It turns out that the Alaska indictment that I mentioned last night was for State Senator John Cowdery, not Ted Stevens.
I don’t expect Stevens to be indicted until after the election, if at all.
In the 1960s I lived in Alaska, and my dad was on Governor Egan’s cabinet, so I follow Alaska politics, which seem to be remarkably corrupt.
It appears part of the decision regarding the rebid has to do with DefSec Gates’ ongoing war with an insubordinate, and frequently incompetent, US Air Force.
Among other things, USAF has been removed from the bid process.
I don’t think that the decision will change, as Gates is asking for amended bids, not new ones, tough the competitors can submit a completely new bid, and he isexpecting to issue a new request for proposals (RFP) in August, with a final decision in December, and in order for Boeing to have a better aircraft, which it needs to have because its on time and on cost performance has been pathetic, it would need to submit some sort of modified 777.
Japan has scrapped legislation that would tax MP3 players, and give the proceeds to the music industry.
Note that they do have taxes on things like DVD burners, but ann MP3 player is different, because it does not copy music, it just plays music.
It’s a bad law, and it’s a good thing that it’s off the table for the moment.
It appears that Kucinich is offering a “privileged resolution”, and Ms. “Not on the Table” says that there may be actual hearings.
“This is a Judiciary Committee matter, and I believe we will some attention being paid to it by the Judiciary Committee,” Pelosi told reporters. “Not necessarily taking up the articles of impeachment because that would have to be approved on the floor, but to have some hearings on the subject.”
Pelosi added: “My expectation is that there will be some review of that in the committee.”
Something odd is going on…I’m just not sure if it will be a good odd, or a bad odd.
The Government Sponsored Entities (GSE), Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, are the second and third largest borrowers in the world, with the federal government being #1, and it appears that they are in trouble.Fannie, Freddie plunge on reports of feds planning bailout – Jul. 10, 2008
well, former St. Louis Federal Reserve President William Poole just said that the GSE’s are insolvent under fair accounting rules.
If they go boom, it’s not hoard gold time, it’s hoard canned goods and ammunition time.
This may sound alarmist, but the credit markets are already demanding the highest spread from Treasury debt ever, 74 basis points, and White House officials are drawing up contingency plans in the event that one or both of them fail, so Pool is not alone in his concerns.
We haven’t even made to the 7th inning stretch in the credit crunch.
Seriously, the Middle East is a very f%$#ed up place.
The Bank of England has decided to hold interest rates steady. It’s not like they had much of a choice. Inflation is heating up, and they are in the middle of a house bubble collapse that rivals ours, so doing nothing was the only option.
If they raised rates, they make the housing crash even worse, if they lower rates, inflation gets worse.
Their inaction appears to have strengthened the dollar, since it points towards few hikes by the European Central Bank too.
In employment, initial applications for unemployment are down from last week (it’s a noisy measure), but it’s still much worse than last year, and teen summer employment is the worst in 40 years, “If the average holds, total summer hiring in May, June, and July would be about 1.2 million, which would be the smallest gain in teen summer employment since 1958.”
In energy, retail gasoline prices fell a bit, but crude oil spiked above $140 again, because of tensions in Nigeria and the US and Iranian saber rattling.
In real estate, mortgage rates are a bit higher this week.
The Rude Pundit notes that he gets a lot of chickensh#@ criticisms of Obama in his email from people who never listed to what Obama said, and so are shocked to find that he is pro gun, pro death penalty, pro “faith based program”, etc. and in his own profane way, says that these people are either clueless, or McCain concern trolls.
That being said, but he does state that there are valid critiques:
Like this one: Barack Obama’s reversal of his position on the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 was a craven, cowardly bullsh#$ move that ought to haunt him with the left (and libertarian right) for the rest of the campaign. By voting for the bill yesterday (including voting for cloture), Obama made a mistake that is the political equivalent of Hillary Clinton’s Iraq war vote. (They are not morally equivalent, since the dead would probably rather be alive and spied on.) And while there’s no telling how Clinton would have voted had she been the nominee, just as there’s no way to know how Obama would have voted on the war had he been in the Senate in 2002, the New York Senator was unencumbered and able to take the moral high ground and voted against the bill.
