Mobius Says Fresh Financial Crisis Around Corner
May 31st, 2011Via: Bloomberg:
Mark Mobius, executive chairman of Templeton Asset Management’s emerging markets group, said another financial crisis is inevitable because the causes of the previous one haven’t been resolved.
“There is definitely going to be another financial crisis around the corner because we haven’t solved any of the things that caused the previous crisis,” Mobius said at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan in Tokyo today in response to a question about price swings. “Are the derivatives regulated? No. Are you still getting growth in derivatives? Yes.”
The total value of derivatives in the world exceeds total global gross domestic product by a factor of 10, said Mobius, who oversees more than $50 billion. With that volume of bets in different directions, volatility and equity market crises will occur, he said.
Libya Lost $1.3 Billion on Options Trades Done with Goldman Sachs
May 31st, 2011But first, remember this one? The Long and Short of It at Goldman Sachs:
The point to bear in mind, as Mr. Sloan brilliantly makes clear, is that as Goldman was peddling C.M.O.’s, it was also shorting the junk on a titanic scale through index sales — showing, at least to me, how horrible a product it believed it was selling.
They had the insight (whatever black magic that entailed) to do those shorts, which means they knew what else was going to blow up; everything, in other words. I don’t think it’s rocket science to know who pocketed the premiums from the sales of these options to the Libyans.
And now, NATO is bombing Libya to save the children? Oh yeah, that’s the ticket.
Via: Wall Street Journal:
In early 2008, Libya’s sovereign-wealth fund controlled by Col. Moammar Gadhafi gave $1.3 billion to Goldman Sachs Group to sink into a currency bet and other complicated trades. The investments lost 98% of their value, internal Goldman documents show.
What happened next may be one of the most peculiar footnotes to the global financial crisis. In an effort to make up for the losses, Goldman offered Libya the chance to become one of its biggest shareholders, according to documents and people familiar with the matter.
Negotiations between Goldman and the Libyan Investment Authority stretched on for months during the summer of 2009. Eventually, the talks fell apart, and nothing more was done about the lost money.
An examination of the strange episode casts light on a period of several years when Goldman and other Western banks scrambled to do business with the oil-rich nation, now an international pariah because of its attacks on civilians during its current conflict. This account of Goldman’s dealings with Libya is based on interviews with close to a dozen people who were involved in the matter, and on Libyan Investment Authority and Goldman documents.
…
Goldman soon carved out a new business with the Libyans, in options—investments that give buyers the right to purchase stocks, currencies or other assets on a future date at stipulated prices. Between January and June 2008, the Libyan fund paid $1.3 billion for options on a basket of currencies and on six stocks: Citigroup Inc., Italian bank UniCredit SpA, Spanish bank Banco Santander, German insurance giant Allianz, French energy company Électricité de France and Italian energy company Eni SpA. The fund stood to reap gains if prices of the underlying stocks or currencies rose above the stipulated levels.
But that fall, the credit crisis hit with a vengeance as Lehman Brothers failed and banks all over the world faced financial crises. The $1.3 billion of option investments were hit especially hard. The underlying securities plunged in value and all of the trades lost money, according to an internal Goldman memo reviewed by the Journal. The memo said the investments were worth just $25.1 million as of February 2010—a decline of 98%.
Officials at the sovereign-wealth fund accused Goldman of misrepresenting the investment deals and making trades without proper authorization, according to people familiar with the situation. In July 2008, Mr. Zarti, the fund’s deputy chairman, summoned Mr. Kabbaj, Goldman’s North Africa chief, to a meeting with the fund’s legal and compliance staff, according to Libyan Investment Authority emails reviewed by the Journal.
Ex-Egypt Bank Head Arrested on Sex Charges
May 31st, 2011Via: Bloomberg:
The former chairman of Egypt’s Bank of Alexandria was charged with sexually abusing a maid at the Pierre Hotel in New York, police said.
Mahmoud Abdel Salam Omar, 74, chairman of El-Mex Salines Co., was arrested yesterday after a 44 year-old female maid alleged he attacked her May 29, according to a police department spokesman. Officers were called to the hotel, located in midtown Manhattan, after she informed security of an alleged incident when she went to Omar’s room after he requested tissues.
Police charged Omar with sexual abuse, unlawful imprisonment, forcible touch and harassment. He allegedly asked the maid for her telephone number and she gave a false one before leaving the room, police said.
The alleged incident comes two weeks after the arrest in New York of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former International Monetary Fund chief charged with attempted rape of a maid at the Sofitel Hotel in Manhattan. He plans to plead not guilty, according to his lawyers.
Omar is the former chairman of the Egyptian American Bank and the Federation of Egyptian Banks, according to the El-Mex Salines company website. He is scheduled to be arraigned this afternoon in Manhattan Criminal Court.
U.S. to View Major Cyber Attacks as Acts of War
May 31st, 2011The Bin Laden spectacle was completely absurd from top to bottom—and now…
Via: AFP:
The Pentagon has adopted a new strategy that will classify major cyber attacks as acts of war, paving the way for possible military retaliation, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.
