Open Thread
November 16th, 2007Guys, if you feel like posting interesting information about what’s going on out there, please do so on comments to this post.
I have no idea what’s happening in the world. My contact with Cryptogon-relevant information ended a couple of days ago. I’m looking forward to getting back to regular posting soon.
Please note that, as always, I have to approve comments manually because of the insidious spam and troll issues.
Posted in Announcements | Top Of Page
Kevin,
Major congrats on the baby. Best wishes to all of you, especially Becky. I hope she has a speedy recovery. Welcome Owen! As for updating Cryptogon there’s no rush. The world will continue going to hell in a handbasket without you.
– Mike Lorenz
MBIA, Ambac Downgrades May Cost Market $200 Billion
“We shudder to think of the ramifications,” said Greg Peters, head of credit strategy at New York-based Morgan Stanley, the second-biggest U.S. securities firm by market value. “You have politicians, taxpayers, municipalities, states. It just opens up a Pandora’s box. That is a huge destabilizing force.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aOjl_Hy9ibBI&refer=home
Chinese TV: Dump the Dollar
Chinese lunchtime television on Friday gave ordinary people a basic tip on how to play the currency markets: sell the dollar!
http://www.cnbc.com/id/21829883
Is China Really Dumping the Dollar? US TIC Flows Will Tell Us on Friday
How Will The Markets React?
http://www.dailyfx.com/story/dailyfx_reports/cross_markets_data_reaction/Is_China_Really_Dumping_the_1195134405859.html
Liberty Dollar office raided
The future of an Evansville-based company that produces a “private voluntary barter currency” known as the Liberty Dollar is in question after federal agents raided the facility this week, according to an e-mail sent by its founder.
http://www.courierpress.com/news/2007/nov/15/liberty-dollar-office-raided/
Welcome to a world of runaway energy demand
“The increase in China’s energy demand between 2002 and 2005 was equivalent to Japan’s current annual energy use.†This nugget of information, buried in the International Energy Agency’s latest World Energy Outlook, tells one almost all one needs to know about what is happening to the world’s energy economy.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/af2a0ed4-9223-11dc-8981-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1
Rothschild family link to “organic” gardening: http://parallelnormal.com/2007/11/02/from-india-to-your-dinnerplate/
Frontal Assault on Freedom: FBI Raids Liberty Dollar
Posted by BJT on Nov 15, 2007
http://www.rabidquill.com/?p=17
No more liberty dollar.
For those interested in gold used as currency, the Liberty Dollar offices were recently raided:
http://houston.craigslist.org/pol/479576572.html
Dollars no good for the Taj Mahal
Foreign tourists to many of India’s most famous landmarks will no longer be able to pay the entrance fee in dollars, the government says.
The ruling is aimed at safeguarding tourism revenues following the recent falls in the dollar.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7098370.stm
http://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/news/20071115/killer-cold-virus-ad14-appears-in-us
as a potential follow up regarding the use of the ‘common cold’ as a delivery vehicle for ‘beneficial’ treatments. a cat out of the bag perhaps? interesting none the less.
congratulations on the successful delivery sir. all the best. =)
China Freezes Bank Lending; Increases Likelihood of Chinese Stock Market Crash
In an extremely dangerous move, the Chinese central government has put a halt to a great deal of the bank lending in the country. According to The Wall Street Journal “a China Banking Regulatory Commission official in Shanghai confirmed that local and Chinese subsidiaries of foreign banks have been requested to ensure that loans outstanding at year end don’t exceed the levels on Oct. 31”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119542008187297217.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/19/0436218
Japan to start fingerprinting all foreign travelers (including permanent residents, etc.) starting tomorrow, Nov 20th. Fingerprints will be stored indefinitely in a ‘database’ to be shared with domestic police and who knows who else.
“Swiss Re Hit by $1 Billion Writedown, Shares Drop”
http://www.cnbc.com/id/21868654
(Begins): “Swiss Re, the world’s biggest reinsurer, became the latest casualty of the subprime debt crisis on Monday as it revealed a 1.2 billion Swiss franc ($1.07 billion) writedown related to credit default swaps.”
