Economy
Related: About this forumWeekend Economists: WEE Can Fly! May 25-28, 2012
Yes, well, the fairies made me do it. And Tansy Gold, the dominatrix of the Stock Market Watch.
You know that Walt Disney made millions ripping off authors whose work either had never been copyrighted, or whose copyrights had expired? But god forbid you should do anything to his stuff! There's been a concerted effort to extend those copyrights indefinitely by corporations like Disney...so the Mouse can never die or be ripped off...
But that's another story.
Today's story is about a boy who never grew up. Pan's the name, Peter Pan....
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But we have modern-day versions which we call Psycopaths, Sociopaths, or Capitalists. Peter Pan was a case of arrested development...the Capitalists are simply begging to be arrested. ALONG WITH THEIR CRONIES IN PUBLIC OFFICES...LEGISLATIVE, EXECUTIVE, AND JUDICIAL!
Have at it, all!
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Demeter
(85,373 posts)owing to the extended weekend due to the solemn holiday....and the fact that things just aren't yet that bad. Yet.
Maybe for the 4th of July?
Demeter
(85,373 posts)It’s the saddest reading around: the little announcements that dribble out of the Pentagon every day or two -- those terse, relatively uninformative death notices: rank; name; age; small town, suburb, or second-level city of origin; means of death (“small arms fire,” “improvised explosive device,” “the result of gunshot wounds inflicted by an individual wearing an Afghan National Army uniform,” or sometimes something vaguer like “while conducting combat operations,” “supporting Operation Enduring Freedom,” or simply no explanation at all); and the unit the dead soldier belonged to. They are seldom 100 words, even with the usual opening line: “The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.” Sometimes they include more than one death. They are essentially bureaucratic notices designed to draw little attention to themselves. Yet cumulatively, in their hundreds over the last decade, they represent a grim archive of America’s still ongoing, already largely forgotten second Afghan War, and I’ve read them obsessively for years.
Into the Memory Hole
May is the official month of remembrance when it comes to our war dead, ending as it does on the long Memorial Day weekend when Americans typically take to the road and kill themselves and each other in far greater numbers than will die in Afghanistan. It’s a weekend for which the police tend to predict rising fatalities and news reports tend to celebrate anydeclines in deaths on our roads and highways...How many today are aware that, as Decoration Day, it began in 1865 in a nation still torn by grief over the loss of -- we now know -- up to 750,000 dead in the first modern war, a wrenching civil catastrophe in a then-smaller and still under-populated country? How many know that the first Decoration Day was held in 1865 with 10,000 freed slaves and some Union soldiers parading on a Charleston, South Carolina, race track previously frequented by planters and transformed in wartime into a grim outdoor prison? The former slaves were honoring Union prisoners who had died there and been hastily buried in unmarked graves, but as historian Kenneth Jackson has written, they were also offering “a declaration of the meaning of the war and of their own freedom.”
Those ceremonies migrated north in 1866, became official at national cemeteries in 1868, and grew into ever more elaborate civic remembrances over the years. Even the South, which had previously marked its grief separately, began to take part after World War I as the ceremonies were extended to the remembrance of all American war dead. Only in 1968, in the midst of another deeply unpopular war, did Congress make it official as Memorial Day, creating the now traditional long holiday weekend.
And yet, when it comes to the major war the United States is still fighting, now in its 11th year, the word remembrance is surely inappropriate, as is the “Memorial” in Memorial Day. It’s not just that the dead of the Afghan War have largely been tossed down the memory hole of history (even if they do get official attention on Memorial Day itself). Even the fact that Americans are still dying in Afghanistan seems largely to have been forgotten, along with the war itself...As the endlessly plummeting opinion polls indicate, the Afghan War is one Americans would clearly prefer to forget -- yesterday, not tomorrow. It was, in fact, regularly classified as “the forgotten war” almost from the moment that the Bush administration turned its attention to the invasion of Iraq in 2002 and so declared its urge to create a Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East. Despite the massive “surge” of troops, special operations forces, CIA agents, and civilian personnel sent to Afghanistan by President Obama in 2009-2010, and the ending of the military part of the Iraq debacle in 2011, the Afghan War has never made it out of the grave of forgetfulness to which it was so early consigned. Count on one thing: there will be no Afghan version of Maya Lin, no Afghan Wall on the National Mall. Unlike the Vietnam conflict, tens of thousands of books won’t be pouring out for decades to come arguing passionately about the conflict. There may not even be a “who lost Afghanistan” debate in its aftermath. ...Few Afghan veterans are likely to return from the war to infuse with new energy an antiwar movement that remains small indeed, nor will they worry about being “spit upon.” There will be little controversy. They -- their traumas and their wounds -- will, like so many bureaucratic notices, disappear into the American ether, leaving behind only an emptiness and misery, here and in Afghanistan, as perhaps befits a bankrupting, never-ending imperial war on the global frontiers...
MORE AT LINK--PLEASE READ
Ghost Dog
(16,881 posts)Civil war changes... everything.
C'est la vie.
mother earth
(6,002 posts)If only the people were truly represented there would be no war.
Mothers and fathers losing precious sons and daughters, tiny children losing precious fathers and mothers....the crimes go on and go unpunished.
May remembering their souls this Memorial Day only strengthen the resolve to end these crimes.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)
dixiegrrrrl
(60,010 posts)great post from Alarimer:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002736286
I commented in his/her post that the Op sentence is a perfect bumper sticker.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Is the government unleashing the same methods of entrapment against OWS that it has used against left movements and Muslim-Americans? With the high-profile arrest of activists on terrorism charges in Cleveland on May Day and in Chicago during the NATO summit there, evidence is mounting that the FBI is unleashing the same methods of entrapment against the Occupy Wall Street movement that it has used against left movements and Muslim-Americans for the last decade.
In Cleveland the FBI announced on May 1 that “five self-proclaimed anarchists conspired to develop multiple terror plots designed to negatively impact the greater Cleveland metropolitan area.” The FBI claimed the five were nabbed as they attempted to blow up a bridge the night before using “inoperable” explosives supplied to them by an undercover FBI employee.
Then on May 19, the day before thousands marched peacefully in Chicago to protest NATO-led wars, the Illinois State Attorney hit three men with charges of terrorism for allegedly plotting to use “destructive devices” against targets ranging from Chicago police stations to the home of Mayor Rahm
With the high-profile arrest of activists on terrorism charges in Cleveland on May Day and in Chicago during the NATO summit there, evidence is mounting that the FBI is unleashing the same methods of entrapment against the Occupy Wall Street movement that it has used against left movements and Muslim-Americans for the last decade.
MORE
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Last edited Fri May 25, 2012, 07:30 PM - Edit history (1)
http://www.alternet.org/story/155456/capitalism_has_failed%3A_5_bold_ways_to_build_a_new_world?page=entire
_310x220
The problem, in a nutshell, is this: The old economic model has utterly failed us. It has destroyed our communities, our democracy, our economic security, and the planet we live on. The old industrial-age systems -- state communism, fascism, free-market capitalism -- have all let us down hard, and growing numbers of us understand that going back there isn't an option.
But we also know that transitioning to some kind of a new economy -- and, probably, a new governing model to match -- will be a civilization-wrenching process. We're having to reverse deep and ancient assumptions about how we allocate goods, labor, money, and power on a rapidly shrinking, endangered, complex, and ever more populated planet. We are bolding taking the global economy -- and all 7 billion souls who depend on it -- where no economy has ever gone before.
Right now, all we have to guide us forward are an emerging set of new values and imperatives. The new system can't incentivize economic growth for its own sake, or let monopolies form and flourish. It should be as democratic as possible, but with strong mechanisms in place that protect the common wealth and the common good. It needs to put true costs to things, and hold people accountable for their actions. Above all, it needs to be rooted in the deep satisfactions -- community, nature, family, health, creativity -- that have been the source of real human happiness for most of our species' history....
Many people imagining our next economy are swept up in the romance of a return to a localized or regionalized economy, where wealth is built by local people creatively deploying local resources to meet local needs. Relocalization is a way to restore the autonomy, security and control that have been lost now that almost every aspect of our lives has been co-opted by big, centralized, corporate-controlled systems. By bringing everything back to a more human scale, this story argues, we'll enable people to connect with their own creativity, their communities and each other. Alienation and isolation will dissipate. We'll have more time for family and friends, really free enterprise and more satisfying work. Our money will be our own, accumulated by us and re-invested in things we value. And it'll be a serious corrective to our delusional ideas about what constitutes real wealth, too. This vision is deeply beloved. It's front and center in both the resilience and Transition Towns movement. You hear it from foodies who extol the virtues of local food, Slow Money investors who back local banks and businesses instead of Wall Street, community gardeners, and 10 million Makers. David Korten argues that capitalism is actually the enemy of truly free markets -- the kind where anybody with ideas and initiative can make a tidy living working for herself, doing something she loves. And that kind of freedom is, very naturally, small in scale. This vision is also seductive. It holds out the promise that if people dare to let go of what they have and reach out to the future, there's a better life waiting within their grasp -- a core piece of any effective change story. However, this model also has a few problems that haven't yet been engaged by most of its proponents, but which compromise its ability to serve as a global framework....
MORE
Demeter
(85,373 posts)BECAUSE THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH, OF WHICH HE IS THE HIGHEST, IS IN CHARGE OF ENFORCING LAWS, MAYBE? JUST AN IDLE SPECULATION...
I wish President Obama would draw the obvious connection between Bain Capital and JPMorgan Chase.
That way his so-called “attack” on private equity is neither a personal attack on Mitt Romney nor a generalized attack on American business.
It’s an attack on a particular kind of capitalism that Romney and JPMorgan both practice: Using other peoples’ money to make big bets which, if they go wrong, can wreak havoc on the economy....
PICK ON HIS BEST BUD JAMIE DIMON? SHIRLEY YOU JEST!
There’s no alternative but to resurrect Glass-Steagall as a whole. Even then, the biggest banks are still too big to fail or to regulate. We also need to heed the recent advice of the Dallas branch of the Federal Reserve, and break them up.
At the same time, there’s no point to the “carried interest” loophole that allows private-equity managers like Mitt Romney to treat their incomes as capital gains, taxed at only 15 percent, when they’ve risked no money of their own.
...Bain Capital and JPMorgan are parts of the same problem. The President should be leading the charge against both.
bread_and_roses
(6,335 posts)Published on Saturday, May 26, 2012 by The Guardian/UK
Well, Why Shouldn't Poor White Voters Reject Democrats?
The white working class is said to 'vote against its own interests'. This only exposes the patronising assumptions of their accusers
by Gary Younge
Such news is generally greeted on the left by a mixture of despair and ridicule. Here is a group of people, it seems, who simply do not understand what's good for them.... Failing to sense the liberation the Democrats have in store for them, they have been seized by a collective bout of false consciousness and are once again set to vote against their own interests. Having thus infantilised them as ostensible adults in need of protection against themselves, progressives will then wonder why this particular group of people do not flock to them at the polls.
(bold emphasis added)
I have been guilty of this myself.
Indeed, the people most likely to have voted Democrat four years ago – the young, the black and Latinos – are among the groups that have fared worse under Obama. And all the polls suggest they're about to do it again, albeit in lesser numbers. One could just as easily argue that they are the dupes. Democrats have no god-given right to the votes of the poor of any race and for the past 30 years can hardly claim to have earned them.
bold emphasis added
This reminds me of what I wrote yesterday about what the Labor movement should be demanding both to benefit our own members and in solidarity with the unorganized workers. So I'm going to repeat it (it's not a complete list by any means, but at least a good start)
Since our leaders won't state the plain truth - THERE IS A WAR ON WORKERS IN THIS COUNTRY AND BOTH SIDES OF THE ISLE ARE ON THE OTHER SIDE - the rants of the Rs become a siren song for union members just as for other working class people who vote against their own pocketbook. (the italics = there's that condenscention Younge speaks about - I really should listen to myself sometimes)
Because the Rs actually define the problem in ways that speak to working people. They rant about high taxes - and the reality is that TAXES ON THE WORKING CLASS (and the poor) ARE TOO HIGH. They are too high so as to subsidize the tax breaks for on wealth and the wealthy. But you don't see Democrats saying this in clear, unambiguous language.
The Rs say our schools are failing. And too often they are. They are failing because teachers have been crushed into serf-like auto-matrons and FUNDS FOR OUR SCHOOLS ARE BEING SLASHED TO GIVE TAX BREAKS TO CORPORATIONS AND TAX CUTS TO THE WEALTHY.
But you don't hear the Ds saying that clearly either. Our Dem Gov in NY earned the sobriquet "Gov 1%" for defending tax cuts for the rich while bashing teachers and public workers, cutting their pensions, and shoveling $$ by the barrel-full to the Corps. He is refusing at the moment to fight for raise to the minimum wage.
I don't know what it will take to turn things around. My own view is that we should be standing against BOTH parties and WITH working people. Demanding living wages for non-union workers. Demanding lowering the 40 hour week. Demanding universal health care. Demanding lowering the retirement age and raising SS to provide a decent retirement. Things that would improve the lives of all workers and show WHICH SIDE WE'RE ON.
* links to an - also by Gary Younge - article here http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/06/comment
"Never mind Mitt Romney, don't bet on any party to care about the poor
Just when Democrats start to sound sanctimonious, the ground beneath them starts to open up and swallow them whole"
Demeter
(85,373 posts)The real question is: why should anyone in the 99% vote for another 4 years of Obamania? Then again, nobody in their right mind would vote for Romney or any GOP, either.
We need better candidates.
bread_and_roses
(6,335 posts)To quote Adam Smith: "But the rate of profit does not, like rent and wages, rise with prosperity, and fall with the declension of the society. On the contrary, it is naturally low in rich, and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin. The interest of this third order, therefore, has not the same connexion with the general interest of the society as that of the other two...the wages of labor being lowered, the owners of what stock remains in the society can bring their goods at less expense to market than before, and less stock being employed in supplying the market than before, they can sell them dearer. Their goods cost them less, and they get more for
them… The great fortunes so suddenly and so easily acquired in Bengal and the other British settlements in the East Indies, may satisfy us that, as the wages of labor are very low, so the profits of stock are very high in those ruined countries..."--Adam Smith, "Wealth of Nations."
My own quarrel with Reich is in his statement:
Too timid to attach "capitalism" - so goes to the false distinction. Hey, Reich - capitalism is all about profit and nothing but profit.
What about that don't you get?
bread_and_roses
(6,335 posts)I'm about staggering with exhaustion tonight - will read it tomorrow.
mother earth
(6,002 posts)this group never disappoint. I love the sense of humor, the brashness, the intelligence & the far reaching ripples of what is on display here EVERY day. 
And somehow, through all the BS of what is our present day circumstances, hope of something better & what will be is emerging...quietly in the background amidst unprecedented greed. 
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Peter Pan is a character created by Scottish novelist and playwright J. M. Barrie. A mischievous boy who can fly and who never ages, Peter Pan spends his never-ending childhood adventuring on the small island of Neverland as the leader of his gang the Lost Boys, interacting with mermaids, Indians, fairies, pirates, and occasionally ordinary children from the world outside of Neverland. In addition to two distinct works by Barrie, the character has been featured in a variety of media and merchandise, both adapting and expanding on Barrie's works.
Peter Pan first appeared in a section of The Little White Bird, a 1902 novel written by Barrie for adults.
The character's best-known adventure debuted on 27 December 1904, in the stage play Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up. The play was adapted and expanded somewhat as a novel, published in 1911 as Peter and Wendy (later as Peter Pan and Wendy, and still later as Peter Pan).
Following the highly successful debut of the 1904 play, Barrie's publishers, Hodder and Stoughton, extracted chapters 13–18 of The Little White Bird and republished them in 1906 under the title Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, with the addition of illustrations by Arthur Rackham.
Barrie never described Peter's appearance in detail, even in the novel Peter and Wendy, leaving much of it to the imagination of the reader and the interpretation of anyone adapting the character. Barrie mentions in Peter and Wendy that Peter Pan still had all of his baby teeth. He describes him as a beautiful boy with a beautiful smile, "clad in skeleton leaves and the juices that flow from trees". In the play, Peter's outfit is made of autumn leaves and cobwebs. His name and playing the flute suggest the mythological character Pan.
Traditionally, the character has been played on stage by an adult woman.
In Peter Pan in Scarlet, Geraldine McCaughrean adds to the description of his appearance, mentioning his blue eyes, and saying that his hair is light (or at least any colour lighter than black). In this novel, Never Land has moved on to autumn, so Peter wears a tunic of jay feathers and maple leaves. In the Starcatcher stories written by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson, Peter has carrot-orange hair and bright blue eyes.
In the Disney films, Peter wears an outfit that was easier to animate, consisting of a short-sleeved green tunic and tights apparently made of cloth, and a cap with a red feather in it. He has pointed elf-like ears, and his hair is a very red auburn. In the live-action 2003 film, he is portrayed by Jeremy Sumpter, who has blond hair and blue eyes, and his outfit is made of leaves and vines. In Hook, he is played as an adult by Robin Williams with dark brown hair, but in flashbacks to his youth his hair is more orangish. In this film his ears appear pointed only when he is Peter Pan, not Peter Banning; his Pan clothing resembles the Disney outfit.
