Click on the image to see larger. Read the centre circle for how to read the graphic.
Cautionary note from source:
However, reader beware, this graphic feels more like eye candy than real data. I’m no ecologist, but something about these numbers doesn’t seem quite right. Completely out of gold in the entire world in 45 years? No more indium (for LCDs) in 13 years? I don’t quite get the comparison between world consumption rate vs half of the US consumption rate. Why half?
Check out this site, with links to images of a street in Detroit where 60 out of 66 homes are abandoned. The street was fully inhabited as recently as 2006. Must see to believe. You’ll have to click on the images and then zoom in and scroll to the right.
Okay, a bit of an exaggeration, but do most Luxembourgers know they are lending $145,000 per capita to the United States?
Very cool, if somewhat confusing, graphic representation of statistical data comparing the world’s only super power to the world’s next super power.
The Web Trend Map is a yearly publication by iA Inc. It maps the 333 most influential Web domains and the 111 most influential Internet people onto the Tokyo metro map. More information here. Click on the map below for the much larger and readable version.
Hilarious!
From http://nancyrommelmann.typepad.com/nancy_rommelmann/:
An exchange between two churches that face each other across a busy street in Castle Rock, Colorado.
Here.
Story from GlobalSecurity.org.
From Krugman’s blog:
Jeff Sachs comes down hard on the Geithner plan, and his worries need to be taken seriously.
I was starting to come to the conclusion that the plan would simply fizzle — that even though participating players would get a large put along with their free toaster, it wouldn’t be enough to raise the price they’re willing to pay to a level banks would be willing to sell at, rather than keep assets on the books at far above their true value. But once you take into account the possibility of insider deals, that all changes. As Jeff says, a bank can create an off-balance-sheet entity that buys bad assets for far more than they’re worth, using money borrowed from taxpayers, then defaults — in effect a straight transfer from taxpayers to stockholders.
If there’s a mechanism to police such deals, it isn’t clear. And the sense that the administration is just too close to Wall Street continues to grow.
Seen at the recent bi-annual Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot in Kentucky by the Washington Independent’s Dave Weigel:
Weigel noted that all three boxes of the Hitler-Obama shirt had sold out by 3:00 p.m. on Saturday.
Nod: Think Progress
From Wired online:
Now it is nothing but torture.
—Sigmund Freud
Go away. I’m all right.
—H. G. Wells
KHAQQ to Itasca. We are on the line 157 337. Will repeat message. We will repeat this on 6210 kilocycles. Wait. We are running on a north and south line.
—Amelia Earhart
May I not seem to have lived in vain.
—Tycho Brahe
How were the circus receipts today at Madison Square Garden?
—P. T. Barnum
I’d hate to die twice. It’s so boring.
—Richard Feynman
Try LSD, 100 mm intramuscular.
—Aldous Huxley
(in a note to his wife)
It is very beautiful over there.
—Thomas Edison
A dying man can do nothing easy.
—Benjamin Franklin
01010100 01110010 01101001 01110101 01101101 01110000 01101000 ❤ (translation: Triumph)
—Mars Phoenix lander
A young child discussing LSD, taken while it was still legal for anyone.
We go from the the supposed positives to the supposed negatives of LSD:
North Korea has released it’s footage of their missile launch. No embed – click link:
http://www.wsmv.com/video/19114677/index.html
Nod: Closing Velocity
Brad DeLong is, rightly, horrified at the great Ricardian equivalence misunderstanding. It’s one thing to have an argument about whether consumers are perfectly rational and have perfect access to the capital markets; it’s another to have the big advocates of all that perfection not understand the implications of their own model.
So let me try this one more time.
Here’s what we agree on: if consumers have perfect foresight, live forever, have perfect access to capital markets, etc., then they will take into account the expected future burden of taxes to pay for government spending. If the government introduces a new program that will spend $100 billion a year forever, then taxes must ultimately go up by the present-value equivalent of $100 billion forever. Assume that consumers want to reduce consumption by the same amount every year to offset this tax burden; then consumer spending will fall by $100 billion per year to compensate, wiping out any expansionary effect of the government spending.
