Economy
Related: About this forumThe Week-end Stock Pot Watch, Thursday, November 28th-December 1st. Holiday Edition!
Last edited Thu Nov 28, 2013, 09:12 AM - Edit history (1)
Since the markets are closed, and Tansy is probably drinking (I am), and making goodies for dinner, just post whatever you want here, concerning the economy, recipe tips, jokes, golf tips or drink recipes.
Everyone have a Merry Thanksgiving.
We're thankful for all of our contributor friends.
Warpy
(111,352 posts)The only thing I'll watch is the Star Trek marathon on BBCA and I'll be eating Chinese takeout.
westerebus
(2,976 posts)I'm thankful the BBC came to America.
Warpy
(111,352 posts)Movie channels were showing awful stuff so I've been flipping back and forth between STNG and Mythbusters.
I hope your Thanksgiving was good, too.
golfguru
(4,987 posts)westerebus
(2,976 posts)I'm thankful I don't play golf and according to those who have seen me play, they are too.
golfguru
(4,987 posts)goodwill to your fellow posters.... I wish everyone was like you!
Happy holiday season to you!
Golf is a funny game. I shot my best score ever..(76 for 18 holes) last month,
and I am in my 70's! Never stop learning in this game.
hamerfan
(1,404 posts)Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
And, no, it's not Alice's Restaurant. I'd call it The Power Of Music. Beethoven's 9th flashmob might be more accurate. Either way, it's worth 5 minutes of your life. Enjoy:
westerebus
(2,976 posts)I'm thankful for the range of good music that's commercial free.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Fuddnik
(8,846 posts)I'll change the title to the "Week-end Stock Pot Watch".
I've gotta work a couple of hours this morning, so you guys have at it.
Love all of ya!
westerebus
(2,976 posts)I'm thankful for Demeter.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)We hang together, because assuredly, they would hang us separately!
westerebus
(2,976 posts)Then there's the epic battle if they do.
hamerfan
(1,404 posts)A personal favorite. Can't Find My Way Home by Steve Winwood. Acoustic version:
xchrom
(108,903 posts)Messages between traders in a commodities chat room last week ranged from the dating habits of Kim Kardashians mother to West African pirates plundering oil and gas reserves to a riddle.
What did the pirate say when he found out he was long WTI-Brent? one user, identified only by number, asked in an Instant Bloomberg chat room Nov. 18, referring to the price gap between U.S. and international oil prices. ARRRRGHBITRAGE THIS came the punchline.
Chat-room messages, like these provided to Bloomberg News by a participant, have taken the role of exchanges or trading pits in markets that lack them. They are a place to discuss offers and prices for currencies and energy swaps, as well as to gossip about reality TV stars or tell bad jokes. They also leave a trail of dealers online behavior.
The investment-banking arm of UBS AG, Switzerlands largest bank, told employees yesterday it was banning the use of multibank and social chat rooms as regulators around the world probe manipulation in the $5.3 trillion-a-day foreign-exchange market. JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc are considering similar actions. Transcripts of chat-rooom discussions helped regulators identify traders wrongdoing in the rigging of global benchmark interest rates, or Libor.
xchrom
(108,903 posts)westerebus
(2,976 posts)I'm thankful for xchrom.
kickysnana
(3,908 posts)xchrom
(108,903 posts)France is "more pessimistic" about the state of its economy than fellow eurozone countries, a European Commission survey has found.
French consumer confidence declined sharply in November, reflecting "worsening expectations about the future general economic situation, unemployment expectations and savings over the next 12 months", it said.
France's Economic Sentiment Indicator (ESI) score fell 0.9 points to 95.2.
But eurozone sentiment rose overall.
hamerfan
(1,404 posts)Candied Sweet Potatoes
6 Large or 8 Medium Sweet Potatoes
4 cups (total) light brown sugar
1 stick (total) butter
¼ cup (total) milk
¼ cup (total) water
½ cup pecan halves (OPTIONAL)
SAUCE:
FIRST HALF OF SWEET POTATOES
2 c. Light Brown Sugar (not packed)
¼ c. Butter (1/2 stick)
¼ c. 50/50 Water/Milk mix
½ tsp. Salt
(For the first ½ of the potatoes)
SECOND HALF OF SWEET POTATOES
2 c. Light Brown Sugar (not packed)
¼ c. Butter (1/2 stick)
¼ c. 50/50 Water/Milk mix
½ tsp. Salt
(For the second ½ of the potatoes)
Wash sweet potatoes. Gently drop unpeeled sweet potatoes into boiling water. Boil for 30-35 minutes, or until tender. Drain sweet potatoes, let cool, then peel and quarter, or cut into 1 to 2 inch slices, depending on size of sweet potatoes (a fork works well to peel them). Melt butter in large nonstick skillet at medium heat, then add water/milk mix and salt, then brown sugar. Cook, stirring often, until it boils, about 5 minutes at medium heat. Add half the quartered and peeled sweet potatoes, and turn stove down to medium low, cooking slowly, turning occasionally, about 30 minutes, or until sweet potatoes are caramelly. Put all this into a 13x9x2 pan. Then do the same with the second half of the sauce ingredients and the second half of the potatoes.
OPTIONAL... Add the pecan halves to the top of the sweet potatoes and bake at 350 degrees for 5 minutes.
This recipe can be halved easily. For the whole batch, it serves 10-12. I get lots of compliments every time I make it.
xchrom
(108,903 posts)Brazil's central bank has raised its benchmark interest rate to 10% from 9.5%, the sixth time in a row that it has put up borrowing costs.
The latest rise has taken the key rate to the highest level since March 2012.
The rises come as Brazil has been trying to rein in inflation. Consumer prices in the country rose by 5.8% in October from a year earlier, above policymakers' 4.5% target.
Prices have been rising in part due to the fall in the Brazilian currency.
xchrom
(108,903 posts)The Greek economy will keep shrinking next year and may need more financial help, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) says.
The OECD's forecast of 0.4% contraction contrasts with the Greek government's prediction of 0.6% growth in 2014.
The OECD also said the recession in Greece had been "much deeper than expected" and that debt would not fall below 160% of GDP before 2020.
It would mark the seventh consecutive year of recession for Greece.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)The New Normal
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Demeter
(85,373 posts)CONSERVATION IS THE FIRST STEP TO ENERGY INDEPENDENCE AND GREEN-LIVING
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/look-at-how-drastically-intelligent-leds-cut-power-consumption?utm_source=Daily&utm_medium=Headline&utm_campaign=GTMDaily
PG&E, California's largest utility, wanted to know how much energy controllable LEDs could save its industrial customers. It recently found its answer: a lot.
Earlier this year, the utility tested the performance of a networked LED system at a 44,800-square-foot Ace Hardware distribution warehouse in California. The system was installed and controlled by Digital Lumens, a Boston-based company with more than 500 projects deployed in the commercial and industrial sector.
Digital Lumens says its system, which combines monitoring software, building controls and LED fixtures, can save customers up to 90 percent on lighting costs...Simply replacing the metal-halide luminaires with LEDs resulted in a 50 percent reduction in energy use from the baseline. By adding in controls that enable the LEDs to react to occupancy and daylight quality, the system enabled a 93 percent drop in electricity consumption from lighting...The controllable LED system cost $117,935 to install. That may seem like a tough sell. But when PG&E modeled the savings, it found that the granular monitoring approach offered the shortest payback period of 3.6 years. When factoring in deferred maintenance, the payback period fell to 2.5 years.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Heating a home is one of the largest household costs these days, and the best way of reducing this cost is with a more efficient, better insulated home.
Shrinkthatfootprint.com claims that it is even possible for a home to be so well insulated against heat loss or gains that only the sun, our bodies, a few simple appliances, and a basic heat recovery system would be enough to provide all the necessary heat for a comfortable existence. Basically, if the insulation is good enough then you need never worry about heating bills.
In the diagram below Shrinkthatfootprint.com provides a visual comparison of the heat gains and losses for three different types of insulated homes.
A Leaky House is the most poorly insulated example. It consists of solid walls, an uninsulated floor, single glazed windows, and lots of draughts. In order to combat the high level of heat loss the leaky house requires 300 kilowatt hours of heat energy per square metre per year to remain at a comfortable temperature.
A Modern House is the typical new build house that many people own. It has insulation between the walls, in the loft and the floor, double glazing windows, and far fewer draughts. This all helps to drastically reduce the energy needed to heat the property to 150 kilowatt hours per square metre per year.
A Passive House is the most perfectly insulated property imaginable. All materials used to build it offer good insulation. It has triple glazed windows, and is so air tight that a ventilation system is needed to keep the air fresh. It estimated to need just 15 kilowatt hours per square metre per year, most of which can actually be generated through a heat recovery system in the ventilation system.
The difference in heating bills for an average sized home in each class has been estimated to be $1,500 a year for the leaky home, $750 a year for the modern home, and just $100 a year for the passive home.
Unfortunately for those living in poorly insulated houses, cost effective retrofits are difficult to achieve and it is far easier to create a well-insulated house during the construction phase of a new build.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)In December 1972, I was part of a nationwide campaign that came tantalizingly close to getting the U.S. Senate to reject Earl Butz, Richard Nixon's choice for secretary of agriculture.
A coalition of grass-roots farmers, consumers and scrappy public interest organizations (like the Agribusiness Accountability Project that Susan DeMarco and I then headed) teamed up with some gutsy, unabashedly progressive senators to undertake the almost impossible challenge of defeating the cabinet nominee of a president who'd just been elected in a landslide.
The 51 to 44 Senate vote was so close because we were able to expose Butz as ... well, as butt-ugly -- a shameless flack for big food corporations that gouge farmers and consumers alike. We brought the abusive power of corporate agribusiness into the public consciousness for the first time, but we had won only a moral victory, since there he was -- ensconced in the seat of power. It horrified us that Nixon had been able to squeeze Butz into that seat, yet it turned out to be a blessing.