The notion of a boy who would never grow up was based on J. M. Barrie's older brother who died in an ice-skating accident the day before he turned 14, and thus always stayed a young boy in his mother's mind. The "boy who wouldn't grow up" has appeared at a variety of ages. In his original appearance in The Little White Bird he was only seven days old. Although his age is not stated in Barrie's later play and novel, his characterization is clearly years older. The book states that he has all of his baby teeth, and Barrie's intended model for the statue of Peter that was erected in Kensington Gardens was a set of photos of Michael Llewelyn Davies taken at the age of six. Early illustrations of the character generally appeared to be that age or perhaps a few years older. In the 1953 Disney adaptation and its 2002 sequel, Peter appears to be in late childhood, between 10 and 13 years old. (The actor who provided the voice in 1953 was 15-year-old Bobby Driscoll.) In the 2003 film, Jeremy Sumpter was 13 at the time filming started; by the end of filming he was 14 and had grown several inches taller. In the movie Hook, Peter is said to have left Neverland many years earlier, forsaking his eternal youth and aging normally. When remembering his buried past, Peter is shown as a baby, and little boy, and also a near-teenager, suggesting that the aging process does not entirely stop in Neverland until puberty or just before, or that Peter aged a little bit every time he left Neverland to come to the real world. When Peter says "I remember you being a lot bigger," in the final duel, Hook answers, "to a 10-year-old I'm huge." He is portrayed by Robin Williams, who turned 40 during production of the film.
...wikipedia...
Tansy_Gold
(17,855 posts)Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, whose sons provided much of the inspiration for Peter Pan, was the daughter of novelist and cartoonist George du Maurier, whose novel Trilby gave the world the character "Svengali" and served as inspiration for Gaston Le Roux's novel Phantom of the Opera
Sylvia's brother was the actor Gerald du Maurier, who achieved his fame performing in J. M. Barrie's plays, notably The Admirable Crichton and as both George Darling and Captain Hook in the premier of Peter Pan. Gerald in turn was father to authors Angela and Daphne du Maurier. Daphne, like the Davies boys and being the same age as they, called James Barrie "Uncle Jim."
DemReadingDU
(16,000 posts)I learn such great bits of history here.
Tansy_Gold
(17,855 posts)They, too, lived in a world that was rapidly changing -- politically, technologically, socially. The more I read about them, the more I'm fascinated by the way they looked at that world and reacted to it.
mother earth
(6,002 posts)chocolates...lol....you just never know what you will learn, or from who, it's all good.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)The European Roller Derby....Greece and Germany are playing chicken!
Greece presses down the accelerator and heads for Germany. “If you force us out of the euro, all of Europe will go up in flames,” say the Greeks.
“Oh yeah?” say the Germans, turning on the speed in their Mercedes, “ve’ll see about that. Ve haf airbags!”
And we watch. Wonder. Which one will lose his nerve? Or will they crash head-on? Nobody knows for sure. But nobody wants to have money in Greek banks…in Europe’s periphery banks…or even in euros…when they find out.
.................................................................................
...what they used to say in Soviet Russia: no rumor is confirmed until it is officially denied…De La Rue, an English company that prints most of the world’s currencies, would not say whether an order for drachma had come through or not....
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Uncivilized times call for uncivilized investments.
Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s partner in crime at Berkshire Hathaway, told CNBC recently, “I think gold is a great thing to sew into your garments if you’re a Jewish family in Vienna in 1939, but I think civilized people don’t buy gold. They invest in productive businesses.” In a way, Munger is correct. Gold is uncivilized in the sense that it functions best when civilization functions worst. The more uncivilized a society becomes, the more civilized gold becomes. So the easiest way to dismiss this statement is to say that maybe it’s 1939 again and maybe this time “we’re all Jewish families in Vienna.”
...Charlie might be right if the world were, indeed, civilized. But maybe the modern world isn’t as civilized as he thinks. Part of what made the world so uncivilized in 1939 was unsound money. The abandonment of the classical gold standard in 1914 made the expansion of the Warfare state possible. The equally unsound system that emerged from World War I — including the Treaty of Versailles — virtually guaranteed that monetary and fiscal instability would lead to political instability. Radical parties like the Nazis flourished...
Since 1997, Berkshire’s shares have declined relative to this forever unproductive asset. The nearby chart depicts the trailing 10-year return of gold since 2007. Thus, the first data point on this chart shows the return an investor would have received from buying gold or Berkshire Hathaway in 1997. Moving across the chart to the right shows subsequent 10-year time frames. Bottom line: Based on a 10-year holding period, there has not been a single moment since late 1997 what an investor would have been better off buying Berkshire Hathaway instead of gold...This lengthy underperformance by Berkshire may explain Buffett’s and Munger’s very vocal and public hostility toward gold. Or maybe that’s just a function of both men living most of their adult lives in an era where the monetary system was not disintegrating. They are unable to imagine it. But the chart above isn’t an indictment of the investment acumen of Buffett and Munger. It’s an indictment of the world’s fiat monetary system!
A civilized society with civilized people has sound money. An economy with sound money has price stability. This stability allows for long-term planning and investment. This stability rewards investors for identifying which businesses are the most productive and efficient users of shareholder capital. For these exact reasons, William McKinley campaigned for President in 1896 and again in 1900 as a champion of the gold standard. He won…twice. But just 12 years after his assassination in 1901, the Era of Incivility began: The Federal Reserve came into being. Just 20 years after that, FDR confiscated all privately held gold. And 38 years after that, Nixon cut the dollar’s last remaining ties to gold, thereby establishing today’s very uncivilized “fiat money” system...
westerebus
(2,976 posts)Any one want to share what they are thinking? We can include anything as its all money all the time.
I think they are trying to manage the Grexit.
But. But, Spain scares the living shit out of them.
Bianka, I think I spelled that right, isn't 2 billion euros in the hole, it's 9 billion. Oops.
If there's a white knight out there some place, they better show up soon.
China has a load of worry in their own back yard.
The euro is still too high making euro companies unattractive, but, that could change to.
Dollar is stronger and that's going to bump inflation and reduce exports.
If the euro bonds go off all the hedges are cross leveraged ala JP Morgue and there's no way to pull the plug on that baby.
Credit will freeze in place like the last time for the TBTF's.
So all that means I still have to get up and go to work and pay taxes.
There is no joy in Mudville.
Well at the bank anyway.
Baseball will be played. Hot dogs ate. Beer guzzled. Ice cream dripped.
That's what makes America great.
Po_d Mainiac
(4,183 posts)The reasons to hold metals (blued/stainless/precious) have only strengthened over the last decade plus.
Ice Cream and Arctic Ice ain't gonna be the only things melting in the coming months
Po_d Mainiac
(4,183 posts)The People’s Bank of China, the central bank, has been hinting that it is purchasing. “No asset is safe now,” said the PBOC’s Zhang Jianhua at the end of last month. “The only choice to hedge risks is to hold hard currency — gold.” He also said it was smart strategy to buy on market dips. Analysts naturally jumped on his comment as proof that China, the world’s fifth-largest holder of the metal, is in the market for more.
http://azizonomics.com/2012/01/31/the-new-goldbuggery/
Demeter
(85,373 posts)See you in the morning, folks. Feel free to wax rhapsodic on anything, just keep it reasonably clean.
xchrom
(108,903 posts)
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Clap your hands if you believe....the fairies should be unionized!
I worked all morning, to avoid the weather, and mostly succeeded. Now it's horrible out, and I can visit with friends and castigate enemies..
xchrom
(108,903 posts)The more European leaders talked at a dinner last Wednesday, the grimmer Angela Merkel looked. One after another, they spoke out in favor of the joint assumption of debt and against the strict austerity course Berlin is calling for. The chancellor stared silently at the man who was responsible for this change of mood -- France's new president, François Hollande, who noted with satisfaction that there was "an outlook for euro bonds in Europe."
Merkel disagreed, saying that euro bonds are not the right tool, but to no avail. Only a minority stood behind the German leader. Even European Council President Herman Van Rompuy said, at the end of the dinner, that there should be "no taboos," and that he would examine the idea of euro bonds. "Herman," Merkel blurted out, "you should at least say that some at this table are of a different opinion."
Merkel's world had been turned upside down. For the first time in years, the chancellor did not set the tone at an EU summit, nor did she and the French president agree on joint positions in a backroom before the meeting.
Much depends on whether Merkel and Hollande will be able to find common ground in the fight over Europe's common currency. They have been arguing for weeks over whether more austerity or more spending can save the euro. Now the dispute has reached a new level of escalation. After Hollande's statements on Wednesday, Merkel is now presenting her opposing concept. In a six-point plan, she calls for deep-seated structural reforms for Europe. Under the plan, government-owned businesses are to be sold off, protections against wrongful dismissal relaxed and obstructive regulations for companies removed. There is also talk of special economic zones and privatization agencies based on the model of Germany's Treuhand trust, created at the time of reunification to sell off most of former East Germany's state-owned enterprises. In short, the Mediterranean region is to become more like Germany, but with better weather.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)I felt for her when W was feeling her up. But that was long ago. Now, she's really showing her limitations.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Scores of federal regulators are stationed inside JPMorgan Chase’s Manhattan headquarters, but none of them were assigned to the powerful unit that recently disclosed a multibillion trading loss. Roughly 40 examiners from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and 70 staff members from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency are embedded in the nation’s largest bank. They are typically assigned to the departments undertaking the greatest risks, like the structured products trading desk. Even as the chief investment office swelled in size and made increasingly large bets, regulators did not put any examiners in the unit’s offices in London or New York, according to current and former regulators who spoke only on condition of anonymity.
Senior JPMorgan executives assured the bank’s watchdogs after the financial crisis that the chief investment office, with hundreds of billions in investments, was not taking risks that would be a cause for concern, people briefed on the matter said. Just weeks before the trading losses became public, bank officials also dismissed the worry of a senior New York Fed examiner about the mounting size of the bets, according to current Fed officials. The lapses have raised questions about who, if anyone, was policing the chief investment office and whether regulators were sufficiently independent. Instead of putting the JPMorgan unit under regular watch, the comptroller’s office and the Fed chose to examine it periodically.
The bank pushback also suggests that JPMorgan had sway over its regulators, an influence that several said was enhanced by the bank’s charismatic chief executive, Jamie Dimon, long considered Washington’s favorite banker.
Now, as regulators scramble to determine whether the chief investment office took inappropriate risks, some former Fed officials are asking whether the investigation should be spearheaded by the New York Fed, where Mr. Dimon has a seat on the board. Some lawmakers and former regulators also have reservations about the comptroller’s office, which is investigating the trade and was the primary regulator for JPMorgan’s chief investment unit....
MORE. LET THE FINGER-POINTING BEGIN!
dixiegrrrrl
(60,010 posts)and
"suggests that JPMorgan had sway over its regulators,"
After thousands of stories, whistlblowing, hell, the hundreds of articles posted HERE....
we now get to read that the investigators "suspect" loose regulations????
Now I know what that bull at Wall Street is really covered with.....
Demeter
(85,373 posts)So I guess you’ve heard about the recent initial public offering that didn’t turn out the way it was supposed to. The company’s Wall Street advisers misjudged the market, and, on its first day of trading, the stock went a little haywire. Then it slowly sank, dropping around 10 percent over the next month.
No, I’m not talking about Facebook. I am referring to Splunk, an 8-year-old, money-losing data analytics company that went public five weeks ago. Splunk’s investment bankers priced the stock at $17 a share. But it closed its first day of trading at $35.48 — a gain of 109 percent — before declining over the next month. (It has rebounded in the last week.)
The offering raised $229.5 million for the company. But if the bankers had done a better job of pricing the shares — and had come closer to the $35 a share that investors were willing to pay — the company would have reaped twice as much. Putting cash in a company’s coffers is supposed to be the whole purpose of an I.P.O. Isn’t it?
Who got all that extra money? The hedge fund managers and Wall Street insiders who were allocated shares — and who immediately flipped those shares for a quick, easy profit. That’s how I.P.O.s work nowadays: It is assumed that the offering will be underpriced, and anybody who can get shares at the I.P.O. price is guaranteed a killing. This pattern has become the very definition of a successful public offering...Compared to Splunk, the Facebook I.P.O. was, indeed, a disaster. For starters, there was only the tiniest initial bump, so the Wall Street speculators did not make their usual killing. What’s more, because the company decided, late in the game, to issue 25 percent more shares — and because Morgan Stanley aggressively priced the stock, at $38 a share — Facebook maximized its take, at $16 billion. Long-term investors should be happy about this outcome; the company now has plenty of capital as it competes with Google and the other Internet big boys....virtually everyone who bought Facebook on that first day was making a one-day, get-rich-quick calculation. It didn’t work out. Too bad.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)...Poor Zuckerberg. He’s got all those Facebook shares. And they’re dropping in price. The stock closed a bit over $31yesterday...and then kept sinking... It was down to $30 in afterhours trading.
What did you expect? The company has sales of $4 billion. IF...IF...it were able to claw out a 10% profit margin...and IF a fair multiple for its earnings were, say, 10...the company would be worth $4 billion. Not $100 billion. Four billion dollars. And instead of having shares valued at $15 billion, Mr. Zuckerberg would have shares worth about $800 million...
http://dailyreckoning.com/the-delusion-of-regulating-risk/
Demeter
(85,373 posts)NOW THAT'S CHUTZPAH!
I'D BE VERY AFRAID THAT THE NEW "RENTERS" WOULD MAKE SURE THE BANK'S DISTRESSED PROPERTY BECAME EVEN MORE SO.....
http://www.latimes.com/business/realestate/la-fi-mortgage-to-rent-20120526,0,2758365.story
Bank of America is testing a mortgage-to-lease program in four states. The idea: Instead of evicting homeowners who face foreclosure, it lets them stay as tenants and sells the homes to investors.
Unable to qualify for modifications on Bank of America mortgages, a few of California's most distressed homeowners are being offered one last chance to stay in their homes: Become renters instead. Testing a mortgage-to-lease program in the Golden State, Bank of America Corp. sent 300 letters this week inviting borrowers without other options to apply. An additional 1,500 letters will go out in the next few weeks as BofA — which also is testing the program in three other states — evaluates whether a national rollout is feasible.
BofA plans to sell the homes to investors. It typically would recoup far less than what's owed but would come out far ahead compared with where it would be after evicting borrowers, making "cash for keys" payments to help them move and selling empty and often vandalized foreclosures in the troubled housing market.
Evicted homeowners tend to look for single-family homes to rent in their own neighborhoods anyhow, so why not let them exchange the deed to the home for a lease, BofA executive Ron D. Sturzenegger said. "It's good for us, it's good for the borrower and ultimately good for the community," said Sturzenegger, who oversees 50,000 employees handling workouts and foreclosures on troubled loans.
MORE
GEE, HOW BIG-HEARTED! WHAT GENEROSITY FROM THE BANKSTER WHO WAS BAILED OUT BY THE TAXPAYERS...GAH! I'M GOING TO GO WASH MY MIND OUT WITH SOAP!
Demeter
(85,373 posts)basically, the investors rent to the former owner for 3 years max, after which, the former owner has a credit rating sufficient to try to buy a house...again. At much elevated prices, I'm sure. Take another ride on the housing go round? Are they serious? Maybe a young couple, but you'll find there aren't that many in foreclosure, because they never stood a chance in the first place.
Anybody ever hear of the "company store"? Now we are going to have "company houses".
Demeter
(85,373 posts)In one short decade, home ownership has gone from being the Holy Grail of middle-class financial achievement -- the biggest and most lucrative investment most of us would ever make, and the one most reliably likely to pay off -- to a very risky financial ball-and-chain that more and more of us are going way out of our way to avoid.
To be sure, rental housing is no joy. You're answerable to the landlord for every picture nail, plugged drain and loose window; and you get to endure bad landscaping, cheap appliances and paint and carpet colors not even Martha Stewart could work with. But if the trade-off is between spending your life co-existing with your landlord's surreal aesthetic choices or watching your life savings turn into six-figure debt as the value of your house sinks beneath the waves, more and more of us are choosing to suck it up and embrace the charms of bubblegum pink bathroom tile...The economic crash has created some deep ontological shifts in how we value homes and home ownership. The early signals are starting to suggest that we're on a return trip back to a much older American tradition of home ownership – one that assessed a home's primary value not on the basis of its price on the open market, but for what it offered intrinsically to families in terms of security, stability and self-sufficiency.
Recent years have seen a boom in slow food and slow money. Now, some of us are also starting to think about the virtue of slow home ownership as well....Now that the boom has gone bust, a lot of Americans are left wondering if there's any reason at all to buy a house now. Seen from the perspective of the high boom years, home ownership now offers no value proposition at all. If it's not going to double your money in a decade, then what's the point? ...Despite the fact that homes are no longer sizzling investments, the bald fact still remains: you need a place to live. And in this deflated market, some people are doing the math and coming to the surprising realization that owning a home in today's market can be cheaper than renting...
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Peter is mainly an exaggerated stereotype of a boastful and careless boy. He is quick to point out how great he is, even when such claims are questionable (such as when he congratulates himself for Wendy's successful reattachment of his shadow).
Peter has a nonchalant, devil-may-care attitude, and is fearlessly cocky when it comes to putting himself in danger. Barrie writes that when Peter thought he was going to die on Marooner's Rock, he felt scared, yet he felt only one shudder run through him when any other person would have felt scared up until death. With his blissful unawareness of the tragedy of death, he says, "To die will be an awfully big adventure". He repeats this line as an adult in the film Hook during the battle with Hook near the film's climax. He then inverts the phrase at the film's very end claiming "To live will be an awfully big adventure."
In some variations of the story and some spin-offs, Peter can also be quite nasty and selfish. In the Disney adaptation of the tale, Peter appears very judgmental and pompous (for example, he calls the Lost Boys "blockheads" and when the Darling children say that they should leave for home at once, he gets the wrong message and angrily assumes that they want to grow up). Nonetheless, he has a strong sense of justice and is always quick to help those in danger.
In the 2003 live-action film, Peter Pan is sensitive about the subject of "growing up". When confronted by Hook about Wendy's growing up, marrying and eventually "shutting the window" on Peter, he becomes very depressed and finally gives up on Wendy.
