Yes, the world is going to S**T; but there's one thing we can do: pour a pint of Guinness! Too many barmen and barladies (especially in the U.S., it must be said) simply pour the Guinness into the glass in a single pull. Ye BARBARIANS!
Half of British adults do not believe in evolution, with at least 22% preferring the theories of creationism or intelligent design to explain how the world came about, according to a survey.
The poll found that 25% of Britons believe Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is "definitely true", with another quarter saying it is "probably true". Half of the 2,060 people questioned were either strongly opposed to the theory or confused about it.
As Martin Cartwright, 49, began undoing his trousers, the woman offered him the money.
Cartwright took the cheque and left but warned her: "If you say anything, even in a thousand years, I'll kill you."
Prosecutor Tim Forster told a court: "He paid the money into his bank account. He told cashiers he had won the lottery." When police caught up with Cartwright, he claimed he had heard voices from Jesus "saying I should rape someone".
Police are searching for his accomplice, a long-haired bearded man from the Middle East, speaking fluent Aramaic. He is considered unarmed and dangerous.
More amusing/interesting stuff! (click for linky):
IStan) O'Neal - who ran off with a compensation package of $46 million in 2007 just before the bank (Merril Lynch) posted an $8 billion loss - ran up a bill of $134.50 at an Upper East Side eatery and left a measly $11.50 tip.
If you're poor and the bank is coming for your home, Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur has a plan for you.
Just squat, she says.
Yes, this Ohio Democrat is actually encouraging her financially distressed constituents whose homes have been foreclosed upon, to simply stay put.
In a Friday report, CNN's Drew Griffin explored the case of Ohioan Andrea Geiss, whose home was foreclosed upon in April.
"Behind in payments, out of work, a husband sick, she had nowhere to go," said Griffin. "So, she decided to follow the advice of her Congresswoman and go nowhere."
The body count is still rising. For months on end, marked by bankruptcies, foreclosures, evictions, and layoffs, the economic meltdown has taken a heavy toll on Americans. In response, a range of extreme acts including suicide, self-inflicted injury, murder, and arson have hit the local news. By October 2008, an analysis of press reports nationwide indicated that an epidemic of tragedies spurred by the financial crisis had already spread from Pasadena, California, to Taunton, Massachusetts, from Roseville, Minnesota, to Ocala, Florida.
Instead of receiving their state tax refunds in dollars, California residents will receive IOUs. Student aid and payments to disabled and needy will also come in the form of IOUs. California is negotiating with banks to get them to accept the IOUs as deposits.
California is often identified as the world’s eighth largest economy, and it is broke.
A person might think that California’s plight would introduce some realism into Washington, DC, but it has not. President Obama is taking steps to intensify the war in Afghanistan and, perhaps, to expand it to Pakistan.
Obama has retained the Republican warmongers in the Pentagon, and the US continues to illegally bomb Pakistan and to murder its civilians. At the World Economic Forum at Davos this week, Pakistan’s prime minister, Y. R. Gilani, said that the American attacks on Pakistan are counterproductive and done without Pakistan’s permission. In an interview with CNN, Gilani said: “I want to put on record that we do not have any agreement between the government of the United States and the government of Pakistan.”
Iceland's new Prime Minister is a Lesbian. Yay, Iceland!
Iceland was poised last night to give the world its first openly gay prime minister as Johanna Sigurdardottir prepared to be installed as an interim government leader to take the embattled country through to elections in the spring.
Sigurdardottir, who would also be Iceland's first woman prime minister, owes her sudden elevation to the removal of the previous coalition after weeks of raucous street protests whipped up by anger and desolation at the startling collapse of Iceland's financial system. She was expected to head a coalition of her own Social Democratic party with the Left-Greens, who have emerged from the crisis as probably Europe's most popular Green party.
Bruce Sterling (once a techno optimist) now says 2009 will be a year of panic. Welcome to the club, Bruce. Take a seat, and welcome!
As 2009 opens, our financial institutions are deep in massive, irrational panic. That's bad, but it gets worse: Many other respected institutions have rational underpinnings at least as frail as derivatives or bundled real-estate loans. Like finance, these institutions are social constructions. They are games of confidence, underpinned by people's solemn willingness to believe, to conform, to contribute. So why not panic over them, too?
The Obama administration is gearing up for a “big bang” announcement within the next two weeks that will combine a bank clean-up with measures to reduce home foreclosures and probably steps to kick-start credit markets.
I suggest that perhaps it's time for America to take a look around the globe at watch the unrest in the streets. There haven't been major crowds seriously protesting in the US for a very long time, but that shouldn't make us think the country is immune. The focus for government, and for everyone, should be on how to minimize the risk that people freeze to death in their homes or are poisoned by their own drinking water. Trying to save the banking system doesn't address that. Trying to save the banking system with the money that belongs to the people makes it more likely they will freeze to death. That in a few words is the choice before us.
Read the links on that AE link. Pretty grim stuff indeed.
Strenuous efforts were being made this weekend by ministers, officials, unions and conciliators to stamp out the wildcat strikes now threatening to become a nationwide protest. Senior civil servants were ordered to an emergency Cobra meeting on Friday to plan the Government's response to the disputes. Police, army and immigration services have been put on alert, and mediators are talking with unions and employers in an effort to resolve the unofficial strikes that erupted at 13 locations last week.
And yesterday there were fears that the disputes over the employment of foreign workers at refineries and power stations could spread to other areas. Tom Hardacre, national officer for engineering and construction at Unite, the union, told The Independent on Sunday: "I think it is extremely likely that industrial action could continue on Monday... There is so much frustration in all sectors of industry, it could escalate to other sectors. That is not what we want, but if there is no solution we could be faced with serious problems in terms of industrial unrest." Unite is now calling for a national protest in Westminster.
The Bank of England can find time away from the global crisis to give female employees fashion advice.
The Bank of England came under fire last night for "institutional sexism", after it held a seminar for female staff to advise them on what clothing, shoes and make-up to wear.
In a week when the IMF announced that the British economy will be the hardest hit of all the developed nations, when strikes erupted across the country and as world leaders gathered in Davos to discuss global recession, senior figures at the Bank turned their minds to lipstick and high heels.
On Wednesday, Bank of England employees gathered for a Dress for Success summit, at which female employees were lectured on the importance of wearing appropriate jewellery and make-up in the workplace.
A memo leaked from the meeting details the advice given to staff, including the warning that wearing certain accessories would make women workers look like prostitutes.
"Look professional, not fashionable; be careful with perfume; always wear a heel of some sort – maximum two inches; always wear some sort of makeup, even if it's just lipstick," read the memo. It was distributed by the professional image consultancy firm hired by the bank for the event.
"Shoes and skirt must be the same colour. No-nos include ankle chains – "professional, but not the one you want to be associated with" – white high heels; overstuffed handbags; an overload of rings, and double-pierced ears," it continued.
We really have so many reasons to murder bankers in the streets. Can we PLEASE get started already? PLEEEEZZE?
China birth defects up sharply. One unintended consequence of environmental legislation in the US was the movement of polluting industries from the US to Asia - and now they've been enjoying the economic benefits - and also suffering the environmental consequences.
A senior family planning official in China has noted an alarming rise in the number of babies with birth defects, a Chinese media report says.
Jiang Fan, from China's National Population and Family Planning Commission, said environmental pollution was a cause of the increase.
The coal-mining heartland of Shanxi province had the biggest problem.
China has reported the trend before, and it was not clear if Mr Jiang was commenting on new or old statistics.
A 2007 commission report said the rate of defects had risen 40% since 2001, from 104.9 per 10,000 births to 145.5 in 2006.
Officials blame emissions from Shanxi's large coal and chemical industry for the problems there.
Almost half of tested samples of commercial high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) contained mercury, which was also found in nearly a third of 55 popular brand-name food and beverage products where HFCS is the first- or second-highest labeled ingredient, according to two new U.S. studies.
Will you be having desert with your meal? Uhm, no.
Demographic studies have indicated that in humans, fertility and intelligence tend to be negatively correlated, that is to say, the more intelligent, as measured by IQ, exhibit a lower total fertility rate than the less intelligent. Other correlates of fertility include income, diet, and educational attainment.
Bloomberg News found that the total cost of bailouts in 2008 was $8.5 trillion. That includes funds allocated for the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), tax rebates, equity buys of entities, liquidity infusions into banks and credit markets along with others.