An arrogant, brusque, narrow-minded and dogmatic agricultural economist, Butz had risen to prominence in the small -- but politically powerful -- world of agriculture by devoting himself to the corporate takeover of the global food economy. He was dean of agriculture at Purdue University, but also a paid board member of Ralston Purina and other agribusiness giants. In these roles, he openly promoted the preeminence of middleman food manufacturers over family farmers, whom he disdained....The whirling horror of Butz, however, spun off a blessing, which is that innovative, freethinking, populist-minded and rebellious small farmers and food artisans practically threw up at the resulting Twinkieization of America's food. They were sickened that nature's own rich contribution to human culture was being turned into just another plasticized product of corporate profiteers. "The central problem with modern industrial agriculture ... (is) not just that it produces unhealthy food, mishandles waste, and overuses antibiotics in ways that harm us all. More fundamentally, it has no soul," said Nicholas Kristof, a New York Times columnist and former farm boy from Yamhill, Ore. Rather than accept that, they threw themselves into creating and sustaining a viable, democratic alternative. The "good food" rebellion has since sprouted, spread and blossomed from coast to coast...MORE
Demeter
(85,373 posts)ONE WOULD HOPE IT BLEW UP WALL ST. FIRST...
http://admin.alternet.org/economy/tomdispatch-laura-gottesdiener-wall-streets-rental-empire?akid=11192.227380.dv2eoN&rd=1&src=newsletter929520&t=16
...Over the last year and a half, Wall Street hedge funds and private equity firms have quietly amassed an unprecedented rental empire, snapping up Queen Anne Victorians in Atlanta, brick-faced bungalows in Chicago, Spanish revivals in Phoenix. In total, these deep-pocketed investors have bought more than 200,000 cheap, mostly foreclosed houses in cities hardest hit by the economic meltdown.
Wall Streets foreclosure crisis, which began in late 2007 and forced more than 10 million people from their homes, has created a paradoxical problem. Millions of evicted Americans need a safe place to live, even as millions of vacant, bank-owned houses are blighting neighborhoods and spurring a rise in crime. Lucky for us, Wall Street has devised a solution: Its going to rent these foreclosed houses back to us. In the process, its devised a new form of securitization that could cause this whole plan to blow upagain.
Since the buying frenzy began, no company has picked up more houses than the Blackstone Group, the largest private equity firm in the world. Using a subsidiary company, Invitation Homes, Blackstone has grabbed houses at foreclosure auctions, through local brokers, and in bulk purchases directly from banks the same way a regular person might stock up on toilet paper from Costco.
In one move, it bought 1,400 houses in Atlanta in a single day. As of November, Blackstone had spent $7.5 billion to buy 40,000 mostly foreclosed houses across the country. Thats a spending rate of $100 million a week since October 2012. It recently announced plans to take the business international, beginning in foreclosure-ravaged Spain....
Fuddnik
(8,846 posts)Now the really scary part.
If FEMA Flood Insurance rates increase the way they're talking about in a couple of months, thousands of people will be walking away from houses they could pay for before the increase in rates. Hedge funds could snap them up cheap, for cash, and not worry about flood insurance.
The Senate tried to offer some relief, and limit the increases, but the tea-baggers in the House ain't going along.
westerebus
(2,976 posts)When the current occupant of the white house explained how a public private venture to secure the housing market would be in the best interests of the country. Saving homeowners. Putting Americans on the road to recovery.
Put them on the road alright.
kickysnana
(3,908 posts)Demeter
(85,373 posts)I'm sure we all have things to be thankful for....I am thankful for our little group: the camaraderie, the sharing, the love.
Stay warm, and dry, and don't overeat! Get some rest, too, you're looking peaked.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)... Income inequality is not someone else's problem. Nearly all of us are likely to experience it. Inequality has been growing in the US since the 1970s. Economist Emmanuel Saez found that the incomes of the top 1% grew by 31.4% in the three years after the financial crisis, while the majority of people struggled with a disappointing economy. The other 99% of the population grew their incomes 0.4% during the same period.
As a result, federal and state spending on social welfare programs has been forced to grow to $1tn just to handle the volume of US households in trouble. Yet income inequality has been locked out of of the mainstream economic conversation, where it is seen largely as a sideshow for progressive bleeding hearts.
In the discussions of why the US is not recovering, economists often mention metrics like economic growth and housing. They rarely mention the metrics that directly tell us we are failing our economic goals, like poverty and starvation. Those metrics of income inequality tell an accurate story of the depth of our economic malaise that new-home sales can't. One-fifth of Americans, or 47 million people, are on food stamps; 50% of children born to single mothers live in poverty; and over 13 million people are out of work. Children are now not likely to do as well as their parents did as downward mobility takes hold for the first time in generations.
The bottom line, which Pope Francis correctly identifies, is that inequality is the biggest economic issue of our time for everyone, not just the poor. Nearly any major economic metric unemployment, growth, consumer confidence comes down to the fact that the vast majority of Americans are struggling in some way. You don't have to begrudge the rich their fortunes or ask for redistribution. It's just hard to justify ignoring the financial problems of 47 million people who don't have enough to eat. Until they have enough money to fill their pantries, we won't have a widespread economic recovery. You can't have a recovery if one-sixth of the world's economically leading country is eating on $1.50 a day...
Demeter
(85,373 posts)...
The bulls and bears of the stock market are locked in a battle right now. This looks likely to go down in history the single best year for U.S. stock market investors since 1997. It seems that anyone with money in the stock market nationwide would want to stock up on cases of champagne and crates of luridly colored streamers to celebrate.
Careful now. When a bull is stampeding, you dont want to get in its way. (Just ask any of the dozens who end up trampled each year in places like Pamplona.)
Running with a bull can give you a great adrenaline charge, but a seconds misjudgment can leave you impaled on its horns and with a portfolio that shows the damage.
That might be one reason why weve seen some big investors who, until now, have criticized the market as frothy suddenly make sharp turnarounds and embrace the rising stock market...
THE BEARS ARE INVESTING! THE BEARS ARE INVESTING!
Ghost Dog
(16,881 posts)So long as the financial sector is allowed to pull cash from the Fed's freebie window, the markets will rise.
As long as the business sector can stall the recovery and keep labor costs low, the markets will rise.
As long as derivatives are unregulated, the markets will rise.
As soon as any one of those changes, the markets will begin to slow down, and recede.
If two change, the markets will become uncomfortable and begin to panic.
If all three change the panic will become full-blown and the market will crash.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Dr. Ted Mazer is one of the few ear, nose and throat specialists in this region who treat low-income people on Medicaid, so many of his patients travel long distances to see him.
But now, as Californias Medicaid program is preparing for a major expansion under President Obamas health care law, Dr. Mazer says he cannot accept additional patients under the government insurance program for a simple reason: it does not pay enough.
Its a bad situation that is likely to be made worse, he said.
His view is shared by many doctors around the country. Medicaid for years has struggled with a shortage of doctors willing to accept its low reimbursement rates and red tape, forcing many patients to wait for care, particularly from specialists like Dr. Mazer.
AND THE BEATINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES...
Demeter
(85,373 posts)WHY? WHAT'S GOING DOWN? COULD IT BE JAMIE?
http://news.yahoo.com/exclusive-ex-ubs-banker-weil-agreed-extradition-u-162932619--sector.html
Raoul Weil, a former UBS banker charged by U.S. authorities five years ago for allegedly helping rich Americans dodge taxes via secret Swiss bank accounts, has agreed to go to the United States to face trial after being arrested in Italy, Weil's lawyer and judicial sources told Reuters.
Weil, a 54-year-old Swiss citizen, has been held in an Italian jail for more than five weeks after police arrested him in a hotel in Bologna where he was holidaying with his wife.
U.S. authorities issued an international arrest warrant for Weil in early 2009, just months after he was charged for allegedly conspiring to help 17,000 American clients of Swiss bank UBS avoid taxes.
"Mr. Weil agreed to extradition to the U.S. because he has always been prepared to confront these charges," Weil's lawyer, Aaron R. Marcu of Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer in New York, said. Weil has said he has committed no wrongdoing....
STAY TUNED TO THIS CHANNEL!
Demeter
(85,373 posts)It's an interesting study into an unusual woman's psychology. George Clooney does a bang-up job, Sandra Bullock is a very troubled person who finds the will to live, if not a reason. My favorite slogan applies: too stubborn to quit, or die.
I think the science was decent. I'm more certain than ever that it wasn't a good fit for the Kid, and I wasn't in the mood for a tear-jerker, but in spite of myself, I can recommend it, as sci-fi, if nothing else: sci-fi in the classical, hard-science style.
DemReadingDU
(16,000 posts)Demeter
(85,373 posts)perhaps I'm growing accustomed to it.
And there's no way to 3d the earth from that height...I did like the aurora seen from space.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)I had a great thread planned on conspiracy, and then my computer was destroyed...but that wasn't a conspiracy, that was a Kid.
I think this piece on the JFK assassination, which turned the course of history, is the best I've read:
John F. Kennedy's Vision of Peace By Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/john-f-kennedys-vision-of-peace-20131120
...JFK's predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, had finalized support on March 17th, 1960, for a Cuban invasion by anti-Castro insurgents, but the wily general left its execution to the incoming Kennedy team. From the start, JFK recoiled at the caper's stench, as CIA Director Allen Dulles has acknowledged, demanding assurances from CIA and Pentagon brass that there was no chance of failure and that there would be no need for U.S. military involvement. Dulles and the generals knowingly lied and gave him those guarantees.
When the invasion failed, JFK refused to order airstrikes against Castro. Realizing he had been drawn into a trap, he told his top aides, David Powers and Kenneth O'Donnell, "They were sure I'd give in to them and send the go-ahead order to the [U.S. Navy aircraft carrier] Essex. They couldn't believe that a new president like me wouldn't panic and try to save his own face. Well, they had me figured all wrong." JFK was realizing that the CIA posed a monumental threat to American democracy. As the brigade faltered, he told Arthur Schlesinger that he wanted to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds."