Abilities
Peter's archetypal ability is his unending youth. In "Peter and Wendy" it is explained that Peter must forget his own adventures and what he learns about the world in order to stay child-like. The fact that the other Lost Boys are growing up and able to be killed in Peter and Wendy contradicts this idea. The unauthorized prequels by Barry and Pearson attribute Peter's everlasting youth to his exposure to starstuff, a magical substance which has fallen to earth.
Peter's ability to fly is explained somewhat, but inconsistently. In The Little White Bird he is able to fly because he – like all babies – is part bird. In the play and novel, he teaches the Darling children to fly using a combination of "lovely wonderful thoughts" (which became "happy thoughts" in Disney's film) and fairy dust; it is unclear whether he is serious about "happy thoughts" being required (it was stated in the novel that this was merely a silly diversion from the fairy dust being the true source), or whether he requires the fairy dust himself. In Hook, the adult Peter is unable to fly until he remembers his "happy thought". The ability to fly is also attributed to starstuff – apparently the same thing as fairy dust – in the Starcatcher prequels.
Peter has an effect on the whole of Never Land and its inhabitants when he is there. Barrie states that although Never Land appears different to every child, the island "wakes up" when he returns from his trip to London. In the chapter "The Mermaid Lagoon" in the book Peter and Wendy, Barrie writes that there is almost nothing that Peter cannot do. He is a skilled swordsman, rivaling even Captain Hook, whose hand he cut off in a duel. He has remarkably keen vision and hearing. He is skilled in mimicry, copying the voice of Hook, and the tick-tock of the Crocodile. In the 2003 film, the mermaids speak by making dolphin-like noises, which Peter can both understand and speak.
In both Peter Pan and Wendy and Peter Pan in Scarlet, there are various mentions of Peter's ability to imagine things into existence, such as food, though this ability plays a more central role in Peter Pan in Scarlet. He also creates imaginary windows and doors as a kind of physical metaphor for ignoring or shunning his companions. He is said to be able to feel danger when it is near. In Peter Pan in Scarlet, it says that when Curly's puppy licks Peter, it licks off a lot of fairy dust, which may be interpreted to mean that he has become fairy-like to the point of producing his own dust, but could also simply mean that he spends so much time with fairies that he is coated in their dust.
In Peter and Wendy, Barrie states that the Peter Pan legend Mrs Darling heard as a child was that when children died, he accompanied them part of the way to their destination so that they would not be scared; he thus resembles the Greek god Hermes in his role as a psychopomp.
In the original play, Peter states that no one must ever touch him (though he does not know why), and the stage instructions specify that no one does so throughout the play. Wendy approaches Peter to give him a "thimble" (kiss), but is prevented by Tinker Bell.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)“Louisiana is the world’s prison capital. The state imprisons more of its people, per head, than any of its U.S. counterparts. First among Americans means first in the world. Louisiana’s incarceration rate is nearly triple Iran’s, seven times China’s and 10 times Germany’s.”
That paragraph opens a devastating eight-part series published this month by The Times-Picayune of New Orleans about how the state’s largely private prison system profits from high incarceration rates and tough sentencing, and how many with the power to curtail the system actually have a financial incentive to perpetuate it.
The picture that emerges is one of convicts as chattel and a legal system essentially based on human commodification.
First, some facts from the series:
• One in 86 Louisiana adults is in the prison system, which is nearly double the national average.
• More than 50 percent of Louisiana’s inmates are in local prisons, which is more than any other state. The next highest state is Kentucky at 33 percent. The national average is 5 percent.
• Louisiana leads the nation in the percentage of its prisoners serving life without parole.
• Louisiana spends less on local inmates than any other state.
• Nearly two-thirds of Louisiana’s prisoners are nonviolent offenders. The national average is less than half.
In the early 1990s, the state was under a federal court order to reduce overcrowding, but instead of releasing prisoners or loosening sentencing guidelines, the state incentivized the building of private prisons. But, in what the newspaper called “a uniquely Louisiana twist,” most of the prison entrepreneurs were actually rural sheriffs. They saw a way to make a profit and did... It also was a chance to employ local people, especially failed farmers forced into bankruptcy court by a severe drop in the crop prices...But in order for the local prisons to remain profitable, the beds, which one prison operator in the series distastefully refers to as “honey holes,” must remain full. That means that on almost a daily basis, local prison officials are on the phones bartering for prisoners with overcrowded jails in the big cities. It also means that criminal sentences must remain stiff, which the sheriff’s association has supported. This has meant that Louisiana has some of the stiffest sentencing guidelines in the country. Writing bad checks in Louisiana can earn you up to 10 years in prison. In California, by comparison, jail time would be no more than a year. There is another problem with this unsavory system: prisoners who wind up in these local for-profit jails, where many of the inmates are short-timers, get fewer rehabilitative services than those in state institutions, where many of the prisoners are lifers. That is because the per-diem per prisoner in local prisons is half that of state prisons.
In short, the system is completely backward. Lifers at state prisons can learn to be welders, plumbers or auto mechanics — trades many will never practice as free men — while prisoners housed in local prisons, and are certain to be released, gain no skills and leave jail with nothing more than “$10 and a bus ticket.” These ex-convicts, with almost no rehabilitation and little prospect for supporting themselves, return to the already-struggling communities that were rendered that way in part because so many men are being extracted on such a massive scale. There the cycle of crime often begins again, with innocent people caught in the middle and impressionable young eyes looking on. According to The Times-Picayune: “In five years, about half of the state’s ex-convicts end up behind bars again.” This suits the prison operators just fine. They need them to come back to the “honey holes.”
Demeter
(85,373 posts)“That is how the American Empire functions,” concludes Roberts. Instead of plundering foreign resources to finance itself, the American Empire is always looking to inflate the next financial bubble. Each of these serial bubbles has the effect of “extracting” wealth from the citizens — by drawing both savings and credit into overly inflated asset classes that then implode.
As the bubbles inflate, robust tax revenues flow to the federal government. As the bubbles implode, tax-payer dollars flow to the connected Wall Street elite. Thus, over time, savings pass from the wallets of citizens to the pockets of scoundrels in Washington and on Wall Street.
For confirmation of this assertion we need look no further than the top o’ the 1%, the Oracle of Omaha. Peter Schweizer of Reason reckoned in his March exposé on Warren Buffett that this folksy fellow “needed the TARP bailout more than most.”
Let’s run through the numbers. Berkshire Hathaway firms in total received $95 billion in TARP money. Berkshire, you’ll recall, held stock in Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and American Express. Not only did these companies receive TARP funds… they also dipped into the FDIC’s treasury to back their debt. Total bailout: $130 billion. TARP-enabled companies accounted for 30% of the Oracle’s publicly disclosed stock portfolio.
Read more: Borrow-As-You-Go Politics http://dailyreckoning.com/borrow-as-you-go-politics/#ixzz1w0U1B6Hr
Demeter
(85,373 posts)It would be very short, although the research would take infinitely longer...but my stomach wouldn't turn.
mother earth
(6,002 posts)
xchrom
(108,903 posts)
Demeter
(85,373 posts)I did the entire route last night, finished at 1:30.
It's funny how every time I do it, there are no errors, and the count comes out right...but if I had to do the whole thing myself, in the winter...and it may be moot soon anyway....they are not reordering envelopes. or any of those normal supplies...the sign of a business going out of business....the little things disappear.
And the beatings of the hired help intensify. The general threatening of people with immediate dismissal. Bundles wrapped so sloppy, it's a wonder they don't explode upon touching. Yep, I'll be looking for an alternate amusement for Weds and Sat. soon....
It's depressing only because I've been looking, and not finding anything. Not anywhere. Of course, given the lousy newspaper service around here, it's hard to search, and the online search is non-existent, too. Door-to-door or word of mouth may be the only way to get employment these days...
xchrom
(108,903 posts)NEW FIGURES showing 24,000 people lost their jobs in the Netherlands during April alone have added fuel to the debate here over austerity versus growth – and prompted the opposition Labour Party to propose a left-wing coalition with the Socialists after the September election.
The figures show unemployment has hit a six-year high of 6.2 per cent, bringing the jobless total to 489,000 – the worst possible news for caretaker prime minister Mark Rutte and his Liberal-Christian Democrat coalition, which fell last month while attempting to agree budget cuts.
The government’s case wasn’t helped by trenchant analysis yesterday from the independent Central Planning Bureau (CPB), which revealed that worst hit were education and the public sector, where 27,000 people lost their jobs in the first three months of this year.
“The government has given unemployment a nudge in the wrong direction,” the CPB said. “People are not more likely to lose their jobs than they used to be, but if you do lose your job, you’re less likely to find a new one.”
xchrom
(108,903 posts)
?ts=1338124367
ONE WEEK into the campaign for the second Greek general election, to be held on June 17th, a poll shows the country’s main anti-bailout leftist party has overtaken its principal promemorandum conservative rival.
Support for the Radical Left Coalition (Syriza), led by Alexis Tsipras, is now at 30 per cent, an all-time high and a solid four points ahead of New Democracy, according to the Public Issue/ Kathimerini poll, which was published late on Thursday.
Growth in support for the two main parties has been at the expense of the plethora of parties that failed to make the parliamentary threshold in the inconclusive May 6th contest and reflects the increasing polarisation around the memorandum issue.
Translated into seats, Syriza’s showing could give it 126 of 300 MPs in the parliament, thanks to the 50-seat bonus awarded to the first party. But this would leave it well short of an overall majority and would require it to enter a coalition with at least three other parties if it is to take power.
xchrom
(108,903 posts)GERMANY IS to propose special low-tax economic zones in crisis-hit euro zone countries to promote growth.
The plan, seen by Der Spiegel news magazine, also proposes setting up national privatisation agencies similar to the “Treuhand” that operated in eastern Germany after unification. The Treuhandanstalt, to give it its full name, was the German state agency that oversaw the restructuring and privatisation of East German enterprises after reunification in 1990. It ceased operating in 1994.
The new plan is being devised as an alternative to growth proposals by French president François Hollande, which have put Berlin under pressure.
According to the document, special economic zones in crisis countries could attract investors with the promise of lower taxes and a lighter regulation regime.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Don't answer that.
There's a massive Low over south Dakota, and the jet stream has returned to its summer latitude, meaning hot and humid, and the rain will miss us today...unless something changes, of course.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)As our political system sputters, a wave of innovative thinking and bold experimentation is quietly sweeping away outmoded economic models. In 'New Economic Visions', a special five-part AlterNet series edited by Economics Editor Lynn Parramore in partnership with political economist Gar Alperovitz of the Democracy Collaborative, creative thinkers come together to explore the exciting ideas and projects that are shaping the philosophical and political vision of the movement that could take our economy back.
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As resistance has grown to America’s widening gulf between the “1 percent” and the rest of the population, something new has exploded in America’s communities; “community wealth building” is an explicit strategy to democratize the ownership of wealth from the ground up. With traditional regulatory and tax-and-spend approaches faltering at every level, the notion that we should create new democratic economic institutions to build wealth, community by community, is quietly gaining traction. We now have the potential for larger and longer-term transformation throughout the nation.
Power for the People
The central idea is simple: people join together through some form of public, community or employee-owned business to meet local needs and thereby regain a measure of local economic democracy and control. Partly self-help, partly community mobilization, and partly sketches for future system-wide expansion, community wealth-building efforts can be found in virtually every region of the country. The range of efforts is vast. Community wealth-building institutions include community development corporations, community development financial institutions, social enterprises, community land trusts, employee-owned enterprises, and cooperatives. All pool capital in ways that create new jobs and anchor jobs in communities.
The efforts also define a new approach to challenging corporate power— a strategy that changes who owns, controls and benefits from the underlying economic wealth of the system. It involves not merely replacing private capital, but displacing it through developing community ownership of business. In other words, profits should flow to workers, consumers or the community—rather than outside investors. And these businesses need to succeed! Increasingly, too, ecological concerns are structured into the very core of many models.
Transformation Everywhere
Examples of the new approach are evident around the world, including worker-cooperatives in Argentina; the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh (which, with its founder, Muhammad Yunus, won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize); and the Mondragón cooperative network in northern Spain, which employs nearly 85,000. Non-profit social enterprise is a community wealth building strategy through which nonprofits independently secure resources to meet their missions in the absence of adequate government support.
Sharing the Wealth
Perhaps the most visible form of a community wealth building is the cooperative. More than 130 million Americans are currently members of a co-op or credit union. Because many Americans own shares in more than one co-op or credit union, the total number of co-op memberships in the United States exceeds 350 million. Overall, a 2009 University of Wisconsin study found that nearly 30,000 cooperatives in the U.S. account for more than $3 trillion in assets, $514 billion in total annual revenue, and provide 856,000 jobs. Credit unions are governed by the core cooperative principle of one-member, one-vote. Importantly, they make their loans directly to their members – member-owners of credit unions can be confident that their deposits will be reemployed productively through loans that help finance local consumer purchases, create jobs and build wealth at home.
Another powerful community wealth-building mechanism is the state-owned bank. In North Dakota, a state-owned bank has operated since 1918, earning the state more than $300 million over the past decade, while helping support local banks and local community investment. Legislation exploring or creating such banks has been introduced this past year in more than a dozen states, including Arizona, California, Hawaii, Illinois, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Virginia, and Washington.
As experience with the various democratized forms has become increasingly enriched over time, innovative strategies of collaboration among enterprises and/or with local governments have also begun to emerge. In California, a comprehensive, community-owned development project consciously links individual and collective wealth building in the diverse working-class Diamond neighborhood in southeast San Diego. With the support of the Jacobs Family Foundation, the community raised philanthropic and government funding to develop a commercial and cultural complex, anchored by a shopping center. A key element was the community public offering, which provided community residents and employees an exclusive opportunity to buy shares (valued at $200 and capped at $10,000) for a total 20 percent ownership stake in the project. As one community owner noted, “That we own stock, and that we have an opportunity to make a difference in what type of business goes in the community [is unbelievable]. We have some say-so in the community environment.”
The Neighborhood Unity Foundation also has a 20 percent ownership share that provides it with a sustainable source of funding for its community wealth building efforts. The Jacobs Family Foundation, which retains 60 percent ownership, intends to turn over its share to community owners by 2018. Ultimately, area residents will own 50 percent of the project and the neighborhood foundation the other 50 percent, retaining the profits generated to benefit the community rather than outside investors.
In Cleveland, Ohio, an integrated group of worker-owned companies, supported in part by the directed purchasing power of large hospitals and universities, has opened a major new vector of urban strategy. The first of Cleveland’s planned network of cooperatives opened its doors for business in September 2009. The co-op industrial scale laundry is a state-of-the-art, ecologically green, commercial facility capable of handling 10 million pounds of healthcare linen a year. Its sophisticated business plan provides all employee-owners a living wage and health benefits. If current projections are realized after seven years on the job each employee will have a $65,000 equity stake in the enterprise.
In October 2009 a second employee-owned, community-based energy company began large-scale installations of solar panels for the city’s largest nonprofit health, education and municipal buildings. (Additionally, it provides home weatherization services.) A third business scheduled to start operations this year is a year-round hydroponic food production greenhouse capable of producing three million head of lettuce and approximately 300,000 pounds of basil and other herbs a year.
More to Come
Many other enterprises are in the planning stage. Cleveland mayor Frank Jackson praised the co-ops for being "a model for how we can put our people back to work and rebuild our community." A growing number of economic development officials, tired of chasing corporations with public subsidy dollars, like the idea of creating anchored, community-owned enterprises that won’t get up and move. Already, the Cleveland co-ops have inspired efforts in other cities to develop similar networks, including Amarillo, Texas; Atlanta, Georgia; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Washington, DC.
Community wealth-building strategies offer powerful possibilities for longer-term change. First, in most instances, the new wealth-democratizing approaches provide responses (or suggestive directions of response) to economic dislocation and social pain where traditional political approaches have failed. Second, in many instances, they involve quite unusual local alliances, frequently including small business and religious leader support. Third, often the institutional trajectories have also begun to define (and secure) new supportive measures from local, state and national policy makers, thereby also beginning to define new directions for potential ongoing and more expansive policy and political action. Finally, that they are based in local, everyday experience may also lead to changes in the foundations of political and democratic cultural development over time.
Together the above suggest a long, slow developmental arc left in the wake of the failure of conventional politics and economics. And already, a growing number of Occupy activists are looking to worker-owned cooperatives as a way to self-fund the movement, displace corporate economic space, and develop an economic base that can support alternative economic and political formations. The path to building a truly democratic economy may be long, but the growing base of community wealth building institutions provide some building blocks that, over time, suggests the quiet development, potentially, of the basis for a community-sustaining economy that serves the interest of all Americans, rather than our current system which disproportionately benefits the wealthiest at the expense of the 99 percent.
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Steve Dubb is research director of the Democracy Collaborative at the University of Maryland.
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THIS IS ONE TO BOOKMARK!
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Three of Wall Street biggest and best-known financial institutions handled the Facebook IPO, so why were people immediately suspicious when the stock soared and then promptly tanked? Easy answer: Because three of Wall Street biggest and best-known financial institutions handled the Facebook IPO.
Each of them - Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase - has a history of exactly the kinds of unethical and/or illegal behavior that might, just might, explain what happened with Facebook...
RAP SHEETS FOLLOW
mother earth
(6,002 posts)Demeter
(85,373 posts)Peter does not know his parents. In Kensington Gardens Barrie wrote that he left them as an infant, and seeing the window closed and a new baby in the house when he returned, he assumed they no longer wanted him. In Starcatchers he is said to be an orphan, though his friends Molly and George discover who his parents are in Rundoon. In Hook, Peter remembers his parents, specifically his mother, who wanted him to grow up and go to the best schools in London to become a judge like his father and have a family of his own. After Peter "ran away" to Neverland, he returned to find his parents forgot about him and had another child (the gender of Peter's sibling is revealed to be another boy in Peter and Wendy).
