ECB Allows Irish Central Bank to Counterfeit 51 Billion Euros
January 18th, 2011I didn’t know the Euro member states could do this.
Via: Mish:
Ireland central bank counterfeited 51 billion Euros out of thin air. The amount is not backed by government bonds. Nor was it a loan from the ECB or anyone else. The money is counterfeit in every sense of the word.
Please consider the facts as depicted in Central Bank steps up its cash support to Irish banks financed by institution printing own money.
The Irish Independent learnt last night that the Central Bank of Ireland is financing €51bn of an emergency loan programme by printing its own money.
The figures also provide the latest evidence that responsibility for funding Ireland’s broken banks is being pushed increasingly back on to Irish taxpayers. The loans are recorded by the Irish Central Bank under the heading “other assets”.
A spokesman for the ECB said the Irish Central Bank is itself creating the money it is lending to banks, not borrowing cash from the ECB to fund the payments. The ECB spokesman said the Irish Central Bank can create its own funds if it deems it appropriate, as long as the ECB is notified.
Research Credit: eo
‘Cows Eat Grass’ and Other Inflammatory Statements
January 18th, 2011Via: Utne Reader:
Cows eat grass. You wouldn’t think it’s a big deal to state this, but at Iowa State University a highly qualified job applicant who had the temerity to voice this simple biological fact was ejected from consideration for a post leading a sustainable agriculture program, The Chronicle of Higher Education reports:
Among those who study sustainability, saying cows should eat grass is not a controversial statement. But saying so in Iowa—which grows more corn than any other state—is likely to attract attention.
Well, it sure did. Ricardo Salvador is a well-respected sustainable agriculture expert and a former professor at Iowa State—and a natural, many observers thought, to lead the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture as its new director. A finalist for the position, however, he didn’t get the post even when the top candidate turned it down. Apparently, his cow comment came back to haunt him:
The remark that may have sunk Mr. Salvador’s candidacy came 37 minutes into his on-campus presentation. While discussing a research project in New York State, he mentioned meat being “produced in the natural way that meat should be produced, which is on land suitable for grasses and perennial crops.”
If this were a TV game show, a loud buzzer would have gone off and Mr. Salvador would have been escorted from the stage that very moment. Because apparently he was supposed to say that cows should eat corn. Even if that’s not natural or sustainable, it’s simply how things are done in Iowa, a state built on big agriculture…
…
The danger of the truth is so great that the Chronicle couldn’t even get Wendy Wintersteen, the dean of Iowa State’s agriculture school, to go anywhere near it. When asked whether cows evolved to eat grass, she replied, “I don’t have an opinion on that statement.”
Research Credit: IL
Ex Tunisia President’s Wife Left with 1.5 Tons of Gold
January 18th, 2011Via: CNBC:
The French government suspects that former Tunisian president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and his family may have fled the country with 1.5 tons of gold, French daily Le Monde reported Monday.
According to the French secret service, Leila Trabelsi, the wife of the ex-president, went to the Central Bank of Tunisia to fetch the gold bars, the paper reported.
The governor of the bank is reported to have refused to give them to her, so Trabelsi rang her husband who first also refused to help, before giving in, according to Le Monde.
“It seems that the wife of Ben Ali left with some gold, 1.5 tons or 45 million euros worth,” a French politician told the paper.
But a central bank official denied receiving verbal or written orders for gold withdrawals, adding that the country’s gold reserves “have not moved,” Le Monde said.
An official from the Elysée told Le Monde that “this information comes directly from Tunisia, in particular the Central Bank. It seems to be pretty much confirmed.”
Trabelsi took a flight to Dubai, before heading to Jeddah. It is still unclear how Ben Ali left Tunisia.
Better Install Firewalls on Chevy Volts; ‘Hugely Vulnerable 5000lb Pieces of Metal’
January 18th, 2011HAHA. One for your bulging What Could Possibly Go Wrong? file folder.
Via: New Electronics:
The Chevy Volt will be the first car of its type: not because it is a hybrid electric/petrol vehicle, but because GM plans to give each one the company sells its own IP address.
The Volt will have no less than 100 microcontrollers running its systems from some 10 million lines of code. This makes some hackers very excited and Adriel Desautels, president of security analysis firm Netragard, very worried.
Before now, you needed physical access to reprogram the software inside a car: an ‘air gap’ protected vehicles from remote tampering. The Volt will have no such physical defence. Without some kind of electronic protection, Desautels sees cars such as the Volt and its likely competitors becoming ‘hugely vulnerable 5000lb pieces of metal’.
Desautels adds: “We are taking systems that were not meant to be exposed to the threats that my team produces and plug it into the internet. Some 14 year old kid will be able to attack your car while you’re driving.
“‘Black hats’ are poised and waiting for this car to come out.”
Research Credit: spongeluke
Spain Cancels Bond Auction; Will Switch to Syndication
January 18th, 2011See, What’s a Syndicated Bond?:
So Greece has started issuing occasional syndicated bonds, where it does just what companies do when they want to issue debt: it gets a small syndicate of banks together, and the banks underwrite the bond, promising to buy it if there aren’t enough bids in the market. Then they go out and build a book and sell the bond to investors just like they would with a corporate issue. This way of doing things guarantees that the government will be able to sell all the bonds it wants to sell.
Via: Irish Times:
Spain’s Treasury, facing a volatile market as it looks for ways to keep its debt costs under control, cancelled a bond auction planned for Thursday and said it would issue a syndicated bond over 10 years.