Another study, conducted by Casey Research, found that the total cost of bailouts in 2008 tops spending for all U.S. wars combined in addition to the New Deal, the Marshall Plan, the Louisiana Purchase and the NASA Space Program. Those represent some of the most expansive and costly government expenditures in history, yet they still do not top the cost of government bailouts in today’s dollars.
"When we consider the costs of these programs, even when adjusted for today's dollars, we see that our most expensive government efforts of the past were relative bargains and that we are wasting a terrible sum of money with the current bailout," Olivier Garret, CEO of Casey Research, told MarketWatch.
Right now, it's seems like the whole thing is coming down - pretty much like the USSR. We can only hope that the U.S. President is the American Gorbachev - and can manage the disaster without the country (and world) falling into total anarchy. If so, then Obama's fate will match Gorbachev's - to be reviled at home, and loved worldwide. So be it. In any event, we'll know soon - as in, the next year or two.Three banks went bust today. Did you hear that on your TV? Unlikely.
This clusterfuck can't go on for much longer - either the system will collapse, or a new state of affairs (a New Order) will arrive. Pick your poison. Either way, please think carefully about your situation, and take sensible precautions.
I've been harping on about this for years now - and if you're still reading the site, this screed will sound familiar. If you're new here, let me assure you that I'm not a nut. Go read the posts from 2006/2007 (hint: they're a better guide to today than anything Jim Cramer has said).
• Visit family and friends now, especially those at a distance. This may be more difficult to do in the future.
• Learn to know your neighbors. It is likely that you will need each other's help more in the future.
• If you live by yourself, consider moving in with friends or relatives. In tough times, it is better to have others to rely on. It is also likely to be a lot cheaper.
• Buy a bicycle that you can use as alternate transportation, if the need arises.
• Start walking or jogging for exercise. Get yourself in good enough physical condition that you could walk a few miles if you needed to.
• Take care of your physical health. If you need dental work or new glasses, get them. Don't put off immunizations and other preventive medicine. These may be more difficult to get, or more expensive, later.
• Move to a walkable neighborhood. If it seems likely that you will be able to keep your job, move closer to your job.
• Trade in your car for one with better mileage. If you have a SUV, you can probably sell it at a better price now than in the future.
• If you have two cars powered by gasoline, consider trading one for a diesel-powered vehicle. That way, if gasoline (or diesel) is not available, you will still have one car you can drive.
• Make sure that you have at least a two-week supply of food and water, if there is some sort of supply disruption. It is always good to have some extra for an emergency--the likelihood of one arising is greater now.
• Keep reasonable supplies of things you may need in an emergency--good walking shoes, boots, coats, rain wear, blankets, flashlights and batteries (or wind-up flashlights).
• Take up hobbies that you will be able to continue in a low energy world, such as gardening, knitting, playing a musical instrument, bird watching, or playing cards with neighbors.
• Join a local sustainability group or "permaculture" group and start learning about sustainable gardening methods.
Seriously - go read the whole thing. This site is NOT intended to be a counsel of despair, even if it seems like that somedays. There are many things that you can do now for little or no money - so, do them.
General Motors plans to invest $1 billion in Brazil to avoid the kind of problems the U.S. automaker is facing in its home market, said the beleaguered car maker.
According to the president of GM Brazil-Mercosur, Jaime Ardila, the funding will come from the package of financial aid that the manufacturer will receive from the U.S. government [THE AMERICAN TAXPAYER, YOU ASSHOLE] and will be used to "complete the renovation of the line of products up to 2012."
Do you get it yet, America? Your tax dollars are being taken from you, and sent to Brazil (and god knows where else), and yet, you're all going to run out and file your tax returns in a few weeks like obediant slaves. Meanwhile, one million French workers took to the streets and shut the country down for a day. THINK!
The Institute of International Finance, the global organisation of major banks, predicted an almost unprecedented collapse in world economic growth and capital flows.
It became the first major global institution to forecast a full-scale global contraction in 2009, predicting that the economy would shrink by 1.1pc.
IIF chief economist Philip Suttle said: "This is the worst period since the interwar years. The global growth backdrop is very difficult. We foresee a contraction in 2009 in the global economy of over 1pc."
He also expects rich economies to contract by 2.1pc – the worst peacetime output since the 1930s.
There is probably even more excess housing inventory gumming up the market than current statistics indicate, thanks to a wave of foreclosures that has yet to hit the market.
The problem: Many foreclosed homes and other distressed properties that are now owned by banks have yet to be listed for sale. The volume of this so-called ‘ghost inventory’ could be substantial enough to depress already steeply falling prices when it does go on the market.
Iceland will be put on a fast track to joining the European Union to rescue the small Arctic state from financial collapse amid rising expectations that it will apply for membership within months, senior policy-makers in Brussels and Reykjavik have told the Guardian.
The financial crisis has gotten so severe in Britain that it has earned London a new nickname in the international media: Reykjavik-on-Thames. The question in Britain is no longer when the economy will enter a recession, but when it will enter a depression, with many bracing for a slump that could rival the 1930s in severity. GDP fell 1.5 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008, and the European Union estimates it will contract another 2.8 percent in 2009. Unemployment is projected to balloon to more than 8 percent by year's end, and an estimated 23 percent of adult Britons currently consider their debt level "unmanageable."
Two years ago the UK Ministry of Defence's Strategic Trends depicted an alarming futuristic scenario in which proletarianised middle-class radicals engage in revolutionary activity and violent 'flashmobs' threaten the authorities with lawless disorder. There are growing signs that these predictions may be more prescient than was originally thought.
Last night's scenes in central Paris were just the latest in a string of violent clashes across Europe since December's 'Greek Intifada' where the police shooting of a teenager became the catalyst for a major grassroots revolt. During January, police have confronted demonstrators protesting deteriorating economic conditions and political corruption in Latvia, Lithuania and Bulgaria. There have been smaller demonstrations in Spain, Turkey, Denmark and Italy.
Whatever their specific national contexts, these disturbances are another consequence of the bursting of the speculative capitalist bubble and the illusion of unlimited prosperity that once sustained it. In the Latvian capital of Vilnius, one 63-year-old protester criticised "the lies, corruption and those grinning, fat faces behind the windows of Parliament". A young Frenchman interviewed by the BBC last night complained about Sarkozy's government aiding bankers but leaving ordinary people to their own fates.
"Fusion is the energy of the future, and it always will be."
"Fusion has been 20 years in the future for the past 50 years."
It's sad to see fusion described as "cheap green power". It's not cheap (and is unlikely to ever be so), and it's never going to be truly green. Ho hum.
Russian oil production decreased for the first time in 10 years according to Vedomosti, a Russian newspaper. The decrease was only 0.7%, while exports were reduced more dramatically year over year, down 6.2%.
The fall in Russian production may be a major turning point in worldwide crude oil production. While OPEC nations such as top producer Saudi Arabia get the attention of most speculators, it is important to note that Russia is the second largest crude oil producer and exporter in the world. In fact, by itself, Russia almost matches the total exports of the third, fourth and fifth top exporting nations combined (Norway, Iran and the United Arab Emirates).
If Russian oil production has indeed peaked, it leaves the world with only three major exporters that are still supposedly able to continue to increase production: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq. Given the massive oil consumption needs of the United States, that leaves America in a particularly vulnerable position at a time when the United States is facing a financial crisis.
According to a simulation of planetary warming trends, failure to drastically cut greenhouse gas pollution within the next half century could choke Earth's oceans for the next 100,000 years.
With warmer temperatures reducing its ability to absorb oxygen, much of the water would become barren and lifeless. Oceanic food chains could be profoundly disrupted.
"What mankind does for the next several decades will play a large role in climate on Earth over the next tens of thousands of years," said geochemist Gary Shaffer of the University of Copenhagen.
This is because, according to climate scientists, it will take at least that long for natural processes to remove fossil fuel emissions from the atmosphere, giving long-term consequences to humanity's short-term habits.
An Australian family who traveled to the US to visit a dying relative were accused of attempting to illegally immigrate by US Customs and Border Patrol officials, who caged them, detained them, starved them overnight, and then sent them back on the next flight to Australia. The US consulate's only comment? "We reserve the right to refuse entry to visitors to the United States."
...the parents of child actors Rubina Ali and Azharuddin Ismail accused the film's producers of exploiting and underpaying the eight-year-olds, disclosing that both face uncertain futures in one of Mumbai's most squalid slums.