Peter is the leader of the Lost Boys, a band of boys who were lost by their parents, and came to live in Neverland; it is reported that he "thins them out" when they start to grow up. He is best friends with Tinker Bell, a common fairy who is often jealously protective of him. His arch-enemy is Captain Hook, whose hand he cut off in a duel. Hook's crew, including Smee and Starkey, also consider him a foe. The Starcatchers books introduce additional foes: Slank, Lord Ombra, and Captain Nerezza.
From time to time Peter visits the real world, particularly around Kensington Gardens, and befriends children there. Wendy Darling, whom he recruited to be his "mother", is the most significant of them; he also brings her brothers John and Michael to Neverland at her request. It is hinted that Wendy has romantic feelings for Peter. In the 2003 film Peter Pan, the feeling is mutual, as the only unhappy thoughts that Captain Hook is able to use to take away Peter's ability to fly are thoughts of Wendy leaving him, growing up, and replacing him with a husband; Wendy is also able to save Peter by giving him her hidden kiss (signifying that Peter is her true love), which once again gives him the will to live. He later befriends Wendy's daughter Jane (and her subsequent daughter Margaret), and Peter and Wendy says that he will continue this pattern indefinitely. In Starcatchers he previously befriends Molly Aster and young George Darling.
Peter appears to be known to all the residents of Neverland, including the Indian princess Tiger Lily and her tribe, the mermaids, and the fairies.
In Hook, Peter states that the reason he wanted to grow up was to be a father. He married Wendy's granddaughter, Moira, and they have two children, Maggie and Jack.
In the 1953 Disney film version it is hinted at the end that Wendy's father George also met Peter Pan once and went to Neverland, when Mr. Darling, seeing the Pirate Ship flying through the air, remarks that he has a strange feeling he has seen the ship before, when he was very young.
In the adaptation of Peter Pan by French comic artist Loisel, Peter Pan is a bastard child and is kicked out of the house by his abusive mother. He does not have a good relationship with her; he tries to win her love by procuring gold for her from Neverland, yet she rejects him countless times. She is later murdered but Peter Pan eventually forgets her death and seems to remember his mother as a kindhearted, beautiful woman and believes she is still alive; it is also implied that Hook is his father, as Hook has a photo of Peter's mother, but this point never was developed in the series.
In the 2011 Neverland TV miniseries, the origin story of Peter Pan is discussed. It is hinted at multiple points throughout the TV special that Peter and the Indian Princess, Tiger Lily, have romantic feelings for each other. It is also mentioned that James "Jimmy" Hook was originally a friend of Peter's. Prior to the film, Hook loved Peter's mother and murdered Peter's father. Feeling guilty after Peter's mother died, Hook took care of Peter, until later on when Peter finds out and becomes angry with Hook, sparking his hatred towards him. The hatred became mutual when Peter (as in other adaptations) cut off Hook's hand and fed it to a crocodile.
Tansy_Gold
(17,855 posts)As I read through all that, I couldn't help but see a lot of commonalities with (the original) Star Wars trilogy, down to the cutting off of the hand.
Another cool day here in the desert southwest. I think I'll go water some plants.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)At Citigroup, shareholders had their say on CEO pay — and they yelled, “No damn way!”
Concerted action by shareholders, workers and public interest groups compelled corporate change in several other cases this spring as well.
At least three CEOs resigned. Executives truncated one shareholder meeting to 12 minutes. And across America and Europe, CEOs lamented the end of automatic approval for excessive executive compensation.
A wave of corporate change is rising because the rabble and the stockholders share an interest: decent corporate governance. To shareholders, decent means more long-term corporate vision providing reasonable returns and fewer risky, quick-profit schemes benefiting only executives. To workers, the unemployed, community and environmental groups, decent means operating corporations in the best interest of the nation, including treating workers with dignity and refraining from polluting. Together, the rabble and the shareholders wield power.
They’ll be exercising it inside and outside the ExxonMobil shareholder meeting next week. Some activist stockholders will seek approval of resolutions calling for the corporation to form a task force on climate change and to reduce greenhouse emissions.
Other activist shareholders, including my union, the United Steelworkers, will seek approval of a resolution calling for Rex Tillerson to give up either his CEO title or his chairmanship of the board of directors. Because corporate boards oversee executives, many experts believe holding both positions is a conflict of interest. The board, for example, determines executive pay. The ExxonMobil board gave its chairman, who also happens to the CEO, a big fat pay increase last year — a jump from $29 million to $34.9 million...
xchrom
(108,903 posts)PRETAX PROFITS at Dublin-based Goldman Sachs Bank (Europe) plc fell by 15 per cent to $49.1 million (€39.2 million) last year .
Operating income at the bank fell by 13 per cent from $87.1 million to $75.4 million, according to accounts filed in the companies office.
According to the directors’ report: “The reduction in profit is reflective of the business environment in which the bank operates. Total operating income decreased year on year, primarily due to a reduction in net interest spread, reduced gain on financial instruments at fair value offset by increased fees and commission income.”
The bank had total assets of $11.6 billion at the end of the year and the directors says “the growth in total assets is primarily driven by increased banking activity”.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Mary Glover, a Pittsburgh-area homeowner living on Social Security disability income, is taking on Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo, charging that they've violated federal and state consumer protection laws and breached contracts.
Yet, because of a decision by one judge, she and thousands of homeowners like her could be priced out of their ability to fight back in court against shady dealings by the nation's biggest banks. And while the decision in this case may seem exceptional, as Dahlia Lithwick and others have pointed out, it's part of a disturbing pattern of the courts shutting their doors to everyday litigants and class-action suits—and in some cases, literally handing corporations a playbook on how to get away with screwing over the little guy.
As she and her attorneys attempt to get Wells Fargo and Goldman to hand over documents relevant to her case, the banks' repeated stalling caused the judge to appoint a “special master” over the case—and required Glover to split the fees for this outside attorney equally with the defendants, banks with billions to spare (and, of course, billions in bailouts from the federal government as well). “It's a David and Goliath situation. When you escalate the costs, there's simply no way that a low-income litigant can keep up,” attorney Scott Michelman, with Public Citizen's Litigation Group, told AlterNet. Michelman and Public Citizen are representing Ms. Glover in a new federal lawsuit filed in the Third District Court of Appeals on May 24, charging that the appointment of the special master in this case will effectively stifle Ms. Glover's ability to go forward with her claims.
Much of the discussion of the mortgage crisis over the last four years has been focused on the refusal of banks to modify borrowers' mortgages so they can stay in their homes, or on illegal foreclosure proceedings. But Ms. Glover's case shows that achieving a mortgage modification is sometimes only the beginning of a homeowner's struggle with the big banks...Glover's original mortgage was taken out through Washington Mutual in 2002, and then sold to Goldman Sachs Mortgage, who retained WaMu to service the loan. In 2005, she was injured in an automobile accident and reached out to WaMu to modify her mortgage so she could remain in her home. According to Michelman, Glover's only income is her Social Security disability payments, which add up to around $10,000 a year.
Her original lawsuit states that WaMu's response was to threaten to evict her if she didn't immediately pay them $559.....
Demeter
(85,373 posts)The Ivy League classes of 2012 arrived on campuses in fall of 2008, just as the world economy was plunging into a Wall Street-driven freefall. Many were glad they weren’t out facing a nasty job market. But they worried about the future. They networked earlier. They fretted over internships. Their senior year started with the launch of the Occupy movement, which raised a collective fist at the financiers whose casino games wrecked the economy. A few students from elite colleges even joined the protest. Back in November, some Harvard students interrupted a Goldman Sachs recruiting event hosted by the Office of Career Services.
But now the show is over, and it’s time to don the caps and gowns. Will students be any less likely to flock to Wall Street this year?
A look at last year’s numbers: In 2011, finance was still the most popular career for Harvard graduates, luring up 17 percent of those who went from college to a full-time job. Finance accounted for 14 percent of the 2010 graduating class at Yale. Princeton, which wins the Lloyd Blankfein Booby Prize for the most Wall Street-crazed campus, sent 35.9 percent of those who had jobs at graduation into finance. That’s more than a third of the entire student body. This year, colleges are reporting more positive hiring trends than any in recent memory. But the strongest growth in job offers has come from -- surprise! -- Fortune 500 companies, investment banks and consulting firms.
That certainly doesn’t bode well for the hopes that the best and the brightest will be flocking into public service. Why do they still run to Wall Street? Are they greedy little lemmings, following the tribe? Are they scared shitless of the future? Or what?
The truth is that even at Princeton, there’s a sense the world is not necessarily waiting with open arms. The most privileged kids in the nation have been looking at the job market for the last couple of years and wondering if all that maniacal attention to performing well on test after test, joining the right clubs, and doing what’s expected is really going to pay off. Intense peer pressure means that everybody is looking at everybody else—those in the same class and those who came before and after -- and thinking, “How will I measure up?” Ivy League universities tend to self-select young people who have a more conformist sense of achievement. True, students at Harvard and Yale are unlikely to be forced to work at coffee shops to pay off loans. But they measure themselves by a different yardstick, and the idea of not living up to all the hype that they and their families have been fed about their world-class educations can induce panic even in the well-to-do. Plus, Ivy Leaguers, just like students everywhere, register cultural shifts, and with the U.S. economy still crawling and the Eurozone stumbling and JP Morgan losing billions, many of them now feel that they had better make a run for Wall Street and make as much money as they can before Armageddon.
Then there’s also what James Kwak and others have described as the wildly successful Wall Street recruiting machine. Flush with cash, Wall Street firms can hire consultants and recruiters who tailor their pitches to the audience, mimicking the kinds of tests, competitive environment and validation these young people have been trained to respond to...
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Advanced Publications, the group that publishes New Orleans' Times-Picayune newspaper, announced Thursday it would scale back its printed edition to three days a week and shift its emphasis to online coverage. Similar cost cutting measures are happening across the country but New Orleans will become the largest city without a daily newspaper and many residents still don't have internet at home.
The cuts come after the paper saw a steep drop in circulation. In 2005, before Hurricane Katrina, the paper had a daily circulation of 261,000; in March of this year, the circulation was 132,000.
According to a 2010 report from the Kaiser Foundation, 36 percent of residents in New Orleans do not have Internet access at home.
The New York Times points out a similar cost-cutting initiatives were recently announced in Alabama -- The Birmingham News, The Press-Register of Mobile and The Huntsville Times. They, too, will print only three days a week and undergo staff cuts...
IN MICHIGAN, ANN ARBOR HAS BEEN WITHOUT A DAILY FOR YEARS, AS A GROUP OF FUNDIES IN GRAND RAPIDS BOUGHT, CRASHED AND BURNED THE 147 YEAR OLD ANN ARBOR NEWS...TO TRY TO CONVERT THE READERS TO THE GOP, AND TO BREAK THE UNIONS.
AND THE FREE PRESS AND DETROIT NEWS DECIDED THEY WOULD PRINT EVERY DAY...THEY JUST WOULDN'T OFFER HOME DELIVERY MORE THAN 3 TIMES A WEEK....
PRINT IS IN ITS DEATH THROES, BECAUSE THE OLD "SOAK THE SUBSCRIBER, SOAK THE ADVERTISER, SCREW UP THE NEWS" MODEL ISN'T WORKING ANY MORE....
NEWSPAPERS FORGOT THAT THEY WERE IN THE NEWS GATHERING AND DISSEMINATION BUSINESS. THEY THOUGHT THAT THEY WERE IN THE MONEY-MAKING BUSINESS...AND AS A RESULT, THEY PUT THEMSELVES OUT OF BUSINESS..
Demeter
(85,373 posts)The character of Peter Pan (or thinly disguised versions of him) has appeared in tributes and parodies and has been the subject of several later works of fiction. (See Works based on Peter Pan for notable examples.) J. R. R. Tolkien's biographer Humphrey Carpenter has speculated that Tolkien's impressions of a production of Barrie's Peter Pan in Birmingham in 1910 "may have had a little to do with" his original conception of the Elves of Middle Earth. Since featuring the character in their 1953 animated film, Walt Disney has continued to use him as one of their traditional characters, featuring him in the sequel film Return to Neverland and in their parks as a meetable character, and the focus of the dark ride, Peter Pan's Flight; he appears in House of Mouse, Mickey's Magical Christmas, and the Kingdom Hearts video games.
The name Peter Pan has been adopted for various purposes over the years. Three thoroughbred racehorses have been given the name, the first born in 1904. It has been adopted by several businesses, including Peter Pan peanut butter, Peter Pan Bus Lines, and Peter Pan Records. An early 1960s program in which Cuban children were sent unattended to Miami to escape feared mistreatment under the then-new Castro regime was called Operation Peter Pan (or Operación Pedro Pan). The Peter Pan syndrome was popularized in 1983 by a book with that name, about individuals (usually male) with underdeveloped maturity. Peter Pan is the name for an Indonesian pop-rock band.
Peter Pan has appeared in a number of adaptations, sequels, and prequels. These include the 1953 Disney animated feature film Peter Pan, various stage musicals (including one by Jerome Robbins, starring Cyril Ritchard and Mary Martin, filmed for television), live-action feature films Hook (1991) and Peter Pan (2003), and the authorized sequel novel Peter Pan in Scarlet (2006). He has also appeared in various works not authorized by the holders of the character's copyright, which has lapsed in most parts of the world.
Peter Pan is depicted in public sculpture. The original statue in Kensington Gardens by sculptor George Frampton was commissioned by Barrie and erected overnight on 30 April 1912 as a May Day surprise to the children of London. There are seven statues cast from the original mould. The other six are located in:
Liverpool, England
Brussels, Belgium
Camden, New Jersey, United States
Perth, Western Australia
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Bowring Park, St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada.
Two statues by a different sculptor are in Kirriemuir, Scotland, the birthplace of J. M. Barrie. A bronze statue by Diarmuid Byron O'Connor was commissioned by Great Ormond Street Hospital in London and unveiled in 2000, showing Peter blowing fairy dust, with Tinker Bell added in 2005.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)&feature=results_main&playnext=1&list=PL3344A3436A592ADC
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Wendy Moira Angela Darling is a fictional character, the female protagonist of Peter and Wendy by J. M. Barrie, and in most adaptations in other media. Her exact age is not specified in the original play or novel by Barrie, though she is implied to be 12 or 13 years old or younger, as she is "just Peter's size" and he still has all his baby teeth. Likewise, her hair color has variously been blonde, brown, or black. Wendy is portrayed in the Disney movie with a blue ribbon in her hair and blue nightdress. Wendy expresses an innocent adoration for Peter as soon as they meet, and is honest to herself and company throughout the entire book, play or movie. As a girl who is beginning to "grow up", she stands in contrast to Peter Pan, a boy who refuses to do so, the major theme of the Peter Pan stories. In the beginning, Wendy hesitates to escape to the Neverland, to take care of her brothers and accompany her mother, but in time, she shows passion for magical events and adventures.
Background
In the novel Peter Pan, and its cinematic adaptations, she is an Edwardian schoolgirl. The novel states that she attends a "kindergarten school" with her younger brothers, meaning a school for pre-adolescent children. Like Peter, in many adaptations of the story she is shown to be on the brink of adolescence. She belongs to a middle class London household of that era, and is the daughter of George Darling, a short-tempered and pompous bank/office worker, and his wife, Mary. Wendy shares a nursery room with her two brothers, Michael and John. However, in the Disney version, her father decides that "it's high time she found a room of her own" and kicks her out of the nursery for "stuffing the boys' heads with her lot of silly stories", but changes his mind at the end of the film after he returns home with his wife after the party.
Character
Wendy is the most developed character in the story of Peter Pan, and is often considered the central protagonist. She is proud of her own childhood and enjoys telling stories and fantasizing. She has a distaste for adulthood, acquired partly by the example of it set by her father, whom she loves but fears due to his somewhat violent fits of anger. Her ambition early in the story is to somehow avoid growing up. She is granted this opportunity by Peter Pan, who takes her and her brothers to Neverland, where they can remain young indefinitely.
Ironically, Wendy finds that this experience brings out her more adult side. Peter and the tribe of Lost Boys who dwell in Neverland want her to be their "mother" (a role they remember only vaguely), a request she tentatively accedes to, performing various domestic tasks for them. There is also a degree of innocent or implied flirtation with Peter (thereby forming a love triangle with Peter's sometimes-jealous fairy friend Tinker Bell). In the Disney version she also becomes jealous of Princess Tiger Lily after the Princess kisses Peter. (In fact, she becomes so jealous she turns on her heel and marches back to Hangman's Tree. In the original script of Barrie's book, Peter and Wendy, Wendy asks Peter, towards the end of the book, if he would like to speak to her parents about 'a very sweet subject', implying that she would like him to speak to her parents about someday marrying her.
Wendy eventually learns to accept the virtues of adulthood, and returns to London, having decided not to postpone maturity any longer.
In an episode included in the novel and later incorporated into some productions of the play, Wendy has grown up and married, and has a daughter, Jane. When Peter returns looking for Wendy (not understanding that she would no longer be a young girl, as time escapes him while he is in the Neverland), he meets Jane; Wendy lets her daughter go off with him, apparently trusting her to make the same choices. The same scenario later plays out between Jane's daughter, Wendy's granddaughter, Margaret. (We don't actually see this happen. Barrie states at the very end of the book that Jane has a daughter, Margaret, who will one day go to the Neverland with Peter Pan, and that the same thing will happen with Margaret's future daughter and future granddaughter, and on and on, for as long as children believe in fairies.)