I honestly believe that the Rude Pundit cannot believe that he wrote that Hillary Clinton took the high moral ground.
I can’t believe that I’m writing that Hillary Clinton took the high moral ground.
In any case, if Obama loses to the sick old man in November, he did it today, because at its core, much of the power of movement supporting him comes not from the number of supporters, but from the enthusiasm of those supporters, and a whole lot of them are seriously non-enthused.
He just made the same vote that Hillary Clinton did to authorize the war. The only question is whether it will kill his campaign as it did hers.
In any case, go read his post. He’s always insightful and entertaining, if somewhat profane.
They are investigating whether brokers misled investors on the nature of the securities, which appeared to be sold as being “like a money market account”, but are now illiquid, because the market has frozen up.
In a Democracy, the cure for a dimwit, sociopath king is not a hip, smart king who pledges to snake our overflowing toilets after he assumes the throne.
In a Democracy, we cannot allow there to be a throne in the first place.
Obama deserves condemnation for his FISA capitulation for this reason.
Go read the whole article, along with his masterful use of photoshop.
Houses lost to foreclosure in the first half of 2008, as opposed to the first half of 2007, where 145,696.
That’s a 136% increase.
He is saying that there are no supplies or reserves that can replace the loss of Iranian production.
Abdalla Salem El-Badri presents the price spikes as potentially “unlimited”, which is obviously hyperbole, but when one considers that there is no spare capacity, losing about 5% of oil production doesn’t just produce price spikes, it produces a real shortage, where one may not be able to find oil at any price.
If there were an interruption of this nature, I would expect oil to spike past $200/bbl within a few weeks.
The relative safety and success of the Taliban and related groups in Pakistan’s tribal areas appears to be to be encouraging more militant Islamists to move men to the area as a base.
I’ve said before that Pakistan is nearly a failed state, and it appears to be getting nearer, all while possessing a significant nuclear arsenal.
Well, it looks like FIFA is weighing in on Zimbabwe and Mbeki’s support of Mugabe, as they are now making statements that seem to imply that the world cup may be moved because of “regional instability”.
As lame as it sounds, this may be the only thing to keep Mbeki from being Mugabe’s agent in this matter.
Still the news is generally not good with ZANU-PF planning to escalate the violence against the opposition.
As to negotiations, were are getting conflicting reports, and Tsvangirai has just denied that there are any talks in process.
Botswana has taken what I believe to be the proper stance, saying that they do not recognize Mugabe as president.
Interestingly, we have reports that Mugabe has been effectively sidelined by the 6 top members of the state security apparatus, and that they are more brutal than Mugabe.
We are also seeing increasing calls for sanctions, which, predicably, the Mugabe regime called racist.
Good news, as she is a big fan of public transit.
No report as to who has been indicted yet.
My guess is that it is neither Ted Stevens of Don Young, or it would have been leaked to the national media.
A thousand words, I guess:
Wolfgang Münchau wonders if this is more than a simple financial crisis, because we’ve already had what seems like our 4th dip into this bathtub, and the financial system is still dirty.
Rather, he posits that the problem is that that the basic structure of our economies have been established by economist whose model of the world is simply wrong.
This is analogous to the Great Depression, where the economists and regulators, following a caricature of Adam Smith’s work, worked for creative destruction, to weed out the weak firms, and so, in the middle of a downward spiral, central banks restricted the money supply to wring out the “weakness”:
….Its principal villains are therefore not bankers, but economists – not in their role as teachers and researchers, but as policy advisers and policymakers.
So who are they? I recall a wonderful episode told by Jagdish Bhagwati in his book In Defense of Globalization when he quoted John Kenneth Galbraith as saying: “Milton’s [Friedman’s] misfortune is that his policies have been tried.” In fact, this is not the worst that could happen. The worst is for economists to try out their own theories themselves. This happened to several highly respected academics who have since become central bankers or finance ministers. If, or rather when, they turn out to be wrong, they risk a double reputational blow – as policymakers and as academics. So do not count on them to change their mind when the facts change.