Rubina was paid £500 for a year's work while Azharuddin received £1,700, according to the children's parents.
However a spokesman for the film's American distributors, Fox Searchlight, disputed this saying the fees were more than three times the average annual salary an adult in their neighbourhood would receive. They would not disclose the actual sum.
Ah, the old "you can live well on $10 a week in Calcutta" argument. The last refuge of exploitative bastards worldwide!
"The (German government's) rescue operations have so far not brought the desired results. The banks have been plugging up their worst holes with billions of euros of taxpayers' money, but their losses have been growing even faster. Meanwhile complaints from companies about increasingly restrictive lending practices are growing louder. Obviously the banks can not be helped just with money alone. The accounting principles and supervisory rules for banks also need to be examined.
"A vicious circle has begun: Forced sales of securities are pushing down prices, which leads to new rounds of write-offs, causing institutions' capital to shrink -- which in turn makes further sell-offs necessary. The government needs to break through this crisis. Then it will also no longer need to take over the bad risks of the all-too-careless banks."
The time has come to issue one of my sternest warnings to date: Bank of America and Citigroup could fail despite the most radical government rescues of all time.
Right now, after recent close calls with instant death, these two megabanks are on life support, receiving massive transfusions of government capital. But they’re still hemorrhaging, and no one in Washington has found a cure.
Thanks to Laureen Mccloskey and Dale Erickson who each donated $5!
From my spin-off site: Animation in Hard Times. Though the information is primarily for artists, you may find some useful information there.
Via Automatic Earth, a chart of future mortgage resets (it ain't over yet):
As you can see, the worst part of subprime resets was "softened" by recent FED interest cuts, even though foreclosures still grew like kudzu. We are now in a lull, and soon the major part of the resets, the Alt-A and ARM part will start. In an economy in which credit is gone, in which unemployment rises fast, in which industrial production scrapes rusty gutters, in which consumer spending won't recover in a long time, if ever, in which people's money is being taken from them to provide life-support to fatally ill institutions, and in which individual debt levels rise significantly every single day.
Here is a chart of federal borrowing through Dec. 2007.
Now, same chart through December 2008.
Anyone still think there are not some rough patches down the road?
To make the above clear, if it isn't already: the borrowing in 2008 was so vast that it compresses all previous borrowing into the tiny flat-line in the second graph. Breath-taking.
Britain was just three hours away from going bust last year after a secret run on the banks, one of Gordon Brown's Ministers has revealed.
City Minister Paul Myners disclosed that on Friday, October 10, the country was 'very close' to a complete banking collapse after 'major depositors' attempted to withdraw their money en masse.
Goldman Sachs predicted last week that US banks will record an extra $1.1 trillion in losses before the economy turns around, with others putting the figure at $3.5 trillion.
It is expected that unemployment will reach 10 per cent this year — 500,000 jobs are being lost every month — and estimates show that eight million families will lose their homes over the next four years. “It’s worse than everybody thought it was,” Vice-President Biden told CBS’s Face the Nation. “There is no good news and no good news on the horizon.”
Mark Zandi of Moodys.com, an economist who spoke to Senate Democrats on Thursday, said that conditions in the US banking system were “eroding far more rapidly than anyone anticipated”.
In Brink of Debt Disaster we looked at how consumer debt has the United States and the United Kingdom stand on the brink of the largest debt crisis in history. Together, these posts show the threat of an outright global systemic deflationary crash is very real.
This is not a call for a global crash, rather a warning that one could easily occur.
The three-day week carries a particular resonance for anyone who remembers the 1970s, as it recalls a time when firms were forced into short-time working, redundancies, and lay-offs...
...Britain's miners walked out on 9 January 1972 – their first strike in 50 years – over the failure to meet their demand for £9 on top of an average weekly wage of £25. The impact of closing all 289 pits in England and Wales – and pickets at power stations – was dramatic.
A month later, the Prime Minister, Edward Heath, declared a state of emergency and, with dwindling electricity supplies forcing factories to close, he imposed a three-day week. A week into the state of emergency, it was announced that electricity would be switched off on a rota basis between 7am and midnight every day.
Victor Shih, assistant professor of political science at Northwestern University in Chicago, sees the potential for "explosive" change. He argues that unemployment could easily reach 50 million; that migrant workers are younger and more volatile than those laid off in the 1990s; and that news spreads faster thanks to mobile phones and the internet. The massive expansion in higher education has also led to millions of unemployed graduates - the most dangerous ingredient, in official eyes, given the student protests of 1989.
At the least he expects a spike in localised riots resulting in the mobilisation of armed police all over the country. And "if a systematic trigger occurs and instability spreads to a sizable city, we will see the large scale mobilisation of both paramilitary armed police and army units, and possibly substantial bloodshed," he added in a recent article. Yet he, too, concludes that a change in regime remains highly unlikely.
The Federal Housing Finance Agency, Freddie Mac's conservator, will ask the Treasury Department for additional funds of between $30 billion and $35 billion, the mortgage giant said in a regulatory filing Friday.
Based on a preliminary evaluation of its fourth-quarter operations, Freddie Mac's management believes that it will need the extra support to offset the impact of operating losses as well as other items that could affect the company's net worth.
A commodities analyst at Goldman Sachs is expecting a "swift and violent rebound" in energy prices during the first half of this year, with prices expected to rise to $65 a barrel (see Bloomberg article). The analyst also believes that the strategy of using supertankers to store crude oil to take advantage of the contango trade (see previous post) is “near the end of this process,” believing that the contango will likely flatten as OPEC and other producers cut supply, decreasing the availability of cheaper crude oil for immediate delivery.
But, Chiang, whose office writes the state's checks, says California is about out of stopgap tricks to pay its bills and keep all its programs running.
It's Chiang's job to wrestle with the state's day-to-day cash-flow problems while legislators and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger haggle over the best way to close a humongous $40-billion gap between state spending plans and projected revenues over the next 17 months.
The controller says California is down to Plan D on its checklist of paying bills. Its cash reserves are piddling; the special funds it borrows from are tapped out, and no one in the private sector is going to lend it any cash at a reasonable interest rate.
Here's a word you may not have heard on CNBC: JUBLIEE. The forgiving of all debts:
And so there developed throughout the ancient Near East a tradition of clean-slate edicts, which “proclaimed justice” or decreed “economic order” and “righteousness” by canceling debts and restoring forfeited land to farmers. Clean-slate proclamations date from almost as early as the first interest-bearing debt, starting in Sumer around 2400 years BCE. Eventually, the tradition became known as the Jubilee Year, but by that time it was taken out of the hands of kings and placed at the core of Mosaic law.
Radical as the idea of the Jubilee seems to modern eyes, these “restorations of order” were a conservative tradition in Bronze Age Mesopotamia for 2,000 years. What was conserved was self-sufficiency for the rural family-heads who made up the infantry as well as the productive base of Near Eastern economies. Conversely, what was radically disturbing in archaic times was the idea of unrestrained wealth-seeking. It took thousands of years for the idea of progress to become inverted, to connote irreversible freedom for the wealthy to deprive the peasantry of their lands and personal liberty.
Big financial institutions have been battered by mortgages gone bad. But a tiny Michigan bank is getting attention in the industry by turning a profit on loans without even charging interest.
Its specialty: financial products that comply with Islamic law. That means no collecting interest, no short selling and no contracts that are considered exceedingly risky.
It also rules out some of the activity that got Western finance in trouble - subprime mortgages, credit default swaps and the like.
"When you look at the economic crisis we're in, if you were to follow Islamic or Sharia financing, you couldn't have this crisis," said John Sickler, corporate director for the bank, University Islamic Financial Corp. in Ann Arbor.
Islamic finance operations aren't prohibited from making a profit. Far from it. Instead, banks that comply with Islamic law, or Sharia, earn money from fees that are part of the cost of the loan, some paid up front and some over time.
If the banking system is insolvent, so is your bank. If the FDIC has no money, it’s quite possible the government can’t protect you. If the bank is not paying any interest, then you are paid nothing for exposing yourself to these risks. So why not convert at least a portion of your savings to Benjamins and put them in your mattress?
Two reasons: cash can be stolen and can lose its value due to inflation.
But if banks pay no interest, then the purchasing power of your savings is as vulnerable in the bank as it is in your mattress. So inflation is a moot point.