Physical Appearance
Wendy is generally depicted as a pretty girl with soft features, twinkling eyes and either blonde, brown or black hair. While Tiger Lily and Tinker Bell are portrayed as the figures of exotic, magical beauty, Wendy represents the conventional, flirtatious young mother figure, and ultimately, it is she who captures the attention of Peter Pan.
The name Wendy
The first name Wendy was very uncommon in the Anglosphere until after the story of Peter Pan and Wendy Darling became well known, and its subsequent popularity has led some to credit Barrie with "inventing" it. Although the name Wendy was used to a limited extent as the familiar-form of the Welsh name Gwendolyn, it is believed that Barrie took the name from a phrase used by Margaret Henley, a five-year-old girl whom Barrie befriended in the 1890s, daughter of his friend William Henley. She called Barrie her "friendy-wendy", which she pronounced as "fwendy-wendy". She died at the age of five and was buried, along with her family, in Cockayne Hatley.
IN A SHORT STORY BY URSULA LEGUIN, A WENDY IS A WOMAN WHO BIRTHS CHILDREN FOR GAY MEN...
IN THE "PETER PAN SYNDROME", WENDY IS THE ENABLER, THAT ALLOWS PETER TO REMAIN A BOY FOREVER...AS SHE SERVES AS A SUBSTITUTE MOTHER.
BEING A WENDY IS NOT PC, NOR PARTICULARLY REWARDING....
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Peter Foy (11 June 1925-17 February 2005) was the stage flying effects specialist who founded "Flying by Foy", most widely known for its work flying actors in the play Peter Pan.
Born in London, England, he began in show business as a child actor, and in one of his roles (as a Sea Witch in Where the Rainbow Ends) was called upon to fly. After serving in the Royal Air Force as a Navigator and Entertainment Officer,[1] he began working for the British company that had flown him, Kirby's Flying Ballets, and sailed to New York in 1950 to stage the flying sequences for Peter Pan starring Jean Arthur. He flew many of her successors in the role, including Mary Martin, Sandy Duncan, and Cathy Rigby.
Other productions for which he created flying sequences included I Love Lucy, Men Into Space, The Garry Moore Show, Hanna Barbera's Jack and the Beanstalk with Gene Kelly and The Flying Nun on television; Fantastic Voyage, Funny Girl, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, Hair and The Wiz in movies; It's a Bird...It's a Plane...It's Superman, Jerome Robbins' Broadway, The Who's Tommy, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Angels in America, The Lion King, Disney's Aida, and Dracula, the Musical on Broadway; and touring productions of the Ice Capades.
An innovator, Foy constantly tinkered with improvements and invented new systems of staged flight for both greater freedom of movement and greater safety.
Jean Arthur's Peter Pan was flown on a Kirby pendulum system with a compound drum, the standard method of flying actors for more than 100 years. But Foy became increasingly dissatisfied with the performance of the flying equipment, which he felt limited stage flight to little more than "nervous stunts or a series of static tableaus". He wanted to create flying sequences that looked more natural and soon began to develop new equipment that would allow actors' movements to be more easily synchronized with music and seamlessly integrated into the action of the play.
By the time he returned to New York, four years later, to fly Mary Martin in the new musical version of Peter Pan, Foy had invented a new system, the "Inter-Related Pendulum", which utilized two suspension points, each controlled by a separate operator. The Inter-Related Pendulum made possible spectacular, highly controlled, free flight, but required operators with a high degree of skill and precision, as the performer's weight passes from one suspension point to the other. The system also required a minimum 40 feet of grid height to produce a natural-looking, effective pendulum swing.
He founded Flying by Foy in 1957; in the 1960s he branched out from Broadway to Las Vegas shows.
Throughout his lifetime, Foy applied his mechanical ingenuity to the challenge of safely flying performers in a variety of different and often difficult circumstances. He solved the problem of flying actors in low height situations (such as little theatres and tent shows) with his invention of the Floating Pulley in 1958. While this development was highly effective, the device was often visible to the audience. His determination to preserve the "magic" of theatrical flight led to his introduction of the "Track-On-Track" system in 1962-63, which allows two operators to independently control the performer's lift and travel in flight.
Foy's "Multi-Point Balance Harness", developed for the swimming sequences in the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage, featured adjustable points of attachment, enabling the actors to maintain any position in flight.
Foy holds patents, in both the United States and the United Kingdom, for a number of flying devices and flying systems, including an advanced form of Track-On-Track developed specifically for the Ice Capades, which he called the "Inter-Reacting Compensator". This system was utilized in the first fully motorized, integrated touring truss flying system, built for the 1977 Ice Capades' "Flying Ballet".
He died in Las Vegas, Nevada.
At the time of his death, "Flying by Foy" was producing the flight effects for two Broadway-bound shows: Spamalot and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
Recent Broadway projects involving "Flying by Foy" include: Mary Poppins, Billy Elliot the Musical, Equus, You're Welcome America - A Final Night with George W Bush, American Idiot, and Priscilla Queen of the Desert.
SORRY--IT'S THE ENGINEERING GEEK COMING OUT FOR AIR
THE WEBSITE: http://www.flybyfoy.com/
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Headlines transmit information in its rawest form — and the best of headlines crystallize indelible truths. Such was the case this week when the New York Daily News blared this simple but iconic headline: "Cuomo: Minimum Wage Harder to Get Than Gay Marriage." The story quoted New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D), claiming that the effort to raise wages for the poorest of his constituents represents a "broader and deeper" divide than the recent successful fight to legalize same-sex matrimony in the Empire State. Though the piece quickly dissolved into the ether, it should have received more attention because it is an important Rosetta Stone — one that translates this era's inscrutable political rhetoric into a clear admission that money trumps everything else.
Decoding this Rosetta Stone requires just a bit of contextual information from Siena College. According to the school's surveys, only 58 percent of New Yorkers support legalizing gay marriage, while a whopping 78 percent support raising the minimum wage from $7.25 to $8.50. Put Cuomo's declaration next to those numbers, and the revelation emerges: In a political arena dominated by corporate money, the governor is acknowledging that politicians will champion initiatives that don't challenge corporate power, but will avoid promoting those that do. Not only that, Cuomo is admitting this is the case regardless of public opinion. Events in New York illustrate the larger dynamic at work. As the New York Times reported, despite lukewarm public support, Cuomo was able to get the state legislature to legalize gay marriage after Wall Street financiers dumped cash into the campaign for equal rights. Knowing that marriage doesn't threaten their profits, these moneyed interests opted to help their ally Cuomo notch a strategic win — one that allows the governor to preen as a great liberal champion to the state's left-leaning voters, all while he simultaneously presses an anti-union, economically conservative agenda that moneyed interests support...With New York's recession-battered voters supporting a minimum wage hike, the greed-is-good crowd is firmly aligned against the initiative. Why? Because unlike gay marriage, which requires no corporate sacrifice, the modest minimum wage boost may slightly reduce corporate profits — and that's something the fat cats in the executive suites never permit without a fight. Knowing this, a hack like Cuomo — a guy who asks "how high?" when his campaign contributors say "jump" — is using his power to undermine the popular minimum wage initiative. In this case, he is cooking up a self-fulfilling prophecy about the measure being a political non-starter.
Not surprisingly, this sleight of hand is not limited to one locale. In Colorado, Democratic activists have cast Gov. John Hickenlooper as a great liberal for supporting same-sex civil unions, all while he loyally shills for oil and gas corporations. At the federal level, the Obama reelection campaign is doing the same, trumpeting the president as a progressive hero for endorsing gay marriage, all while he slow-walks tougher bank regulations. Even on Wall Street itself, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein has lately portrayed himself as a great humanitarian. As proof, he doesn't cite any willingness to acknowledge financial-sector crimes. Instead, he cites his decision to become the Human Rights Campaign's national spokesman for gay marriage.
Noting all this isn't to disparage the push for same sex marriage (I'm a strong supporter!) — it is merely to spotlight a bait and switch whereby social issues are increasingly used to perpetuate the economic status quo. Obviously, it's possible to simultaneously guarantee equal rights and fix the economy. But as New York most recently proves, it's much harder to do both when money dictates political outcomes, and when bought-off politicians employ social issues as an excuse to ignore economic justice.
mother earth
(6,002 posts)bread_and_roses
(6,335 posts)Demeter
(85,373 posts)I DON'T THINK YOU CAN FIX AN ANTI-DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTION THAT IS UNDERMINING THE ECONOMY
http://www.nationofchange.org/how-fix-fed-dismiss-dimon-boot-bankers-and-can-corporations-1337956771
IT'S A LONG ARTICLE...READ IT CAREFULLY
Demeter
(85,373 posts)It seems like something out of a Monty Python routine. The boards that govern the Federal Reserve, the publicly-created central bank that dispenses money to bankers, are all dominated by ... the bankers who receive that money. Picture it if you can:
Fed Board room, 2008:
ECONOMIST: This is serious! The global economy is collapsing because of your reckless gambling!
LONE CITIZEN BOARD MEMBER: That is serious. What can we do? We could break up our banks and fire their executives, or ...
BANKER: Wait! I've got it! Give us more money!
(Nods all around the table)
Six months later:
ECONOMIST: This is serious! We've given you money but you're not lending it out to get the economy moving!
LONE CITIZEN BOARD MEMBER: That is serious. What can we do? Perhaps there could be rules and conditions about lending that ...
BANKER: Or they could give us more money!
OTHER BANKERS: Good one! Let's go with that!
Three years later:
ECONOMIST: This is serious! Joblessness is still at record highs. Poverty has soard. Too-big-to-fail banks are bigger than ever. And you guys are still breaking the law and skirting the rules.
LONE CITIZEN BOARD MEMBER: Hmm. That is serious. The Fed could use its regulatory authority to ...
BANKER: (aside) I hate that guy. (to all) Let me see ... hmmm ... how about giving us more money?
Three and a half years later:
ECONOMIST: This is serious! The country -
BANKERS (in unison): More money!
Demeter
(85,373 posts)DemReadingDU
(16,000 posts)5/27/12 Brand New Details On The Cardplaying Chessmaster Who Bagged JPMorgan's London Whale
Today's New York Times has a lengthy story, detailing the trader who helped bag JP Morgan's "London Whale."
If you don't know, JP Morgan recently announced that it had lost around $2 billion on some bad credit trades. Reports surfaced that one of the players on the other side of those trades was legendary credit trader Boaz Weinstein.
The New York Times Azam Ahmed offers a lot of details on Weinstein's personal life and professional career. Some of which we knew; some we didn't.
Here's a round up of what was written about him:
He grew up in Manhattan's Upper West Side.
He earned the title of chess master when he was 16. At a recent auction, he paid $10,500 to play chess with legend Garry Kasparov. He plays online games with Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel.
He won a stock-picking competition as a student in New York's prestigious Stuyvesant High School.
When he was 18, he failed to land a job at Goldman Sachs. But then he was able to get more interviews after playing chess with a senior partner, whom he ran into at a bathroom.
He studied philosophy at the University of Michigan.
As a credit trader at Deutsche Bank, Weinstein booked profits in 10 out of 11 years
In his heyday, he booked around $40 million in profits each year.
He earned the title of managing director at age 27. At the time, he was the youngest MD in Deutsche Bank history.
During the height of the financial crisis, his team had lost around $2 billion.
In 2005, he won a Maserarti at a poker tournament sponsored by a unit of Berkshire Hathaway. He still drives it.
He's banned from Las Vegas' Bellagio casino for counting cards at blackjack.
His hedge fund Saba Capital, has $5.5 billion under management and his offices are located on the 58th floor of New York City's Chrysler Building.
His wife, Tali Farhadian Weinstein, is a lawyer with the Justice Department.
In the hedge fund industry, Weinstein is known as a 'monster,' an unusually aggressive trader.
He's currently in talks to buy a $24 million apartment on Fifth Avenue.
Read the whole story at
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/27/business/how-boaz-weinstein-and-hedge-funds-outsmarted-jpmorgan.html
http://www.businessinsider.com/boaz-weinstein-jp-morgan-london-whale-2012-5
Demeter
(85,373 posts)bread_and_roses
(6,335 posts)Published on Sunday, May 27, 2012 by Common Dreams
'All Pain, No Gain': The Irish Backlash to Europe's Austerity Plans
And In One Small Irish Town, Loophole Allows for Return to Pre-Euro Currency
- Common Dreams staff
... An Irish "No" would not by itself derail the fiscal treaty, because only 12 eurozone countries are required to ratify it for it to come into force. Already, Romania, Portugal, Greece, Slovenia and Slovakia have done so. However, it would embolden increasingly powerful anti-austerity campaigns in bigger eurozone countries like Italy and Spain, any of whose failure to participate could effectively sink the project.
"A No vote in the only popular poll on current efforts to save the euro would be hugely damaging to the treaty, in that it would signal to investors that if it was put to a vote in many countries, it would not get past," said Hugo Brady, of the Centre for European Reform.
"The sense of a backlash against austerity would be much enforced."
Leading the No vote is Sinn Fein, whose combination of Irish nationalism and hard-left economics has struck a chord with many.
I'm rooting for Sinn Fein - I may not much like nationalism - but I sure as hell do like NO to austerity.
(article illustrated with a hideous billboard head of Merkel - obviously exhorting and looking like that monster sand head of Imhotep in the Mummy movie - on a political sign calling for a No on austerity vote)
Demeter
(85,373 posts)1) Greece is very likely to exit the Euro.
2) When Greece exits the Euro it will be punished severely by the monetary authorities. They intend to let Greeks starve. They will cut off food supplies, and Greeks will not be able to afford food. Oil is also going to be a problem. Greeks will probably not be able to flee to other countries.
3) The reason they will punish the Greeks is because they can. They couldn’t punish the Argentinians or the Icelanders, because both those countries can feed themselves. They can punish the Greeks. They need to make an example, because they are worried about Spain, Portugal, Ireland and other countries. (Heck, even the Dutch are having problems. The Dutch! If the Dutch can’t make it in the Euro, no one can.) This isn’t, contra Lagarde about “bad Greeks”, while it is true that Greece should never have been let in to the Euro, well, everyone knew that. Including the countries that let Greece in.
4) Greece is going to have get hardcore and creative about creating a new economy. Since the monetary authorities intend to starve them and deprive them of oil, they must retaliate hard. Greece has a number of options, and this is what Greece should do You don’t play nice with people who are trying to cause a famine in your country.
- Greece has a large fleet. Use it to strip mine the Mediterranean of all resources possible. Yes, the Med is a fragile ecosystem. If the other Euros don’t like it, they can not punish Greece, otherwise Greece will have to feed itself. The Euros could send fleets, but as the British-Iceland fishing war proved, that’s prohibitively expensive.
- Start gun-running and other black market activities up. European gun-running currently goes through Albania. Greece has much better ports. If the Euros don’t like it, they can militarize Greece’s borders at a cost much higher than feeding the Greeks.
- Become a full on black-hole for banking. If anyone wants to store money in Greece, they can. No questions asked, no forms needed.
*********************************************************************************
COMMENT FROM Formerly T-Bear
May 27, 2012
Another 2¢ opinion. Along with Greek yogurt use Greek (is) toast. At 20+ rate of unemployment the chances of any economic recovery are near null until the unemployment rate is reduced by a large fraction in the vicinity of 1/2. Somewhere in that 20 +% is a tipping point for economic collapse. Do expect a money economy develop that reestablishes the social value/utility of exchange outside the purview of official government, commonly known as black market, black economy or black money. Most of this economy will operate outside the government’s ability to tax. Black economies always occur when official economies fail to provide needs, wants and desires (the driving motivation of all economics). Greece will likely remain a member of the European Union (EU) while leaving the European monetary union (EMU), and as a member will retain the right the EU to economic assistance in reducing poverty and obtaining an equitable standard of living with other member states of the EU.
Probably the most far reaching effect of Greece will be the trigger it gives “the market” to destroy Spain, also an economy brought low (even lower than Greece) by the irrationalities of the omnipotent market of fond ideology (/s). Unfortunately Spain’s economy is well past the tipping point for economic collapse as well as being the 4th largest in the EMU, presenting a problem in supporting that strain the resources of the EU itself. Icing the Spanish cake is a government so thoroughly indoctrinated in “market ideology” that air must be pumped to it; a government hell bent at all costs to impose austerity upon its economy, e.g. 19 billions on offer to “recapitalize” its 4th largest bank at the same time incapable of providing the several billions required to fund the national schools. Such governments are staffed by liars, thieves and knaves to power; such governments must be turfed with all dispatch into the rubbish bins of history (please don’t get me started). About the only reason Spain has not gone into cataclysmic collapse may be due to accumulated wealth (unconsumed income) built up by the people, allowing some measure of durability withstanding the economic crisis (neither national nor personal debt was extensive for a large fraction of the population which shows the requirement that impoverishment is required for public assistance is a foolish position at best and compounded disastrous in economic emergency).
Italy will soon follow. As will Holland. Great Britain will (returning the sentiment) eventually get it right after trying everything else.
Make deals with other “pariah” and semi-pariah nations. Start with Iran and Russia for oil (Iran will be happy to give oil in exchange for black market help). Make a deal with various 2nd world nations for food, start with Argentina, they have no reason to love the IMF or the European Union, which promised to “punish” them for nationalizing oil in Argentina. In exchange Greece can offer use of their fleet, for cheap, and port rights for the Russian navy. They’ve wanted a true warm water port for some time. Offer them a nice island in the Med with a 30 year lease.
Hold on for a couple years. Odds are that soon enough Ireland, Spain, Portugal and maybe others will leave the Euro. They won’t be in any mood to screw Greece for their ex-Euro masters. Heck, odds are 50/50 that there won’t be a Euro zone at all in 3 years, since Germany wants to screw everyone, including France.
