Texas University Takes Delivery of Nearly $1 Billion in Gold Bars; Vaulting it in New York
April 17th, 2011That’s a lot of shiny. Which other funds are going to ask COMEX to cough it up?
Via: Bloomberg:
The University of Texas Investment Management Co., the second-largest U.S. academic endowment, took delivery of almost $1 billion in gold bullion and is storing the bars in a New York vault, according to the fund’s board.
The fund, whose $19.9 billion in assets ranked it behind Harvard University’s endowment as of August, according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers, added about $500 million in gold investments to an existing stake last year, said Bruce Zimmerman, the endowment’s chief executive officer. The holdings are worth about $987 million, based on yesterday’s closing price of $1,486 an ounce for Comex futures.
The decision to turn the fund’s investment into gold bars was influenced by Kyle Bass, a Dallas hedge fund manager and member of the endowment’s board, Zimmerman said at its annual meeting on April 14. Bass made $500 million on the U.S. subprime-mortgage collapse.
“Central banks are printing more money than they ever have, so what’s the value of money in terms of purchases of goods and services,” Bass said yesterday in a telephone interview. “I look at gold as just another currency that they can’t print any more of.”
—
More: Bloomberg:
If the holders of just 5 percent of those contracts opted to take delivery of the metal, there wouldn’t be enough to cover the demand, Bass said.
7 Million Afghans Will Go Hungry Without Aid
April 17th, 2011In other news: Afghanistan: U.S. Spends $20 Billion Per Year for Air Conditioning in Tents
Via: Reuters:
The United Nations warned on Friday of a looming food aid shortage in Afghanistan that could leave more than 7 million people hungry unless it received urgent cash donations of over $250 million to buy more supplies.
Most of those who will go short of food are women and children, but overall those at risk make up nearly a quarter of the country’s population of around 30 million, said the U.N.’s World Food Programme (WFP).
Jingle Mail: Morgan Stanley Failed to Make $3.3 Billion Debt Payment by Friday Deadline, Handed Over Keys to Central Tokyo Office Building to Blackstone; Largest Ever Repayment Failure of Its Kind in Japan
April 17th, 2011Via: Reuters:
A Morgan Stanley property fund failed to make $3.3 billion in debt payments by a deadline on Friday, handing over the keys to a central Tokyo office building to Blackstone (BX.N) and other investors, the largest repayment failure of its kind in Japan.
It marks the latest fallout from a series of highly leveraged investments by Morgan Stanley (MS.N), one of the most aggressive investors in worldwide property markets before the global financial crisis.
The $4.2 billion MSREF V real estate fund missed its April 15 deadline to repay 278 billion yen($3.3 billion) worth of debt packaged in commercial mortgage-backed securities on the 32-storey Shinagawa Grand Central Tower, a property which has seen its value plunge, two people involved in the transaction said.
They spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the matter.
A Morgan Stanley spokeswoman in Tokyo declined to comment. A New York based spokesman for Blackstone, which holds the most junior portion of the debt and gains the right to market the building for seven months, was not immediately available for comment.
This is the largest repayment failure of debt packaged in CMBS in Japan, according to analysts and industry experts, bigger than the 112 billion yen that real estate investor K.K. daVinci Holdings failed to pay on the Pacific Century Place office building.
FBI Hijacks ‘Coreflood’ Botnet
April 17th, 2011Alternate headline: FBI Obtains Distributed Denial of Service Capability for Free.
Interestingly, in other recent news, the government is stepping up propaganda efforts on the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace scheme, which is ‘voluntary‘, of course…
Translation: They want you to use NSTIC. They want you to want to use it. There are a lot of ways to make you want to use it.
Via: Wired:
In an extraordinary intervention, the Justice Department has sought and won permission from a federal judge to seize control of a massive criminal botnet comprising millions of private computers, and deliver a command to those computers to disable the malicious software.
The request, filed Tuesday under seal in the U.S. District Court in Connecticut, sought a temporary restraining order to allow the nonprofit Internet Systems Consortium, or ISC, to swap out command-and-control servers that were communicating with machines infected with Coreflood — malicious software used by computer criminals to loot victims’ bank accounts.
According to the filing, ISC, under law enforcement supervision, planned to replace the servers with servers that it controlled, then collect the IP addresses of all infected machines communicating with the criminal servers, and send a remote “stop” command to infected machines to disable the Coreflood malware operating on them.
A Justice Department spokeswoman confirmed that the takeover occurred Tuesday evening, and the shutdown command was sent to infected computers based in the United States.
“Under the authority granted by the court in the TRO, we have responded to requests from infected computers in the United States with a command that temporarily stops the malware from running on the infected computers,” spokeswoman Laura Sweeney wrote in an e-mail.