The only real risks are fire or theft. These are real risks, of course. So it probably makes sense to diversify: keep some in the bank and some elsewhere.
In a total collapse of the financial system, cash equivalents are not cash.
Families must brace themselves for a slump of far greater severity and longevity than the recessions of the 1980s and 1990s, they warned. They said the current crisis will be of a scale to rival the biggest peace-time crisis in modern history — the Great Depression.
The warning was delivered by economists and politicians after the Office for National Statistics revealed that the economy shrank by 1.5 per cent in the final three months of 2008 alone.
And the worst part is that it’s not over. Economists expect another huge decline in the first quarter, with a smaller contraction in the second quarter.
GDP is expected to have fallen at a 5.5% annualized rate in the final three months of last year, according to the median forecast of economists surveyed by MarketWatch. That would be the biggest decline since the 6.4% drop in early 1982 and one of the worst quarters in the post-World War II era.
I know it is difficult for Americans at every level to imagine a different way-of-life, but we'd better start tuning up our imaginations, because endless motoring is not our destiny anymore. The message has not moved from the grassroots up, and so at this perilous stage the message had better come from the top down. Mr. Obama needs to go on TV and tell the American public that were done cruisin' for burgers. He could do that by drastically reviving his stimulus proposal as it currently stands.
Indeed, the risks of nationalization they warned about then apply equally to the United States now. The first is that nationalization can prove contagious. If the Obama administration took over Bank of America and Citigroup, two of the largest banks in the United States, private investors could decide to flee from the likes of JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, or other major banks, fearing they could be next.
Moreover, Mr. Obama’s advisers say they are acutely aware that if the government is perceived as running the banks, the administration would come under enormous political pressure to halt foreclosures or lend money to ailing projects in cities or states with powerful constituencies, which could imperil the effort to steer the banks away from the cliff.
“The nightmare scenarios are endless,” one of the administration’s senior officials said.
Republican Senator wants to ban curse words. Nice priorities you got Senator, in the face of global financial and ecological collapse.
Fuck off back to your sewer, shitbag.
Insolvency means the inability to pay one's debts as they fall due.
This is defined in two different ways: Cash flow insolvency
unable to pay debts as they fall due. An indicator of this on the balance sheet, is if there is "net current liabilities". Balance sheet insolvency
having negative net assets: liabilities exceed assets; or net liabilities...
...Insolvency is not a synonym for bankruptcy, which is a determination of insolvency made by a court of law with resulting legal orders intended to resolve the insolvency.
In 2007, LEAP/E2020 announced that US banks and consumers were both insolvent. More than a year ago, our team estimated that USD 10,000-billion worth in « ghost-assets » would vanish in the crisis. Both announcements came in complete opposition with the common opinion of that time; however they proved perfectly justified in the months after. In the same line, LEAP/E2020 today estimates that a new sequence of the fourth phase (so-called decanting phase) of the unfolding global systemic crisis has began: the sequence of global insolvency...
...The US Dollar is just a fiction of international monetary unit and many countries are striving to get away from it as quickly as possible. Thus, quite rightly, the entire financial sphere is suspected of being a giant black hole. Concerning companies, no one can tell if their order books are reliable because in every sector customers cancel their orders or just stop buying, even when prices are discounted, as indicated by dropping retail sales in the past few weeks. Concerning States (and municipalities), slumping fiscal revenues are likely to result in even higher deficits and then bankruptcies. As a matter of fact, Russian billionaires, Gulf oil-monarchies, Chinese commercial Eldorados, all the golden-egg geese of companies and financial institutions of the planet (namely European, Japanese and North-American ones) turn out to be insolvent or hardly solvent. The question of the solvency of the US federal State and federated states (as well as of Russia or the United-Kingdom) is beginning to be asked by some big international media; as well as the question of the solvency of large capital-based pension funds, major players in this past twenty years’ globalised economy.
According to LEAP/E2020, the trend is clear: the sequence that has begun this year is a sequence of global insolvency.
Executive Order revokes Executive Order 13440 that interpreted Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. It requires that all interrogations of detainees in armed conflict, by any government agency, follow the Army Field Manual interrogation guidelines. The Order also prohibits reliance on any Department of Justice or other legal advice concerning interrogation that was issued between September 11, 2001 and January 20, 2009.
Iceland's government was last night scrambling to avoid becoming the first administration to be ousted by the global financial crisis, as ministers huddled to try and hold together a coalition in the face of some of the biggest protests the country has seen for 60 years.
Protesters who have mounted vocal demonstrations in recent weeks against the collapse of the economy squared up to police, spattered parliament with eggs and paint, and at one point surrounded the prime minister's car as he tried to leave his office.
They pelted Geir Haarde's car with eggs and banged on the windows, shouting "resign", in a sign of mounting exasperation at the government's failure to prevent the economy from imploding under a mountain of billions of dollars of debt.
The senior lieutenant serving in Iraq then kicks its wildly-flailing body, spits out the head, and shouts “f***er” at the dying bird.
In the video footage the pathetic creature is seen seconds later still flapping pitifully in its death throes.
Minutes earlier another high-ranking soldier, a sergeant major responsible for discipline amongst the soldiers, had also performed the stunt to the perverse delight of the men he controls.
The American military tradition is heir to the British one, and, as H. L. Mencken pointed out, the Anglo-Saxon has never been known to seek out a fair fight. The British military did its best work using rifles against pygmies armed with ripe fruit, and using machine guns to cut down cavalry.
One wonders how this heroic killer of defenceless chickens will fare against fully grown Mujahedeen warriors in Afghanistan? Here's a clip from "Little Big Man", in which Dustin Hoffman gives good-natured advice to murdering scumbag, General Custer:
Ugh. Really. UGH. One of the oily meat-puppets on CNBC just said that "we've hit bottom!" Un-freaking-believable. They've been saying this every day for the last 12 months. Keep the masses calm, keep suckering them out of the few bucks left in their retirement accounts. Now, Jim Cramer is screaming about Geithner's $34,000 tax bill. Unreal. People's lives are being destroyed in plain view, and these disgusting shills continue to crank the 24/7 go-go Wurlitzer.
The UK teeters on the brink of financial meltdown - actually, they're hanging off a cliff by their fingernails. The consequences of the UK turning into Argentina are dire. Truly scary. When we hit bottom, don't worry - we won't need a TV bobblehead to tell us.
Given the possibility that the financial system may not exist in the near future, George Monbiot offers an introduction to the use of alternative currencies:
In his book The Future of Money, Lietaer points out - as the government did yesterday - that in situations like ours everything grinds to a halt for want of money. But he also explains that there is no reason why this money should take the form of sterling or be issued by the banks. Money consists only of "an agreement within a community to use something as a medium of exchange". The medium of exchange could be anything, as long as everyone who uses it trusts that everyone else will recognise its value. During the Great Depression, businesses in the United States issued rabbit tails, seashells and wooden discs as currency, as well as all manner of papers and metal tokens. In 1971, Jaime Lerner, the mayor of Curitiba in Brazil, kick-started the economy of the city and solved two major social problems by issuing currency in the form of bus tokens. People earned them by picking and sorting litter: thus cleaning the streets and acquiring the means to commute to work. Schemes like this helped Curitiba become one of the most prosperous cities in Brazil.
Privately, something close to desperation is starting to develop inside government. After watching the slide in bank shares on Friday, one cabinet minister did not altogether joke when he said: "The banks are fucked, we're fucked, the country's fucked."
Yesterday marked a new low for all involved, even by the standards of this crisis. Britons woke to news of the enormity of the fresh horrors in store. Despite all the sophistry and outdated boom-era terminology from experts, I think a far greater number of people than is imagined grasp at root what is happening here.
The country stands on the precipice. We are at risk of utter humiliation, of London becoming a Reykjavik on Thames and Britain going under. Thanks to the arrogance, hubristic strutting and serial incompetence of the Government and a group of bankers, the possibility of national bankruptcy is not unrealistic.
Events are moving fast in Europe. The worst riots since the fall of Communism have swept the Baltics and the south Balkans. An incipient crisis is taking shape in the Club Med bond markets. S&P has cut Greek debt to near junk. Spanish, Portuguese, and Irish bonds are on negative watch.
Dublin has nationalised Anglo Irish Bank with its half-built folly on North Wall Quay and €73bn (£65bn) of liabilities, moving a step nearer the line where markets probe the solvency of the Irish state.