Nationalize basically every industry. It’s unfortunate, but it’s going to be necessary. Hundreds of billions of dollars have fled Greece in the past 3 years, in fact that was one of the main reasons for dragging out the “bailouts” (really, bailouts of German banks), to let the money flee. All Greek assets are going to be frozen overseas, so the Greeks will need to work with what they have.
No more money goes out of the country. Slap on currency controls, to make sure what money is there doesn’t leave (this is aimed at Greece’s rich). If any banker or anyone else circumvents them, throw them in jail, the sentence should be life, generous, since they are committing treason.
Seriously change the tax system, and insist on really taxing the rich. Go to heavily progressive taxation, reduce the burden on the poor (a large number of people now), this will buy support.
A food rationing system, with cards and delivery to every person in the country will be necessary. It won’t be fun, but combined with the above, you can make sure that no one starves.
Greece has been under siege for years now, and traitors within its own country (its politicians) have betrayed it. This means Greeks are in serious danger of suffering a famine. The response to that, by Greeks, will have to be pragmatic and severe. If non-Greeks don’t like it, that’s too bad. When millions of people are in danger of starving, a country does what it has to.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2012/05/harsh-language-from-lagarde-imf-has-no.html
The Guardian writes It's payback time: don't expect sympathy – Lagarde to Greeks.
The International Monetary Fund has ratcheted up the pressure on crisis-hit Greece after its managing director, Christine Lagarde, said she has more sympathy for children deprived of decent schooling in sub-Saharan Africa than for many of those facing poverty in Athens.
In an uncompromising interview with the Guardian, Lagarde insists it is payback time for Greece and makes it clear that the IMF has no intention of softening the terms of the country's austerity package.
Asked whether she is able to block out of her mind the mothers unable to get access to midwives or patients unable to obtain life-saving drugs, Lagarde replies: "I think more of the little kids from a school in a little village in Niger who get teaching two hours a day, sharing one chair for three of them, and who are very keen to get an education. I have them in my mind all the time. Because I think they need even more help than the people in Athens."
"I think they should also help themselves collectively." Asked how, she replies: "By all paying their tax."
Asked if she is essentially saying to the Greeks and others in Europe that they have had a nice time and it is now payback time, she responds: "That's right."
Jens Weidmann, president of the Bundesbank, poured cold water on the idea – which is strongly backed by the French president, François Hollande – and also said financial aid to Greece should be cut off if it failed to keep to the bailout deal.
Jürgen Fitschen, joint head of Germany's biggest bank, Deutsche, described Greece as "a failed state … a corrupt state".
Purposely Inflammatory Statements to Benefit Syriza
Those statements are not only inflammatory, but purposely so. Lagarde has to know that her message stating more sympathy to Africa than patients refused life-saving drugs in Greece is bound to incite Greeks.
Recall that Antonis Samaras (the head of New Democracy) and Evangelos Venizelos (the head of Pasok), have promised voters they will renegotiate the terms. Greek voters just had that promise yanked away in no uncertain terms. IMF and Deutsche Bank statements also make German chancellor Angela Merkel look like a cream-puff with her offer of potential stimulus efforts.
In contrast to the lies of Samaras and Venizelos, Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras says the bailout is null and void, while stating Greece will remain in the euro. It is hard to say with certainty whether his promise to remain in the eurozone is a purposeful lie as opposed to pure fantasy, but given there is no provision to kick any country out of the eurozone, he just might believe it.
Lies and Bluffs
For further discussion please consider:
What if Tsipras is Not Bluffing? Who Holds the Upper hand? What is Troika's Biggest Fear? Can Greece Possibly Stay in the Eurozone After Default?
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2012/05/what-if-tsipras-is-not-bluffing-who.html
Merkel's 6-Point Plan to Save Europe; Merkel Backed Into Tight Corner: Social Democrats Threaten to Not Ratify Merkozy Treaty Without Growth Measures; Merkel Coalition at Risk
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2012/05/merkels-6-point-plan-to-save-europe.html
IMF Purposeful Attempt to Incite Greek Exit
The IMF has had enough. It does not want to deal with a coalition of Samaras and Venizelos given falling revenues in Greece and no hint of any true structural reforms. Rather, Lagarde wants to drive Greek voters to Syriza so that Greece can default and the Troika can cut off all funding in "clear conscience"
All funding should be cut now (in fact three years ago), but the IMF hopes to absolve itself of blame.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Preparing for Greece’s exit from the Eurozone has been picking up momentum and has reached critical mass—on the way to a fait accompli. Still unspeakable in public discussion last year, it has become a routine topic at all levels of government. While everyone at the very top still hues to the line that Greece should stay in the Eurozone, out of the other side of the mouth comes but—especially since the focus is on Spain, the real problem, the one problem that the Eurozone will have trouble digesting. Even if it could digest bailing out Spain or losing Spain, the next step up, Italy, due to its size, is beyond bailout and would cause the Eurozone to fracture into its component pieces—unless the ECB decides against all treaty limitations and stiff German opposition to monetize directly and without qualms any sovereign debt that needs to be monetized. And even that would tear up the Eurozone because Germany and a handful of other countries would refuse to be tied to that kind of loosey-goosey management of their currency.
There are political realities in Germany, where Chancellor Angela Merkel, slipping in the polls, is trying to decipher the scribbles on the wall. Her people, who vacation in Greece more than any other people, have handed her some clues: 60% said they wanted Greece out of the Eurozone, a jump from November when an already shocking 49% had wanted them out, according to a ZDF Politbarometer poll released Friday. Only 31% wanted Greece to remain in the Eurozone, down from 41% in November, with 9% not giving a hoot.
And Germans made short shrift of French President François Hollande’s favorite debt crisis panacea that he’d demanded from day one of his campaign, re-demanded at the G-8 in Chicago, and slammed on the table at the EU summit in Brussels earlier this week: Eurobonds. An astounding 79% were against them, and only 14% were for them...Apparently, Germans have understood how insidious—insidious for Germans, but a great deal for debt-sinner countries—these bonds would be. They'd spread the risk of each country to all countries, but the last man standing, possibly Germany, would end up having to bear them all. They'd cut the borrowing costs for Greece (oops, scratch that), Spain, Italy, and a slew of other Eurozone countries but raise the costs for Germany—now zero on shorter term debt, and negative when adjusted for inflation. It didn't help that Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann vilified them in his quiet manner every chance he got, most recently when he said, "The belief that Eurobonds could solve the current crisis is an illusion."
But the next big battle may actually revolve around keeping Germany in the Eurozone: 50% of the respondents saw more disadvantages than advantages, up from 43% in February; only 45% saw more advantages, down from 51% in February. The more costs and risks rise for Germany, the more this number is going to skew away from the euro. A scary trend for Eurozone bailout freaks. And suddenly Germans woke up to the headline, "Greeks Pay less Taxes"—taxes being a sore subject for Germans who pay out of their noses to get their welfare-state budget into balance. For a debacle without equal, read.... The Confiscation Conundrum in Europe.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Europe has re-descended into rumor hell—where good rumors are head fakes that cause markets to rally, and where bad rumors, though passionately denied by all sides, turn out to be true.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Earlier this month, I asked the leaders of a group of US-based companies what – if anything – they were doing to prepare for “Grexit”, or a possible exit of Greece from the eurozone. The responses from the manufacturers were rather vague.
The bankers, however, were alarmingly precise: amid all the speculation about Grexit, they told me, banks are increasingly reordering their European exposure along national lines, in terms of asset-liability matching (ALM), just in case the region splits apart. Thus, if a bank has loans to Spanish borrowers, say, it is trying to cover these with funding from Spain, rather than from Germany. Similarly, when it comes to hedging derivatives and foreign exchange deals, or measuring their risk, Italian counterparties are treated differently from Finnish counterparties, say.
The halcyon days of banks looking on the eurozone as a single currency bloc are over; cross-border risk matters. To put it another way, while pundits engage in an abstract debate about a possible break-up, fracture has already arrived for many banks’ risk management departments, at least when it comes to ALM in their eurozone books....
ALAS, POOR EURO...I KNEW HIM, HORATIO
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Greece will leave the euro zone next year and the country's new currency will "immediately fall by 60 percent," according to Citi chief economist Willem Buiter.
Greek officials have repeatedly stressed that the country will be running out of cash by the end of June, after which it would be unable to make debt payments and pay civil wages and pensions. An election is scheduled for June 17 after inconclusive results of the May 6 polls meant a government could not be formed.
The Troika of international lenders — the European Union, the European Central Bank [cnbc explains] , and the International Monetary Fund [cnbc explains] — are waiting to see what government will result from the elections next month before disbursing more aid.
"The elections (on June 17th) will not produce a viable government that can follow the troika plan, leading to a stalemate between the Greek government and official creditors, and to the suspension of EFSF-IMF funding,” Buiter wrote in Citi's latest Global Economic Outlook. ...MORE
Demeter
(85,373 posts)It’s been a week since shares in Bankia plummeted on reports, later denied, that customers were pulling deposits out of the Spanish lender. Fears of a full-scale bank run in Greece have not yet materialised. But the possibility of a deposit run in Europe's peripheral states is still very much alive. It is also the thing that policymakers are least prepared for.
As with most aspects to the euro crisis, the usual answers are not much help. One tactic is to show customers the money. Old hands of emerging-market bank runs talk of how they used to pile cash up in full view of panicking customers so that they could see how well stocked the banks were with money. The equivalent now is to let the central bank provide enough liquidity that the ATMs always spit out cash. But if the idea is to get your hands on euros today in case of a currency redenomination tomorrow, then you will still want it out of the bank and under the mattress.
Another response to runs is to calm worries about the solvency of specific institutions by beefing up the scale of deposit guarantees. In the first phase of the crisis, which now seems almost innocent in its simplicity, that is what governments did. But that makes the problem worse, not better, if government solvency is at the root of the problem.
The logical solution, as we argue this week, is to set up a joint deposit-guarantee scheme, in which euro-zone states pool resources to provide credible reassurance that depositors across the zone will get their money back, up to a harmonised threshold of €100,000 ($125,000). To get around the redenomination risk, the guarantee would have to be a promise to repay the original value of the deposit in euros....
Po_d Mainiac
(4,183 posts)for at least 25 seconds before writing that turd.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)At least 30 seconds...
Po_d Mainiac
(4,183 posts)Demeter
(85,373 posts)By Robert Reich
http://www.nationofchange.org/obama-has-explain-why-fairness-essential-growth-and-why-some-democrats-have-stop-believing-otherwise
...Fairness isn’t inconsistent with growth; it’s essential to it. The only way the economy can grow and create more jobs is if prosperity is more widely shared.
The key reason why the recovery is so anemic is so much income and wealth are now concentrated at the top is America’s the vast middle class no longer has the purchasing power necessary to boost the economy.
The richest 1 percent of Americans save about half their incomes, while most of the rest of us save between 6 and 10 percent. That shouldn’t be surprising. Being rich means you already have most of what you want and need. That second yacht isn’t nearly as exciting as was the first.
It follows that when, as now, the top 1 percent rakes in more than 20 percent of total income — at least twice the share it had 30 years ago — there’s insufficient demand for all the goods and services the economy is capable of producing at or near full employment. And without demand, the economy doesn’t grow or generate nearly enough jobs....
Demeter
(85,373 posts)At this time of year, at graduation ceremonies in America and elsewhere, those about to leave university often hear some final words of advice before receiving their diplomas. To those interested in pursuing careers in finance – or related careers in insurance, accounting, auditing, law, or corporate management – I submit the following address:
Best of luck to you as you leave the academy for your chosen professions in finance. Over the course of your careers, Wall Street and its kindred institutions will need you. Your training in financial theory, economics, mathematics, and statistics will serve you well. But your lessons in history, philosophy, and literature will be just as important, because it is vital not only that you have the right tools, but also that you never lose sight of the purposes and overriding social goals of finance.
Unless you have been studying at the bottom of the ocean, you know that the financial sector has come under severe criticism – much of it justified – for thrusting the world economy into its worst crisis since the Great Depression. And you need only check in with some of your classmates who have populated the Occupy movements around the world to sense the widespread resentment of financiers and the top 1% of income earners to whom they largely cater (and often belong)...
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Cities need public transit and affordable housing. But outdated laws make it easy for the wealthy to block progress...NIMBYism... has essentially become an official part of the urban planning process in many cities. From bike lanes in Brooklyn to desperately needed housing in D.C., public micromanagement has become such a problem that several cities are now trying to rein in the Not-In-My-Backyard crowd. “The current process does not work for anyone,” one urban design expert told the San Francisco Chronicle. “We want the Planning Commission to focus on big planning issues, not micro-design issues.”
How tiny bands of refuseniks and wealthy obstructionists absorbed so much power provides instructive lessons for how they might be stopped. “The field of urban planning went through a major change in the last half-century,” says Rob Goodspeed, a PhD candidate at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning. “There was a time in the ’50s when people thought it would be more of a science. We’d use expert analysis and computer models to tell us the answers.” This approach, of course, was a disaster. Cities traumatized by the post-war urban renewal projects that arose from such thinking granted broad development-veto power to private citizens. San Francisco got its onerous “discretionary review” process in 1955 as its urban-renewal czar M. Justin Herman was brutally leveling large swaths of the city — a process that today is used by residents to oppose everything from broadband Internet infrastructure to a neighbor’s backyard deck because it could “lead to the use of a grill.” Boston created its “citizen advisory committees” in the ’60s, whose members, plucked from neighborhood groups, remain empowered to approve or deny development proposals to this day. And in 1970, the California Environmental Quality Act gave anyone in that state the power to stymie development by questioning its eco-friendliness, a right that’s routinely abused.
These rules, designed to check the power of city officials, now perversely consolidate immense power in the hands of a few outspoken “concerned citizens.” By dragging out the building process indefinitely, these people can make it so expensive that deep-pocketed luxury developers have a better chance of surviving it than anyone actually building affordable housing. Worst of all, these rules have created a new norm in which individual residents just assume that their personal opinions should carry great weight in routine planning decisions. According to a 2011 survey, one in five Americans have actively opposed a local development project, and 74 percent want no new development in their communities at all.
On the one hand, it’s nice that so many people think their neighborhood is perfect just the way it is. On the other, this feeling may be a quirk of psychology, not an accurate reflection of reality...
IT DEPENDS ON WHO IS AGAINST THE PROPOSAL, IMO.
AND WHO IS FOR IT.
THIS IS A VERY NASTY, SLANTED ARTICLE...THE PREMISE IS THAT PROGRESS IS GOOD, REGARDLESS OF WHAT THE PEOPLE MOST AFFECTED WANT. I CANNOT AGREE, HAVING SEEN MANY A NEIGHBORHOOD DESTROYED BY "URBAN RENEWAL" IN THE 60'S, AND THOSE NEIGHBORHOODS ARE STILL DESTROYED, UNLESS SOME NATURAL OR MAN-MADE CATASTROPHE HAS REMOVED THE "IMPROVEMENT", PERMITTING LESS EXPERT REMEDIATION.
AND THEN THERE WAS THE RECENT CASE IN WHICH EMINENT DOMAIN WAS USED TO DISPOSSESS PEOPLE OF MODEST MEANS OF THEIR HOMES AND COMMUNITY, SO THAT A PRIVATE DEVELOPER COULD PROFIT BY BUILDING AND SELLING TO THE WEALTHY...
Demeter
(85,373 posts)IT AIN'T OVER UNTIL THE TRUTH LEAKS OUT...AND ALL THE CARDS ARE FINALLY ON THE TABLE AND REVEALED...
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Demeter
(85,373 posts)At the end of the 1990s, after the total collapse of the mass-privatization experiment in Boris Yeltin's Russia, some of the more earnest free-market proselytizers tried making sense of it all. The unprecedented collapse of Russia's economy and its capital markets, the wholesale looting, the quiet extermination of millions of Russians from the shock and destitution (Russian male life expectancy plummeted from 68 years to 56 years)—the terrible consequences of imposing radical libertarian free-market ideas on an alien culture—turned out worse than any worst-case-scenario imagined by the free-market true-believers.
Of all the disastrous results of that experiment, what troubled many Western free-market true-believers most wasn't so much the mass poverty and population collapse, but rather, the way things turned out so badly in Russia's newly-privatized companies and industries. That was the one thing that was supposed to go right. According to the operative theory—developed by the founding fathers of libertarianism/neoliberalism, Friedrich von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman and the rest—a privately-owned company will always outperform a state-run company because private ownership and the profit-motive incentivize the owners to make their companies stronger, more efficient, more competitive, and so on. The theory promises that everyone benefits except for the bad old state and the lazy.
That was the dominant libertarian theory framing the whole "shock doctrine" privatization experiment in Russia and elsewhere. In reality, as everyone was forced to admit by 1999, Russia's privatized companies were stripped and plundered as fast as their new private owners could loot them, leaving millions of workers without salaries, and most of Russia's industry in far worse shape than the Communists left it.....Lucky for them, Milton Friedman provided the answer to a Cato Institute interviewer: Russia lacked "rule of law"—another neoliberal/libertarian catchphrase that went mainstream in the late 80s. Without "rule of law," Friedman and the rest of the free-market faithful argued, privatization was bound to fail.
AND THEN THE AUTHOR LOOKS CLOSER TO HOME, AT CHESAPEAKE OIL...
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Less than six months before the November presidential elections in an exceptionally distressed United States the narrow, unpleasant parameters of political possibility are emerging. Two alternatives confront the American people, both to the right of center.
1. If President Barack Obama is reelected, with the Democratic Party retaining control of at least one chamber of Congress, there probably will be four more years of economic stagnation, high unemployment, increasing poverty and inequality, more wars, erosions of civil liberties and global warming.
2. If Mitt Romney is elected, with the right/far right Republican Party dominating either House or Senate, every particular of the travail afflicting the country today will be multiplied, with emphasis on fulfilling the desires of the 1% at the expense of the 99%.
