor countries enough money to service their debts until the...
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Fed Up →
Bored by the proceedings at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul one day in 2008, I decided to try to gather some color down the road in Minneapolis, where Ron Paul and fellow dissident conservatives and libertarians were holding a counter-convention at the Target Center. At one point a speaker thundered that Barack Obama and John McCain “both have a lot to learn about Austrian...
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Libya: Just a Bad, Bad Idea →
So let’s review: No clear national or even humanitarian interest for military intervention. Intervening well past the point where our intervention can have a decisive effect. And finally, intervening under circumstances in which the reviled autocrat seems to hold the strategic initiative against us. This all strikes me as a very bad footing to go in on.
And this doesn’t even get us to...
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Elizabeth Warren Is Not Jesus - Krugman →
Certainly in my case, while I like and admire Warren, I’m under no illusions that all will be right with the world if Warren does, in fact, become head of the Consumer Financial Protection Board. For one thing, consumer protection is at best a piece of financial reform, and arguably not the most important piece. And Warren is just a good person, not a saint; she’s trying to work within the...
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A Big But →
Times change. The bureaucratic big-governmental impulse was a serious problem in the 1970s, but it is not today. Indeed, competent government is on the verge of being overwhelmed by zealous budget-slashers and taxcutters. We can’t have it both ways. Either we need nuclear power, in which case we must have capable governments, writing and enforcing those building codes, measuring climate...
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Just Imagine Big Tokyo Quake, 23 Years Later:... →
But in the imagined scenario, the Japanese stock market rose in anticipation of a massive stimulus and a glorious economic future. Just now it is collapsing, spectacularly.
There’s a reason for the difference: The market has a lot less faith now than it did in 1988 in Japan’s economic future. The single biggest financial question to arise from the imagined scenario was: Just how screwed will the...
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Michael Sabia se fait voler des documents... →
Le président de la Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, Michael Sabia, s’est fait voler des documents confidentiels portant sur des plans d’action en investissement de la Caisse, jeudi dernier à Westmount, a appris La Presse.
Sa mallette et une bonne partie de son contenu ont été retrouvés le lendemain, mais un téléphone contenant des courriels confidentiels est toujours...
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Will Ireland Threaten to Default? →
The creators of the European Union knew that the end game was the dissolution of nation states. But the inability to work out a process for achieving the intended aim meant the architects left troublesome issues unresolved, with the idea that inevitable crises would force resolution.
But what they failed to anticipate is that the costs of these crises would be visited on the inhabitants of...
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Muddling through will not work this time →
What has been happening is that forward-looking investors see through this scheme, and correctly assess the risk of a future default, also for existing bonds. They know that once a country defaults, old and new bonds will be treated alike. They are also bearish on neighbouring country bonds. Spain is solvent, of course, but an implosion of Portugal plus a further likely decline in Spanish house...
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Total German triumph as EU minnows subjugated →
These conditions are capitulation by three vulnerable states on core policies, and partial loss of sovereignty for the rest of the eurozone.
For Greece, the terms are a fire-sale of €50bn (£43.2bn) of national assets within four years, a tenfold increase from the original €5bn that premier George Papandreou thought he signed up to a year ago.
When the IMF first mooted this sum last month he told...
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What the Luddites Really Fought Against →
As the Industrial Revolution began, workers naturally worried about being displaced by increasingly efficient machines. But the Luddites themselves “were totally fine with machines,” says Kevin Binfield, editor of the 2004 collection Writings of the Luddites. They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around...
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P.J. Crowley Forced to Resign After Condemning... →
Look again at what Crowley said, especially in line with his 2008 paper. The extreme measures military officials are putting a U.S. citizen and soldier awaiting trial through, including extended isolation and mandatory nudity, is both wrong and counterproductive. It alienates potential allies, bolsters the narrative of terrorists and extremists, betrays our ideals and ultimately makes us weaker....
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Parfum de scandale autour des nouveaux billets de... →
La firme Securency fait l’objet d’une vaste enquête de la Police fédérale d’Australie. Des médias australiens ont révélé que des représentants de Securency, établis dans différents pays du monde, ont offert des pots-de-vin à des gouvernements étrangers pour les convaincre de remplacer leurs billets de papier par des billets en polymère.
