In 2002, Greenspan discussing the CDS said that, “The use of a growing array of derivatives and the related application of more sophisticated methods for measuring and managing risk are key factors underpinning the enhanced resilience of our largest financial intermediaries.
Now we have $45 TRILLION of potential exposure out there.
Bloomberg has a pretty good primer here, and it’s fairly entertaining, which goes along with the fact that “Frankenstein’s Monster” is in the title.
The McCain campaign appears to have posted some of Cindy McCain’s recipes online.
Problem is, that they were copied off of the food network.
Oops.
Yes, Donald Rumsfeld is set to publish his memoirs. It’s on my reading list, just after “Atlas Shrugged”, which is at some point colder than hell freezing over.
Courtesy of angryflower.com, click for full cartoon.
In this case, I’m referring to Robyn Hooker, principal of Kent Gardens Elementary School in McLean, VA, who issued the edict because tag had become a game, “of intense aggression.”
One of the peculiarities of being a principal in the US, at least at public schools, is that you cannot work your way up through the ranks. You have to get a certification specific to being a principal.
Generally, this means that either you went in with the goal of being a principal, i.e. that you wanted to be “in education” but you did not want to teach, or you decided that you really didn’t like teaching that much.
So you get profoundly dysfunctional people like this, who think that any problem, and it appears that the tag was getting a bit rough can be solved with a mindless punitive over-reaction.
What’s more, they lack adult supervision, which is why teachers’ unions are the way they are. Would you want to work for someone like her?
Stephen Hadley, Bush’s National Security Clown Advisor, repeatedly confused Nepal and Tibet on Stephanopoulos’s show when discussing the Olympics.
My guess is that this was an honest Freudian slip, Nepal, Nipple, and it just naturally falls to the lips…..Or maybe he’s just a completely incompetent ninny.
Yep, he’s claiming that the housing bubble, and subsequent bust are not his fault.
Let’s see, you nearly tripled the money supply before you stopped publishing M3 data in 2006, and that is “fragile”.
M3 again baby, with all that money that you created, it all had to go somewhere.
Dude, that was you PIMPING yourself to George Walker Bush for the election, so you would get reappointed.
Dude, you have actively pumped up and bailed out every asset boom under your watch. You engineered bailouts, either through monetary policy such as low interest rates, or directly, as you did with the LTCM hedge fund.
Which is why you did your best to effectively dismantle Glass-Steagall back when Paul Volker was Fed Chair.
You allowed, scratch that, you encouraged the repackaging of garbage into Byzantinely complex instruments, and you called them good.
Regulators are more than able to prevent this, you were simply completely unwilling to take even the most basic advisory steps to do so. Your whole hearted of so called financial innovations like “credit default swaps” which are too complex for the people who trade them to understand is clear.
The legacy of Ayn Rand, your mentor, is bad writing, ugly prose, and the impoverishment of all but the most dishonest.
Thanks asshole.
In the spirit of L. Ron Hubbard, who once declared, “I’d like to start a religion. That’s where the money is!*, I hereby declare myself the first Senior Ecclesiastic Authority of The Church of Ronald Reagan. I declare myself to be the supreme confessor and Pontifex Maximus.†
My inspiration is the inimitable Digby, who notes that when the Republicans discovered that Ronald Reagan was rated by historians as mediocre, “They put millions in to the project and succeeded in changing the names of airports, schools and highways all across the country. They have plan to put Ronnie on Rushmore and the ten dollar bill. Over time I would expect that someone will come up with the idea to declare Reaganism a religion.”
You know, designing and analyzing useful things, much like Hubbard’s few pennies a word, are not a great way to make a lot of money, but as Pontifax Maximus, the revenue possibilities border on endless.
Just think of that lucrative “selling tortillas with Reagan’s visage on eBay” market.
I would be set for life.
*Full disclosure, I have met editor Sam Moskowitz, one of the sources of the quote, though I don’t recall talking with him, I think that I was just in the audience at an SF con.
†This is a reference to the Roman Emperor’s role as head of the state Church, not the Pope. Both terms derive from the word for “bridge”.
It appears that while Hillary Clinton was condemning the Columbia free trade pact, mark pen, in his capacity as CEO of Burson-Marsteller Worldwide, was having meetings with representatives of the Columbian government in order to lobby for the agreement.