What else could be expected during the present conservative era? Paul Krugman, the liberal Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist, recently described Obama, whom he supports, as having ruled like "a moderate Republican circa 1992." Viewing the ultra-conservatives, African American professor and left intellectual Cornell West detected "creeping fascism."
In today's society — based on gross economic inequality facilitated by a two-party political system spanning center right to far right and where big money is the decisive factor in the electoral process — an ostensibly democratic election can hardly mitigate the worst of abuses afflicting working people and their families much less bring about substantial reform....
....
Progressive change certainly remains possible in America, although neither ruling party is equipped to bring it about. These parties were not prepared to end the Vietnam war either, or to get rid of Jim Crow, or to implement the eight-hour day, or to allow women the democratic right to vote. But the people organized radical mass movements to fight for these goals and won. The struggles of various organizations that began coalescing early last year, propelled several months later by Occupy's left critique of inequality, Wall St. and the 1% ruling plutocracy, have the potential to become a mass movement. Many such potentials have come along and faded for various reasons, including some that were co-opted or lost their vision. But broad and deep movements — as long as they are massive, activist, radical and well organized — also have significantly changed American history for the better. That's the light at the end of this increasingly dismal electoral tunnel.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Department of Homeland Security forced to release list following freedom of information request. Agency insists it only looks for evidence of genuine threats to the U.S. and not for signs of general dissent...The words are included in the department's 2011 'Analyst's Desktop Binder' used by workers at their National Operations Center which instructs workers to identify 'media reports that reflect adversely on DHS and response activities'.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/82701103/Analyst-Desktop-Binder-REDACTED
AND, AS USUAL, WE HAVE TO READ ABOUT IT IN ENGLAND....
Demeter
(85,373 posts)...Meanwhile the three American “domestic terrorists” are being held in solitary confinement. Like many of the NATO protesters, they came from out of town. Brian Church, 20 years old, came from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Jared Chase, 27, came from Keene, New Hampshire. Brent Betterly, 24, came from Oakland Park, Florida. Charged with providing material support for terrorism, the judge set their bail at $1.5 million each.
These three are not charged with actually throwing a Molotov cocktail at a person or thing. They are charged with coming to Chicago with the idea of doing so. Somehow the 16 federal intelligence agencies plus those of our NATO puppets and Israel were unable to discover the 9/11 plot in the making, but the Chicago police knew in advance why two guys from Florida and one from New Hampshire came to Chicago. The domestic terrorism cases turn out to be police concoctions that are foiled before they happen, so we have many terrorists but no actual terrorist acts.
Two other young Americans are being framed by their Human Rights Government. Sebastian Senakiewicz, 24, of Chicago is charged with “falsely making a terrorist threat,” whatever that means. His bail was set at $750,000. Mark Neiweem, 28, of Chicago is charged with “solicitation for explosives or incendiary devices.” His bail is set at $500,000.
This is human rights in America. But the State Department’s human rights report never examines the US. It is a political document aimed at Washington’s chosen enemies.
CLICK ON LINK FOR INTERNATIONAL ASPECTS
Demeter
(85,373 posts)HIGGINS. She coming to see you. (ELIZA DOOLITTLE)
MRS. HIGGINS. I dont remember asking her.
HIGGINS. You didnt. I asked her. If youd known her you wouldnt have asked her.
MRS. HIGGINS. Indeed! Why?
HIGGINS. Well, it's like this. Shes a common flower girl. I picked her off the kerbstone.
MRS. HIGGINS. And invited her to my at-home!
HIGGINS {rising and coming to her to coax her} Oh, thatll be all right. Ive taught her to speak properly; and she has strict orders as to her behavior. Shes to keep to two subjects: the weather and everybody's health—Fine day and How do you do, you know—and not to let herself go on things in general. That will be safe.
MRS. HIGGINS. Safe! To talk about our health! about our insides! perhaps about our outsides! How could you be so silly, Henry?
HIGGINS [impatiently] Well, she must talk about something. {He controls himself and sits down again}. Oh, she'll be all right: dont you fuss. Pickering is in it with me. Ive a sort of bet on that I'll pass her off as a duchess in six months. I started on her some months ago; and shes getting on like a house on fire. I shall win my bet. She has a quick ear; and shes been easier to teach than my middle-class pupils because shes had to learn a complete new language. She talks English almost as you talk French.
MRS. HIGGINS. Thats satisfactory, at all events.
HIGGINS. Well, it is and it isnt.
MRS. HIGGINS. What does that mean?
HIGGINS. You see, Ive got her pronunciation all right; but you have to consider not only how a girl pronounces, but what she pronounces...
Bernard Shaw (1856–1950). Pygmalion. 1916. ACT III
http://www.bartleby.com/138/3.html
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Demeter
(85,373 posts)...The Federal Aviation Administration has allowed several police departments to use drones across the U.S. They are controlled from a remote location and use infrared sensors and high-resolution cameras. Chief Deputy Randy McDaniel of the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office in Texas told The Daily that his department is considering using rubber bullets and tear gas on its drone....
The use of potential force from drones has raised the ire of the American Civil Liberties Union. “It’s simply not appropriate to use any of force, lethal or non-lethal, on a drone,” Catherine Crump, staff attorney for the ACLU, told CBSDC. Crump feels one of the biggest problems with the use of drones is the remote location where they are operated from. “When the officer is on the scene, they have full access to info about what has transpired there,” Crump explained to CBSDC. “An officer at a remote location far away does not have the same level of access.” The ACLU is also worried about potential drones malfunctioning and falling from the sky, adding that they are keeping a close eye on the use of these unmanned aircraft by police departments. “We don’t need a situation where Americans feel there is in an invisible eye in the sky,” Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst at ACLU, told CBSDC.
....McDaniel says that his community should not be worried about the department using a drone. “We’ve never gone into surveillance for sake of surveillance unless there is criminal activity afoot,” McDaniel told The Daily. “Just to see what you’re doing in your backyard pool — we don’t care.”
But the concern for the ACLU is just too great that an American’s constitutional rights will be trampled with the use of drones. “The prospect of people out in public being Tased or targeted by force by flying drones where no officers is physically present on the scene,” Crump says, “raises the prospect of unconstitutional force being used on individuals.”
AND BATTLEFIELD USE IS EQUALLY PROBLEMATIC...THIS CENTURY'S M.A.D.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)A leading human rights lawyer today claimed that more than 30 UK citizens were at risk of being killed by drone air strikes overseas as he stepped up a legal battle to reveal if British intelligence is being used in the attacks. Clive Stafford Smith, of the London law firm Reprieve, issued his warning as it emerged that ministers have hired three QCs to fight a High Court case he is bringing over the death of a Pakistani man last year.
The judicial review hearing, being brought on behalf of the victim’s son, Noor Khan, is seeking to force Foreign Secretary William Hague to disclose whether, as experts believe, Britain is sharing intelligence with America which could be used in drone attacks. Mr Stafford Smith today said as well as exposing what he described as a “crime” he also wanted to secure greater transparency and protect potential further victims.
“I understand that there are 32 people who British intelligence are concerned about and may provide intelligence to the US that could result in them being killed,” he said.
Hundreds of US drone strikes have been carried out in Pakistan against suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban militants, several killing innocent civilians. The case over the death of Noor Khan’s father’s may take place as early as July.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)May 23, 2012
As you might have noticed, the stock market is falling like a stone. As of 9 AM PST, the Dow Jones has dropped 172 points while all the other indices are down sharply. German 2-year debt (bund) has dipped below 0% this morning at auction, signalling an acceleration in the bank run taking place in southern Europe. Depositors in Spain, Greece, Italy, Portugal, etc would rather take a loss on their investment, then risk not their money back at all. The European Central Bank (ECB) does not guarantee deposits, so people are withdrawing their money en masse and getting out of Dodge pronto. What we're seeing is a real-time panic.
The ostensible trigger for the panic is known, but you won't read about it in the financial media where the news is dumbed down to the point of incoherence. What's really going on is that the German central bank (The Bundesbank) has indicated that it's ready to pull the plug on Greece which means that future bailouts will probably not be forthcoming. That's bad. It means that Greece will run out of money some time in June; their banking system will implode, and the "birthplace of democracy" will be reduced to 3rd world status overnight. Here's a blurb from the Bundesbank's communique:
This jeopardises the continued provision of assistance. Greece would have to bear the consequences of such a scenario. The challenges this would create for the euro area and Germany would be considerable, but manageable given prudent crisis management. By contrast, a significant dilution of existing agreements would damage confidence in all euro-area agreements and treaties and strongly weaken incentives for national reform and consolidation measures. In such circumstances the institutional status quo comprising liability, control and individual responsibility of member states would be fundamentally called into question.
When the Eurosystem provided Greece with large amounts of liquidity, it trusted that the programs would be implemented and thereby ultimately assumed considerable risks. In the light of the current situation, it should not significantly increase these risks. Instead, the parliaments and governments of the member states should decide on the manner in which any further financial assistance is provided and therefore whether the associated risks should be assumed."
Okay. So German central bankers don't want to wait until the June elections in Greece to decide whether to provide more money or not. They're throwing in the towel now. No more money. No more bailouts. No more Mr. Niceguy. End of story. But what does that mean? Does it mean that the whole global financial system is headed back into the shitter again like after Lehman Brothers? No one knows for sure, but there's bound to be a few bumps in the road, don't you think? Take a look at this from Bloomberg today (Wed):
Can you really slash a trillion bucks out of the rotting corpse of the EU banking system and still keep things running smoothly? Don't bet on it. Here's more from Bloomberg:
Lenders probably would need another 800 billion-euro liquidity lifeline from the ECB to help stem contagion from a Greek exit, Citigroup analysts estimated in a May 17 note...." (Bloomberg)
That's right, the EU banks were gifted over 1 trillion euros 3 months ago, and they're still too undercapitalized to weather the storm of a Greek default. Nice, eh? So, the whole system is just an empty gourd, right? They're broke, so the ECB will have to print up another 800 bil just to keep the house of cards from collapsing in a heap...Here's a little icing on the cake from Bloomberg:
That’s how much time the country’s leaders would probably have to enact any departure from the single currency while global markets are largely closed, from the end of trading in New York on a Friday to Monday’s market opening ....
“I am completely convinced they could not orchestrate an orderly exit,” said Erik Nielsen, chief economist at UniCredit SpA in London. “This is a country that can’t implement laws, so how in the world are they going to secretly agree to print money, control the banks, control capital flows and think this is going to be orderly? It’s completely impossible.” ...
“There is no reason to think there won’t be riots and violence,” said Lefteris Farmakis, a strategist at Nomura International Plc in London. “It would be a pretty disastrous situation. People have no understanding of the consequences of a euro exit.” ("War-Gaming Greek Euro Exit Shows Hazards in 46-Hour Weekend", Bloomberg)
Riots, street violence, skyrocketing unemployment, grinding poverty...the whole schmeer. And what's the most likely scenario for Greece after all that? Well, probably another military coup backed by President Hopium and his band of CIA merry pranksters, right? Okay, my bad. I don't want to polarize all the Obama fans, but, Geez Louise, things are looking mighty grim for the poor Greeks, don't you think? Of course, it all could go smoothly "without a hitch"; no credit crunch, no bank runs, no flight to safety, no crashing stock markets, no decades of struggle and social unrest, no splitting up of the eurozone, no ethnic animosities, no uber-nationalism, no right wing fanaticism, no border skirmishes or armed hostilities, no revolutions, no depression, no rise of fascism...just a smooth transition to a new, slimmed-down version of the EZ. After all, that's what Germany is expecting. And they could be right.
But, probably not.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)I'M NOT WORRIED...I'M SURE THEY CAN RUN OUT THE CLOCK...EMPTY PROMISES NOTWITHSTANDING
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Now that I can dream of prosecutions....better late than never....
Demeter
(85,373 posts)
Demeter
(85,373 posts)IT'S FOX NEWS, SO GRAIN OF SALT=STILL, IT'S JPMORGAN, NO SALT NEEDED
http://www.foxbusiness.com/news/2012/05/24/jp-morgan-had-1013-billion-one-sided-exposure-fed-data-show/
J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. (JPM) sold $101.3 billion more long-dated derivatives insuring against defaults by investment-grade companies as of March 31 than it had bought back, according to quarterly data from the Federal Reserve.
The amount of insurance-like credit-default swaps the bank sold was double its $50.2 billion net position at the end of December and more than four times its $23.6 billion net position as of Sept. 30, 2011.
The Federal Reserve data, first reported Wednesday by Reuters, validate earlier reports by The Wall Street Journal that positions by traders at the bank, including one dubbed "the London whale," had reached a face value of $100 billion or more.
Those trades were part of a complicated three-step strategy, previously reported by Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal, that have raised questions about whether the bank was hedging its risks or making big bets on the direction of CDS prices. he bank is a member of a CDS clearinghouse run by IntercontinentalExchange Inc. (ICE), which it pays to guarantee such trades. That offers some hope the risks of the bank's losses to broader markets will be contained. While it couldn't be determined how many CDS trades J.P. Morgan had cleared, ICE had $914 billion of open CDS in its U.S. clearinghouse as of May 18.
MUCH MORE AT LINK
Demeter
(85,373 posts)So many questions still dangle over JPMorgan Chase’s disastrous credit bet. Here is one more: Why is it so hard to find answers in the bank’s public financial filings? Since JPMorgan announced more than $2 billion of losses on the trade earlier this month, the bank has largely relied on its chief executive, Jamie Dimon, to talk about the bet. He has not provided meaningful specifics when analysts have asked for them. And JPMorgan has neither released new filings with details about the mechanics of the trade nor used existing disclosures to help outsiders get to the bottom of what is going on. This is par for the course on Wall Street. Bank filings rarely contain data that could give warning of a trading blowup. And when a big bet does go bad, banks usually stay tight-lipped about it. But JPMorgan’s problems may show the need for better disclosure about trading positions.
First, regulators investigating the bank appear to believe there is a disclosure issue with the trade, which was made in JPMorgan’s chief investment office, a unit of the bank that invests excess money.
“Our focus is on the quality of their risk disclosure,” Mary L. Schapiro, chairwoman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, said at a hearing of the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday. “We’re very focused on the accuracy and timeliness of that disclosure.”
One of the risk disclosures regulators may focus on is a metric called value at risk, a tool banks use to estimate potential trading losses under stressed conditions. In its first-quarter earnings release on April 13, JPMorgan provided a value-at-risk reading for the chief investment office. On May 10, the bank substantially increased the potential loss estimate, saying the prior figure was inaccurate. In theory, if investors had gotten the accurate value-at-risk figure on April 13, they may have had at least a vague warning that the chief investment office was involved in volatile trading. The unit’s losses ballooned after the end of the first quarter.
But beyond inadequate value-at-risk information, a lot seems missing from JPMorgan’s disclosures about its hedges — the trades the bank makes to offset risks elsewhere. JPMorgan said its $2 billion-plus losses stemmed from a hedge that somehow went awry. Like other banks, JPMorgan makes specific hedge disclosures in filings with the S.E.C., but none appear to include the big moves that led to the hedging losses. That probably means it is buried in aggregated disclosures — and could even be part of numbers identified as client-related activity...
MUCH MORE
Demeter
(85,373 posts)JPMorgan Chase & Co is replacing Lou Lebedin after keeping him for just two months as the New York bank's sole global prime brokerage chief, Bloomberg News reported, citing unnamed people familiar with the change.
Lebedian, a 54-year old former Bear Stearns executive, had been co-head of JPMorgan's global prime brokerage since 2008, and had run the business solo since March when his London-based co-head was moved to a different role.
Lebedin is being replaced by Teresa Heitsenrether, the co-head of JPMorgan's fixed income brokerage since 2008. Heitsenrether, 47, is based in London.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Bank runs are not supposed to happen in a modern advanced economy. Yet, newspapers reported last week that Greek depositors were stepping up their withdrawal of savings held in local banks. Understanding why this is happening – and what we can do about it – is key to assessing the threat to European and global growth, jobs and financial stability.
There are two critical safeguards against the start and disorderly acceleration of bank runs: national deposit insurances schemes and central bank provision of emergency liquidity. They kick in once the banking system’s first line of defence – which consists of strong capital and good assets on the balance sheet – is breached.
Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/CTBPCC/QNWZ8E/IEP5S/62EQOT/WT9246/SN/t?a1=2012&a2=5&a3=28
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Concern raised of cash flow turning negative in early June amid a sharp fall in tax revenues and a loosening of spending controls during two election campaigns
Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/IOCBMM/2OFIRY/WH2F8/L9BGYO/4CUMHM/MQ/t?a1=2012&a2=5&a3=28
Demeter
(85,373 posts)A European Commission finding determines the government of Mario Monti has not done enough to combat tax evasion and the black economy
Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/IOCBMM/2OFIRY/WH2F8/L9BGYO/VLQ6JN/MQ/t?a1=2012&a2=5&a3=28
Demeter
(85,373 posts)WHY DON'T I BELIEVE THIS? IT WOULD BE TOO CONVENIENT FOR THE BANKSTERS
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/26/us-greece-election-poll-idUSBRE84P06J20120526
Greece's conservatives have regained an opinion poll lead that would allow the formation of a pro-bailout government committed to keeping the country in the euro zone, a batch of new surveys showed on Saturday.
Greece was forced to call repeat elections for June 17 after a May 6 vote left parliament divided evenly between groups of parties that support and oppose the austerity conditions attached to a 130 billion euro bailout agreed with the European Union and International Monetary Fund in March.
Polls up to Saturday had showed pro- and anti-bailout parties running neck-and-neck ahead of the vote which could determine the country's future in the single currency.