The next confrontation with the defense and intelligence establishments had already begun as JFK resisted pressure from Eisenhower, the Joint Chiefs and the CIA to prop up the CIA's puppet government in Laos against the communist Pathet Lao guerrillas. The military wanted 140,000 ground troops, with some officials advocating for nuclear weapons. "If it hadn't been for Cuba," JFK told Schlesinger, "we might be about to intervene in Laos. I might have taken this advice seriously." JFK instead signed a neutrality agreement the following year and was joined by 13 nations, including the Soviet Union.
His own instincts against intervening with American combat forces in Laos were fortified that April by the judgment of retired Gen. Douglas MacArthur, America's undisputed authority on fighting wars in Asia. Referring to Dulles' mischief in Southeast Asia during the Eisenhower years, MacArthur told JFK, "The chickens are coming home to roost, and [you] live in the chicken coop." MacArthur added a warning that ought to still resonate today: "Anyone wanting to commit American ground forces to the mainland of Asia should have his head examined."
A MUST-READ!
Demeter
(85,373 posts)http://jfkfacts.org/assassination/fact-check/fact-check-did-the-fed-kill-jfk/
(WELL, THEY MAY HAVE BANK-ROLLED THE PLOT...)
http://thecommonsenseshow.com/2013/11/16/jfk-murder-fifty-years-later-and-the-cover-up-continues/
(EVIDENTLY, RON PAUL IS A PROMOTER OF THE FED RESERVE THEME)
...On June 4, 1963, President Kennedy issued Executive Order 11110 and this accompanied the Kennedy act which was the beginning of an attempt to strip the Federal Reserve Bank of its power to loan money, at interest, to the government. JFK was on his way of stripping the then 50 year history of fleecing the American people. In effect, JFK, by issuing 4.3 billion dollars of U.S. notes based upon silver held in reserve, JFK was going to be able to wipe away the beginnings of national debt which, today, has mortally wounded the American economy. Please take note of the fact that this event was only a little over 5 months before the assassination. When JFK was murdered, LBJ failed to continue with the program.
Who stood to lose the most money if the Federal Reserve had lost its stranglehold on the American economy? You would be right if you answered Chase-Manhattan Bank with its 6,389,445 shares of Federal Reserve Board Stock valued at 32.3% of the total value of stock at the Fed. Also, Citibank had a lot to lose by this move as well as they were invested in the Federal Reserve shares to the tune of 4,051,851, or 20.5% of the total value. I think you might be getting an idea who owned and/or controlled the majority interests in these two banks in 1963, but there is more before we answer the question on who profited the most from the murder of a sitting President in 1963....
AND SO ON
Demeter
(85,373 posts)...Given the huge amount of associated detail and long list of individuals who were or may have been involved in the incident (not to mention the graphic autopsy photographs available to see), its not surprising that so many people are intrigued by the conspiracy theories. After all, a good conspiracy theory makes an excellent story.
With this in mind, we present 10 incredible JFK conspiracy theories. Some of them are plausible, while others are more far-fetched and absurd but theyre all equally fascinating....
10. The Federal Reserve Bank Theory
...There are several problems with this theory, the main one of which is that Executive Order 11110 did not, in fact, create any new authority over the Federal Reserve Bank; it merely transferred already existing authority from the President to the Secretary of the Treasury. Also, Kennedys plan was to reduce the use of treasury silver and increase printed Federal Reserve Bank notes effectively giving the Reserve more power. Still, the idea of an international banking cabal pulling the strings and having a president eliminated sounds a whole lot more exciting....
9. The Lyndon B. Johnson Theory
...A new twist to the theory is the alleged emergence and (still) pending release of secret recordings made by President Kennedys now deceased widow, Jackie Onassis. According to some claims, the tapes reveal that Jackie thought Lyndon B. Johnson was involved as well. Very intriguing indeed....LBJ WAS RUTHLESS ENOUGH, TO BE SURE
8. UFO Cover-Up Theory
7. The Mafia Theory
SOMEHOW, THIS SEEMS FAR TOO ASTUTE FOR THE MAFIA OF THE EARLY 60'S...UNLESS, THEY WANTED THEIR NIGHTCLUB/CASINO BUSINESS IN CUBA BACK...
6. The George Bush Sr. Theory
...George Bush Sr. is alleged to have been part of a conspiracy plot to kill JFK using his connections with the CIA and the Mafia... the researchers claim that there is a connection between JFKs assassination, Watergate, and the Iran-Contra scandal, in all of which, they say, George H. W. Bush played a part. There are even some diehards who believe that Bush Snr. was responsible for John Kennedy Jnr.s death as well!
IF POPPY COULD, HE WOULD...AND HE COULD A LOT
5. The Illuminati Theory ALSO INVOLVES THE FED....
4. The KGB Theory
3. The Israeli Theory
2. Gay Thrill Kill Theory JIMMY DURANTE SAID IT BEST: "EVERYBODY WANTS TO GET INTO THE ACT!"
1. The CIA Theory
TIES IT ALL TOGETHER...Such is the popularity of, and belief in, this conspiracy theory that the CIA has a page dedicated to discrediting it on their website. They blame European leftists and the US media for spreading lies about their involvement. Yet despite this, widespread acceptance of the theory continues and is unlikely to abate anytime soon.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)That would be the 99%, or at least the bottom 80....
When (if) the final answer is given, this country can begin to heal.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)... The true story of JFKs murder has never been officially admitted, although the conclusion that JFK was murdered by a plot involving the Secret Service, the CIA, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff has been well established by years of research, such as that provided by James W. Douglass in his book, JFK And The Unspeakable, published by Simon & Schuster in 2008. Ignore Douglass interest in the Trappist monk Thomas Merton and Mertons prediction and focus on the heavily documented research that Douglass provides...
...Robert Kennedy knew what had happened. He was on his way to being elected president and to holding the plotters accountable for the murder of his brother when the CIA assassinated him. A distinguished journalist, who was standing behind Robert Kennedy at the time of his assassination, told me that the killing shots came from behind past his ear. He submitted his report to the FBI and was never contacted.
Acoustic experts have conclusively demonstrated that more shots were fired than can be accounted for by Sirhan Sirhans pistol and that the sounds indicate two different calibers of firearms....
MUCH MORE
westerebus
(2,976 posts)I'm thankful for wife didn't beat you into a coma with your new golf clubs.
Fuddnik
(8,846 posts)Last edited Fri Nov 29, 2013, 02:02 AM - Edit history (1)
I had to work this morning on the driving range. Could have been done in less than an hour, but decided to go in early and hit some balls.
Finished my job, and decided to play the back nine before I went home.
Finally got home, and helped her finish cooking. I'm still alive.
on edit: The worst part of today was dinner at my SIL's house next door. She's a bland cook, and they're Fox News conservatives, and they had a few of their RW friends over for dinner too. So, spending time at the golf course was my way of staying sober, and biting my tongue during dinner and cocktails. They're really nice people, but they piss me off royally every time they mention politics, and I try to just walk away. And I had success today, just biting my tongue.
DemReadingDU
(16,000 posts)We had a funny discussion about all the topics that shouldn't be discussed...politics, health, religion, etc. Then we proceeded to talk about them, lol!
Pretty much we are all on the same page, so there weren't any heated arguments.
westerebus
(2,976 posts)xchrom
(108,903 posts)U.K. traders whove come under investigation for rigging benchmark rates may find themselves in another difficult situation -- unable to find a good lawyer.
The top attorneys at specialist white-collar crime firms say that, in the past few months, theyve seen the largest number of finance workers ever seeking advice as probes into the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, expand to the manipulation of currency, derivatives and precious metals benchmarks.
About half a dozen law firms in the British capital specialize in advising individuals facing regulatory and criminal probes, while the largest London and U.S. based firms generally represent institutions. The increase in probes means that in a growing number of cases, the most experienced lawyers for individuals are turning traders away.
There is an unprecedented increase in the number of individuals who need specialist legal advice, said David Corker, a defense lawyer at Corker Binning. The supply of such lawyers is limited because hitherto white-collar crime has been seen as largely a boutique or highly specialist area.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)the Gecko is gonna get Gekkos all over the world!
xchrom
(108,903 posts)Congresss latest attempt at crafting a budget plan is on track to end up the same way as others have in the past decade: with little or no agreement.
Negotiators have little chance of breaking this string of futility, even after a 16-day government shutdown in October that cost the U.S. economy $24 billion. If they do, itll only be to curb automatic spending cuts, including $19 billion that hits the Pentagon starting in January.
Now budget experts, labor unions and business groups are saying enoughs enough, and questioning why lawmakers cant live within their means the way ordinary Americans do and instead lurch from one budget standoff to the next.
Its a stupid way to run a country, said Maya MacGuineas, head of the Campaign to Fix the Debt, a non-partisan advocacy group whose members include business leaders and former lawmakers. Change comes from two possible things: a crisis or leadership.
xchrom
(108,903 posts)The Obama administration has said the governments troubled healthcare.gov website will function smoothly by the end of tomorrow. Those paid to help enroll Americans in Obamacare remain doubtful.
From Florida to Alaska, the navigators designated to sign people up for insurance under the U.S. health-care overhaul say that while the governments online insurance exchange has improved in some ways since its Oct. 1 debut, outages and errors continue to prevent many from using it to buy their coverage.
The site is kind of hit and miss, said Karen Basha Egozi of the Epilepsy Foundation of Florida, a U.S. designated navigator. There have definitely been more hits lately than in the past. But I know there are cases where people still get locked out when they try to purchase a plan.
Tyann Boling, chief operating officer of Enroll Alaska, a unit of Anchorage-based Northrim Benefits Group LLC, said she now rates the site a four out of 10, with 10 being fully functional. Its got a long ways to go, she said.
xchrom
(108,903 posts)New European unemployment data is out today.
The headline unemployment rate came in at 12.1% vs 21.2% expected.
As usual, the numbers on youth unemployment are totally staggering.
Total Eurozone youth unemployment is 24.4%.
In Italy it's 41.2%.
In Spain it's 57.4%.
