It appears that the Federal Reserve is using the same ratings agencies that rated the various subprime and Alt-A mortgage backed securities as AAA to evaluate the collateral offered by financial institutions as a part of the Federal Reserve’s sh%$pile for cash program.
So, Helicopter Ben is relying on the ratings agencies that called moldering corpses AAA….Nice…
No, I am not referring to the 1040A income tax short form, or the even shorter 1040EZ form. I am referring to the form required to apply for the Treasury Department’s TARP program, which is only two pages long.
So, now we know why we don’t want to release any more money to Hank Paulson or Neel “Cash & Carry” Neel Kashkari: They are not even applying the due diligence to these loans that Alt-A lenders applied to liar loans.
In addition to being a virulently anti-gay, anti-abortion bigot, I forgot to mention that Obama’s choice to give the invocation at the inauguration also supports the assassination of foreign leaders:
HANNITY: Can you talk to rogue dictators? Ahmadinejad denies the Holocaust, wants to wipe Israel off the map, is seeking nuclear weapons.
WARREN: Yes.
HANNITY: I think we need to take him out.
WARREN: Yes.
HANNITY: Am I advocating something dark, evil or something righteous?
WARREN: Well, actually, the Bible says that evil cannot be negotiated with. It has to just be stopped. And I believe…
HANNITY: By force?
WARREN: Well, if necessary. In fact, that is the legitimate role of government. The Bible says that God puts government on earth to punish evildoers. Not good-doers. Evildoers.
and views gay marriage marriages as being equivalent to incest, child rape and polygamy:
Rick Warren: But the issue to me is, I’m not opposed to that as much as I’m opposed to the redefinition of a 5,000-year definition of marriage. I’m opposed to having a brother and sister be together and call that marriage. I’m opposed to an older guy marrying a child and calling that a marriage. I’m opposed to one guy having multiple wives and calling that marriage.
Steven Waldman: Do you think, though, that they are equivalent to having gays getting married?
Rick Warren: Oh I do.
BTW, while I’m sure I don’t have enough readers to get a comment to the effect that this was not Obama’s decision, but that of the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, headed by Diane Feinstein.*
Well, the word is out that this was Obama’s pick:
A powerful Democratic friend contacted me this morning to let me know that they talked to the key players yesterday, and Diane Feinstein, chair of the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, had nothing to do with the pick of Rick Warren as Obama’s invocation speaker at the inaugural. The decision was made by Obama himself, I’m told, and Feinstein just assumed that he had vetted it with his staff. Difi went along with Obama’s decision, not the other way around. If this is true, then our apologies to Senator Feinstein for suggesting that she was involved.
This has the ring of truth.
Feinstein made her statewide political career on reaching out to the gay community as mayor of San Francisco following the assassination of Moskone and Milk.
It’s one of the few things that she has never wavered on.
*Full disclosure, my great grandfather, Harry Goldman, and her grandfather, Sam Goldman were brothers.
So, we have The Wall Street Journal doing a story with a screaming headline about how Google is attempting to subvert network neutrality.
Note that the Journal‘s editorial page has long argued against network neutrality, and Google has long championed the idea that ISPs should act as common carriers.
Well, they note one of Google’s main allies, Larry Lessig, has shifted his position to match Google’s, which he shows (with footnotes) to be wrong.
Then Google explains that what it is doing is placing caching servers to better response time, not buying enhanced access to the last mile of wiring to the home.
It’s called “edge caching”, and Akamai has been doing since 1998.
While Google’s actions might be troubling to Akamai, they would likely see a huge new competitor in this market, this is nothing new.
Additionally, the article claims that Obama and his people are walking backwards from their commitment to network neutrality, a charge which they unequivocally deny.
We also have Wired.com calling bullsh$# too.
And finally, if you need any more convincing, isen.blog plucks this little jewel from the article:
One major cable operator in talks with Google says it has been reluctant so far to strike a deal because of concern it might violate Federal Communications Commission guidelines on network neutrality.
“If we did this, Washington would be on fire,” says one executive at the cable company who is familiar with the talks, referring to the likely reaction of regulators and lawmakers.
