Sell the Virgin Islands to Richard Branson.
Now it won't completely solve the problem, but it'll go a long way towards paying down our debt. And since he always names everything Virgin anyway... less work for him!
Maybe we should just go whole hog and have him buy the US.
Virgin America, owned by Richard Branson.
I think I'll send him an email.
Back from the dead, Tokyo banks buy into Wall Street
Once considered too naive and cautious for the high-risk, high-return world of investment banking, cash-rich Japanese firms are once again aggressively pushing abroad.
"The balance of power in the global financial industry has changed dramatically over the past one to two weeks," said Shinichi Ina, banking analyst at Credit Suisse in Tokyo.
"I don't think anyone imagined a few months ago that Mitsubishi would be making Morgan Stanley into a group firm. I don't think they could have imagined it themselves."
On Main Street, insurance protects people from the effects of catastrophes.
But on Wall Street, specialized insurance known as a credit default swaps are turning a bad situation into a catastrophe.
When historians write about the current crisis, much of the blame will go to the slump in the housing and mortgage markets, which triggered the losses, layoffs and liquidations sweeping the financial industry.
But credit default swaps -- complex derivatives originally designed to protect banks from deadbeat borrowers -- are adding to the turmoil.
"This was supposedly a way to hedge risk," says Ellen Brown, the author of the book "Web of Debt."
"I'm sure their predictive models were right as far as the risk of the things they were insuring against. But what they didn't factor in was the risk that the sellers of this protection wouldn't pay ... That's what we're seeing now."
Brown is hardly alone in her criticism of the derivatives. Five years ago, billionaire investor Warren Buffett called them a "time bomb" and "financial weapons of mass destruction" and directed the insurance arm of his Berkshire Hathaway Inc., to exit the business.
Threatened by a "financial tsunami," the world must consider building a financial order no longer dependent on the United States, a leading Chinese state newspaper said on Wednesday.
The commentary in the overseas edition of the People's Daily said the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., "may augur an even larger impending global 'financial tsunami'."
China is a major buyer of U.S. Treasury bonds, and through its sovereign wealth fund it has taken stakes in two large U.S. financial institutions.
In July 2005, China revalued the yuan and freed it from a dollar peg to float within managed bands. But the yuan and China's trade remains tightly linked to the fortunes of the dollar.
The commentary suggested China must brace for grave economic fallout and look to alternatives, saying the crisis brings to mind the Great Depression of the 1930s.
"Lehman Brothers announced bankruptcy will not only have a domino effect on the global financial world, it will bring a shock to the world economy," the front-page comment stated.
Juan Cole is brilliant today. Go read: Informed Comment, A Nation of Masochists.
And in the wake of the greatest and most sustained act of systematic plunder since the Mongol hordes appropriated to themselves the riches of everyplace in Asia from Beijing to Isfahan, the reaction of the supine and slave-like American voting public is to scratch their heads and have a hard time deciding if they would like more of the same.
Read about former President Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression.
As I write this article, I am seeing proposals by some to create a new Resolution Trust Corp., as we did in the 1990s to clean up the S&L problems. The RTC managed and sold assets from S&Ls that had already failed. It was run by the FDIC, just like the FDIC. We needed to create the RTC in the 1990s only because we could not comingle the assets from failed banks with those of failed thrifts, because we had two separate deposit insurance funds absorbing the respective losses from bank and thrift failures.
I can't imagine why we would want to create another government bureaucracy to handle the assets from bank failures. What we need to do urgently is stop the failures, and an RTC won't do that.
Again, we must take three immediate steps to prevent a further rash of financial failures and taxpayer bailouts. First, the SEC must suspend Fair Value Accounting and require that assets be marked to their true economic value. Second, the SEC needs to immediately clamp down on abusive practices by short sellers. It has taken a first step in reinstituting the prohibition against "naked selling." Finally, the bank regulators need to acknowledge that the Basel II capital rules represent a serious policy mistake and repeal the rules before they do real damage.
We are almost out of time if we hope to eradicate the cancer in our financial system.