Penn subsequently apologized for this, but the Change to Win union alliance is now demanding that Penn be fired by the Clinton campaign:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Friday, April 4, 2008CONTACT: Greg Denier
Noreen Nielsen
(202) 721-0660WASHINGTON, DC – The following is a statement from Change to Win executive director Greg Tarpinian concerning the latest revelation that Hillary Clinton’s chief campaign strategist Mark Penn met Monday with Colombia’s ambassador regarding the Colombia Free Trade Agreement.
“It’s time for Senator Hillary Clinton to send her vaunted ‘chief strategist’ Mark Penn packing — back to his job consulting for union busting corporations and anti-labor governments for good.
“We have questioned Penn’s role in the Clinton campaign in the past for his representation of union busting employers like Cintas. At that time, Penn said there was a wall between him and his firm’s representation of union busters. The latest revelation that Penn — whose firm represents the Colombian government in its effort to secure passage of a so-called free trade agreement — is actively involved in securing its passage in the middle of Senator Clinton’s presidential campaign is outrageous. It also suggests that he has been playing a double role – advising the Senator on what to say to curry Democratic voters and advising the Colombian government on what to say to curry a majority of votes in Congress.
“The vast majority of Americans do not believe that we should be granting preferential trade status to a government that coddles death squads that target union organizers. Colombia remains the most dangerous country in the world for union members, where more than 2,200 workers have been murdered since the 1980s by Colombian death squads for trying to form unions while the government has done nothing to effectively stop the murders. It is time for Penn to go.”
A postscript to all this is that Columbia has now fired Burson-Marsteller Worldwide, saying that, “The Colombian government considers this a lack of respect to Colombians, and finds this response unacceptable.”
Bummer of a birth mark, Hal.
Another bit of news from the department of the blatantly obvious.
It appears that in their zeal to keep teens from having sex, abstinence education may be contributing to STD and pregnancies.
In the hit parade of abstinence only stupidity reinforced myths believed by teens:
Is it any wonder that Florida has the sixth-highest teen pregnancy rate nationally?
Yes, Fredrick Kagan, an chicken hawk idiot in a family of chicken hawk idiots, is criticizing the UK over its withdrawal from Basra last year, and its determination not to involve ground troops now.
Mr. Kagan, you are 38 years old, and according to the wiki, “He earned a B.A. in Soviet and East European studies and a Ph.D. in Russian and Soviet military history, both from Yale University. He worked as an Assistant professor of military history at West Point from 1995-2001 and as an Associate professor of military history from 2001-2005.”
You are young enough to serve, and you have the background to serve. Go serve in this war you love so much.
Ummmm…Look at the date when this was posted.
I can dream, can’t I?
I would not mind President Pelosi.
Reference my previous post.
In any case Richard Band, publisher of a well respected Wall St Newsletter is saying that the Dow will hit 16,000 by late 2008 or early 2009.
Dow 36,000 writ small, I guess, because the only way I see it hitting that number that soon (a 33% appreciation) is inflation hits 50%.
I dunno, maybe he’s banking on some sort of Bush is not the President rally, but this still makes him stupid.
First, we enthusiastically back and fund a not-particularly-competent military leader, who spends most of the money we send him on a potential war with India, and now we send “Mr. Death Squad” to lean on a not yet formed opposition government to be more proactive, all while continuing unilateral air strikes in populated areas.
Some selected quotes from the article below:
…
The meeting with Nawaz Sharif, …. have failed entirely. Sharif said that Pakistan would no longer be a “killing field” where other countries pursue their own interests.
…
[with tribal elders] “We told them that whatever differences we have (with the extremists), they can all be solved through the jirga system,” said Malik Darya Khan, one of the tribal chiefs who participated, referring to the traditional meetings of elders to solve disputes.
There also appeared to be an open dispute between Sharif and U.S. officials on how to deal with Musharraf. Sharif said afterward: “We don’t recognize him as the legitimate president.”
Dawn newspaper, in an editorial on Thursday, described the arrival of the two U.S. envoys as “indecent haste.” It added: “It is time Washington gave the new government time to settle down.”
