13 Dec ’07:
According to the FT article [“Bank co-ops keep US afloat”], the top 10 FHLB loans as of 30 Sep 07 are:
“Member” Advances % of tot
Citibank [...]
Next up: Switzerland.
AFP (“Swiss Fear More Pressure on Bank Secrecy after Obama Victory,” 10 Nov ’08):
Switzerland is likely to come under further pressure from the United States over its prized system of banking secrecy after the election last week of Barack Obama, key sector players predicted. The newly-elected US president, who formally takes office in [...]
NYT head (29 Oct ’08):
Intelligence Agencies Face Austerity
Body:
Spending on intelligence operations increased by some 9 percent last year, to $47.5 billion, Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, said on Tuesday. That figure includes most intelligence spending, including the budget for the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency and the operations of spy satellites, [...]
Said to be a Sequoia Capital’s “recent…presentation to its portfolio companies about how to try to survive an economic downturn”:
The how-to bit (slide 53) is a bit thin.
(26econ)
except a stoner who made 866% off it:
October 17, 2008
Today I write not to gloat. Given the pain that nearly everyone is experiencing, that would beentirely inappropriate. Nor am I writing to make further predictions, as most of my forecasts inprevious letters have unfolded or are in the process of unfolding. Instead, I am writing [...]
Here:
To: Nettime-l <nettime-l {AT} kein.org>
Subject: <nettime> how to fix a liquidity crisis
From: t byfield <tbyfield {AT} panix.com>
Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2007
Until just a few months ago, received wisdom held that the “modern” global financial system had become so complex and intertwingled that it had developed a de facto ability to absorb and dissipate almost any [...]
Krugman (“What Happened Today?”, NYT, 9 oct ’08):
On a separate note, one good thing is that there haven’t been any reports of people on Wall Street jumping out of windows. That’s because the windows in modern office buildings don’t open.
Yet.
It’s been widely noted that the national debt clock, erected by NYC real estate magnate Seymour Durst to protest the now-quaint US$2.7 trillion debt in 1989, has run out of digits, and that “[a]s a short-term fix, the digital dollar sign on the billboard-style clock near Times Square has been replaced with an integer—the ‘1’ [...]
Google layoffs.
Contributing factors:
advertising clients looking for lower expenditures and greater efficiencies;
laid-off workers spending more time smurfing the net;
broadband services cut off for nonpayment.
Garet Garrett, Ouroboros, or the Mechanical Extension of Mankind (NYC: Dutton, 1926) labors to explain what a player piano means:
As I write, the strains of a Liszt rhapsody float into my window. They come from a farmer’s cottage a little way down the road. Yesterday a motor truck stopped at his house and unloaded a [...]
The NYT offers a curious meditation on the historical parallels between the collapse of the USSR (when “shock therapy” was the order of the day) and the US’s current difficulties:
Just in time:
“The time of domination by one economy and one currency has been consigned to the past once and for all,” Medvedev said during a [...]
It’s morning in America.
When was the last time GWB gave a press conference in light like that? Desperate times call for desperate measures.
Photo: Julian Bleecker, Everyday Digital Money conf, UC Irvine, 18-19 Sept 2008.
(B***S***)
FT:
The programmers of Super Mario Galaxy will generate more profit this year than the average Goldman Sachs banker has ever managed. According to calculations by the Financial Times, the average employee at Japanese video games maker Nintendo is on track to earn more for their company this year than the average Goldman Sachs employee did [...]
Robert Wolf (CEO, UBS Americas), Steven Black (co-CEO, JPMorgan Chase), and Vikram Pandit of (CEO, Citigroup) try out this season’s casual style as they head into Sunday meetings held by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York:
Nouriel Roubini, who appears to be always right these days, says: “If Lehman collapses expect a run on all [...]
FT:
United Airlines plunged yesterday after a false report that the carrier had returned to bankruptcy court surfaced on the internet. A six-year-old Chicago Tribune story on United’s 2002 bankruptcy filing, spotted on a Google search yesterday morning by an investment newsletter, triggered a massive sell-off of the carrier’s shares until trading was halted. [...] United [...]
“Shorter” Krugman:
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac shouldn’t have been private, so even though they were just nationalized let’s say they were “deprivatized.” And besides, Bush isn’t Thatcher.
And Putin “deprivatized” Yukos.
From Peter Arnett’s ’97 interview with bin Laden:
REPORTER: Mr. Bin Ladin, if the Islamic movement takes over Saudi Arabia, what would your attitude to the West be and will the price of oil be higher?
BIN LADIN: We are a nation and have a long history, with the grace of God, Praise and Glory be to [...]
The LA Times’s “L.A. Land” weblog quotes President George W. Bush from his 15 July press conference:
If your question is, should the government bail out private enterprise, the answer is, no, it shouldn’t. And by the way, the decisions on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—I hear some say ”bailout”—I don’t think it’s a bailout. The [...]
Surprisingly clear:
In earlier years, actually being repaid by borrowers was crucial to lenders. Now, because so much consumer debt is packaged into securities and sold to investors, repayment of the loans takes on less importance to those lenders than the fees and charges generated when loans are made.
If the NYT and its ilk did actual [...]
One theory:
A colleague writes, “Everyone seems to have missed the obvious: The State Department’s third man is going to [talk with] Iran to send oil prices down. I’m sure Paulson told Bush this was the only way to stop a panic.” Almost certainly part of it. (And is it working?)
We’ll see how this tactic affect [...]
Note (1) the “house”/“home” distinction and (2) the absence of either when foreclosure arrives.
(kudos to Calculated Risk)
Q: What do you call your stockbroker?
A: Waiter!
NYT, “Rich, but Rejected,” on the plight of “investment bankers and others on Wall Street [who] have gone from being Manhattan’s most aggressive apartment buyers to real estate pariahs.” So be it; but if that’s the journalistic standard, how would it describe the city’s rapidly growing ranks of [...]
Simon Jenkins:
I was always uncomfortable at the overselling of economics as a science, when it is rather a branch of psychology, a study of the peculiarities of human nature. Its spurious objectivity, manifest in its ridiculous love affair with maths, induced a “Jupiter complex”, a conviction that scientific certainty applied with enough rigour to any [...]
“Matching luggage” means overstuffed garbage full of someone’s life, and “residential units” means someone trying to live in a self-storage space—according to Fred Reger, auctioneer and ironist. This from an NYT story about self-storage sites auctioning off the property of people who’ve defaulted on their storage rental fees. “U-Store-It’s stock is up 33 percent this [...]