In Portugal it's 36.5%. And so on and so on.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/youth-unemployment-in-europe-2013-11#ixzz2m2r3l7yf
xchrom
(108,903 posts)The economic outlook for Spain has improved, says ratings agency Standard and Poor's (S&P).
The debt-laden country, whose banks came under severe pressure during the financial crisis, has been struggling to improve its public finances.
S&P raised its assessment from negative to stable and re-affirmed its BBB- long-term sovereign credit rating.
However, S&P cut its credit rating for the Netherlands from the top-level AAA rating to AA+.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Demeter
(85,373 posts)Well that escalated quickly. Having broken above $900 yesterday to new record highs (and a 100% gain in a week), the crypto currency is not looking back now. On what is higher than average volume this morning, Bitcoin just broke above the magic $1000 level for the first time (at $1025). Meanwhile, the BTC China "arb'd" rate is around $950 for those playing at home; and Litecoin has just topped $26 (from $4 a week ago!).
Demeter
(85,373 posts)It looks overvalued. But even if this digital currency crashes, others will follow...BITCOIN is booming. Investors are piling into the digital currency, which is not issued by a central bank but is conjured into being by cryptographic software running on a network of volunteers computers. This week the price of a Bitcoin soared to above $1,000, from less than $15 in January.
Having long been favoured by libertarians, gold bugs and drug dealers, Bitcoin is attracting some surprising new fans. Germany has recognised it as a unit of account. Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, told a Senate committee on virtual currencies that the idea may hold long-term promise. A small but growing band of shops and firms accept payments in Bitcoin. Some like the way it allows funds to be transferred directly between users, without middlemen. Others are attracted by the potential for anonymous transfers, or by the fact that the number of Bitcoins in circulation has a fixed upper limitso there is no way a central bank can inflate their value away by issuing more.
But the recent price surge, driven by Chinese investors stashing money offshore, looks like a classic bubble. Hoarding means that Bitcoin is currently more of a speculative asset than a currency. And a crash is not the only risk Bitcoin users face. As the price rises, Bitcoin theft is increasing, both from individuals and from online exchanges that store the coins and convert them into other currencies. Around $1m in Bitcoins was recently stolen from BIPS, a European exchange. GBL, a Chinese Bitcoin exchange, abruptly vanished in October, taking $4.1m-worth of deposits with it.
The system itself is straining at the seams (see Technology Quarterly). The amount of computing power consumed by its transaction-verification system, which has the side-effect of mining new Bitcoins, is mushrooming: it now far exceeds that of the worlds 500 fastest supercomputers combined. At the same time Bitcoins method of recording and processing transactions, and compensating those who verify them, is becoming unwieldy. Adjusting Bitcoins protocols, however, requires getting the volunteers who maintain its software to agree on the necessary changes, and the Bitcoin community to adopt them, before anything goes wrong...
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Demeter
(85,373 posts)Many people have a tale of a lost or broken hard drive containing some bit of precious data they wish they could recover. But perhaps no one on the planet has thrown out a hard drive as valuable as the one James Howells says is now buried in a landfill.
According to an article in The Guardian today, Howells threw out the hard drive, "rescued from a defunct Dell laptop," this past summer. "And then last Friday he realised that it held a digital wallet with 7,500 Bitcoins created for almost nothing in 2009," the story notes.
Howells, an IT pro, says his mistake likely occurred in mid-July, at which time a single bitcoin was worth about $90. Today, the value of a single bitcoin passed $1,000 for the first time, making 7,500 bitcoins worth $7.5 million.
According to The Guardian story, Howells did not have a backup. The drive he allegedly threw out "contains the cryptographic 'private key' that is needed to be able to access and spend the bitcoins; without it, the 'money' is lost forever."
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xchrom
(108,903 posts)India's economic growth rate picked up strongly in the second quarter, according to official figures.
The economy expanded at an annual rate of 4.8% in the July-to-September period, up from 4.4% in the previous quarter.
The acceleration was faster than analysts had been expecting.
Asia's third-largest economy has been weighed down by various factors, such as high inflation, a weak currency and a drop in foreign investment.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)India has a lot of problems, not all of them financial.
xchrom
(108,903 posts)xchrom
(108,903 posts)Consumer prices in Japan rose at the fastest pace in five years in October, suggesting policymakers' attempts to end years of deflation are working.
Consumer prices, excluding food, rose 0.9% from a year earlier. Prices have now risen for five months in a row.
Japan has been battling deflation, or falling prices, for best part of the past 20 years.
It is seen as a major drag on its economy and policymakers have unveiled a series of measures to end the cycle.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)J EDGAR IS THE GHOST AT ANY FEAST...
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131125/02515925349/how-fbi-actually-does-much-nsas-spying-is-keeping-that-quiet.shtml
from the like-they-don't-have-a-history-of-abuses? dept
For all the focus on the NSA of late, a few folks have been trying to remind everyone that the FBI is heavily involved in all of this and, in many ways, has an equally bad if not worse record in abusing the rights of Americans. Many of the programs discussed were to retrieve information by the FBI or the NSA, and it turns out that the FBI often does much of the dirty work for the NSA, including interfacing with various companies to get access to data. We'd mentioned recently how the FBI was pushing tech companies to install "port readers" at both telco and tech companies (though, many tech firms were resisting), and also that the FBI had been ramping up their use of malware.
Shane Harris, over at Foreign Policy has a nice profile on the FBI's Data Intercept Technology Unit, or DITU, who handles most of this work. It repeats the story of the port readers, but adds how the DITU is often the unit that works with tech companies and then passes info along to the NSA -- so some companies don't even realize they're dealing with the NSA, believing it's just via the FBI (not that this would make things any better). It also notes that the DITU tends to be made up of a lot of ex-telco guys who know very specifically how the telco networks work, something that at least some people at the telcos may be uncomfortable with the government knowing (though, again, the telcos seem much more willing to open up to the government than the tech companies).
It's an interesting profile all around, but at the end it gets even more interesting, as an ex-law enforcement source that Harris talks to highlights that without investigating what the DITU is up to, Congress' exploration of what's going on will be very incomplete.
The former law enforcement official said Holder and Mueller should have offered testimony and explained how the FBI works with the NSA. He was concerned by reports that the NSA had not been adhering to its own minimization procedures, which the Justice Department and the FBI review and vouch for when submitting requests to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
"Where they hadn't done what was represented to the court, that's unforgivable. That's where I got sick to my stomach," the former law enforcement official said. "The government's position is, we go to the court, apply the law -- it's all approved. That makes for a good story until you find out what was approved wasn't actually what was done."
That makes it sound like even more bad behavior is going to be revealed eventually...
WHO NEEDS TV SITCOMS?
Demeter
(85,373 posts)The concept of the "liquidity trap" is well-known to most: it is that freak outlier in an otherwise spotless Keynesian plane, when due to the need for negative interest rates to boost the economy (usually resulting from that other inevitable Keynesian state: the bursting of an asset bubble) - a structural impossibility according to most economists although an increasingly more probable in Europe - central banks have no choice but to offset a deleveraging private banking sector and directly inject liquidity into the banking sector, with the outcome being soaring asset prices and even more bubbles, which will eventually burst only to be replaced with even more failed attempts at reflation. Sadly, very little of this liquidity makes its way to the broad economy as the ongoing recession in the developed world has shown for the 5th year in a row, which in turn makes the liqudity trap even worse, and so on in a closed loop.
Since there is little else in the central bankers' arsenal that is as effective in boosting the "wealth effect" - which is how they validate their actions to themselves and other economists and politicians - they continue to do ever more QE. And since banks are assured at generating far greater returns on allocated capital in the markets, where they can use the excess deposits they obtain courtesy of the Fed's generous reserve-a-palooza as initial margin for risk-on trades, the liquidity pipelines remain stuck throughout the world, and loan creation - that traditional money creation pathway - is permanently blocked (as is the case empirically in both the US and Europe, where private-sector loan creation is declining at a record pace).
Everywhere except the one place that has yet to actually engage in conventional quantitative easing: China. At least explicitly, because loan creation by China's state-controlled entities and otherwise government backstopped banks, is anything but conventional money creation. One can, therefore, claim that China's loan creation is a form of Quasi-QE whereby banks, constrained from investing in a relatively shallow stock market, and unable to freely transfer the CNY-denominated liquidity abroad, are forced to lend it out knowing that if things turn sour at the end of the day, the PBOC will bail them out. Paradoxically, this "non-QE" is exactly how QE should work in the US and other developed markets...In order to offset the lack of loan creation by commercial banks, the "Big 4" central banks - Fed, ECB, BOJ and BOE - have had no choice but the open the liquidity spigots to the max. This has resulted in a total developed world "Big 4" central bank balance of just under $10 trillion, of which the bulk of asset additions has taken place since the Lehman collapse.
How does this compare to what China has done? As can be seen on the chart below, in just the past 5 years alone, Chinese bank assets (and by implication liabilities) have grown by an astounding $15 trillion, bringing the total to over $24 trillion, as we showed yesterday. In other words, China has expanded its financial balance sheet by 50% more than the assets of all global central banks combined! And that is how - in a global centrally-planned regime which is where everyone now is, DM or EM - your flood your economy with liquidity. Perhaps the Fed, ECB or BOJ should hire some PBOC consultants to show them how it's really done.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Remember how Quantitative Easing was going to get the banks lending again?
Well, it hasnt worked that way. In fact, after 4 years of zero rates and $3 trillion in monetary pump-priming, banks are lending less to small businesses and consumers than before the financial crisis. (International Business Times)
But how can that be, you ask, after all, didnt the banks just report record profits in the Third Quarter?
Yep, they sure did. $40 billion-worth. But the bulk of that dough was raked off their gaming operations, you know, all the dodgy activities that Dodd-Frank regulations were going to stop, but never did. As far as lending to households and small businesses, thats been a non-starter from the get-go. Check this out from the IBT:
Small business loans decreased in 2012 from 2011. there was $588 billion in small business loans outstanding in June 2012, 3.1 percent less than at the end of 2011. (Banks Have Received $2.3 Trillion In Quantitative Easing But Are Lending Less To Small Businesses And Consumers Than Before The Financial Crisis, International Business Times )
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Demeter
(85,373 posts)There is too much money in the world being invested in all the wrong ways.