The newspaper said the Pentagon plans to unveil its first-ever strategy regarding cyber warfare next month, in part as a warning to foes that may try to sabotage the country’s electricity grid, subways or pipelines.
“If you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks,” it quoted a military official as saying.
The newspaper, citing three officials who had seen the document, said the the strategy would maintain that the existing international rules of armed conflict — embodied in treaties and customs — would apply in cyberspace.
It said the Pentagon would likely decide whether to respond militarily to cyber attacks based on the notion of “equivalence” — whether the attack was comparable in damage to a conventional military strike.
Such a decision would also depend on whether the precise source of the attack could be determined.
Aussies to Be Fined for Swearing [???]
May 31st, 2011Nat, they’re coming for you.
Via: Sydney Morning Herald:
Australians may have a love of plain speaking but new laws are set to curtail some of their more colourful language with police issuing on-the-spot fines for obnoxious swearing.
The country’s second most populous state Victoria is due to approve new legislation this week under which police will be able to slap fines of up to Aus$240 (US$257) on people using offensive words or phrases.
Eurozone Crisis Risks ‘Systemic’ Fallout
May 31st, 2011Via: AFP:
The debt crisis in Greece, Ireland and Portugal could have “significant systemic effects” in the eurozone, Italy’s central bank chief Mario Draghi, who is set to head up the European Central Bank, said on Tuesday.
“In the eurozone, the sovereign debt crisis in three countries, which together represent six percent of the area’s GDP, has the potential to exert significant systemic effects,” Draghi said at a central bank conference.
“European economic and monetary union is facing its most difficult test since it was created,” added Draghi, referring to Greece, Ireland and Portugal which have agreed bailout packages worth tens of billions of euros (dollars).
“European surveillance over national budget policies, which was weakened in the middle of the last decade on the initiative of the three biggest countries, showed itself wanting just when it was most essential,” he said.
Had the European stability pact rules been respected to the letter, the ratio of public debt to gross domestic product on the eve of the crisis would have been 10 percentage points less in the eurozone, he said.
“There are no shortcuts,” warned Draghi, calling on governments to rein in public finances.
High Radioactivity Found in Japanese Nuclear Workers
May 30th, 2011Via: AFP:
Two workers from Japan’s stricken Fukushima nuclear plant have been contaminated by high levels of radioactive iodine, the operator said Monday, prompting fears over their long-term health.
The workers, reportedly men in their 30s and 40s, may have already been exposed to radiation levels higher than the recently boosted official annual limit, Japanese media suggested.
Test: Javascript Bitcoin Miner
May 30th, 2011Update: Good Video Cards for GPU Mining
—End Update—
Update: HAHA Never Mind
This misses doing anything worth doing by about four orders of magnitude. lol.
Thanks to everyone who tried this out, but it’s the Bitcoin equivalent trying to win the lotto.
—End Update—
A crew calling themselves bitp.it have created a distributed javascript Bitcoin mining system. Since many tens of thousands of you are apparently waiting for some other method of supporting Cryptogon, besides the ones available already, *grin* I thought that maybe you’d be up for opening this Bitcoin mining page on Cryptogon [Update: Page taken down] in your browser, and leaving it open for as long as you like. You don’t have to do anything else. The code will run inside your browser until you close the tab or window. Open as many instances of the thing as you want. If you monitor your processor utilization, you’ll see the browser using more with each instance.
On a modern computer, you probably won’t notice any difference with just one instance running. On smartphones, old computers and netbooks, you may notice a slowdown, or your fan turning on or becoming audible.
Bitcoins are so hard to mine now that I doubt that this will accomplish anything, but I just wanted to see how many hashes per second you guys could reach.
Writer Urges Internet Junkies to ‘Switch Off’ and Think
May 30th, 2011The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr
Via: AFP:
Like tens of millions of others, US technology writer Nicholas Carr found the lure of the worldwide web hard to resist — until he noticed it was getting harder and harder to concentrate.
He set out his concerns in a celebrated essay headlined “Is Google making us stupid?”
And his latest book “The Shallows” explores in depth what he fears the Internet is doing to our brains.
“The seductions of technology are hard to resist,” Carr acknowledges in that book, which has sold an estimated 50,000 hardback copies in the United States alone. But he thinks it’s time to start trying.
In a speech at last week’s Seoul Digital Forum and an interview with AFP, Carr restated his concerns that IT is affecting the way people think and feel and even the physical make-up of their brains.
Every new technology in history — like the map and the clock — changed the way people think but Carr sees special dangers in the Internet.
He got his first PC back in the 1980s and was an avid net user until “a few years ago, I noticed some disturbing changes in the way my mind worked. I was losing the ability to concentrate.”
Miami Shootout
May 30th, 2011Via: Miami Herald:
Three police officers are in the hospital Monday after emptying several rounds of bullets on a driver who opened fire on South Beach.
The driver was killed; four bystanders were injured.
The police officers involved are in non-life-threatening condition, said Miami Beach Police Sgt. Alejandro Bello.