“Bad timing gives the wrong signals, as if they are trying to pressurize the new government when it is in the stages of being formed,” said Shireen Mazari, the director general of Institute of Strategic Studies in Islamabad.
“The war on terror has be to revisited. The most dangerous thing is that the Americans have succeeded in shifting the center of gravity of the war to Pakistan. We have to shift it back to Afghanistan,” Mazari said.
Pakistani concerns about U.S. activity have been ignited over the last month by a series of apparent American missile attacks on targets in Pakistan. The news that the former commander of the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention camp, where hundreds of Muslim prisoners, many of them Pakistanis, have been held without charge, has been appointed the chief U.S. defense representative in Pakistan isn’t likely to help relations.
Seriously, they could not screw this up more if they tried.
Pakistan’s new coalition government is saying that it objects to what it considers the reckless and excessive air strikes of the US in Pakistan.
It’s clear that Musharraf is on the way out, and that this is the policy of the government, so what is the response of the US Military? They accelerate their bombing, because we need to get those last few licks in before the end of Musharraf actually become official.
Does anyone in the White House or Pentagon have a clue as to how damaging this behavior is?
More importantly, does anyone in the White House or Pentagon have any clue about anything period.
It appears that batteries were mistaken for missile fuses.
Well that cinches it for me, Homer Simpson and George W. Bush are the same people.
Think about it. You’ve never seen them together at the same place and the same time.
Also, look at the Simpsons episode with George H.W. Bush….That hatred is Oedipal.
He’s saying that, “leavint the door open“, but that really means that he doesn’t know what to do.
Not surprising, since his number one and two economic buddies are Alan Greenspan, whom McCain once famously said that if he died, he put sun glasses on him and do the Weekend and Bernie’s thing, and Phil Gramm, who spent his career making wall street safe for scam artists.
They are numbers one and two on the “who f%&$ed Wall Street up” hit parade.
The facts are quite clear, there is no tie between vaccines and Autism*, and this has been conclusively proven.
The doctor who came up with this cockamamie theory had his ticket yanked. The removal of Thimerisol (which was an independent good regardless of the non link to Autism) made no difference in the trajectory of the disease.
Vaccines represent the greatest success in public health in the history of…well..history.
When we see reports like this one the Neanderthal† anti-vaccination movement, the basic points which need to be made are as follows:
These basic points were not made in this article, though it was hinted at when the writer quoted Sybil “I’m a Moron” Carlson saying that vaccines caused “immunology”.
Let’s be clear. Vaccines do have risks, I know someone who is in a wheelchair because of a vaccine induced case of polio, and my mother had an allergic reaction to the horse serum used in the tetanus vaccine, but they are less than that of not being vaccinated, and they are acute, not chronic.
The anti-vaccine movement is based on two things, stupidity and ignorance involving the science, and a blithe disregard for for the effects of society.
That’s why we are getting outbreaks of measles, mumps, whooping cough. Because these people are creating reservoirs of disease out of their children, and it affects the vaccinated too, because no vaccine is 100%, and some vaccinated children are put at risk.
*Full disclosure, my son is on the spectrum, diagnosed with Aspergers.
†In deference to the GEICO cavemen, I wish to apoliogize for any offense to true Neanderthals.
Bill O’Reilly calls everyone else fascists, but leaves me out.
I’m crushed.
Maybe I should write about O’Reilly’s bust for soliciting an underage prostitute a few years back.
Just kidding, but one wonders if how many readers this will pull in via “the Google”.
So, this mouthdrooling moron thinks that we have seen the bottom of a falling stock market when the Dow hit 11,740.15 on March 10.
The Fed has just dumped the gross national product of Guatemala in the stock markets, and you think that the bottom has been reached.
More phony numbers, and the DJI is always a phony number, from people who have a vested interest in dumping their crap off on you.
So, Hillary Clinton is suggesting that Bush create, “an emergency working group on foreclosures”, staffed by such notables as Robert Rubin, Paul Volker, and ….wait for it….wait for it….wait for it….wait for it….Alan Greenspan.
Alan Greenspan the man who suggested in 2004 that the housing sector was, “in good shape”, we would all be better off if, “lenders provided greater mortgage product alternatives to the traditional fixed-rate mortgage”?????
I am completely at a loss for invective.