Mr. Isaac, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. from 1981-1985, is chairman of the Washington financial services consulting firm The Secura Group, an LECG company.
Americans need to hear a full-throated debate by lawmakers about the range of players in this mortgage maelstrom who either lied, took on too much debt, or failed to check creditworthiness as these loans were issued and then sold up the financial food chain to the point where it has become nearly impossible to determine their value.
They also need to hear about the government's role in encouraging a housing bubble – and that will mean Congress needs to look at itself. No longer should federal support for owning a home be based on the false premise that housing prices will always go up or that taxpayers are the final backstop for mortgage holders.
Gawker, that is: It's The "Absurd Financial Product Some Rich Person Actually Bought" Contest!, but I stayed for the story.
Today's decision by the Bush administration to stick us with even more debt (to the tune of half a trillion US$) is just insane. Re-inventing the RTC was a semi-decent idea yesterday, but it's morphed into a massive bailout for the entire economy. These idiots are re-financing the United States. Hell, they're re-financing BAD DEBT.
Ye gods and little fishes. Why the hell didn't we impeach the Clown College when they lied and invaded Iraq?
CNN wants to know, Will it work?
Um.
Those securities were backed by home loans, many made to buyers with bad credit or without proof of income. As housing values fell and foreclosures shot to record levels in the past two years, the value of those securities plunged. That in turn caused massive losses in the financial sector.
This week it reached a crisis situation. Banks and investment firms stopped making the loans to each other as they hoarded cash to protect against any sudden liquidity crunch as well from unknown problems on their partners' balance sheets.
"I'm confident this will work," said Mark Zandi, chief economist with Moody's Economy.com. "The federal government is committed to backstopping the nation's financial system and will do whatever is necessary to make sure the system does not unravel. The details are important but secondary."
"If this doesn't work, we're in trouble, because there's not much more the government can do," said Jaret Seiberg, a financial services analyst at the Stanford Group. "They've left very few arrows in the quiver."
here, stating that United States was up for bidding
We thus want to acknowledge the progress you have made in your evolution from economic superpower to economic basket case. Normally, such a process might take 100 years or more. With your oscillation between free-market extremism and nationalization of private companies, however, you have successfully achieved, in a few short years, many of the key hallmarks of Third World economies.
Your policies of irresponsible government deregulation in critical sectors allowed you to rapidly develop an energy crisis, a housing crisis, a credit crisis and a financial market crisis, all at once, and accompanied (and partly caused) by impressive levels of corruption and speculation. Meanwhile, those of your political leaders charged with oversight were either napping or in bed with corporate lobbyists.
Take John McCain, your Republican presidential nominee, whose senior staff includes half a dozen prominent former lobbyists. As he recently put it, "I was chairman of the [Senate] Commerce Committee that oversights every part of the economy." No question about it: Your leaders' failure to notice the damage done by irresponsible deregulation was indeed an oversight of epic proportions.
Admittedly, your transition to Third World status is far from over, and it won't be painless. At first, for instance, you may find it hard to get used to the shantytowns that will replace the exurban sprawl of McMansions that helped fuel the real estate speculation bubble. But in time, such shantytowns will simply become part of the landscape. Similarly, as unemployment rates continue to rise, you will initially struggle to find a use for the expanding pool of angry, jobless young men. But you will gradually realize that you can recruit them to fight in a ceaseless round of armed conflicts, a solution that has been utilized by many other Third World states before you. Indeed, with your wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, you are off to an excellent start.
we get Caribou Barbie as VEEP nom to run with Mr. Magoo.
Like Obama and Biden wasn't weird enough.
Is it too late to move to Canada?
Financial Crisis Is Absent From Agendas of Parties, Candidates
Many Democrats shy away from tackling the credit crisis because of the party's historical support for Fannie and Freddie. The Republicans, for their part, are reluctant to draw attention to a crisis that occurred on their watch. The subprime meltdown isn't the only item missing from the parties' agendas. The list also includes the Democrats' failure to set out a strategy for countering Russia's assertiveness and the Republicans' silence on income inequality.