A great ring of EU states stretching from Eastern Europe down across Mare Nostrum to the Celtic fringe are either in a 1930s depression already or soon will be. Greece's social fabric is unravelling before the pain begins, which bodes ill.
Patrick Rocca seemed to have it all. A poster boy for Ireland’s Celtic tiger economy, he lent Bill Clinton his helicopter whenever he was in Ireland for a round of golf and rubbed shoulders with Tony Blair at gala dinners.
He played tennis with Sir Alan Sugar in Marbella and ran a property empire that spanned the Irish Sea.
With a glamorous wife, three young children and a sister who is the partner of Van Morrison, the musician, he seemed to embody the shiny world into which Ireland transformed itself after decades on the periphery of Europe.
Yet on Monday morning neighbours noted something was not right when he was seen wandering outside his luxury home in his pyjamas. A little while later he shot himself in the head while his wife Annette was out on the school run.
Unfortunately no one in the UK with any authority is (thinking clearly). This is a known quirk of the Fiscal Insanity Virus, now rapidly spreading the globe.
FIV always seems to strike those with the power to do the most damage. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Bank of England Governor Mervyn King, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling, all seem to be in the late stages of FIV.
Hope of recovery is slim.
One of the world's leading investors voiced the markets' concerns. Jim Rogers, of the Singapore-based Rogers Holdings and co-founder of the Quantum fund with George Soros, told Bloomberg Television: "I would urge you to sell any sterling you might have. It's finished. I hate to say it, but I would not put any money in the UK."
Mr Rogers added that the pound will fall below its record low of $1.0520 reached in February 1985. Given near parity with the euro, it raises the intriguing possibility that the pound/dollar/euro exchange rate could yield a "triple parity".
What Obama can do, and it's his sole option, with time running out in a matter of days now, make no mistake about it, is to force the banking system, and the financial system at large, to open their vaults and expose all the paper hidden in there to the light of day. This will be hard, if not impossible - the latter depends on Barack's resolve. But if it's not done, the US somewhere around February 1 will start going through the same motions that London is forced to dance to today. There are no solvent banks left in England, without government, read taxpayers, money they would have to close shop tomorrow morning. The same would happen in the US without the immeasurable and intractable hundreds of billions that have been handed out to date. The reason why this hasn't worked to restore confidence, trust, belief and hope is that there is far too much fear of what is still left in additional losses.
Speaking in Dubai, Professor Roubini said: "The problems of Citi, Bank of America and others suggest the system is bankrupt. In Europe, it's the same thing."
His warning comes just a day after the UK's second phase in its own banking bail-out, and after Bank of America, Merrill Lynch and Citi last week reported almost $26bn of fourth-quarter losses.
"We have got a crippled financial sector, not only in the US but across the globe," said Keith Wirtz, chief investment officer of Fifth Third Asset Management.
Gulf Arab states will maintain their 2010 deadline for a single currency, the secretary-general of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) has said.
Leaders of GCC countries (Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and Bahrain) approved a final draft of an accord on a monetary union agreement in their annual summit in Muscat, the capital of Oman, on Tuesday.
The agreement would pave the way for a single currency, which all GCC states but Oman are working towards launching.
Petroleos Mexicanos, Mexico’s state oil company, will probably report its fastest drop in production since 1942, eroding revenue as plunging crude prices limit the amount of cash available to drill for new reserves.
Pemex last year likely extracted 2.8 million barrels a day, down about 9 percent from the 3.08 million a day pumped in 2007, representing a total of $20 billion in lost sales, according to data compiled by the government and Bloomberg. The Mexico City- based company, which had revenue of $104 billion in 2007, plans to report annual production figures tomorrow.
Scientists have identified a group of river pollutants that are able to stop testosterone from working. These anti-androgens have been linked with the feminisation of fish in Europe's rivers and could be affecting the development of male reproductive organs in humans, it found...
...For the study in the journal 'Environmental Health Perspectives', the scientists analysed anti-androgenic activity in samples of river water taken near 30 sewage outflows. They were able to demonstrate statistically that this activity could be linked with hermaphrodite fish found in the same rivers...
Dr Jobling said that there are several chemicals in widely used pharmaceuticals and pesticides that are known to have anti-androgenic activity. They included flutamide and cyproterone, used to treat prostate cancer, and several compounds found in agricultural pesticides.
The scientists detected relatively high levels of anti-androgenic chemicals near sewage outflows -- suggesting they came from domestic sources. One possibility is that drugs excreted from the body may end up in rivers. However, the scientists have not discounted the idea that anti-androgens may also be seeping into rivers as run-off from agricultural land.
Bear that in mind, the next time some smarmy git mouths off about the stupidity of Organic Agriculture...
Scientists say data from satellites and weather stations indicate a warming of about 0.6C over the last 50 years.
Writing in the journal Nature, they say the trend is "difficult to explain" without the effect of rising greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere.
Meanwhile, scientists in Antarctica say a major ice shelf is about to break away from the continent.
The Wilkins Ice Shelf is said to be "hanging by a thread" from the Antarctic Peninsula, the strip of land pointing from the white continent towards the southern tip of South America.
Regular readers will know that I'm skeptical about alternative energy replacing our current sources. The only one that might offer a hope for Business-as-usual is LFTR - Liquid Flouride Thorium based reactors. Note: I'm not pro-nuclear, but these are one of the least studied alternatives. Thorium is 16 times more plentiful than Uranium, and the fuel cycle is a LOT cleaner, producing very little waste.
Here's a pro-Throrium article on the Oil Drum. Normally, TOD comments are illuminating, but not in this case, as the technology is so poorly known. I'd like to read a serious pro-con article. If anyone knows of such, please email! The biggest thing 'argument' against these thorium reactors is: if the technology is so great, why haven't the Chinese & Indians built them yet?
Well, it's been a long, and truly awful 8 years. Happily, Obama is President now, and he's going to fix everything. So, with weary fingers, my work is done. No more kicking the President up the arse. No more treasonous dissent. No more snarky comments. My fellow Americans, the time has now come for us to pull together, and put bitter partisanship behind us. We shall hunt down Republican scum like the freedom-hating dogs that they are, and hang them from lamp-posts! So, from this day on, let's support the President, and work together as one!
Now, we work together in fresh spirit of openness and reform. With new young leader, USSR USA is set for happy future. Soon, we declare wictory in Afghanistan, and happy times come again!
On Red Planet, life seethes. All hail Martian comrades!
The fact that we have found three discrete regions where Mars is releasing methane at this time means we have a window into processes occurring under the surface of the planet. The production (of methane) is likely due to only one of two possibilities. The first is geochemistry, the second is biology. That raises much interest on which one is the dominant production mechanism. [If it's geochemical in origin] we might expect the methane to be released only under regions that are volcanic districts. On the other hand, there could be biology that's going on either very near the surface or deep below the permafrost layer.
Just a few months ago, Guy Derenoncourt was working as an equity trader at a boutique investment firm in New York. Then the equity market fell apart and he quit.
Last week, he enlisted for a four-year stint in the Navy, a military branch he chose because it would keep him out of Afghanistan and offer him a variety of aviation-related jobs.
“I really had no intention to join if it weren’t for the financial turmoil, because I was doing quite well,” Mr. Derenoncourt, 25, said, adding that a sense of patriotism made it an easier choice.
A plunge in the share price of the Royal Bank of Scotland prompted City and Westminster speculation tonight of imminent full-scale nationalisation for the bank as the financial markets issued a vote of no confidence in the government's latest bail-out.
Amid growing concern from the government that the credit crunch is intensifying an already severe recession, Gordon Brown served notice that Labour's patience with the banks was rapidly running out as the Treasury unveiled a second emergency package in three months.
“The government wants to take control, dictate lending policies, dictate banks’ views of their assets, and generally interfere with what are private companies,” the U.K. Shareholders Association said in a statement, describing Brown’s plan as “creeping nationalization.” The lobby group represents individual investors.
U.S. financial losses from the credit crisis may reach $3.6 trillion, suggesting the banking system is “effectively insolvent,” said New York University Professor Nouriel Roubini, who predicted last year’s economic crisis.
