In energy, oil is down a bit, but gasoline has hit a new high again.
Additionally, we have monoliner insurance giant MBIA posting a $2.4 billion loss, tied, once again to the obscure financial instruments CDOs and CDSs.
Pretty slow news day otherwise.
Theoretically, the runoff for president of Zimbabwe is supposed to be held within 21 days of the announcement of results, but the electoral commission is saying that it will not be able to conduct an election in that time frame.
I’m not sure how much is organizational incompetence, and how much is the desire of ZANU-PF to have time to use the state security forces to intimidate the opposition.
The MDC has demanded outside observers/peacekeepers for the elections, and Mugabe’s government has not been receptive, to put it mildly.
They are now demanding an end to economic sanctions before allowing western observers in.
Bill O’Reilly Snaps…Again – Watch more free videos
I’m wondering if Fox has decided to ease him out, and so we are starting to see a drip, drip, drip, to diminish him before easing him out.
I think of myself as an angry guy, but whenever you get to turn over a rock in the Republican psyche, it makes me look like Mahatma Ghandi.
I really should be writing about the travails of New York Republican congressman Vito Fossella, following his arrest for drunk driving while on the way to his mistress, with whom he had fathered a child.
The sane* Republicans in New York, are calling for his resignation, but congressman Peter King, showing that he’s firmly in the nutzo category, is blasting them for, “Putting a knife in the back of a good guy who’s made a mistake.”
Actually, it’s at least two mistakes…heh.
It gets better, because it appears that not only is Vito not resigning, it looks like he has decided to stay in the race for reelection.
*Well, relatively sane…they are Republithugs.
Specifically, the measure calls for a 2.5% tax on any endowment in excess of $1 billion.
Massachusetts has 9 colleges and universities that meet this criterion, with Harvard’s endowment of $35+ billion leading the list, and it would be expected to raise $1.4 billion for Massachusetts.
There are a number of reasons that I think that this is a good idea, the first is that Greg Mankiw, former head of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors hates the idea with a passion, and if a Bushie opposes an idea, you are unlikely to be wrong supporting it.
The second, and more logical reason, is that these endowments are so excessive as to run counter to the goals of these institutions as educational non-profits.
Brad Delong, a Harvard Alumni, runs the numbers, and notes that over the past 50 years, Harvard’s graduation rate has gone from 1200 to 1600/year (which means that there is $5.5 million of endowment for each student there), while the UC starting from 5000/year created many more educational openings, both through expansions at UC Berkeley and UCLA, and by improving other parts of the UC system noting that, “Today we have UC Davis, UC Merced, UC Santa Barbara, UC Santa Cruz, UC Sunnydale*, UC Irvine, UC Riverside, UC San Diego which together with UCB and UCLA graduate 40,000 undergraduates a year.”
Matthew Yglesias, also a Harvard Alumni, says “Long story short if you, like me, are a graduate of a fancy college and the development people come around asking you for money don’t do it save your money for institutions that (a) have less money and (b) do more to help people in need.“
It raises an interesting point, specifically that endowments and foundations become a sort of charitable money pit, where the accumulation of more resources become a major, if not the major driving force behind institutional activities.
*Never knew Delong was a Buffy fan.
General Thomas Hartmann, the senior officer in the Office of Military Commissions, has been barred from any participation in the Hamdan trial by senior judge Navy Captain Keith Allred.
The defense, bolstered by testimony from former chief prosecutor Morris Davis, claimed that Hartmann was exerting undue pressure on the prosecutors to rush the “sexy cases”, and hurry prosecutions for political gain, and use evidence obtain by torture.
We are seeing increasing push back, on many levels against the Bush Agenda, by judicial and bureaucratic forces, because there is an increasing realization that Bush and His Evil Minions™ have less than 9 months left on their term, and they are irrelevant.
The judge’s decision on the Yoo memos also reflects this.
Well, it appears that proximate cause of this conflict boils down to two thing, control of the Beruit airport and Hezbollah’s communications system:
It has been announced by all sides that today is the first day of the civil war in Lebanon. This has been building with the steady assassination of political leaders since the conclusion of the war in 2006. Hezbollah is not happy, and all of a sudden the government of Lebanon has access to some very accurate intelligence.
It started with a tip regarding airport security and the means by which Iran was reportedly flying in military supplies to Hezbollah. It didn’t go over well with the militia when the government announced they were going to seize control of a security camera system in the Beruit airport. That was followed by the removal of the head of airport security, a member of Hezbollah.
It’s not particularly surprizing that this would lead to violence. You are talking about the supply lines and the communications network of Hezbollah, which are crucial to them tactically.