The amount of money being created by the Federal Reserve, Bank of Japan and the ECB is dwarfed by the amount of money being produced by Chinese banks and shadow banks.
This money is being spent on unproductive enterprises. About 70% of all sales of Brooklyn homes, for example, are going to hedge funds, investors and international buyers, who are looking for income. In Australia much of the real-estate is driven by Chinese buyers, so Australians buy in the US, because the US is cheaper, and so on.
Money creation is out of control, we are creating vast amounts of money, and then spending it either unproductively or harmfully. As I noted earlier, virtually the entire run up for the Dow can be explained by Federal Reserve giving rich people money. In China the money is also going into real-estate, most of it shoddy, and entire rural communities are being forced off their land and into the newly built slums (because, very quickly, that is what they will become. We have a lot of experience with what happens with these sort of planned prebuilt cities: and virtually all of it is bad.)
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Demeter
(85,373 posts)...The first step to getting out of our current mess, then, is 95% marginal tax rates on all income over 5 million, 90% on all income over 1 million, and a huge increase of corporate tax rates to over 70% unless they are doing what is in the public interest. (Tax breaks on 20% corporate taxation rates do not affect corporate behavior.)
There are more fundamental fixes, mind you, but these are the basic, brain dead fixes that are doable within the current system, without radical changes. This is what basic economics, as understood in the 1950s with slight updates for an understanding of sinks and supply bottlenecks, tells you to do.
Do not give money, free money, to people who are not spending it in ways beneficial to society as a whole. And take away money from people who are spending it in harmful ways.
Money is a social creation, it is permission to tell people what to do. You do not give money, and permission, to those who use it badly.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)The fallout from the subprime mortgage crisis continues to plague U.S. banks, according to Standard and Poor's, with the ratings agency estimating billions of dollars in extra litigation fees may hit major lenders.
In the lead-up to the financial crash of 2008, U.S. banks packaged and sold residential mortgage-backed securities - a type of financial instrument that contained mortgages and home-equity loans of varying risk. Once homeowners in the U.S. started defaulting on their loans in record numbers in 2007, the market for mortgage backed securities collapsed as it became impossible to tell whether the debt in the security was high- or low-risk, sparking the global financial crisis...
"We estimate that the largest banks may need to pay out an additional $55 billion to $105 billion to settle mortgage-related issues," Stuart Plesser, a credit analyst at the ratings agency said in a press release late on Tuesday.
The banks included in the report are Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo...
Demeter
(85,373 posts)IT MAY GET OLD, BUT IT NEVER GOES AWAY...
NSA Document Says NSA Needs More Power
http://admin.alternet.org/nsa-document-says-nsa-needs-more-power?akid=11184.227380.5ZfHVh&rd=1&src=newsletter928941&t=20&paging=off¤t_page=1#bookmark
This latest NSA revelation from James Risen and Laura Poitras inthe New York Times is one of the creepiest yet. It's a mission statement that forthrightly asserts that if the laws might interfere with the NSA's ability to function to its full, Orwellian, Big Brother capabilities those laws need to be eliminated. (I guess the Constitution would need an overhaul as well. Talk about out of date ...)
In a February 2012 paper laying out the four-year strategy for the N.S.A.s signals intelligence operations, which include the agencys eavesdropping and communications data collection around the world, agency officials set an objective to aggressively pursue legal authorities and a policy framework mapped more fully to the information age.
Written as an agency mission statement with broad goals, the five-page document said that existing American laws were not adequate to meet the needs of the N.S.A. to conduct broad surveillance in what it cited as the golden age of Sigint, or signals intelligence. The interpretation and guidelines for applying our authorities, and in some cases the authorities themselves, have not kept pace with the complexity of the technology and target environments, or the operational expectations levied on N.S.A.s mission, the document concluded.
Using sweeping language, the paper also outlined some of the agencys other ambitions. They included defeating the cybersecurity practices of adversaries in order to acquire the data the agency needs from anyone, anytime, anywhere. The agency also said it would try to decrypt or bypass codes that keep communications secret by influencing the global commercial encryption market through commercial relationships, human spies and intelligence partners in other countries. It also talked of the need to revolutionize analysis of its vast collections of data to radically increase operational impact.
It's gets more Strangelovian by the day. I guess the old fashioned dictum that just because you can do something doesn't mean youshould wasn't taught in NSA school.
N.S.A.s Sigint strategy is designed to guide investments in future capabilities and close gaps in current capabilities, the agency said in a statement. In an ever-changing technology and telecommunications environment, N.S.A. tries to get in front of issues to better fulfill the foreign-intelligence requirements of the U.S. government.
We must stop at nothing that might prevent our government from "keep us safe" from any threats, large or small, that may or may not materialize...
Microsoft, suspecting NSA spying, to ramp up efforts to encrypt its Internet traffic
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/microsoft-suspecting-nsa-spying-to-ramp-up-efforts-to-encrypt-its-internet-traffic/2013/11/26/44236b48-56a9-11e3-8304-caf30787c0a9_story.html
Microsoft is moving toward a major new effort to encrypt its Internet traffic amid fears that the National Security Agency may have broken into its global communications links, said people familiar with the emerging plans.
Suspicions at Microsoft, while building for several months, sharpened in October when it was reported that the NSA was intercepting traffic inside the private networks of Google and Yahoo, two industry rivals with similar global infrastructures, said people with direct knowledge of the companys deliberations. They said top Microsoft executives are meeting this week to decide what encryption initiatives to deploy and how quickly.
Documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden suggest but do not prove that the company is right to be concerned. Two previously unreleased slides that describe operations against Google and Yahoo include references to Microsofts Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger services. A separate NSA e-mail mentions Microsoft Passport, a Web-based service formerly offered by Microsoft, as a possible target of that same surveillance project, called MUSCULAR, which was first disclosed by The Washington Post last month.
Though Microsoft officials said they had no independent verification of the NSA targeting the company in this way, general counsel Brad Smith said Tuesday that it would be very disturbing and a possible constitutional breach if true....
SO WHY SHOULD MICROSOFT BE EXEMPT?
Demeter
(85,373 posts)THEY WERE NEVER PUBLIC TO BEGIN WITH...THAT WAS THE WHOLE POINT OF LEAKING! BAD HEADLINE, SUSPECT OPINION
http://pando.com/2013/11/27/keeping-secrets/
Who owns the NSA secrets leaked by Edward Snowden to reporters Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras?
Given that eBay founder Pierre Omidyar just invested a quarter of a billion dollars to
personally hire Greenwald and Poitras for his new for-profit media venture, its a question worth asking.
Its especially worth asking since it became clear that Greenwald and Poitras are now the only two people with full access to the complete cache of NSA files, which are said to number anywhere from 50,000 to as many as 200,000 files. Thats right: Snowden doesnt have the files any more, the Guardian doesnt have them, the Washington Post doesnt have them
just Glenn and Laura at the for-profit journalism company created by the founder of eBay.
Edward Snowden has popularly been compared to major whistleblowers such as Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning and Jeffrey Wigand. However, there is an important difference in the Snowden files that has so far gone largely unnoticed. Whistleblowing has traditionally served the public interest. In this case, it is about to serve the interests of a billionaire starting a for-profit media business venture. This is truly unprecedented. Never before has such a vast trove of public secrets been sold wholesale to a single billionaire as the foundation of a for-profit company...
Demeter
(85,373 posts)SEE PICTURES AT LINK:
http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2013/11/mmt-toddlers.html
PART OF THE GET-EM-WHILE THEY'RE YOUNG PLAN
Demeter
(85,373 posts)There are no comparisonsObamacare stands alone By Major Garrett
http://www.nationaljournal.com/all-powers/stop-the-metaphor-madness-20131128
...The ACA is, most of all, a mess.
And I don't mean HealthCare.gov, a subject I will return to momentarily.
I mean the law and its consequences, its regulations and taxes, its causes and its effects are messy. Winners and losers abound. This is true now and will be true for as long as the law remains. And remain it likely will, precisely because of the tight and self-reinforcing alliance the law constructed with insurers, hospitals, and doctors. Americans who lacked insurance coverage will find it through the private sector on federal or state exchanges or via Medicaid. Americans who had policies on the individual market will lose their old coverage and possibly find new and better coverage or more expensive and inferior plans. Americans employed by large corporations will see modest changes in benefit and premium schedules, and those who work for smaller companies may see previous coverage vanish and choose new options that may or may not live up to their expectations. All of this will be destabilizing and generate in different regions and among different demographic groups anxiety, possibility, relief, and rage.
In this, Obamacare will unintentionally but unmistakably resemble the old systemwhere these powerful emotions and wrenching economic dislocations were common but engineered entirely by the private insurance market. To cover those who lacked insurance, Obama decided to interpose the federal government in this messy market, and his hyper-simplistic rhetoric about keeping insurance plans and doctors exposed his contempt for public discourse and corroded his credibility, by far the most durable personal attribute of his presidency.
Obama's rhetoric has been his political undoing, driving his poll ratings to new lows and grinding his other legislative ambitions to dust. Obamacare has become a crucible of accountability and believability. Within that confined space, made hotter and more vaporous by his own discredited platitudes, Obama's ability to lead, inspire, and persuade has suffered. But the law remains, and the next four months will be but the first of many moments to judge its outcomes against its ambitions and promises....LARGE EDIT...All this will serve as the backdrop for Obama's State of the Union address, which will unquestionably be the State of Obamacare address. Landing between the expected conclusion of budget/sequester talks on Jan. 15 and a debt-ceiling extension on Feb. 15, the State of the Union (Obamacare) address will be Obama's next best chance toin White House jargonpivot, reset, or reach an inflection point on the ACA as a matter of law, implementation, and politics. Obamacare will be able, the White House hopes, to admit past mistakes, errors of management, and leaky health care promises but spin the larger debate forward with tales of website redemption, enrollment surges, and satisfied consumers with newfound coverage and contentment.