Five polls published in the weekend press showed the conservative New Democracy party, which supports the bailout, with a lead of between 0.5 and 5.7 points over the anti-bailout leftist SYRIZA party - though analysts said the race was still too close to call....
Demeter
(85,373 posts)...the people potentially in the best position to help shore up the nation’s finances are mainly keeping their heads down. They are among the wealthiest Greeks — whether shipping magnates, whose tax-free status is enshrined in the constitution, or the so-called oligarchs who have accumulated vast wealth via their dominance in core areas of the economy like oil, gas, media, banking and even cement.
Astute investors, they have been reluctant to lend a hand to the Greek treasury through the risky proposition of buying government bonds. But they have also been slow to dispense funds to philanthropies trying to combat the mounting social ills that their nation’s economic collapse has wrought — drawing a sharp rebuke from the head of a foundation created from Greek shipping wealth that has become Greece’s largest charitable donor in recent years. Mainly, though, they have done what Greeks, from the richest to those of modest means, have traditionally done: pay as little as they can in the way of taxes.
Many economists say the oligarchs are a big part of Greece’s economic problem, because they have capitalized on the insular, quasi-monopolistic approach to business that is one reason their nation has long lagged the far more competitive economies of many other euro zone nations. The moneyed elite in Greece have always been secretive in nature, especially when it comes to their fortunes. Assessing the ultimate value of Greek private sector wealth is a nearly impossible task, because much of the money exists offshore, secreted away in Swiss bank accounts or invested in real estate in London and Monaco.
Now, with the country’s top vote-getter, the leftist firebrand Alexis Tsipras, talking more and more about nationalizing companies and industries and, in the words of his top economic adviser, “taxing the rich,” there is even more incentive to lie low...
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Pressure on Greece increased dramatically on Wednesday night after Germany's central bank called for a suspension of financial support to Athens and eurozone finance ministries agreed to draft contingency plans for a Greek exit from the euro. In a blunt warning to Athens, the Bundesbank said a Greek withdrawal from the eurozone would be disruptive but "manageable", undermining claims by Greece's radical anti-austerity leader, Alexis Tsipras, that Europe would not dare pull the plug. "When the Eurosystem provided Greece with large amounts of liquidity, it trusted that the programmes would be implemented and thereby ultimately assumed considerable risks," said the bank. "In the light of the current situation, it should not significantly increase these risks."
The German financial daily Handelsblatt said the Bundesbank was "holding a gun to Greece's head", hammering home the message that Germany will not submit to blackmail from populist politicians in Athens...
Demeter
(85,373 posts)A fresh wave of safety concerns has put the government and operators of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster site back on the highest alert
Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/IOCBMM/2OFIRY/WH2F8/L9BGYO/8ZHX8R/MQ/t?a1=2012&a2=5&a3=28
WHAT INSANE PERSON EVER STEPPED DOWN THE ALERT?
Demeter
(85,373 posts)
kickysnana
(3,908 posts)Did they hire the folks from the EPA ca 9/11?
Demeter
(85,373 posts)THAT'S PEANUTS! WOMEN DON'T HAVE THE OPPORTUNITIES FOR CRIME THAT MEN DO.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financial-crime/9289673/Former-Lloyds-head-of-fraud-and-security-Jessica-Harper-charged-over-2.5m-fraud.html
A director at the state-backed Lloyds Banking Group whose job it was to prevent online fraud has been charged on suspicion of a £2.46m scam herself. Jessica Harper, the former head of fraud and security for digital banking at Lloyds, has been accused of submitting false invoices “to claim payments totalling £2.46m to which she was not entitled,” the Crown Prosecution Service said. The CPS has authorised the Metropolitan Police to charge her with a single count of fraud.
The charge relates to a period between September 1, 2008 and December 21, 2011. Lloyds is 41pc state owned after the taxpayer rescued the bank with £20bn during the financial crisis, with the first bail-out coming shortly after the alleged fraud started – in October 2008.
As head of online fraud and security, Ms Harper, 50, would have been about six or seven rungs down from the executive board, and is likely to have been on as much as £70,000. The alleged fraud came to light as part of an internal investigation at Lloyds that was reported to the Metropolitan Police earlier this year. No customers are believed to have been affected and she no longer works for the bank...
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Demeter
(85,373 posts)Demeter
(85,373 posts)INTERESTING BACKGROUND / SPECULATION
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/is-the-euro-ending-or-beginning-
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Dave Altig's recent macroblog post on policy actions that affected the Fed's balance sheet made me wonder about how changes to the Fed's balance sheet since the financial crisis compared with other central banks.
Relative to before the financial crisis, the Federal Reserve's asset holdings are currently about 3.3 times larger. Initially, the source of that increase was the collateral associated with various temporary lending facilities that the Fed used to address the financial panic. Those assets were then replaced on net by purchases under the first large-scale asset purchase program in 2009. Then in late 2010, asset holdings increased further as a result of a second large-scale asset purchase program.
Of course, size isn't everything. While it might be tempting to try and interpret the change in the size of the central bank's balance sheet as a summary statistic of the degree of monetary policy accommodation, as Dave Altig's post points out, that interpretation is not so straightforward. Increasing the size of the balance sheet is not the only thing a central bank can do to ease monetary policy when short-term interest rates are very low. For example, in late 2011 the Fed began a maturity extension program that changed the composition of the assets on the balance sheet, but this program did not materially alter the size of the balance sheet.
With this caveat in mind, the following chart compares the proportionate changes in the size of asset holdings of five central banks over the period from the first quarter of 2007 through the first quarter of 2012: the Federal Reserve (FR), the Bank of England (BE), the European Central Bank (ECB), the Bank of Canada (BC), and the Bank of Japan (BJ).
http://macroblog.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341c834f53ef0168ebc2fd4d970c-pi
One take-away from the chart is the large variation from country to country. Here are some observations:
- Bank of England: Through mid-2011, the proportionate increase in the Bank of England's asset holdings was roughly similar to the Fed's. But then the Bank of England began a second round of large scale asset purchases that sharply increased the size of its balance sheet. By the first quarter of 2012, the Bank of England's asset holdings were about 4.2 times as large as they were before the financial crisis.
- European Central Bank: Through mid-2011, the ECB's asset holdings were about 1.7 times their precrisis level. But the sharp increase in the ECB's longer-term lending programs in recent months has resulted in a large increase in the size of ECB's balance sheet. By the first quarter of 2012, the ECB's asset holdings were about 2.5 times what they were before the financial crisis.
- Bank of Canada: In 2009, the Bank of Canada's asset holdings had increased to about 1.6 times their precrisis level—similar to the ECB's increase. But as liquidity pressures in Canadian financial markets eased, the Bank of Canada's asset holdings declined in 2010. By the first quarter of 2012, the Bank of Canada's asset holdings were around 1.3 times the precrisis level. (Note that the Bank of Canada's asset data are through February 2012.)
- Bank of Japan: The balance sheet of the Bank of Japan did not increase materially during the financial crisis, but has increased somewhat over the last year. By the first quarter of 2012 the Bank of Japan's asset holdings were about 1.2 times the pre-crisis level.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)James K. Galbraith is an economics professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where he holds the Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations. He writes about economics for numerous publications. His latest book, “Inequality and Instability: A Study of the World Economy Just Before the Great Crisis” (Oxford University Press, 2012), is available here...SEE LINK
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Like many Americans, I was doing everything I could to help elect Barack Obama. It wasn’t all that much—but as an economist in Texas, I had some authority on the thinking of former Senator Phil Gramm, John McCain’s chief economic adviser. I’d made the front page of the Washington Post describing Gramm as a “sorcerer’s apprentice of financial instability and disaster.” (Gramm, with a certain sense of humor, denied it.) For that, and for my experience drafting policy papers, I was in contact every few days with Obama’s economists.
To economists in my own circle, it had long been clear that the financial crisis then unfolding was an epic event. We had watched the subprime mortgage disaster build up. In August 2007 we knew the meltdown had begun. Bear Stearns had failed. But for reasons that have to do with the pace and rhythm of politics, these issues remained on the back burner, the campaign being dominated by health care and the Iraq war. For those of us on the outside, it was hard to know whether the insiders understood what was coming.
And so it seemed a good idea to raise an alarm. But here you confront the Cassandra paradox: if you predict disaster, no one believes you. Economics is rife with alarmists; if the wolf really is at the door, it’s better to have a whole chorus saying so. For this I had the help of the Charles Leopold Mayer Foundation for Human Progress, which convened a meeting in Paris. When you invite twenty friends to spend a few days in Paris in June, it’s rarely hard to persuade them to come. Among the Americans in the group were the editors of two important journals, a former United Nations financial expert, and the former federal regulator who had blown the whistle on the savings and loan fraud. There were also senior specialists from France, Britain, India, China, and Brazil. The meeting had no political connection, but one result was a long memorandum, which I sent in early July to the Obama team. I do not know whether, or by whom, my memo was read. Not the slightest word came back.
Yet the memo disproves the notion that nobody knew. To the group in Paris, three months before Lehman, what I wrote was obvious. It was our consensus view. What follows is an excerpt:
CONTINUES AT LINK
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Warren Mosler (visit Warren’s blog) applies simple arithmetic to numerical relations that have a $ sign (or € sign), and explains clearly how a money economy works...Everybody else stares mystified, as if placing a $ or € in the equation propels us into some alternate universe where ordinary arithmetic does not apply; where suddenly everybody is offering “moral” solutions (Live within our means!) to grade school arithmetic questions, as if “being good” exempts us from the rules of adding and subtracting money numbers.
“If Timmy brings 100 marbles to school and lends them to his classmates at 5% interest for the day, and the classmates diligently work to trade and earn and win enough marbles to pay their debts, how many marbles will Timmy collect at the end of the day?”
Follow up:
Most of the pupils are of the linear thinking neoclassical persuasion steeped from the cradle in “banker arithmetic”, so they sharpen their pencils and calculate that Timmy will receive 105 marbles in total principal + interest. “Profit drives the marble economy”, Teacher correctly explains, “which is why the classmates were all so busily engaged working for marbles.” And the pupils agreed it would be great fun participating in a marble economy where you could exercise your talents to get out more than you put in. But little Warren had failed to cram his head into the neoclassical pencil sharpening box where you learn banker arithmetic and he exclaims, “But there ARE only 100 marbles, so unless Teacher adds marbles into the room, Timmy can only get back as many marbles as he put in. So the correct answer is Timmy will get back 100 marbles and some of his classmates will default on their debts and suffer a life of stupid unemployed poverty because Teacher says “We must live within our means.” and she refuses to add the needed marbles even though she owns the marble factory that produces unlimited marbles at virtually no cost.”
Teacher, by virtue of her “solid moral character”, is hired to run the Bundesbank, from whence she engineers a German export juggernaut that trades Mercedes for marbles so that Germans always earn enough marbles as profits to pay their debts. So now the “classmates” in Europe are rich in Mercedes but are destitute for marbles, because Germany got all the marbles in exchange for the Mercedes, and after the classmates ran out of domestic marbles Teacher “loaned” them more Bundesbank marbles so they could keep buying more Mercedes to keep the export juggernaut going. But finally it turns out the classmates cannot keep borrowing and spending German marbles to buy German exports and they start defaulting on their debts. Teacher thinks, “Default? Which of my pupils used that word before?” And she remembers the little immoral heretic Warren who couldn’t understand moral arithmetic and insisted on applying “regular” arithmetic to problems about marbles. So she calls him up from his tropical tax haven and asks him to repeat what he once explained about “not enough marbles”.
Warren explains monetary arithmetic, which turns out to be the same as “regular” arithmetic except you confuse people with the mesmerizing $ € signs that wizards like to use to show how arcane and inscrutable they are. Then Teacher’s eyes are opened to the reality that morality and arithmetic inhabit non-intersecting Venn sets, where morality does not alter arithmetic. And with her newfound numerical clarity Teacher is appointed dictator of the ECB to save Greece and Germany and euroland from their mystifying problems with money numbers. From her commanding heights at the ECB Teacher promptly begins distributing per capita grants of euros to all the classmates in the eurozone, and soon everybody has enough marbles to pay their debts and keep their game of “money economy” happening, to the delight of all parties. Greeks are smiling in their new Mercedes and Germans are revelling in their fat bank accounts as they soak up the Greek sun on vacation. And all’s right with the world...
BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE!
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Why does it seem like there isn’t enough money to pay for the things we really need? The headlines are filled with stories about our nation’s “debt problem” and dire warnings about our impending “bankruptcy.” As an architect who fills his waking hours thinking up all kinds of wonderful things we could be building, I’m alarmed by the idea there isn’t enough money to pay for any of them. Before wasting more time dreaming, I had to find out: Is it really true? Are we really too poor to put America back to work making and building the things we need to maintain a prosperous nation?
Searching for an answer, I discovered a small (but growing) group of economists (see here, here, here, here, here, here) who represent an emerging school of thought known as “modern monetary theory” (MMT). These men and women are valiantly trying to make us all understand a paradigm shift that occurred some forty years ago, when the world abandoned the gold standard. Their key insight shocked me: A sovereign government is never revenue constrained when it is the Monopoly issuer of its own pure fiat currency; it has all the money that’s needed to put its citizens to work building anything—and providing any service—that is desired by the public (provided the real resources are available). Even more remarkable, sovereign “deficits” in the fiat currency are just the accounting record of the surpluses that have been injected into the private economy. Eliminating the sovereign currency deficit by imposing austerity will not make the economy healthier; it will, in effect, bankrupt the citizens!
If this seems to defy logic, stay with me for just a few minutes. I’m going to propose a simple exercise that will help you “see” this reality for yourself. The exercise is simply that everyone join me in a familiar game of Monopoly. By the end of the game, I hope to convince you that MMT is correct and that we could be doing better, much better – for ourselves and future generations—if we just understood and took ad vantage of our modern monetary system.
Let’s begin.
Playing Monopolis Monopoly
We’ll play by the normal rules (I’ll suggest some added features as we go along) except this time we’ll pay special attention to certain things that are happening. For example, you’ll recall that before the game can begin, one player has to agree to be the “banker” (a tedious task, but someonehas to do it.) But now choosing this person has a special importance: it must be done democratically, with the players voting to determine who will manage the game’s money. We’ll do this little exercise because we want to pay special attention to the fact that the Monopoly “bank” is an entity created by the players themselves for their mutual benefit. In fact, we won’t refer to it as the “bank” anymore, but instead will call it our “currency issuing government” (CIG). In a real sense, we all “own” CIG together, and taking a minute to democratically choose who will manage it heightens our awareness of this key fact. To reinforce this awareness, the next thing we’ll think about, as we set up the Monopoly board, organize the Deed Cards, shuffle the Chance Cards and choose our tokens, is that what we are really doing is setting up, and getting ready to operate, a miniature nation-state. Let’s even give it a name: Monopolis. We, the players, are the new citizens of Monopolis. We have just established, through democratic consensus, our currency issuing government, and we are now getting ready to operate our economy. That’s what the game is about.
Issuing the Currency
As we get ready to play, we immediately discover an odd dilemma: CIG has all the money! We, the players, are ready to go but we can’t start the game until we have some of CIG’s money. This is an awkward moment, which is dispensed with so quickly in regular Monopoly we hardly notice it. (The “banker” is instructed to make initial cash distributions in the amount of $1500 to each player). If we pay attention, we can see that this moment raises some interesting and crucial questions. The first question is: are we not playing the game backwards? Isn’t it us, after all, who have to give our money to government before it has any money to spend on anything? Politicians are telling us this all the time: “Your tax dollars are going to pay for this or that.” And, as will become clear, at the state and local level, this is certainly true. But at the federal level—at the level of the sovereign state—the game of Monopoly provides us with our first clue that something is fundamentally different now from what we habitually imagine it to be. The CIG we’ve created for our nation of Monopolis, in fact, has exactly the same purpose, and exactly the same unique and special power as any government that issues its own sovereign currency: Its purpose is to issue and manage the money we are going to play our game with, and the special power we’ve granted it is the ability to create as much money as necessary for our game to go on as long as we want it to...
MORE
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Have a solemn, peaceful Memorial Day. See you on SMW!
Eugene
(61,872 posts)Source: Reuters
Spanish debt costs spiral, Rajoy says no outside bailout
By Julien Toyer and Sarah White
MADRID | Mon May 28, 2012 9:26am EDT
(Reuters) - Spanish debt yields jumped and shares in Bankia SA plunged to record lows on Monday after the government, struggling to sort out its finances, put forward a plan to revive its fourth-largest lender involving more public debt.
Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy pinned the blame for rising Spanish borrowing costs on concern about the future of the euro zone and again ruled out seeking outside aid to revive a banking sector laid low by a property boom that has long since bust.
"There are major doubts over the euro zone and that makes the risk premium for some countries very high. That's why it would be a very good idea to deliver a clear message there's no going back for the euro," Rajoy told a news conference.
"There will not be any (European) rescue for the Spanish banking system," Rajoy added, before backing calls for the euro zone bailout fund, which will be in place from July, to be able to lend to banks direct.
[font size=1]-snip-[/font]
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/28/us-spain-finances-spain-idUSBRE84R0DF20120528
bread_and_roses
(6,335 posts)LONDON (Reuters) - European stocks rose for a third straight session on Monday and the euro bounced back from two-year lows, as Greek polls showing growing support for pro-bailout parties eased speculation about a disorderly exit by Athens from the single currency.
... The recovery was boosted by the publication of five Greek polls on the weekend which showed the conservative New Democracy party, a supporter the bailout plan, with a slight lead over the anti-bailout leftist SYRIZA party, although analysts said the outcome of the June 17 election was still too close to call. [ID:nL5E8GQ2CK]
"although analysts said the outcome of the June 17 election was still too close to call" Doesn't take much, does it?
If I prayed, I'd be praying for SYRIZA