A separate court filing Tuesday afternoon (.pdf) indicated that the FBI’s New Haven office is behind the operation. In that filing, authorities informed the court that a new variant of Coreflood had been released by criminals Tuesday morning, but that the FBI had tested the kill command against that variant and it had worked successfully.
According to the filing, Coreflood is designed to run whenever an infected computer is rebooted. Therefore the intervention software designed to disable Coreflood has to resend the disable command after every reboot, until the victim removes the malware from his system. The government assured the court, however, that this would cause no harm to computers.
“Based upon technical evaluation and testing, the Government assesses that the command sent to the Coreflood software to stop running will not cause any damage to the victim computers on which the Coreflood software is present, nor will it allow the Government to examine or copy the contents of the victim computers in any fashion,” the government wrote in its request.
Research Credit: DW
Is Sitting a Lethal Activity?
April 16th, 2011Via: New York Times Magazine:
Sitting, it would seem, is an independent pathology. Being sedentary for nine hours a day at the office is bad for your health whether you go home and watch television afterward or hit the gym. It is bad whether you are morbidly obese or marathon-runner thin. “Excessive sitting,” Dr. Levine says, “is a lethal activity.”
Cryptogon Readers Send Contributions in April
April 16th, 2011Thank you.
Pookie $75
AnotherBrotherMark $20
BS CA$20
March Earnings
April 16th, 2011March earnings came to a total of $1315.93. That’s a great result! Cryptogon supporter activity on Amazon U.S. alone represented 53% of earnings. Ten readers sent cash contributions, which included an extremely generous $200 from JH. Thanks very much to everyone who supported Cryptogon in March.
Fukushima: Fuel Rod Fragments at Bottom of Reactor Vessels
April 16th, 2011Flashback: Arnie Gundersen: How Fukushima’s Fuel Rods Melted and Shattered
And now…
Via: Japan Times:
Melted fuel rod fragments have sunk to the bottoms of three reactors at the Fukushima No. 1 power plant and could theoretically burn through the pressure vessels if emergency water-pumping operations are seriously disrupted, the Atomic Energy Society of Japan said Friday.
If too many of the melted fuel fragments puddle at the bottom, they can generate enough concentrated heat to bore a hole in the pressure vessel, which would result in a massive radioactive release to the environment..
“It will take at least two or three months … until the situation of fuel rods is stabilized” said Takashi Sawada, vice chairman of the nuclear body.
The fuel rods are being cooled by tons of water that is being manually injected into the reactors and their spent-fuel pools by truck. But if those operations are interrupted for two or three days by an aftershock or other unforeseen event, the reactors’ cores will again be at risk of melting down further, he said.
The nuclear safety committee, consisting of nuclear engineers and academics, compiled the analysis based on the data disclosed by Tokyo Electric Power Co. and the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, the government’s nuclear watchdog. Earlier reports quoting experts giving the same explanation have been circulating in western media for a week.
The fuel rods in reactors 1, 2 and 3 are heavily damaged. Pieces of the rods melted into fragments about 1 cm wide or smaller and drifted to the bottom of the pressure vessels, the committee said.
U.S. Meat Widely Contaminated with Drug-Resistant Bacteria
April 16th, 2011Via: Los Angeles Times:
Meat in the U.S. may be widely contaminated with strains of drug-resistant bacteria, researchers reported Friday after testing 136 samples of beef, chicken, pork and turkey purchased at grocery stores.
Nearly half of the samples — 47% — contained strains of Staphylococcus aureus, the type of bacteria that most commonly causes staph infections. Of those bacteria, 52% were resistant to at least three classes of antibiotics, according to a study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.
DNA testing suggested the animals were the source of contamination. Environmental health scientist Lance Price, the study’s leader, said the animals most likely harbored these drug-resistant pathogens because antibiotics routinely are fed to livestock to promote growth and prevent disease in crowded pens on large farms.
“These findings really point to serious problems with the way food animals are raised in the U.S. today,” said Price, who directs the Center for Food Microbiology and Environmental Health at the Translational Genomics Research Institute, a nonprofit biomedical research center in Phoenix.
Belarus: Central Bank Halts Sales of Gold for Roubles
April 15th, 2011This is what the beast looks like when the mask finally comes off.
Via: Reuters:
Belarus’ central bank has stopped selling gold to local retail customers for Belarussian roubles, it said on Friday, after demand for precious metals soared due to expectations of a currency devaluation.
The bank did not explain its decision.
Belarus is in talks with Russia on a $3 billion bailout package that Minsk hopes will help it avoid a painful devaluation of the rouble and offset the large current account deficit.
Belarussians bought 470 kilograms of gold from the central bank last month, up from 209 kilograms in January and February together, as they sought to protect their savings.
Analysts say that Belarus will have to eventually devalue the rouble by about 20-30 percent even if it receives aid from Moscow. However, the central bank has said it would not make any such moves until late April.
Research Credit: AN