As David Isenberg so rightly notes, “Yeah, right, the cable guys want to preserve Network Neutrality, while Google wants to violate it. That **would** be a boy-bites-dog story, if it were true.” (emphasis original)
Additionally, he makes some good notes on the regulations on this:
Google’s FCC counsel, Rick Whitt explains that Google simply seeks to do edge caching, just like Akamai, Amazon, and several other companies. The idea of edge caching is to locate frequently used content closer to the people who access it. It makes accessing the cached content faster.
Importantly, since the cache must be connected to the Internet by a big, fat, stupid [emphasis mine] pipe, the company doing the caching can, in principle, buy pipes from any carrier. Indeed, if it is concerned with up-time, local congestion, or avoiding single points of failure, it will buy connections from several providers. [See my “Buy as Many Nines as you Need“]
Also, in principle, carriers can let any edge cache access its network. Indeed they have a duty to do so, under the Doctrine of Public Callings, the doctrine of common law that underlies common carriage and network neutrality that has been in effect for about 900 years now. [emphasis mine]
Net Neutrality only becomes an issue when a carrier picks and chooses which cache to supply pipes to.
The argument the WSJ seems to be making — and they don’t make it very well — is that when Google has an arrangement with carriers to provide a cache it advantages its access. However, it has always been the case that Google pay a carrier more for a fatter pipe to its content. Edge caching is another case of that, no matter in which building a caching platform might be located.
In other words, if Google does edge caching it buys access. It’s the same as when I, as a residential customer, pay $34.95 for one megabit DSL service or $49.95 for 3 megabit DSL.
The concern of Network Neutrality advocates is not with access but with delivery. The fear is that Internet connection providers would charge for expedited delivery of certain content to the end user, and in so doing would put themselves in the business of classifying which content gets enhanced delivery. Since they were charging for expedited delivery, they’d get more revenue for improving the enhanced delivery, so the only network upgrades would be for the enhanced service. Non-enhanced would fall further and further behind. Plus the power to decide what gets delivered might, indeed, be powerful, and power corrupts; just ask NARAL.
(NARAL was denied the ability to send text message alerts to people who had opted in to by Verizon wireless, because abortion rights are icky.)
So, as a result of belt tightening operations Bank of America has laid20 senior executives, “including some longtime supporters of Chief Executive Officer Kenneth Lewis.”
To take out the tree, go after the roots first. Kenny boy, architect of the buyout of Countrywide Financial that has made BoA the target of suits by both states protecting mortgage holders and investors who hold Countrywide mortgaged backed securities, is on the way out.
Yet another “Master of the Universe” who thought that he could spin sh%$ into gold.
The Republicans are responding in a totally reasonable way — they are wildly overreacting and hoping the facts catch up with their hyperbole. There isn’t a reasonable person around who thinks this scandal will taint Obama in any meaningful way, but at the very least, it reminds people of the political world from whence he came. This story could be a useful preamble to something bigger down the road. I’m not saying it will turn out that way, but you have to push. The same way the Dems are pushing on Coleman in Minnesota right now.
Except, of course, the FBI is investigating Norm Coleman, and there are suspicious transfers both of money and items to him and his wife, and nothing about Coleman makes it past page A11.
As versus a statement from the US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald in which he categorically states that no one from the Obama campaign is involved, most likely because it was someone from the Obama campaign who dropped a dime on Governor Impossible Hair.
She was alleged to have teared up at Ted Stevens’ valedictory speech to the Senate (though the never reliable Dana Milbank now puts it off to allergies, which Murray says she never had), so she’s gone native, as have far too many of the WaPo staff.
When all is said and done, Washington, DC is a small, one industry town, and everyone goes to the same parties (except, of course for the black majority of the population), and we get crony journalism.
Howard Husock, the vice president for policy research at the Manhattan Institute, says that the credit crunch is all the fault of the n*gg*rs.
All you need to know is that CRA loans are performing better than their non-CRA counterparts.
Once again, the Manhattan Institute, shows why they have always been the right wing’s go to think tank for racism and bigotry.
Ben Bernanke has said that he will not use the fed lending facility, already bailing out banks to the tune of trillions of dollars to provide liquidity to the auto makers.
It’s true that Obama can’t get rid of him until the end of his term, but how about asking him to resign?
It now appears that the other contenders have bowed out of the running and Michael Ignatieff will be the new party leader.