As I said, Obamacare is a saga and a mess, singularly so. It needs no metaphorical embroidery...
The author is National Journal Correspondent-at-Large and Chief White House Correspondent for CBS News. He is also a distinguished fellow at the George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs.
DemReadingDU
(16,000 posts)mahatmakanejeeves
(57,617 posts)They released this the day before (U.S.) Thanksgiving. I'm really getting old.
ETA News Release: Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report (11/27/2013)
Source: Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration
Read More: http://www.dol.gov/opa/media/press/eta/ui/eta20132256.htm
UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE WEEKLY CLAIMS REPORT
SEASONALLY ADJUSTED DATA
In the week ending November 23, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 316,000, a decrease of 10,000 from the previous week's revised figure of 326,000. The 4-week moving average was 331,750, a decrease of 7,500 from the previous week's revised average of 339,250.
The advance seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate was 2.1 percent for the week ending November 16, a decrease of 0.1 percentage point from the prior week's unrevised rate. The advance number for seasonally adjusted insured unemployment during the week ending November 16 was 2,776,000, a decrease of 91,000 from the preceding week's revised level of 2,867,000. The 4-week moving average was 2,831,750, a decrease of 22,750 from the preceding week's revised average of 2,854,500.
UNADJUSTED DATA
The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 363,053 in the week ending November 23, an increase of 37,229 from the previous week. There were 358,869 initial claims in the comparable week in 2012.
....
The total number of people claiming benefits in all programs for the week ending November 9 was 3,913,729, an increase of 38,437 from the previous week. There were 5,183,962 persons claiming benefits in all programs in the comparable week in 2012.
== == == ==
Good morning, Freepers and DUers alike. I ask you to put aside your differences long enough to read this post. Following that, you can engage in your usual donnybrook.
I have been posting the number every week for at least a year. I seriously do not care if the week's data make Obama look good. They are just numbers, and I post them without regard to the consequences. I welcome people from Free Republic to examine the numbers as well. They paid for the work just as much as members of DU did, so I invite them to come on over and have a look. "The more the merrier" is the way I look at it.
I do not work at the ETA, and I do not know anyone working in that agency. I'm sure I can safely assume that the numbers are gathered and analyzed by career civil servant economists who do their work on a nonpartisan basis. Numbers are numbers, and let the chips fall where they may. If you feel that these economists are falling down on the job, drop them a line or give them a call. They work for you, not for any politician or political party.
The word "initial" is important. The report does not count all claims, just the new ones filed this week.
Note: The seasonal adjustment factors used for the UI Weekly Claims data from 2007 forward, along with the resulting seasonally adjusted values for initial claims and continuing claims, have been revised. These revised historical values, as well as the seasonal adjustment factors that will be used through calendar year 2012, can be accessed at the bottom of the following link: http://www.oui.doleta.gov/press/2012/032912.asp
Demeter
(85,373 posts)by John Taylor
Research by Christopher Erceg and Andrew Levin is providing solid evidence that the decline in the labor force participation rate since 2007 has been due to cyclical factorsthe recession and slow recoveryrather than to demographic factors. In other words, the fact that such a large number of people have dropped out of the labor force is associated with the weak economy rather than to their reaching their retirement yearsor some other typical demographic trend. Because the unemployment rate does not count the people who dropped out of the labor force it no longer gives a good reading of the state of the labor market. The unemployment rate would be much higher without this large decline in labor force participation.
In the latest version of their paper Chris and Andy estimate how large the US unemployment rate would be without this abnormal decline in the labor force, and they produced this amazing chart which summarizes their findings (I tweeted about this yesterday).
?w=640
ErcegLevin_26aug2013 Fig 6 right
That the actual unemployment rate has become such a poor indicator of labor market trends is one reason why many economists have focused on the employment to population ratio. Here is an update of a chart I have been using for several years to illustrate the lack of progress in employing the working age population compared to recoveries from previous deep recessions, such as the recovery from the recessions in the early 1980s. It too is an amazing chart.
?w=640
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Goldman Sachs may have provided the Government with a knockdown valuation of the Royal Mail losing the taxpayer more than £1bn when it was privatised last month, according to critics.
Yet the giant US investment bank has proved remarkable adept at deciding when to cash in shares in the historic institution on behalf of its clients.
A new analysis of Royal Mails official share register by The Independent has found that Goldman Sachs offloaded around 4.5 million Royal Mail shares worth at least £25m between 31 October and 11 November at the top of the market. The decision by the bank, which received millions of pounds from the Department of Business to price the Royal Mail at £3.30-a-share when it floated last month, would have made its clients up to £12m if the shares were sold at the £5.87 peak.
Senior sources at Goldman Sachs stressed the fluctuations were not solely down to selling shares and claimed some would have resulted from stock-lending transactions and movements of collateral which do not relate to changes in the share price. The news has fuelled fresh criticism of the Government and its banking advisers over the Royal Mail float, as the Business Secretary, Vince Cable, prepares to face questions over the scandal by a committee of MPs today.
Adrian Bailey, chair of the Business Select Committee, which is due to question Mr Cable on Wednesday, said: Its totally unacceptable. I dont see how you can act as adviser to the Government and then profit from the advice you have given them. It is a conflict of interest.
THAT'S NOT A BUG, THAT'S A FEATURE....
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Democratic strategist Doug Sosnik was a close adviser to President Bill Clinton, and hes famed in Washington circles for his closely held, big-think memos on the state of American politics. We got our hands on his latestin which he warns of a rising populist tide that threatens to swamp Republicans and Democrats alikeand are reprinting it in full here with his permission.
For some time now, the daily commentary has focused on the publics increasing anger and frustration about the sluggish economic recovery, dysfunctional government and a failure of leadership. But all this analysis misses the more fundamental point, which is that Americans alienation from our political system and its leaders has been building for more than a decade. This extended period of dissatisfaction has had an extremely corrosive effect on the nations social fabric.
The current discontent with the leadership in our country, coupled with long-term domestic economic trends dating back to the early 1980s, is beginning to force a redrawing of the political lines that have separated Americans since the culture wars of the 1960s. An emerging movement in our country is calling for change to the status quo and to the leadership class. Across the political spectrum, there is an growing populist push for a retrenchment from global affairs, with a renewed focus on the problems here at home. Americans are worried about the struggles of the battered middle class, whose real incomes have not improved in more than two decades, the elimination of special deals for the wealthy and big business and the protection of the publics privacy from what they see as predatory companies and an intrusive federal government. These are the issues that will dominate our politics going forward, and we will see populists from the left and the right increasingly come together to force change.
A decade of anger and disaffection
There is a pent up desire for dramatic change that has been shaped by a confluence of major events in the United States and around the world. In the last 10 years the country has fought two wars, faced the greatest worldwide economic meltdown since the 1930s and experienced the most significant technological transformation since the Industrial Revolution. The nation has also undergone a major demographic makeover, shifting from a majority white country to an increasingly multicultural society. Throughout this period our leaders have failed to manage the pace of all this change and to face up to the severity of our challenges, resulting in disillusionment and deep divisions among the public by race, age and income.
The countrys dissatisfaction is evident in all the major polling trend lines. Since the beginning of the last decade, a majority of the country has believed that the country is heading in the wrong direction, regardless of which party was in power. Trust in the federal government, as well as congressional approval ratings, have dropped to historic lows...
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kickysnana
(3,908 posts)When we got her she ate only one brand of dry cat food, no treats, no other brand so I started mixing the food and gradually increasing it to 1/3 of 3 kinds (in case they stop making one or change it).
She's 8 now I don't think cats get less fussy do they? She is a sweetheart but odd. She will bat at the feathered teaser a couple times and then is content to watch it fly around the room. She is terrified of plastic bags and big cardboard boxes. Wish I spoke cat some days.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Some cats deign to learn a bit of human, though.
DemReadingDU
(16,000 posts)She stopped eating the dry cat food. Last winter when she stopped eating, I took her to vet and she had a bad tooth that had to be pulled. Poor kitty
But she recovered fine.
Thinking the cat may have another bad tooth, I took her to vet again, but teeth are ok. Oh, she is drinking a LOT of water. She is old, 16-17 years, and so a complete blood test was done. Some things were high, some were low, some indication that she has beginnings of kidney failure, but the vet was most interested in the low potassium. So the cat is getting potassium supplement gel that I mix with some baby food chicken. And she will eat that mixture. And she will eat some shredded cheese too.
But the really odd thing she does, is that she bites out her fur, in chunks. Very weird.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden succeeded where President Barack Obama couldnt -- getting Microsoft Corp., Google Inc. and Yahoo! Inc. to upgrade computer security against hackers. Microsoft is the latest company considering measures to ensure the protection of customer data and strengthen security against snooping by governments, according to Brad Smith, general counsel for the Redmond, Washington-based company.
The companies are adopting harder-to-crack code to protect their networks and data, after years of largely rebuffing calls from the White House and privacy advocates to improve security. The new measures come after documents from Snowden revealed how U.S. spy programs gain access to the companies customer data -- sometimes with their knowledge, sometimes without -- and thats threatening profits at home and abroad.
These companies actively fought against numerous mechanisms that would have mandated far more secure data, Sascha Meinrath, director of the Open Technology Institute at the New America Foundation in Washington, said in a phone interview. Now they are paying the literal price.
While Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook Inc. provide data to the government under court orders, they are trying to prevent the NSA from gaining unauthorized access to information flowing between computer servers by using encryption. That scrambles data using a mathematical formula that can be decoded only with a special digital key...
MUCH MORE AT LINK
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Google, the giant of the Internet, thought about moving its servers out of the U.S. after the NSA debacle, said Eric Schmidt, the company's chairman, on Friday at the Paley International Council Summit in New York.
"Actually, we thought about that and there are many, many reasons why it's impossible for Google to leave the United States, although it's attractive," Schmidt said.
"But the reason it's an interesting idea is because American firms are subject to these rules, the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] rules, Patriot Act and so forth, and this government surveillance is really a problem."