Belgium is also seeking an opportunity to place debt with a syndicate of banks and Portugal also plans one for the first quarter, as fiscally stretched sovereign issuers elsewhere in Europe also seek to cut spiralling financing costs.
Risks premiums on Spanish and Portuguese debt widened and one analyst said Spain’s announcement could add a new layer of uncertainty to an already tense debt market.
“Some weeks ago this possibility was being speculated about. But, far from calming markets it could be interpreted as an attempt by the Treasury to avoid more uncertainty and assure financing at a fixed rate,” said an economist at IG Markets, Soledad Pellon.
The Treasury said the new bond would be a similar volume as last year’s syndicated issue, between €4 billion and €5 billion.
David Rockefeller Greeted by Adoring Fan Upon Arrival in Chile
January 18th, 2011Flood Disasters in Sri Lanka and South Africa Driving Food Prices Higher
January 17th, 2011Sri Lanka: Via: AFP:
Sri Lanka warned Monday that food prices could shoot up after devastating floods in the north and east of the country destroyed rice and vegetable crops.
Disaster Management Minister Mahinda Amaraweera said vegetable prices had already been affected because of the impact on growing areas that were swamped by unusually heavy monsoon rains.
More than a million people were displaced by the floods that began nine days ago and at least 40 people have died.
“We have a buffer stock of rice that is good for three months. That means there will be no immediate impact on the price of rice, but vegetables are already going up in price,” Amaraweera told AFP.
South Africa: Via: IOL News:
More than 20 municipal areas in six provinces are expected to be declared disaster areas following the floods of the past two weeks.
And while the floods recede, food prices and unemployment are expected to rise.
The worst-hit areas are in the Northern Cape, followed by North West.
…
Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Tina Joemat-Pettersson warned that food supplies would be affected, inflation could rise and the effect would be felt in the agricultural sector.
Yesterday, Joemat-Pettersson flew over flood areas in Gauteng, the Northern Cape, Free State and North West.
“Anticipate food prices to go up. We can’t give the exact statistics or figures yet as we are still investigating the effects of the floods, as well as those in Australia, which could impact on our food supply and our markets. The fear is that more rain is still to come, and we can only make a proper assessment when the water levels have subsided,” she said during her tour.
“Already, 20 000 hectares of farmland in Keimoes have been washed away. It is a grape farm area and has been completely devastated.
“I am also deeply concerned about unemployment in these areas, as last year we had 100 000 job losses in agriculture. We were just recovering from that and had already created 50 000 jobs in the sector, but these floods have reversed that and could possibly result in even more losses,” said Joemat-Pettersson.
She could not estimate the total cost of damage or how much the state would spend on interventions.
Research Credit: ST
Detroit May Close Half of Its Public Schools
January 17th, 2011Via: The Detroit News:
Detroit Public Schools would close nearly half of its schools in the next two years, and increase high school class sizes to 62 by the following year, under a deficit-reduction plan filed with the state.
The plan, part of a monthly update Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb gives the Department of Education, was filed late Monday to provide insight into Bobb’s progress in his attempt to slash a $327 million deficit in the district to zero over the next several years. Under it, the district would slim down from 142 schools now to 72 during 2012-13.
Bobb has said school closures, bigger classes and other measures would be needed if he cannot get help from lawmakers to restructure finances in the state’s largest school district.
Rudolf Elmer, Former Julius Baer Banker, Hands 2,000 Private Banking Files to WikiLeaks
January 17th, 2011Via: Sydney Morning Herald:
THE Swiss whistleblower Rudolf Elmer has provided WikiLeaks with two CDs containing information on more than 2000 bank clients suspected of tax evasion.
The disks were handed over in London last night to the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange. They are said to contain secret bank details of clients, including politicians, multinationals, hedge funds and organised-crime figures.
…
“I want to talk about the Swiss secrecy system, which is damaging our society. The short story is simple: I was in the Cayman Islands and there was a mouse tail and I started to pull on it. The tail got bigger, looked like a dragon tail, I went back to Switzerland and it became bigger, a fire-breathing dragon with several heads. One head was the banks, the other the Swiss press, to an extent, and they all came after me and my family.”
Mr Elmer faces court in Zurich tomorrow over allegations that he breached Swiss banking laws after he handed client data to WikiLeaks in 2007.
He left the bank in 2004 after eight years at its Cayman Islands trust subsidiary. During that time, he has said, he became aware of widespread tax evasion by prominent customers and that this occurred with the full knowledge of the bank’s top management.
Former Dictator ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier Back in Haiti
January 17th, 2011Did he arrive on a Blackwater plane?
Via: Time:
In the past 12 months, Haiti — already the western hemisphere’s economic basket case — has suffered an epic earthquake that according to latest estimates killed more than 250,000 people and leveled the country’s infrastructure, a cholera epidemic that has claimed thousands more lives and a powder-keg political crisis tied to the fraud-tainted Nov. 28 presidential election.
All the country needed now was the return of a brutal exiled dictator.
This being Haiti, whose chronic tragedy is so often served with a helping of banana-republic bizarreness, that’s what it got Sunday afternoon when Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier landed in Port-au-Prince for the first time since being thrown out of the country and packed off to France almost 25 years ago. “I came to help my country,” the 59-year-old former despot declared as some 2,000 of his supporters met him at the airport. But it’s hard to imagine how Duvalier’s reappearance, which Haitian officials insist took them by surprise, could do anything more than throw Haiti into even deeper turmoil as it tries to rebuild after last year’s disaster.