“I’ve found that credit losses could peak at a level of $3.6 trillion for U.S. institutions, half of them by banks and broker dealers,” Roubini said at a conference in Dubai today. “If that’s true, it means the U.S. banking system is effectively insolvent because it starts with a capital of $1.4 trillion. This is a systemic banking crisis.”
Solution to problem clear: Send citizen Roubini to re-education facility in Alaska.
He inherits a government of superficially gleaming marble edifices -- all gloriously on view tomorrow -- but full of broken machinery within, infested with weevils, termites, and rats. The USA is functionally bankrupt. We have no money. The pixel "money" being emailed over to the insolvent banks has no basis in reality beyond the quiver in Ben Bernanke's voice as he announces each new injection. Yet all reports so far indicate that President Obama is bent on continuing the process one way or another.
If comrade Kunstler fails to improve attitude, surely holiday in gulag not far behind? Time now to rally around new Party Secretary Obamachev! New four year plan assured of success! All hail turnip harvest! Trabants for all!!!
Canada's Toronto Star was categorical in its condemnation.
"Goodbye to the worst president ever," it declared. "Bush was an unmitigated disaster, failing on the big issues from the invasion of Iraq to global warming, Hurricane Katrina and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression."
"Bush leaves a country and an economy in tatters," wrote the Sunday Times in London. It said America's national debt and unemployment nearly doubled on his watch.
Britain's Daily Mail said he entered office with a budget surplus of $128 billion but exits with a $482 billion deficit.
"He leaves the world facing its biggest crisis since the Depression, the Middle East in flames and U.S. standing at an all-time low.
With the ascension of President Change, the rubes are buying it more aggressively than ever. (No one seems to mind hearing pro-FISA Obama praise Martin Luther King, who was on the other end of government wiretaps.) Electing a President of Color is a boon to the empire, something media and political elites quickly latched onto, noting that the rest of the world will admire us again because our president has dark skin.
Obama's breakthrough should provide the necessary cover for imperial repair, from PR stunts like closing down Gitmo (whenever that happens), to a "humane" reassertion of American firepower. Time will tell how effective Obama will be, but if the man has anything, it's time. That's Bush/Cheney's present to the new prez. He'll be given slack to get America back on its feet, so it can stomp others again with renewed purpose and HOPEfully "success," as Joe Biden put it in the VP debate, insisting that Americans favor military intervention that "works."
A whole range of psychological factors will contribute to this tipping point: general awareness in Europe, America and Asia that the crisis has escaped from the control of every public authority, whether national or international; that it is severely affecting all regions of the world, even if some are more affected than others (see GEAB N°28); that it is directly hitting hundreds of millions of people in the “developed” world; and that it is only worsening as its consequences reveal throughout the real economy. National governments and international institutions only have three months left to prepare themselves to the next blow, one that could go along severe risks of social chaos. The countries which are not properly equipped to cope with a surge in unemployment and major risks on pensions will be seriously destabilized by this new public awareness.
America's biggest banks were battling to head off an investor rout following fears that their battered finances would need a further boost from the US government.
Bank of America saw its share price slump 20% at one point before closing down 18% at $8.32, while Citigroup dived 18% and closed down 15.5% at $3.83. The falls wiped out the gains the two banks had made since a faltering recovery began in November.
Bank of America was locked in discussion with US treasury officials following its request for a loan. Meanwhile, Citigroup is expected to report its deepest quarterly deficit yet, after suffering net losses for four consecutive quarters.
Shares in Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland plummeted as huge losses at two of America's biggest financial institutions sparked fresh fears for the future of Britain's banking industry.
In a frantic hour of trading, Barclays lost almost a quarter of its value - marking the second wave of a banking crisis that has already dragged the industry to the edge of collapse. The dramatic fall, which also shook the newly merged Lloyds TSB and HBOS, forced banking chiefs to cancel a planned summit in the City and triggered a flurry of emergency meetings in Whitehall.
Alistair Darling, the chancellor, met Adair Turner, the chairman of the FSA, the main financial regulator, while Gordon Brown met Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, to assess the damage after a week of devastating news for the banking industry.
The latest rescue plan comes amid growing concern that lenders are about to unveil losses for 2008 that will shock the market.
Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) could reveal about £20 billion of losses which would be the biggest corporate loss ever in Britain. HBOS's bad debts, meanwhile, are thought to be so serious that the Government will press for the Lloyds Banking Group to come under state control.
In a closely linked plan, the Government is preparing to "swap" certain types of shares in RBS, increasing its stake in the troubled lender from almost 60 per cent to 70 per cent. Ministers believe it is increasingly likely that they will now have to fully nationalise the Edinburgh-based bank.
Under the same share-swap scheme the Government could increase its holding in the enlarged Lloyds bank from 43 per cent to over 50 per cent, giving it a controlling stake. Lloyds is expected to fiercely resist the move.
In his book Wealth, War, published last year, former Morgan Stanley chief global strategist Barton Biggs advised people to prepare for the possibility of a total breakdown of civil society. A senior analyst whose reports are read at hedge funds all over the city wrote just before Christmas that some of his clients are “so bearish they’ve purchased firearms and safes and are stocking their pantries with soups and canned foods.”
The housing boom saw government coffers gorged with tax receipts – property taxes as a percentage of total taxes increased from 6.9 per cent in 1998 to 15.7 per cent in 2006. Government spending rose sharply, with a 40 per cent increase in public sector employment since 2000. Consumers, meanwhile, became dangerously indebted: Irish household borrowings now stand at €36,500 ($48,200, £33,100) twice the eurozone average.
In 2006, Bertie Ahern, Ireland’s then prime minister, had approvingly observed that the “boom is getting boomier”. But by that point a housing correction was overdue. The only surprise was the pace of the adjustment, with housing completions collapsing from 88,000 homes in 2006 to fewer than 30,000 forecast for this year. Forecasters were wrong-footed – not least the government. “The mistake was to interpret what was rare as something permanent,” says Philip Lane, professor of macroeconomics at Dublin’s Trinity College university.
"What I am saying is that if Ireland continues hurtling down this road which is close to default, the whole of Europe will be badly affected. The credibility of the euro will be badly affected. Then Spain might default, Italy and Greece," Mr McWilliams said.
He [Economist David McWilliams] told Marian Finucane on RTE radio: "So it is very, very essential that we go to Europe and say: 'Listen, we have a serious problem but the way we get out of it is either we default or we pull out of the euro, both of which is a disaster for us, bad even for the European project'.
In some cases, applicants were so embarrassed by their plight they stood with their backs to the street facing the wall while waiting their turn at the counter...
...However, the Labour TD said he found it "absolutely astonishing" that it can take up to 14 weeks to process a fresh unemployment assistance claim today -- whereas at the height of the recession in the 1980s, with 250,000 people on dole queues, the average waiting period was just three weeks.
Eastern Europe is heading for a violent "spring of discontent", according to experts in the region who fear that the global economic downturn is generating a dangerous popular backlash on the streets.
Hit increasingly hard by the financial crisis, countries such as Bulgaria, Romania and the Baltic states face deep political destabilisation and social strife, as well as an increase in racial tension.
In his 1988 book, The Collapse of Complex Societies, Joseph Tainter argued that all societies - like all organisms - are doomed. Tainter studied ancient Rome as well as the Mayan civilization. He noticed that problems always blaze up. Each one - whether climatic, political or economic - rings the firehall bell. And each solution - and readers may substitute the word "bailout" for solution - brings more challenges and takes more resources. Finally, the available resources are worn out.
Tainter observes that when the costs become high enough, people seem to give up. By the end of Roman era, for example, the burdens of empire were so heavy that people sold themselves into slavery to get free of them. So many people did so at one point that the authorities had to come up with another solution; they outlawed the practice. Henceforth, Roman citizens were required by law to remain free!
Still, the data don't lie. After receiving trillions of dollars from their respective governments, the large banks in the US and UK are in worse shape than ever. Much worse. And there is only one option left in the minds of the people's chosen representatives: take away the money, even more money, from those that elected them. If they admit to having made a mistake, it's one and one only: not enough money has been spent...
...The only conclusion you can draw from this is that people care more for their own comfort than they do for their grandchildren's well-being. The hope that springs eternal allows people to deceive themselves into believing and thinking whatever it is that will allow them to do what they want, for their own short-term selfish reasons. And they don't know that it's a hopeless cause, they don't know how broke the system is, and their communities. The media don't report it, because it would hurt sales, and politicians don't talk about it because it would cost them votes.