Hezbollah has now appeared to lave largely withdrawn from west Beruit, but they appear to still be aggressively confronting Walid Jumblatt’s pro government Druze forces east of the city.
In an otherwise unremittingly negative review of retired general Ricardo Sanchez’s book detailing his experiences in (mis)managing the Iraq war, Washington Post columnist William Arkin of, we find this rather remarkable quote from the general’s book: “
Today in the San Antonio Express-News, Sanchez blames everyone else for what happened during his 14 months in Iraq and says he experienced ‘confused’ pep talks from President Bush. ‘Kick ass!’ Bush is said to have said in the video-teleconference during the battle of Fallujah in 2004. ‘If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell!’
(emphasis mine)
While I agree that Sanchez’s tenure in Iraq deserves nothing but disdain, he, along with Paul Bremer are the two people most responsible for US missteps, I think that he misses the importance of this quote.
The importance is not that Sanchez blames someone else. It’s that what George W. Bush said is are indicators clearly, and deeply, disturbed mind. I’m not talking Pat Buchanan crazy here. I’m talking really, literally insane.
GW Bush’s finger is on the button, and I think that we are seeing someone who is suffering from some severe psychosis, the sort that would normally require compulsory medication, and possibly detention, and Arkin misses it because he, with much justification, hates Sanchez so much.
This is the next stage of an asset collapse, the declaration that a bottom has been found, and it has no where to go but up now.
First, we have an OP/ED in the Wall Street Journal declaring the housing crisis to be over. This is suspect for two reasons:
Additionally, the logic is just plain silly. He claims, among other things, that low interest rates will have housing bottom out, even while there are increasing inflationary and interest rates pressure.
He also believes that since the inventory is not at 11 months, near historic highs, it will turn around.
He could be dishonest, or he could be an idiot, but my money is on both.
I also think that he does not understand how much Alan “Bubbles” Greenspan distorted the market during his tenure as Fed Chair.
We are also seeing some bargain hunting in the financial markets, but again, we saw that, and the declaration of a number of times during the dotcom crash.
To put it bluntly the market is a fool some times.
Of more significance are reports like this, where we see those neighborhoods hit earliest hardest are seeing an up tick. Is this because they are cannibalizing from other neighborhoods that people perceive as still being on the way down?
I agree with the Rich Toscano, when he suggests:
So what does it all mean? One really helpful puzzle piece was supplied by SD Realtor a couple weeks back. He posted some data showing that while volume has declined in many higher end areas, it is actually up quite substantially in some of the areas that have really been crushed (e.g. Eastlake).
His conclusion was that the price declines have gotten so bad in some areas that buyers are starting to creep back in. But where the prices have been stickier, demand remains quite weak. This is a sensible analysis and I tend to agree. If this is what’s going on, and volume is still the good leading indicator it once was, those hard-hit areas are likely closer to the bottom than the rest of San Diego.
There’s one other twist to the question. The months of inventory figure has declined, but that measures sales against “want to sell” inventory. What’s arguably more important is the number of sales vs. “must sell” inventory. It could well be that even as the total amount of inventory declines, must-sell inventory is steady or even rising. I attempt to proxy this relationship with my sales-per-notice-of-default charts. Perhaps the next update of that chart will fill in some blanks, but given that we’ve just been at or near all time high default levels and that defaults generally represent future must-sell inventory, it doesn’t seem like there is a real danger that must-sell inventory will decline much any time soon.
Banks are still foreclosing, and the numbers are continuing to increase, and that is the data which we should consider.
It looks like Henry Paulson and other members of the Bush administration are finally beginning to realize that the falling dollar may be a problem:
The Bush administration is leading the international effort to put a floor under the falling dollar.
The conventional wisdom holds that the Europeans, worried that the mighty euro is making their companies less competitive, prodded Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and other group of seven finance ministers last month into signaling their joint disapproval of the dollar’s plunge. Canada has also been troubled by the strong loonie.
But a senior U.S. Treasury official says that the move actually came at the behest of the American side.
The problem with the dollar is not a speculative artifact, it is a result of two things, that the dollar is objectively overvalued when one looks at the fundamentals of the American economy, and that the Euro has become a reasonable alternative as a reserve currency.
The dollar will continue to trend down until some sort of equilibrium is reached in the best case.
More likely, we will see a stampede of the speculators and a significant downside overshoot.
Interesting…When correcting for raw materials, and that is a lot of US exports, things like ore, food, and hides, exports are not growing.