Selon la télévision australienne, de...
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Common mistakes made by economists →
Tyler Cowen has posted lists of mistakes he thinks common to left-wing economists and right-wing economists. Both are worth reading, but they have a strong “from one economist to another” tone. So here’s a list of mistakes that I think economists and people who are heavily influenced by economists tend to make when they look at politics. I should preface this by saying I have, at one point or...
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The New American Pessimism →
I can’t remember when I last heard someone genuinely optimistic about the future of this country. I discount politicians, investment bankers and generals since their line of work requires that they offer upbeat assessments of everything from our deteriorating economy to our suicidal wars, and assorted narcissists accustomed to shutting their eyes to the plight of their fellow Americans. The...
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The banks' opposition to TMX and the Alpha factor →
For starters, while TD has been an active supporter of Alpha, CIBC has not. In fact, since Richard Nesbitt, the former head of TMX, took over as head of CIBC’s securities operations, by all accounts CIBC has taken little interest in Alpha other than routing a lot of trading there. (Which, ironically, has led to CIBC being Alpha’s largest shareholder as the ownership group is...
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What will Saudi Arabia do? →
Saudi oil production looks quite different over the last few years, as highlighted in more detail in Figure 4. The kingdom’s production actually declined between 2005 and 2007. Although it subsequently increased, at the peak of oil prices in July of 2008 Saudi production was essentially only back to where it had been in 2005. The failure of Saudi production to increase between 2005 and 2008...
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Corrupt, Not Stupid! The Michael Lewis Lawsuit as... →
Mr. Chau’s curious complaint seems much more intent on making Mr. Lewis and Mr. Eisman look stupid than making any serious legal case against them. And in this it largely succeeds, leaving readers with a brilliantly cartoonish impression of Mr. Lewis. He is an alternately pathetic and shamelessly exploitative has-been who “saw the world economic crisis—which he acknowledges was...
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Québec aurait laissé filer 5 milliards de dollars,... →
Le Bureau d’audiences publiques sur l’environnement (BAPE) a estimé que le Québec aurait profité de revenus de 5 milliards de dollars s’il avait imposé les mêmes règles que l’Alberta pour l’octroi de permis d’exploration du gaz de schiste.
Selon le rapport du BAPE, les rentes d’explorations du gaz de schiste rapportent environ 1 million de dollars...
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Towards a Theory of Corporate and Financial Sector... →
I talked more about GE, this business model, and the bailouts in this post. That money came in from a very active business line in the subprime loan business during the housing bubble, among many other activities. As Froud et al point out, their capital markets business structure was dependent on a form of ratings agency arbitrage, where the financial market part of the business piggybacked onto...
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China at 60% Risk of Banking Crisis, Fitch Gauge... →
China faces a 60 percent risk of a banking crisis by mid-2013 in the aftermath of record lending and surging property prices, according to a Fitch Ratings gauge.
Fitch sees the risk of “holes in bank balance sheets” should a property bubble burst, Richard Fox, a London-based senior director, said in a phone interview on March 4. The risk assessment is from a macro-prudential monitor used by the...
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Does IMF Stand for Impressive Macroeconomic... →
But then the question becomes, why is the IMF willing to let him speak up? Other international organizations, like the OECD, have been willing to throw all logic aside in order to be properly austerian;why not the Fund?
One answer is that Blanchard is who he is — a big gun in the field, someone the IMF needs more than he needs the IMF, who has the kind of independence that lets him speak his...
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McKinsey, the Insider Trading Scandal, and the... →
I’m not easily shocked these days, but I have to confess I gasped out loud when I read that the former managing director of McKinsey, and until recently board member of Goldman and Procter & Gamble, Rajat Gupta, had been charged by the SEC for insider trading. Why would someone with one of the most blue chip reputations in Corporate America, who has clearly done very well financially, risk it...
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HSBC reveals plans to quit London for Hong Kong →
Britain’s biggest bank, which has been headquartered in the capital for 19 years, warned key investors that last week’s disappointing full-year results have made arguments for shifting HSBC’s domicile to Hong Kong “overwhelming”.
The shareholders have been surprised by the swift gear-change in HSBC’s review of its domicile but some have already told the bank...
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