Schmidt said that Google was presented with data of internal monitoring of traffic between its servers where the government had reversed engineered protocols that exchanged random data between the company's servers.
"Google's position is we are outraged on this...It's government overreach, is the best way to explain it...This kind of government surveillance is also a huge business risk", he said.
Because other governments do not want the U.S. breaching their citizens' data, they will begin to demand control over the servers of American businesses located in their country.
"If you're a member of the government from one of these countries, what are you going to do? You're going to say 'what can I do in my country to prevent this?'" he said.
"Well, the most obvious thing you can do is prevent all of those American services, and all of that snooping and so forth, by requiring data localization. By requiring servers be in your country under your control, which breaks the Internet."
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Demeter
(85,373 posts)The US National Security Agency hacked more than 50,000 computer networks worldwide installing malware designated for surveillance operations, Dutch newspaper NRC reports citing documents leaked by Edward Snowden.
The latest round of revelations comes from a document dating from 2012 that shows the extent of the NSAs worldwide surveillance network. Published by Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad, it points out more than 50,000 locations, where the NSA used Computer Network Exploitation (CNE) and implanted malicious software into the networks. According to the NSA website CNE includes enabling actions and intelligence collection via computer networks that exploit data gathered from target or enemy information systems or networks.
Once the computer has been infected, the implants act as digital 'sleeper cells' that can be remotely turned on or off with a single push of a button, the Dutch paper reported. The malware can remain active for years without being detected, the newspaper added. The malicious operations reportedly were carried out in many countries including China, Russia, Venezuela and Brazil. The hacking is conducted by the Tailored Access Operations (TAO), a special unit within the NSA tasked with gaining access to foreign computer systems.
According to the Dutch media, one of the examples of the CNE operation is the reported attack against Belgian telecom company Belgacom that was discovered in September 2013. The attack was previously reported to have been carried out by British intelligence agency GCHQ that worked in cooperation with its American counterpart. GCHQ injected malware in the Belgacom network to tap their customers telephone and data traffic. The agency implemented a technique known as Quantum Insert, placing Belgacoms servers in strategic spots where they could intercept and redirect target traffic to a fake LinkedIn professional social network's website.
Public sources show that TAO employs more than a thousand hackers. The task force has been active since at least 1998, according to Washington Post...
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Demeter
(85,373 posts)A widely held view in elite circles is that the rapid rise in inequality in the United States over the last three decades is an unfortunate side-effect of technological progress. In this story, technology has had the effect of eliminating tens of millions of middle wage jobs for factory workers, bookkeepers, and similar occupations. These were jobs where people with limited education used to be able to raise a family with a middle class standard of living. However computers, robots and other technological innovations are rapidly reducing the need for such work. As a result, the remaining jobs in these sectors are likely to pay less and many people who would have otherwise worked at middle wage jobs must instead crowd into the lower paying sectors of the labor market. This story is comforting to elites, because it means that inequality is something that happened, not something they did. They won out because they had the skills and intelligence to succeed in a dynamic economy, whereas the huge mass of workers that are falling behind did not. In this story, the best we can do for those left behind is empathy and education. We can increase opportunities to upgrade their skills in the hope that more of them may be able to join the winners.
That's a nice story, but the evidence doesn't support it. My colleagues Larry Mishel, John Schmitt, and Heidi Sheirholz, just published a paper showing that the pattern of job growth in the data doesn't fit this picture at all. This paper touches on a wide variety of issues related to technology and wage inequality, but first and foremost, it shows that the story of the hollowing out of the middle does not fit the data for the 2000s at all. Since 2000, the increase in employment has occurred almost entirely in low-wage occupations. There has been a decline in relative employment for both workers in middle wage and high wage occupations. If this "occupational shift story" explained trends in wages we should expect to see sharply rising wages for retail clerks, custodians and other workers employed in low-paying occupations. Of course, we see the opposite. Workers in these occupations continued to lose ground in the 2000s as they did in the prior two decades. Their wages barely kept pace with inflation over the last three decades....
It is not difficult to identify other potential culprits trade would certainly rank high on the list. A trade policy that quite deliberately puts factory workers in direct competition with low-paid workers in the developing world, while protecting doctors and other highly paid professionals, would be expected to redistribute income from the former to the latter...The weakening of unions is likely also an important factor. The private sector unionization rate in the United States has shrunk from over 20% in the 1970s to less than 7% at present. In the same vein, the deregulation of major industries like airlines, telecommunications, and trucking has been another factor putting downward pressure on wages. The higher unemployment rates we have seen, not just in the last five years but in the last 35 years, compared with the early post-war decades, has also weakened the bargaining power of workers at the middle and bottom of the pay ladder.
We have also seen big changes that contributed to growth of income at the top. The highlights in this category would be deregulation in the financial sector and the changes in corporate governance that pretty much allow top management to write their own pay checks. The big difference between the items listed above and the occupational shift story is that this is a list of items that involve policy changes. If this list (which could be extended) explains the growth in inequality over the last three decades then, it means that inequality was a result of policy. It was not something that just happened; it was something that we did or was done to us. That presents a very different policy agenda for addressing inequality. No one would quarrel with the idea that our children should get a better education, but if a lack of skills was not the cause of inequality, more skills will not be the solution. Rather, we might look at an agenda that would rein in finance and CEO pay, restore the strength of labor unions, and include a more balanced trade policy...
xchrom
(108,903 posts)This undated image released by Ripley's Times Square Odditorium shows a vampire killing kit from India at Ripley's Times Square Odditorium in New York. The item is one of many from a featured collection up for sale until Dec. 24. (AP Photo/Ripley's Times Square Odditorium)
NEW YORK (AP) -- Where's a Black Friday shopper to turn for a 19th century vampire-killing kit?
Believe it or not, the item is part of the Black Friday madness at the Ripley's Times Square Odditorium. It will set you back about $25,000.
At a little more than $19,000 a shrunken head is a comparative bargain.
Or the thoughtful gift-giver might prefer a taxidermy Albino giraffe. The price tag is about $1.7 million. Gift-wrapping is not included.
Still got tons of room under the Christmas tree - and about $2.5 million to spare? Your loved one might be clamoring for 18th century, iron-clad elephant armor from India.
xchrom
(108,903 posts)MEXICO CITY (AP) -- Mexican drug cartels looking to diversify their businesses long ago moved into oil theft, pirated goods, extortion and kidnapping, consuming an ever larger swath of the country's economy. This month, federal officials confirmed the cartels have even entered the country's lucrative mining industry, exporting iron ore to Chinese mills.
Such large-scale illegal mining operations were long thought to be wild rumor, but federal officials confirmed they had known about the cartels' involvement in mining since 2010, and that the Nov. 4 military takeover of Lazaro Cardenas, Mexico's second-largest port, was aimed at cutting off the cartels' export trade.
That news served as a wake-up call to Mexicans that drug traffickers have penetrated the country's economy at unheard-of levels, becoming true Mafia-style organizations, ready to defend their mines at gun point.
Three Michoacan state detectives were wounded in an ambush earlier this week when they were traveling to investigate a mine taken over by criminals. When reinforcements arrived, those officers were also ambushed, part of a string of attacks on police in Michoacan on Wednesday and Thursday that left two officers dead and about a dozen wounded.
xchrom
(108,903 posts)Everything is as it has always been: decayed rows of houses, weathered doorframes with intricate carvings, potholed dirt roads, fishing boats rotting on the beach and, in the middle of it all, the Boma, a stone fortress built by the former German conquerors in Bagamayo, a sleepy coastal town in Tanzania.
Bagamayo was the capital of the colony of German East Africa from 1888 to 1891, when the administrative seat was moved to Dar es Salaam because the shore in Bagamayo was too shallow for a real seaport. Since then, time seems to have stood still.
"But soon nothing will be as it once was in Bagamayo," says Marie Shaba, "because now the new rulers of the world, the Chinese, are coming."
The 65-year-old radio journalist is wearing a bright, mango-yellow kitenge, the traditional dress worn by Tanzanian women. She calls herself a cultural activist. For years, Shaba has been fighting to have Bagamayo, an important arena for the slave trade in the 19th century and for colonial history, declared a United Nations World Heritage Site.
But now Shaba fears that the sleepy town will disappear in the waves of progress.
xchrom
(108,903 posts)The list of euro-zone countries with immaculate credit ratings took another hit this week. On Friday morning, Standard & Poor's (S&P) removed the Netherlands' top rating, downgrading the country to AA+. This leaves only three countries in the common currency area with the best grade of AAA: Finland, Luxembourg and Germany. Two years ago, six countries still had that rating.
S&P stated the downgrade resulted from weaker prospects for economic growth than previously anticipated. The agency said the atmosphere would make it more difficult for the government to reach its fiscal targets. Despite a "stable" outlook for the Netherlands, the company said the development of the country's per capita gross domestic product is "persistently lower" than nations with similarly high levels of economic development. The other two major rating agencies, Moody's and Fitch, have also threatened the Netherlands with a downgrade.
Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem, who is also president of the Euro Group, recently announced that his country would violate the European Commission's deficit rules despite an additional 6 billion ($8.16 billion) austerity package.
Dijsselbloem has stated that he doesn't think the move by S&P will have any substantial effect on the interest rates the country pays on its debt. In a statement released Friday in The Hague, Dijsselbloem said he was "disappointed" by the downgrade, but that he didn't expect it to have any impact on interest rates because the markets were already expecting the change.
xchrom
(108,903 posts)It rumbled and thundered, then India's first Mars rocket shot into the sky above the Bay of Bengal, trailing a long tail of fire behind it. It was one of those rare moments when Asia's third largest economy showed its modern side, with everything running punctually and precisely. On the ground, the head of India's space program rejoiced, and declared: "Any mission is not beyond our capability."
That was early November, but this country with a population of 1.2 billion could celebrate its actual triumph 10 months from now, when the Indian-designed space probe is scheduled to reach the red planet and orbit it several times. If the mission proceeds as planned, it will make India the fourth space-going power to successfully reach Mars, following the United States, Russia and Europe. And, most importantly, India will achieve this step before its greatest rival, China.