In statements following this, he promptly showed that Steven Harper has his balls in a jar somewhere:
Ignatieff has cautioned against automatically trying to topple the minority Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a strategy that the party had contemplated only last week. Even so, a new Liberal leader is expected to move quickly in a drive to rebuild the party into a credible alternative to Harper’s Conservatives.
It appears that the fact that the Conservatives are on every media outlet in Canada screaming like scalded babies has made Mr. Ignatieff concerned that they might say something bad about him.
To paraphrase Josh Marshall, why would the voters believe that you can fight for them if you cannot fight for yourself.
Stephen Harper put out an austerity budget in the middle of a recession because he’s a lunatic. He tried to gut public campaign finance because he is a lunatic without scruples.
If you won’t work with this man, you will be his bitch.
It appears that the US Army is looking to employing mercenaries private contractors as security guards at forward operating bases (FOBs), because, you know, the presence of heavily armed mercenaries operating largely with impunity in the countryside worked so well in winning the hearts and minds of the people of Iraq.
No, this is not The Onion, this is just the latest bunch of Pentagon whiz kids at work.
Because it looks like Treasury’s latest plan is to lower mortgage rates to 4.5% for new home buyers, to stop the slide in home prices.
First, you can’t re-inflate the bubble…The speculative frenzy that was at its core is over.
Second, why would someone buy a house at 4.5%, when whoever you sell the house to 20 or 30 years later would buy at a more normal rate, driving the price down.
Basically, it’s an attempt to get people to knowingly buy overpriced homes.
Does it come with a kick me sign for buyers to wear on their back?
I have, on a number of occasions mentioned that the Fed has a habit eliminating statistics that might show them in a less than stellar light, so we have them dropping M3 from their reports, for example.
Well, we have another case of this now, with the Cleveland Federal Reserve ceasing the publication of their TIPS spread derived inflation expectations.
OK, so what is a, “TIPS spread derived inflation expectations?”
Well, the TIPS are, “Treasury Inflation Protected Securities”, basically bonds, with a twist, and the twist is that the principal is indexed to the consumer price index, so over the life of the instrument, you have interest and principal, your original investment returned to you.
They are set up so that the bond stars with an index of 1, and can never go below 1.
The spread derives inflation expectations are a measure of the difference in price between new 5 year TIPS and 5 year old 10 year tips.
Assuming that they pay the same interest, you would assume that they would be identical. In both cases you pay your money, and you get all your money back, plus interest, after 5 years, right?
Wrong.
This is wrong, because after 5 years, those 10 year bonds are at an index of 1.2 or so, while the new bonds are at an index of 1.0, which means that if you have deflation, the 10 year bonds can drop back to some number between 1.2 and 1.0, while the 5 year bond will, under those circumstances, stay at 1.0.
In the event of flat prices, or inflation, they are identical.
So, the 10 year bond with 5 years left is somewhat riskier, because you can lose up to 20% through deflation.
So the question is, what do people who buy these bonds think of this risk?
If they think the risk is small, then the price difference (spread) between the two bonds in the open market will be small, and if they think that the risk is large, the spread will be larger.
So, the market has increasingly been saying that they have high deflationary expectations, which translates to “Depression” for the rest of us, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland finds this inconvenient, so they will stop publishing the data.
A review of the Windows Vista™ successor beta, Windows 7:
So far, Windows 7 looks and behaves almost exactly like Windows Vista. It performs almost exactly like Vista. And it breaks all sorts of things that used to work just fine under Vista. In other words, Microsoft’s follow-up to its most unpopular OS release since Windows Me threatens to deliver zero measurable performance benefits while introducing new and potentially crippling compatibility issues.
Ouch, though some of the things that it breaks may very well just be the fact that it’s beta, but the final analysis, which uses some fairly deep level diagnostics to see how the OS works is that, “We can now say with some certainty that Windows 7 is in fact just a repackaging of Windows Vista – an “R2” release, to use Microsoft’s nomenclature on the Windows Server side of the house.”
The folks at Microflaccid still do not get it. They don’t need a software upgrade drop, they need rewrite.
