Archive for the 'Economy' Category
Market Moves and the Lunatic Fringe
December 24th, 2009Via: The Australian: IMPLODING equities, exploding credit default swaps, soaring gold and slumping oil — if, at any time over the past 18 months, it seemed that markets were in the grip of lunacy, it may be because investors are, technically, lunatics. The market mayhem since the global financial meltdown began in 2008 has provided […]
Trading Shares in Milliseconds
December 23rd, 2009I like the part about how NASDAQ is looking at requiring all brokers to use a specified length of network cable on the links to the exchange’s servers. HA. The article assumes the reader will get it, but just in case you don’t, the point is that the length of the cable affects the latency. […]
Swindler Duped CIA Over Al-Qaeda Decoding Scam
December 23rd, 2009Related “research”: U.S. Government Funding Research Into “Malintent” Detector? Via: AFP: A con artist convinced the CIA and other US agencies in 2003 that he could decode secret messages sent by Al-Qaeda through Al-Jazeera broadcasts, Playboy magazine reported. Duped by claims that “bar codes” on Al-Jazeera television contained targeting information for Al-Qaeda attacks, former president […]
Cost to Fight Each Al Qaeda Member in Afghanistan Per Year: $300 Million
December 23rd, 2009War is a Racket by Smedley D. Butler Via: ABC News: As he justified sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan at a cost of $30 billion a year, President Barack Obama’s description Tuesday of the al Qaeda “cancer” in that country left out one key fact: U.S. intelligence officials have concluded there are only about […]
Ford Offers Retirement, Buyouts to All Hourly Workers With at Least a Year of Service
December 22nd, 2009Via: AP: Ford Motor Co. has offered buyout or retirement incentive packages to all of its 41,000 U.S. hourly workers as it tries to further reduce its factory work force. Ford, the healthiest of Detroit’s three automakers and the only one to avoid government aid and bankruptcy protection, still has more workers than it needs […]
Trillions of Troubles Ahead
December 21st, 2009Via: Forbes: If the government stays on the course it’s been on for the past forty years without a radical change, the federal government will soon have a $10 trillion budget. In other words, the federal budget deficit will be $1.4 trillion. Just to make the size more visible, that’s $1,400 billion. Our colleague Rob […]
GE Attempting to Silence a Danish Academic from Discussing Dangers of Omniscan
December 20th, 2009Via: Times Online: Two years ago in a conference room in the Randolph hotel in Oxford, Henrik Thomsen gave his inside account of a medical “nightmare”. In a presentation to about 30 colleagues, Thomsen, one of Europe’s leading radiologists, revealed how patients treated at his hospital had subsequently contracted a rare and potentially fatal disease. […]
“Double the holdings? It is definitely impossible.”
December 19th, 2009Via: Shanghai Daily: IT is getting harder for governments to buy United States Treasuries because the US’s shrinking current-account gap is reducing supply of dollars overseas, a Chinese central bank official said yesterday. The comments by Zhu Min, deputy governor of the People’s Bank of China, referred to the overall situation globally, not specifically to […]
FDIC Friday
December 19th, 2009Via: CNN: Banks in six U.S. states were closed Friday, bringing the total number of failed banks this year to 140, at a cost of over $1 billion to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Among the institutions seized by regulators was a so-called “bankers’ bank” in Illinois called Independent Bankers’ Bank (IBB), which had about […]
AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and GMAC: “Long-Term Wards of the State”
December 18th, 2009Via: New York Times: Even as the biggest banks repay their government debt in what is being heralded as a successful rescue program, four troubled giants of the financial world remain on government life support. These companies, the American International Group, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and GMAC, are not only unable to repay the government, […]