Our export economy is that of a 3rd world nation. It’s raw materials and food, not finished goods.
One of the problems that we are facing is that if the dollar falls, we lack the domestic industrial capacity to pick up the slack. It has been dismantled over the past 30 years, and it may take it 30 years for it to recover in any significant way.
There has been a surge of people moving to mass transit driven by higher gas prices, though I have to say that after 60 years of direct and indirect subsidies to the “own a car” lifestyle, this will either be a short term change, or a part of a slow change.
That being said, the City of San Francisco has come up with an interesting idea, congestion pricing on parking meters, the theory being that if you price the meters high enough that there are always a few open, you eliminate the people driving around and around looking for parking, and reduce congestion, in addition to reducing the total number of drivers.
Eric Alterman has a column up, Think Again: The Costs of Enforced Sexual Ignorance, in which he rightly excoriates the people who propose abstinence only education.
However, he misses the bigger point:
These programs are chosen as if specifically designed not to work. One long-term evaluation of 10 state abstinence-only programs concluded, “Abstinence-only programs show little evidence of sustained (long-term) impact on attitudes and intentions. Worse, they show some negative impacts on youth’s willingness to use contraception, including condoms, to prevent negative sexual health outcomes related to sexual intercourse. Importantly, only in one state did any program demonstrate short-term success in delaying the initiation of sex; none of these programs demonstrates evidence of long-term success in delaying sexual initiation among youth exposed to the programs or any evidence of success in reducing other sexual risk-taking behaviors among participants.”
(emphasis mine)
He seems to think that these programs are wrong headed, and failures as a result.
They are not. They are failures by design.
The driving force for the people behind these programs is that they believe that sex is evil.
The scripture , “It is better to marry than to burn”, states that marriage is preferable to lechery, but inferior to celibacy, and people behind this are not interested in protecting children, they are interested in punishing them.
In fact, not only to they oppose premarital sex and abortion, they oppose birth control for married couples too. Their goal is not to overturn just Roe, but also Baird. They want women barefoot and pregnant.
Their new (started last December) CEO has announced a restructuring, with the standard quote about getting back to “core” businesses.
Ultimately, Citigroup said it would get rid of roughly $500 billion in so-called legacy assets that currently make up about 22% of the company. Given the current market conditions, the company said it expected to wind down those assets to less than $100 billion over the next two to three years.
This is more than a refocus, this is going to be a significant amount of losses in order to raise capital and to get out of losing business.
Of all the really big banks, Citi is the one that I am least confident in.
Not that important in the scheme of things, but the Gripen’s performance in a non-western air force is likely to be significant to its sales prospects.
It’s not too significant, except that I like it. Some nice pics at the link.
U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein, Southern District of NY, is demanding Yoo’s Aug. 1, 2002 memo on interrogation techniques for the CIA.
He had earlier accepted claims of privilege by the US government, but reversed himself when the ACLU presented evidence that the memo had been, “incorporated into official practice and policy.”
Hopefully, we’ll see more of this.
There appears to be a tentative cease fire in Sadr City:
Under the terms of the agreement, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s government would gain control over Sadr City, now a largely lawless area, and in turn give members of Mr. Sadr’s militia who were not actively involved in the fighting a guarantee that they would not be arrested.
I’m not sure that Maliki will have any meaningful control thouhg, though rockets into the Green Zone are likely to decrease, but this was shaping up to be a disaster for Maliki as well as Sadr:
The Iraqi government has done little to ease the crisis and allow medical and other aid to reach people. There has been almost no effort to repair the shattered neighborhood, where burned-out cars and piles of bricks from bomb-damaged houses are common sights.
If this had gone to a full offensive, we would have seen massive artillery and air strikes, and the neither Iraqi government nor the US military had resources available to handle the 100 thousand or so refugees who would have been created, which would have been politically disasterous for Dawa and ISCI.
Note that once again Iran had to take the lead in mediating this. Our military presence bolsters Iran’s regional ambitions.
The FDIC has closed ANB Financial, NA, Bentonville, AR, and Fremont General, which regulators told to stop issuing subprime loans last year, may file for bankruptcy.
Update: As someone noted, ANB is was the largest bank in Bentonville, Arkansas, the home of WalMart. Not sure of the significance of this fact.
I think that participating in the runoff, though I agree with the assesment that Tsvangirai most likely won outright in the first round.
Hopefully, with the rest of the world watching, and (hopefully) Thabo Mbeki sidelined in the process, the MDC can win the presidency.
That being said, there is a pretty good chance that Morgan Tsvangirai will be whacked by someone working for the ZANU-PF.