Senator Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, said conventions aren't the place to discuss detailed plans for dealing with the markets.
``The conventions are aimed at the average voter,'' he said Aug. 25 in Denver. ``You don't go into Quinlan's bar and ask them what to do about the'' Securities and Exchange Commission.
``We feel like we've taken a big step to stabilize the situation,'' said Senator Tom Carper of Delaware, a Democrat on the Banking Committee.
``We are in the midst of the worst financial crisis since World War II,'' Stanley Fisher, governor of the Bank of Israel and a former IMF official, told central bankers in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, on Aug. 23.
So the Olympics end today.
yawn
I haven't watched any of it. But I bet one thing wasn't clear in the televised events:
Sex and the Olympic City
Ah yes, the swimmers. For some reason the International Olympic Committee insists on bunching the swimming events towards the beginning of the Games with the inevitable consequence that the aquatics folk get going earlier - sexually I mean - than everyone else. So much so that, at the outset of the Sydney Olympics, Jonathan Edwards, a Christian and triple jumper extraordinaire, caused a ripple by telling them publicly to keep a lid on it. Edwards was simply concerned about getting woken up by creaking floorboards, but given his biblical credentials, it became a story about morality. Not that his intervention made a blind bit of difference. There is a famous story from Seoul in 1988 that there were so many used condoms on the roof terrace of the British team's residential block the night after the swimming concluded that the British Olympic Association sent out an edict banning outdoor sex. Here in Beijing, organisers have realised that such prohibitions are about as useful as banning breathing and have, instead, handed out thousands of free condoms to the athletes. If you can't stop 'em, at least make it safe.
I've just found out that residents of southwestern Connecticut can rest in peace as that dangerous outlaw has finally been captured:
Saugatuck Sheep Finally Captured
Last Thursday, a female sheep that has eluded capture for almost a year was caught by Westport Animal Control, assisted by Bridgeport's Beardsley Zoo.
The female sheep (also called a ewe) spent the past year wandering around the Treadwell Avenue area in Saugatuck, causing a disturbance in the neighborhood by wandering onto people's property and leaving droppings on their lawns.
She was found on Echo Lane and was brought to Westport Animal Control, where she spent the night.
Part of the ewe's notoriety was her size. "This sheep was the biggest sheep I've ever seen. I would estimate that it was about 200 pounds," said Lt. Thomas Casimiro of the Westport Police Department.
Ewes normally weigh between 100 and 225 pounds. That should give some idea of how large this female was at 200 pounds.
While many of the residents on the street knew of the sheep's existence, few ever saw it.
"We tried a few times to catch the sheep, but it kept getting away. It was hard to catch it because we were trying hard not to hurt it. That's when we tried to get the zoo involved," Casimiro said.
The other reason for the sheep's notoriety was that no one knew where the sheep came from.
"We don't know where the sheep came from," Casimiro said. "We don't know if it got loose from Stew Leonard's, or if it escaped from a truck on I-95." The only identification the sheep had was a blue tag in its right ear.
In a speech in Thailand, Mr. Bush praised U.S. economic and diplomatic ties with Beijing. But he said the United States "stands in firm opposition" to China's detention of political, human rights and religious activists.
Mr. Bush urged China to trust its people with greater freedom, saying that is the only way for China to develop to its full potential.
In K2 aftermath, lessons learned
Had you heard about this? I hadn't.
The search for survivors on the world's second-tallest peak ended Tuesday, when the severely frostbitten Italian climber Marco Confortola made it to safety after 11 lives were lost in one of the most tragic accidents of modern mountaineering.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn died yesterday at the age of 89.
His wife, Natalya, told the Interfax news agency that her husband, who suffered along with millions of Russians in the prison camp system, died as he had hoped to die.
"He wanted to die in the summer — and he died in the summer," she said. "He wanted to die at home — and he died at home. In general I should say that Alexander Isaevich lived a difficult but happy life."
I just read an email from a friend detailing things to be done before going on vacation for two weeks. One of the To Do items was to clean her house first.