Hell’s Bells Ringing On Wall Street
The rumor is that ACA is trying to renegotiate its credit swaps.
MaxedOutMama has the story:
http://maxedoutmama.blogspot.com/2007/11/hells-bells-ringing-on-wall-street.html
I note that the US stock market went way down yesterday and then up a bit today. As I have said previously, this seems to be happening a lot, and I’ll bet the Plunge Protection Team has been playing the role of the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike. It seems apparent that Bernanke has been sacrificing the US$ the way he has so that the stock market won’t tank. It’s not exactly good for the economy that the dollar is tanking, but the resulting inflationary pressure no doubt makes small-time investors want to keep their stocks and bonds, as these financial instruments are the only mitigation this investor has against the dollar-devaluation inflation. And the motivation for keep the small-potatoes people in the game is that their exodus could initiate a chain-reaction that could make the financial markets seriously tank. But that also means that the Plunge Protection Team has to be extra vigilant because a tanking dollar becomes part and parcel of the US economy’s structural weakness, and the ripple effect of economic structural weakness can negatively affect the stock market.
Can you imagine the stampede out of the markets that would result from the combined factors of a tanking dollar and flagging financial markets? We know this will happen eventually, but these structural weaknesses of which I speak (two of which are the massive levels of debt on every level of the economy and the mortgage mess) provide the sort of “perfect storm” conditions that will make the big capitalists willing to go to any lengths to put off this reckoning for as long as possible.
Thanksgiving What Really Happened?
There is nothing wrong with Thanksgiving today, it is just that the history have been mixed up and changed many times over the years. It is based on half truths and and lies. Yes American Indians in the East had their own harvest holidays, their were five of them one large one was in the Summer. However the original Thanksgiving holiday was not celebrating a dinner but a masacre. The orginal Thanksgivings were celebrating three different massacres where the Puritan Settlers trapped American Indians at the Mystic River and burned them alive. It was on this day and on two other massacres that Richard Bellingham the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony declared it a Thanksgiving. Later the dates of the three “battles” were combined into one day of giving thanks to the Christian god, on the advice of Washington who thought one holiday was enough. It was over a hundred years before Lincoln made it a federal holiday and inserted the mythology of a bortherly loving dinner between to cultures, two languages, and two different religions.
-more-
http://www.rys2sense.com/anti-neocons/viewtopic.php?p=21382#21382
I hope you’ll appreciate my analogy…http://thetenring.blogspot.com/2007/11/spinning-and-recovery.html
The Coming Crash
Message from John L. Petersen on the Coming Crash
November 19, 2007
It appears that the world in general and the United States in particular are on the edge of a major disruption in the global financial system. Here’s the summary as we see it.
At a recent Board meeting of The Arlington Institute, Dr. David Martin, CEO of M*CAM and one of the members of the Board was asked for his assessment.
http://www.kontentkonsult.com/news/2007/11/coming-crash.html
Quant Funds & The August Market Turmoil
Tue, Nov 20 2007, 06:13 GMT
by John Mauldin
Millennium Wave Investments
What really happened last August? There was blood in the street for many hedge funds, while others did ok. But in this week’s Outside the Box, Jon Sundt from Altegris Investments (and my US partner) dives you the behind the scenes details of what was going on inside the trading rooms of various quantitative hedge funds. It makes for interesting, if not sobering, reading.
-continued-
http://www.fxstreet.com/futures/market-review/outside-the-box/2007-11-20.html
Treasury Sec Paulson Expects Tidal Wave of Mortgage Problems
While all the signs of a perfect economic storm are registering more and more clearly, Bush admin is waffling and barely waking up, while a single lone Republican senator is blocking even minimal intervention.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson expects the mortgage problems lenders face to be so great, that companies will be unable to process them all on a one-on-one basis. He told the Wall Street Journal, in an interview “We’re never going to be able to process the number of workouts and modifications that are going to be necessary doing it just sort of one-off,” Mr. Paulson said. “I’ve talked to enough people now to know there’s no way that’s going to work”
-more-
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_rob_kall_071121_treasury_sec_paulson.htm
Article on forced child vaccinations in the US.
http://www.newstarget.com/022267.html