In case you haven't been following the news, LaHood is a conservative Illinois Republican with little transportation expertise and almost no administrative experience, who has earned a LCV lifetime voting score on critical environmental issues of 27 percent, and who maintains deep financial connections to the very industries he's now supposed to regulate. He may be no worse than most of those who've lead the Department of Transportation, but his appointment is a profoundly uninspiring vote for business as usual at a time when we need change, and an strong indication that the administration doesn't get that energy policy, technological innovation, urban planning, environmental sustainability and transportation are all bound up together, and no solution to our problems can be had without tackling them all together.
Oh wow - how did so many of us miss this? Do you really think that ANYTHING has changed since the Titanic? Only the landed gentry get life rafts - and the poor can starve, freeze or drown - as they please.
Has anyone noticed the ugly reality captured in the so-called “Miracle on the Hudson”? One of the first photos shows that first class passengers were offered first-class rafts to ensure that they’d survive in comfort, while the economy class passengers were forced out onto the metal wings to fend for themselves. Kinda sorta looks a lot like a metaphor for the financial crisis. “Miracle” our ass–this is just flat reality in 21st century America.
Angry about the reality in the photo above? Do something about it. Pull your money out of your bank. Travel by cargo ship. Travel by train. Stop buying from these evil bastards - and begin the process of extracting yourself (as best you can) from their wicked, life-destroying economy.
Many of us are perfectly capable of living well on very little. My weekly expenses are between $200-$250 a month...and those can probably be reduced a bit more. Take a brutal inventory of your life, your possessions, your wants vs. your needs. Become the worst enemy that this Global Empire fears most: the non-consumer.
Here's a must-watch. It's a video slideshow with commentarty by Steve Bell, showcasing his eight year long coverage of Bush. Bell is the greatest cartoonist since the Big Bang - peerless. Clip here. (Click on the arrow on the bottom left of the image to play).
Bank of America is already choking on Countrywide Financial and Merrill Lynch. JPMorgan is choking on Washington Mutual and a mass of derivatives a mile thick. Wells Fargo needs to digest Wachovia's mass of toxic pay option ARMS.
Big investment banks ripped up more than $30,000bn worth of credit derivatives last year, or almost half the record total outstanding at the start of 2008, as they aggressively pursued efforts to tidy up the industry.
IRELAND WILL see more demolition than construction of houses over the next decade, as the economy struggles to recover from the collapse of the housing market and the emergence of “zombie” banks, UCD economist Morgan Kelly told the conference.
In a presentation that drew several collective intakes of breath, Mr Kelly predicted that house prices would fall by 80 per cent from peak to trough in real terms.
“Construction, but not demolition, of residential and commercial property will fall to zero for the foreseeable future,” he said.
Four more links about technology (the good and the bad):
How cities harm your brain. Not just cities, but the entire modern way of life. If I could do just one thing to change modern life, it would be the destruction of cel-phones/texting. It's increasingly difficult to have a focused conversation with someone, as they're always checking their goddam phones, or being buzzed with text messages.
Now scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening. Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control. While it's long been recognized that city life is exhausting -- that's why Picasso left Paris -- this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so...
...One of the main forces at work is a stark lack of nature, which is surprisingly beneficial for the brain. Studies have demonstrated, for instance, that hospital patients recover more quickly when they can see trees from their windows, and that women living in public housing are better able to focus when their apartment overlooks a grassy courtyard. Even these fleeting glimpses of nature improve brain performance, it seems, because they provide a mental break from the urban roil.
Our recent consumption rates are the most voracious in history. By the end of 2007, the world had consumed about 1.1 trillion barrels of oil. Half of this was consumed over the last 25 years alone. So far, we have consumed about 50% of the total recoverable oil, according to the World Energy Council.
Chris Skrebowski, a London-based member of the Energy Institute in Britain and consultant editor of the Petroleum Review, which is considered the oil industry bible, said he believes world oil reserves will peak "no later than 2012."
He paints a doomsday scenario of a world blithely unaware that in a few years its oil-based lifestyle will begin to end.
With the Earth's climate at the tipping point to spin the planet into overheated mass extinction, some of us are thankful for the economy's collapse. "The worst slowdown since the Great Depression," said the New York Times (Business Day, Jan. 3). While it's true some kinds of environmental protection slacken when times are rougher for certain industries, on the whole there's a direct relationship between consumption and ecological destruction. Another relationship is between increased consumption (and work and debt) to unhappiness, mental illness and diminished social cohesion.
The cost of the Bush Regime’s wars, together with the 2009 budget deficit that Bush has bequeathed to Obama, equals half of the accumulated national debt of the United States.
Several years ago United States Comptroller General David Walker informed Congress and the White House that the accrued liabilities of the US government exceeded the ability to pay. Yet, “our” leaders ignored the Comptroller General and rushed headlong to add more trillions of dollars to federal liabilities. In effect, the United States is bankrupt at this present moment. According to generally accepted accounting principles, the federal government has a negative net worth of $59.3 trillion.
Who is going to lend to a bankrupt government that is ruled by financial crooks, the military-security complex, and the Israel Lobby? How long will the world finance US aggression that disrupts energy prices, keeps the world on edge, and makes America’s creditors complicit in war crimes?
UK celebrity chef Jamie Oliver made a splash with his recent campaign to get junk food out of schools. Here's a 7 minute hilite reel of his 200 minute long program:
Soybeans, as found in nature, are not suitable for human consumption. Only after fermentation for some time, or extensive processing, including chemical extractions and high temperatures, are the beans – or the soya protein isolate – suitable for digestion. A diet high in soya is a diet high in plant estrogens. Research studies in both humans and animals have found that isoflavones in soya can have a profound effect, raising levels of oestrogen significantly. Proponents claim plant estrogens are ‘safer’ because they are natural, but this is simply not true. High levels of circulating oestrogen are a cancer risk – whatever the source...
...Soya flour is used in bread; soya oil is in margarine and is the main component of the ubiquitous ‘vegetable oil’ found in a variety of food products. If you eat conventionally reared meat you are eating soya-fed animals. Soybean concentrate is used to bind foods together and boost protein content, and soya lecithin, the emulsifier E322, is one of the most widely used food additives. It is found in health drinks, ice creams, yoghurts, meat substitutes, sweets, infant formula, bakery goods, breakfast cereals, drinks, margarine, pasta and processed meats.
Soya-based infant formula milk is widely available, often on the same shelves as varieties based on cow’s milk, and is currently given to around 3 per cent of infants in the UK. This soya milk still contains isoflavone, exposure to which may impact on future fertility and reproductive development. The Government advises parents not to use soya-based formula without medical supervision, yet there is nothing to prevent parents using soya formula; neither are there any warnings on the packs.
In 1998, in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, investigators reported that circulating concentrations of isoflavones in infants fed soya-based baby formula were 13,000 to 22,000 times higher than plasma oestradiol (naturally produced oestrogen) concentrations in infants fed baby formula made with cow’s milk.
Most recently, a study at the Harvard School of Public Health, in Boston, found that men who regularly ate soya had significantly lower sperm counts.
With the death toll from the 17-day Israeli assault on Gaza climbing above 900, pressure is increasing for an independent inquiry into specific incidents, such as the shelling of a UN school turned refugee centre where about 40 people died, as well as the question of whether the military tactics used by Israel systematically breached humanitarian law.
...Teachers returned from winter break to find a bathroom-in-a-box on their desk, complete with toilet paper and all the accessories, marked For Lockdown Only.
Staff members assembled the kits to use during long-term lockdowns like the four hours Patterson High School students spent in their classrooms last fall when fights broke out on campus...
...Hence, in Turlock, the emergency toilets. Maintenance workers put together 701 of them over the winter break, enough to supply every classroom in the district that needed one. They cost $20 (£13) each, or about $14,000 total - the equivalent of nearly 200 high school textbooks.
"It's a small price to pay for personal dignity," said Patricia McGuire, a district assistant superintendent.
Methane on Earth is mainly produced by life, but also can be released from volcanoes or tectonic activity. Having methane appear on Mars is something of a mystery, because the planet is not believed to have active volcanism or tectonics. Could the methane be evidence of martian life forms buried underground?