In fact the collapse of Long Term Capital Management in the 1990s is a classic case of this, where you had world class economists with world class models being poleaxed by reality, which, through the wonders of leverage, caused a near collapse in world financial markets that required a Federal Reserve bailout.
I think that much of the genius of Keynes was that he was willing to adjust his theory when reality proved him wrong, which is rare in anyone, particularly an academic.
Interestingly enough, Münchau suggests that “Neo-Keynsian” model of the economy, where financial markets (which, BTW, would include the housing bubble) play no meaningful roll in the economy, had contributed mightily in the current crisis.
I’m not sure exactly what a “Neo-Keynsian” is. Truth be told, I barely grok what an old Keynsian is, though on hitting “the Wiki” it may be that “Neo-Keynesian” economics is akin to “Keynesian” in the same way that “Neo-Liberal” is to “Liberal”, which is to say “not at all”:
Several of them have been leading proponents of an economic theory known as New Keynesianism. It is, in fact, probably the most influential macroeconomic theory of our time. At the heart of the New Keynesian doctrine stands the so-called dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model, nowadays the main analytical tool of central banks all over the world. In this model, money and credit play no direct role. Nor does a financial market. The model’s technical features ensure that financial markets have no economic consequences in the long run.
This model has significant policy implications. One of them is that central banks can safely ignore monetary aggregates and credit. They should also ignore asset prices and deal only with the economic consequences of an asset price bust. They should also ignore headline inflation. An important aspect of these models is the concept of staggered prices – which says that most goods prices do not adjust continuously but at discrete intervals. This idea lies at the heart of some central bankers’ focus on core inflation – an inflation index that excludes volatile items such as food and oil. There is now a lively debate – to put it mildly – about whether an economic model in denial of a financial market can still be useful in the 21st century.
He is saying that academicians who value the consistency of their theory over reality have been placed in positions of regulatory authority, and that the inevitable regulatory failures are at the core of the credit crunch.
I agree wholeheartedly.
His prescription, creative destruction by allowing, “some defaulting banks to go bust,” is a part of the solution, but I do not believe that it addresses the “whys” of the bubble, it only wrings out the froth, leaving the ground fertile for another bubble.
I believe that the core of the problem is one of governance values, particularly in the US and the UK, that speculative arbitrage purely for profit is it’s own virtue.
Certainly, when Alan “Bubbles” Greenspan lauded financial innovation, this was his core value.
At the level of the regulator, this attitude needs to change. Speculation should not be viewed as a virtue, but rather an unavoidable and frequently toxic byproduct of a functioning financial market, much in the same way that, for example, dioxins are a byproduct of the paper making process.
We need the paper (in both senses of that work) to function as a society, but the toxic emissions (again in both senses of the word) should be kept to as low a level as is practical.
In the case of the financial markets, this means the following:
Yep.
After all the push-back from Democrats about how it would take over a decade for the drilling to produce oil, and how oil companies are not drilling on millions of acres of leases that they already hold, Dick Durban is talking up a McCain campaign talking point because he doesn’t want to see fuel economy standards raised for the car companies, because he represents Michigan.
Idiot.
So, the Federal Reserve and the SEC have decided that unregulated markets are not all that they thought, so they are going to be more aggressive in regulations and making sure that financial dealings are more open.
The more interesting bit are the quotes from economist Barry Bosworth.
First he says that he thinks that the financial instruments are so complex that they may defy regulation (to which I say, “shut them down, then”):
“I think they are going to be forced openly to think about banning some of these instruments,” economist Bosworth said. He said that forcing banks to disclose some of their investments may simply lead them to pull out of certain markets.
So, some are so bad that they must be banned, and some are so toxic that they cannot stand up to public scrutiny.
Our financial system is a snake pit.