Hank Paulson and His Evil Minions™ are completely clueless
The head of a new Congressional panel set up to monitor the gigantic federal bailout says the government still does not seem to have a coherent strategy for easing the financial crisis, despite the billions it has already spent in that effort.
Elizabeth Warren, the chairwoman of the oversight panel, said in an interview Monday that the government instead seemed to be lurching from one tactic to the next without clarifying how each step fits into an overall plan.
Hoocoodanode?
Hank Paulson is not trying to save anything but his friends and buddies back in Wall Street, and does not realize that much of that industry resembles a gangrenous limb, and requires amputation.
This is not just incompetence. It is incompetence and a complete unwillingness to do anything that might fix the problem, because that would make the high life style of the investment bankers largely obsolete.
Link:
Last month’s federal backstop of Citi attracted some catcalls for letting the struggling bank’s management and shareholders off easy. But to former AIG chief Hank Greenberg — a persistent critic of the tougher terms the government has enforced in its rescue of the teetering insurer — the Citi deal is a paragon.
(emphasis mine)
OK, so a few days ago, I serve up an excerpt from a parody of Atlas Shrugged, so what does Google ads serve up?
Gifts for Proud Producers and Capitalists Everywhere!*
Ummmm….OK…I have nothing but contempt for Ayn Rand and routinely mock her and her followers, calling them “Randroids”, and in this case, I am spreading mockery of what she and her “Randroids” consider to be her magnum opus, and I get an ad serving a company dedicated to lionizing a horrible person and a lousy writer.†
Then again, perhaps the proprietor is mocking her too. There is a notice at the bottom of the page:
JohnGaltGifts.com is not in any way affiliated with or sponsored by the estate of Ayn Rand ®, the Ayn Rand ® Institute (ARI), Dr. Leonard Peikoff, or any other organization or company.
It appears to me that this means that the T-shirt and sticker maker is using the fruit of Ayn Rand’s intellectual output to enrich himself, which is specifically what Rand condemned.
If that’s the case, it’s a very subtle and sophisticated parody.
*I’m linking because I’m complaining, it’s only fair.
†While I have never read Atlas Shrugged, nor do I intend to, I have read The Virtue of Selfishness in 1980 as part of a philosophy of literature class in high school, and it was awful. Emanuel Kant was more readable.
So, my kids are watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade, and they have a “Fosters Home for Imaginary Friends” float.
On the float, Rick Astley singing “Never Gonna Give You Up”.
They Rickrolled me!!!!!!
Update:
The Youtube:
Another edit:
The Wiki for Rickrolling.
Specifically, one Jay Nordlinger of the National Review Online, who just posted an article titled, “GOP life on the down low, &c. “
My guess is that this guy is not up on cultural slang…..Like shooting fish in a bloody barrel.
H/T Matthew Yglesias for the catch.
That’s the short read on Dan Ariely’s reseasrch, he is a professor of behavioral economics at Duke University:
We did this study in India, where the cost of living is relatively low so that we could pay people amounts that were substantial to them but still within our research budget. The lowest bonus was 50 cents — equivalent to what participants could receive for a day’s work in rural India. The middle-level bonus was $5, or about two weeks’ pay, and the highest bonus was $50, five months’ pay.
What would you expect the results to be? When we posed this question to a group of business students, they said they expected performance to improve with the amount of the reward. But this was not what we found. The people offered medium bonuses performed no better, or worse, than those offered low bonuses. But what was most interesting was that the group offered the biggest bonus did worse than the other two groups across all the tasks.
(emphasis mine)
So, we have people over compensated and for work that mostly really does not to be done, (financials have exploded relative to the rest of the economy over the past few decades) and given bonuses for under-performing, and now we find out that the bonuses make them do a crappier job.
Delightful.
gail Collins is suggesting that George W. Bush resign for the good of the country so that Barack Obama can start implementing his policies.
Ignoring the precedent, which is very bad, that it would set regarding presidents and serving out their their terms, the idea that Bush would resign, when he is already burrowing political appointees into the civil service and creating regulations in order to knee cap him is delusional.
George W. Bush is all about George W. Bush, and he believes that he is on a mission from God (which will hopefully take him to The Hague at some time), and the rejection of ego inherent in such an action, because it is an acknowledgment of his failure on a spectacularly grand scale.
It won’t happen.