Me starts wondering why.
Why do we clean before we go on vacation?
I can just hear my Mother (yeah, I hear dead people) saying it's because you (meaning her) don't want to come back to a dirty house.
Me... don't care. I'd rather walk away from the disaster and deal with it when I come back all (hopefully) fully relaxed and refreshed.
Sadly this pondering is mute for me 'cuz I ain't going no where soon.
I will be housecleaning, however.
but...
Wal-Mart warning managers of labor bill
Wal-Mart Stores Inc said on Friday it has held meetings with U.S. store managers warning them of issues that could arise if Democrats win power and pass a law that would make it easier for workers to unionize, but stressed it was not telling workers how to vote.
I'm not sorry to see the month go. It hasn't been horrible, just frustrating with petty annoyances and some frim-fram sauce on the side.
Tomorrow is Claudius' birthday. Happy 2,018! If you've never read or seen I Claudius, you should - it's fantastic! It's not really historically accurate, but it's a good time, so I give it a pass on accuracy.
I missed the hen party. I ended up with a stomach flu for two days. Blech! Oh well. The wedding is a week from tomorrow ~ 08-08-08. They lucked out on getting that date, the one the originally wanted. It's to be outdoors and I'm scanning the weather channel site for the 10-day forecast and I'm not liking what I'm seeing. I don't do well in extreme heat and humitity.
sigh
Project Runway was a bit blah last night. Either I'm getting tired of the show or the show is getting tired. One of the contestants is named Suade. He talks about himself in the third person, which is why I remember his name. It's not just annoying, it's childish and stupid. There's another contestant, my age, who is dangerously into Leatha (leather). A Tanorexic. And then a whole bunch of other people who just sorta fade into each other. I can't even remember who won or who lost last night. I was too busy with crewel to notice.
Merrill posts $4.9 billion loss, sells Bloomberg stake
We're going from bad to worse. But Freddie is looking at offering US$10 billion in new shares. I really wonder who would be insane enough to buy them.
The main buyers for any new-stock issues are likely to be existing shareholders worldwide, the paper said, citing one person involved in the discussion.
Any sale would have to offer a high rate of return to attract buyers, given the near-14 percent yield on Freddie's preference shares, the paper added.
Yes, I disappeared again.
Did you miss me?
probably not
I've moved... again. Back in Bridgeport. Full circle in four years. It's a nice little two-bedroom condo and I'm mostly unpacked. Still some boxes to empty.
Still in the same job, sadly. I should probably do something about that.
Let's see... news: The Anglicans have their knickers in a knot; the Pope is in Australia for World Brainwashing (um) Youth Day; Obama raked in some serious cash last month, but he is still behind McCain; US economy is... a sick joke; Tony Snow died (RIP) and Bush admitted his love for the man - in the national Cathedral no less! And some nutjob geek is in jail for holding San Franciso hostage.
Not much new, is there? Oh, wait, I've picked up a new addiction ~ knitting. I kinda suck at it at the moment, but hope springs eternal!
Kitchen-Floor Conflict Intensifies As Rival House Cats Claim Same Empty Bag
"MAPLEWOOD, MO—Ongoing turmoil in the troubled kitchen-floor region of the Branson household reached a boiling point Tuesday, as relations between rival house cats Boswell and Johnson erupted into fresh violence. Observers said the arrival of a new brown paper-bag in the area ignited long-standing tensions and set off another round of territorial conflict between the two factions in the most serious aggression since the devastating stove-side siege of 2005."
How many must suffer before President Bush finally intervenes? Clearly we need a UN Peace-keeping mission in Maplewood, Missouri, to bring peace to the is destable region. And why aren't the Candidates addressing this, the most serious issue facing America today? Why? Write your Representatives and Senators and DEMAND they deal with this war today!
This was surprising:
Truman's daughter dies at 83
.
Shortly before her father's death in 1972 Daniel published Harry S Truman under her maiden name. A critically acclaimed full length biography of her father, the book used extensive sources from the Truman Library.