The space mission shone in the sky above India like a glimmer of hope for a country where back on the ground hardly anything is going according to plan. The competition with China for dominance in Asia -- colorfully described for years by Western authors as a duel between the dragon and the elephant -- has long since been decided, economically and thus geopolitically as well, and not in India's favor.
Hailed for two decades for its miraculous ascent, India's economy is now faltering. Growth, once around 10 percent, is now less than half that. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicts it will ultimately be under 4 percent for the current year, as it was last year as well.
bread_and_roses
(6,335 posts)The entire past two-three weeks I've been frantically busy. I really hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving, full of an abundance of all good things. I miss being here and reading the thread - I didn't even read what's above yet.
Fudd, good topic! I think I'll have time to at least catch up with this thread later today.
I had thought I'd be working on a personal project I want to do in my spare time over the past month, but I have not had any spare time. But since I'm lucky enough to work for labor unions and with progressive allies, that's a really, really good thing - are people waking up? There have been so many times I've been twiddling my thumbs on the job because everyone was keeping their heads low while the world was going to hell in a handbasket around them. (The nature of my work is such that how busy I am largely depends on how active others are willing to be.)
I am very thankful for all of you here in SMW and WE - I've learned so much here, and laughed a lot, which is more precious than gold.
xchrom
(108,903 posts)A protester participates in a demonstration against government austerity measures in Oviedo, Spain on November 29. (Reuters)
The collective mood of a nation mired in a prolonged economic recession shows many of the symptoms of clinical depression: despair, fatalism, an inability to make decisions, lack of motivation, and irritability. This is one of the impressions I got from a recent trip to Spain and Italy, two nations I know well and visit often. While both countries have recently made small strides on the path to recovery, I nevertheless came away with the strong sense that their economies are in recession and their societies are in depression. In the course of my travels, I also felt more than ever before that Europeans have fallen out of love with Europeor, more precisely, with the idea of building a Europe-wide union.
Hopelessness and irascibility are present in spades in statements by politicians, activists, and opinion leaders, and in media reports on the mood of the people in the street. Pessimism is the default attitude, and there is a notable paucity of the kinds of exciting ideas and proposals that energize society. All of this is understandable. When a family suffers a major trauma, it is natural for its members to react by becoming more self-absorbed and withdrawing from the world. The same is true for countries.
In both Italy and Spaintwo of the hardest-hit economies in EuropeI found a tendency to turn inward and focus on events at home rather than developments abroad. My visit to Spain, for example, coincided with an incident in the Catalan Parliament in which a lawmaker took off his sandal and threatened Rodrigo Rato, the former head of the International Monetary Fund, who was testifying at a hearing about the large, bailed-out Spanish bank he had led, Bankia.
Naturally, the incident attracted a lot of media attention; almost everyone with whom I spoke in Spain mentioned it. What received significantly less press was the news that on that same day, in Beijing, Chinese officials had unveiled major economic reforms at the Communist Partys Third Plenum. I noticed the same inward-looking attitude in Italy. For the past two decades, any visit to the country has been bound to coincide with some attention-grabbing news about Silvio Berlusconi and his relationship with power and, inevitably, women. This time was no different, with the buzz centering on the lead-up to the Italian Senates expulsion of the former Italian prime minister. And yet, if the decisions made at the Third Plenum help China avoid an abrupt economic slowdown that would harm the global economyand prolong Italy and Spain's economic troublesthen what happened in Beijing will have a far greater impact on the lives of Italians and Spaniards than the theatrics of Catalonias sandal-toting legislator or the travails of Italys former prime minister. Despite these realities, I found that even well-informed elites in these countries are paying little attention to what is going on in Chinaor in the rest of the world, for that matter.
Fuddnik
(8,846 posts)Right up there with Scientology.
xchrom
(108,903 posts)DemReadingDU
(16,000 posts)11/4/13 Steve From Virginia: Nothing Lasts Forever
Americans dont want to know as their precious cars slowly slip away along with the suburbs, the jet vacations to Las Vegas and Orlando, the college educations for the children, the money-for-nothing investments, the privilege and the absence of accountability. Right now the car and the cost of fuel is pricing everything else out of reach and the Americans are too dumb and TV-addled to recognize it.
Drillers are able to borrow from finance for modest periods of time. They have done a very good job promoting their latest speculative efforts and have been able to find hundreds of billions of dollars in new financing for plays that are marginal compared to previous plays. After the drillers borrow the customers arrive to retire the drillers loans with their own either that or the drillers go out of business.
Because the new plays are more complex and difficult to exploit, the amounts needed by the drillers steadily increase. Fifty years ago a dollar would return fifty dollars or more worth of new crude, presently a dollar returns ten dollars or less. This diminution of returns is the consequence of our societys extraction- and consumption success. No greater drilling effort or monetary cheating can retrieve lost productivity. Waste has a lower entry cost than drilling; what we do best is waste more, faster.
Customers ultimately meet the cost of petroleum, they must borrow to do so. Meanwhile, what is borrowed for is simply thrown away. Oil in the ground is perpetual but its use is one-time and instantaneous. Because fuel has historically been improperly priced as a loss-leader for the rest of industry there is no incentive to find other uses but to burn it for pleasure and label the process work. This lie has become very costly over the long term.
Continued borrowing in ever-increasing amounts of fuel slowly pauperizes the oil consuming customers who are ruined by their goods absence of return. Besides fuel, customers must borrow to pay for cars, freeways, parking lots, insurance companies and militaries. Think of energy components as accounting entities: the cost of fuel- plus the cost of credit needed to gain the fuel are on the expense side of the ledger, the returns from using the fuel, the cars, freeways and whatnot are entered on the income side, these two entities added together must equal zero. However, fuel use offers minimal returns; driving the car cannot pay for the car or anything else. Balancing the national energy ledger requires borrowing; eventually the account becomes nothing but a mass of bad loans.
This is how the world has accumulated so much debt, not social programs for humans but credit subsidies for the auto- and auto related industries and the absence of return for these things users. Right now, the arguments about continuing social programs are about choosing what to jettison in order to keep driving cars and wasting fuel. This is a foolish choice because the onrushing costs of subsidizing the car industry and fuel supply are unsustainable. Regardless of what choice is made the end result is insolvency and deleveraging and fuel shortages.
A too-high price for fuel causes distress within the credit system: consider the too-high price to be the upper bound where enough damage is done to the economy to destroy fuel demand. Since 2008 there has been an observable series of stepwise declining high fuel prices along with repeated crises; each succeeding price lower than those preceding, each crisis being more damaging. The world is becoming poorer every day made so by the marching real costs of credit and petroleum.
The demand destruction process is incremental and cumulative: over time more customers become insolvent and can no longer borrow. As a consequence, governments have become the worlds borrowers of last resort. They are the last man standing able to indirectly subsidize the petroleum industry. Governments and their central banks have become the rear guard of the waste-making status quo even as their own credit costs mount. The next step down the rabbit hole is for governments themselves to become insolvent and for the fuel-waste regime to simply fall apart, as it must. This will occur even as the extraction industry by itself appears to be robust due to its own self-aggrandizing propaganda and wishful thinking on the part of consumers.
more...
http://www.economic-undertow.com/2013/11/04/nothing-lasts-forever/
xchrom
(108,903 posts)Greeces credit rating was raised two levels by Moodys Investors Service, which cited the countrys progress in fiscal consolidation and an improving economic outlook.
The countrys government bond rating was raised yesterday to Caa3 from C and given a stable outlook, Moodys said in a statement. The ratings company said it expects Greece to achieve (and possibly outperform) its target of a primary balance in 2013, and record a surplus in 2014. A cyclical recovery in the economy is another reason for the credit grade increase, Moodys said.
The Greek economy is bottoming out after nearly six years of recession, Moodys said in the statement. The ratings company said it expects the governments budget focus to remain on savings generated from structural reform measures as opposed to further spending cuts.
Under the accord with the troika of the European Commission, International Monetary Fund and ECB, posting a primary surplus will qualify Greece for additional debt relief.
xchrom
(108,903 posts)Nanex Chart of Equity Trading after Chicago PMI Data on Feb. 28, 2013.
The nemesis of Wall Streets high-frequency traders operates out of an apartment-sized office above the Bliss Salon -- manicure/pedicure $45 -- on Elm Street in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka.
Staring at four computer monitors,Eric Scott Hunsader, the founder of market-data provider Nanex LLC, looks for hints of illicit trading hidden in psychedelic images of triangles dancing with dots that represent quotes to buy and sell U.S. stocks broken down by the millisecond.
Charts of trading produced by Hunsaders eight-person firm have captivated everyone from regulators to art gallery owners. One stunt involved a computerized piano piece mimicking quotes for an exchange-traded fund. He infuriates some traders, who say Nanex draws unwarranted conclusions and spreads conspiracy theories.
To Hunsader, the images created from market feeds are evidence of high-frequency trading firms exploiting market rules to turn a profit in a lawless environment. Though others in the industry see his reports and charts as propaganda, Nanexs interpretations are helping to drive the public debate about the fundamental fairness of the modern stock market.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Members of the German government will use encrypted phones as part of urgent guidelines to protect against NSA snooping. The encryption software is not compatible with Apple, so Germany will phase out the use of iPhones at government level.
Germanys two main political parties - the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) have agreed on new guidelines to ensure ministers are protected from having their communications intercepted by spy agencies. As part of the new regulations, politicians and high-ranking officials will be required to make calls on encrypted phones.
Software approved by Germanys Bonn Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) will be used to protect phones from outside meddling. The program itself is incompatible with Apple technology, so German ministers will be forbidden from using iPhones for official communications, reports newspaper The Local.
Our conversations and communication structure have to be safer, the government report said in the wake of the spy scandal that revealed Chancellor Angela Merkels communications had been monitored by the NSA...MORE
Demeter
(85,373 posts)So follow me to
Weekend Economists Thanksgiving Leftovers 2013
http://www.democraticunderground.com/111644318
for more news and opinion...Demeter