In the short term, as dollar carry-trades continue to be unwound and questions of political will and falling interest rates haunt the euro and some other currencies, the US dollar may be the recipient of some upward appreciation. But with the American government appearing increasingly to be in panic mode, a run on the US dollar could develop rapidly into cascading devaluation. Even if no such panic run materializes, the long-term outlook for the US dollar is one of high risk and low return. This beckons major upward pressure on precious metals.
The American military tradition is heir to the British one, and, as H. L. Mencken pointed out, the Anglo-Saxon has never been known to seek out a fair fight. The British military did its best work using rifles against pygmies armed with ripe fruit, and using machine guns to cut down cavalry. A wealth of racist terminology was brought to bear, to dehumanize the enemy, making such massacres palatable: the kaffir, the jap and the gook. They were all brutes, to be exterminated. The Americans have carried this tradition into the nuclear age, and used a nuke or two to subdue the Japanese, who had all the other weapons that were modern during that era. In the other theater of that war, on the Western front, the supposedly good fight was won by sitting it out for as long as possible, then ponderously bombing various hitherto picturesque historical districts of Europe in order to time the entry into Berlin to coincide with the arrival of the Soviet troops, who had a great deal more to lose, and could be relied upon to do all of the heavy lifting and most of the dying. So much for valor.
"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
Below, a photo of Israelis watching the fighting in Gaza - drinking Coke, and having a good time. Clearly their lives are sufficiently safe that they can treat war massacres as entertainment:
And below, the consequences of said entertainment on the innocent:
Since many people have short memories, Robert Fisk gives us a history lesson:
Have we forgotten the 17,500 dead – almost all civilians, most of them children and women – in Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon; the 1,700 Palestinian civilian dead in the Sabra-Chatila massacre; the 1996 Qana massacre of 106 Lebanese civilian refugees, more than half of them children, at a UN base; the massacre of the Marwahin refugees who were ordered from their homes by the Israelis in 2006 then slaughtered by an Israeli helicopter crew; the 1,000 dead of that same 2006 bombardment and Lebanese invasion, almost all of them civilians?
No Robert, we haven't forgotten. We don't care. We are Monsters.
GWB...asserted that America was addicted to oil, but he failed to take the idea a step further and say that our vaunted "way-of-life" could no longer be taken for granted. If anything, he endorsed the popular idea that a suburban lifestyle and WalMart consumerism was a Jesus-driven entitlement, and his circle in governance did everything possible to replace the industrial economy with an economy based on suburban land development and credit card spending -- which was enabled by fantastic experiments in finance that proved to be nothing more than an impenetrable web of swindles.
Hidden in plain view on the internet are people who actually know what they're talking about. One such is Gail E. Tverberg of theoildrum.com. She has made her forecast for 2009. First, let's look back 12 months ago, and read her 2008 foreast:
Many monoline bond insurers will be downgraded in 2008, and some may fail.
More and more people influential in financial markets will begin to recognize peak oil.
Long term loans, including those for energy companies, are likely to become less available as awareness of peak oil rises.
There is likely to be a serious recession in 2008, deepening as the year goes on.
At least several large banks will fail.
The amount of debt available to consumers is likely to decline.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may need government assistance.
A new class of homes -- those "never to be sold" -- will emerge.
Politicians will continue to make attempts to help homeowners, and perhaps other types of borrowers.
The amount of structured (sliced and diced) debt issued is likely to drop to close to zero.
Besides banks, many other players in financial markets are likely to find themselves in financial difficulty in 2008.
The value of the dollar will fall relative to some currencies, causing the relative price of oil to rise.
The stock market probably will decline during 2008.
Prices are likely to rise in 2008 for food and energy products. Prices may decline for homes and non-essential goods and services.
There is a chance that some type of discontinuity will make financial conditions suddenly take a turn for the worse.
As many as a million American jobs could be lost every month by next spring as businesses struggle to raise capital in financial markets consumed by fear, according to a new analysis.
November was the worst month in the US labour market since the oil crisis of 1974, as more than 500,000 US workers were laid off, according to official figures released on Friday.
But Graham Turner, of consultancy GFC Economics, says the rising cost of corporate debt is now flashing a red warning signal that far worse is to come over the next few months and job losses are heading for levels last seen in the 1930s Great Depression.
Fresh sources of oil equivalent to the output of four Saudi Arabias will have to be found simply to maintain present levels of supply by 2030, one of the world's leading energy experts has said.
Fatih Birol, chief economist of the International Energy Agency (IEA), the developed world's energy watchdog, told The Times that the depletion of existing oilfields meant that vast new investments would be required to satisfy the demand for oil.
"The past eight years of imperial overstretch, hubris and domestic and international abuse of power on the part of the Bush administration has left the US materially weakened financially, economically, politically and morally," he said. "Even the most hard-nosed, Guantanamo Bay-indifferent potential foreign investor in the US must recognise that its financial system has collapsed."
He said investors would, rightly, suspect that the US would have to generate major inflation to whittle away its debt and this dollar collapse means that the US has less leeway for major spending plans than politicians realise.
Yesterday Russia stopped gas supplies through Ukraine to Bulgaria, Hungary, Greece, Turkey, Romania, Serbia, Bosnia and Macedonia. The government of Slovakia declared a national emergency; Austria and Italy reported falls of 90 per cent; France said Russian supplies had tailed off 70 per cent, and Germany also reported a decline although did not quantify it.
The experts said the levels found were low under the maximum residue levels allowed for fruit, but they were ‘very high’ and ‘up to 300 times’ the figure permitted for bottled or tap water.
The chemicals detected included carbendazim, thiabendazole, imazalil, prochloraz, malathion and iprodione. They are mainly applied to fruit after harvest to stop it developing fungal infections and rotting.
A total of 19 products were bought in the UK, all made by Coca-Cola.
Comic genius Chris Morris is making a movie about suicide bombers.
"Even those who have trained and fought jihad report the frequency of farce," she said. "At training camps, young jihadis argue about honey, cry for their mums, shoot each other's feet off, chase snakes and get thrown out for smoking. A minute into his martyrdom video, a would-be bomber looks puzzled and says 'what was the question again?' On Millennium eve, five jihadis set out to ram a US warship. They slipped their boat into the water and carefully stacked it with explosives. It sank."
Ms Steed said terrorist cells share the same group dynamics as stag parties and five-a-side football teams. "There is conflict, friendship, misunderstanding and rivalry," she said. "Terrorism is about ideology, but it's also about berks.
Remember the wall that environmentalists (like the 1972 "Limits to Growth" authors) have long been saying that industrial society would eventually hit? Permit me to make the formal introduction: Industrial society, meet wall; wall, meet industrial society.
It's understandably taking a while for the recognition to seep in. We are not accustomed to seeing every indicator of economic well-being, in virtually every country in the world, slam into reverse over the course of a few short months. I still have random conversations with businesspeople and bankers who say we've hit bottom and recovery is at hand; in their view, this is just another business cycle. I see things a bit differently: to my eyes the world situation looks like a slow-motion film of a train wreck, and the sheet metal at the front of the locomotive has only just begun to crumple.
German billionaire Adolf Merckle committed suicide by throwing himself under a train, “broken” as his business empire crumbled under a growing burden of debt, his family said.
The 74 year-old businessman was hit yesterday evening near his hometown of Blaubeuren, 44 miles southeast of Stuttgart, a police officer said in an interview. His body was found on the tracks at around 7:30 p.m. about 300 yards from his home and a suicide note had also been found.
Russia’s natural gas dispute with Ukraine worsened, shutting off fuel shipments to Europe for the first time in three years and driving energy prices higher.
Russia and Ukraine blamed each other for cuts as supplies from OAO Gazprom through Ukraine plummeted, deliveries to the Balkans halted and Slovakia declared an emergency. The spat over prices, transit tariffs and debt caused U.K. gas to jump as much as 27 percent and came amid freezing temperatures across Europe.
An airline passenger forced to cover his T-shirt because it displayed Arabic script has been awarded 240,000 dollars in compensation, campaigners said Monday.
Raed Jarrar received the pay out on Friday from two US Transportation Security Authority officials and from JetBlue Airways following the August 2006 incident at New York's JFK Airport, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) announced...
...He was told other passengers felt uncomfortable because an Arabic-inscribed T-shirt in an airport was like "wearing a T-shirt at a bank stating, I am a robber,'" the ACLU said.
Jarrar eventually agreed to cover his shirt with another provided by JetBlue. He was allowed aboard but his seat was changed from the front to the back of the aircraft.