But suppose that the increase in government spending is temporary, not permanent — that it will increase spending by $100 billion per year for only 1 or 2 years, not forever. This clearly implies a lower future tax burden than $100 billion a year forever, and therefore implies a fall in consumer spending of less than $100 billion per year. So the spending program IS expansionary in this case, EVEN IF you have full Ricardian equivalence.
Is that explanation clear enough to get through? Is there anybody out there?
– Krugman
Sorry, having trouble embedding – you’ll have to click the link below.
Background from Design Boom:
American artist Lee Gainer is based in Washington, DC and creates images that question culturally accepted perceptions. her series ‘two months salary’ is focused on the engagement ring industry. Through the series, gainer investigates the evolution of the engagement ring from luxury item to must-have item. She discovered the popular convention of spending two-months salary on a ring was originally invented by DeBeers in 1947. This purchasing habit continues today and became an interest of Gainer’s. Gainer calculated the average US salaries for a number of occupations and found a selection of ring’s based on the two-month rule. She assembled these into a series of twenty prints each featuring nine rings and the occupation name.
Following are some samples, but find them all here.
Reports (CNN others) are saying that the second stage of the North Korean Taepodong-2 rocket splashed a few hundred kilometres from where a truly successful launch would have landed, but after the 2006 failure, they’re clearly making progress.
North Korea’s news agency, KCNA, stated that,
… its Kwangmyongsong-2, or “Lodestar-2,” named after the propaganda nickname of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, was in an orbit anywhere from 490 to 1,426 kilometers, or 304 to 886 miles, from the earth, circling once every 104 minutes. KCNA said the satellite was broadcasting “immortal revolutionary paeans” to Mr. Kim and his late father, President Kim Il-sung.
However, NORAD disagrees with that statement:
American military sources said the launch was a failure, claiming that the rocket’s payload failed to enter into orbit.
If the reports of an earlier splash for stage two are correct, it is unlikely the rocket achieved the necessary velocity to enter orbit.
Politico reports that a recent poll shows Americans are apparently fed up with North Korea and it’s missile program and are relatively supportive of using military resources to deal with the situation. Here’s the main part:
American voters across lines of age, party and gender support a military approach to eliminate North Korea’s nuclear capabilities, according to a Rasmussen Reports surveyreleased Sunday morning — and conducted in the two days prior to North Korea’s test missile launch on Saturday.
The poll shows that 57 percent of all voters support such a response, while just 15 percent oppose it. A military response is favored by a majority in both parties — 66 percent of Republicans and 52 percent of Democrats — and by 57 percent of both men and women.
A majority of respondents, 51 percent, also oppose the U.S. offering economic aid to North Korea in exchange for it agreeing to dismantle its nuclear program.
From Krugman:
S.D.R.’s, or special drawing rights, in which the International Monetary Fund keeps its accounts.
But there’s both less and more here than meets the eye. S.D.R.’s aren’t real money. They’re accounting units whose value is set by a basket of dollars, euros, Japanese yen and British pounds. And there’s nothing to keep China from diversifying its reserves away from the dollar, indeed from holding a reserve basket matching the composition of the S.D.R.’s — nothing, that is, except for the fact that China now owns so many dollars that it can’t sell them off without driving the dollar down and triggering the very capital loss its leaders fear.
Some background and further explanation from Foreign Policy’s Annie Lowrey:
Back in 1969, the world economy was still suffering from the effects of the Great Depression and the world wars. At the Bretton Woods conference at the end of World War II, the heads of state attending decided against creating a global reserve currency, instead instituting a fixed-rate exchange system.
Twenty-five years later, there weren’t enough key exchange assets — units of gold bullion and dollars — to keep up with the growing global economy. So, the IMF’s member states decided to create the SDR system.
A basket of stable major currencies — like the dollar, pound, and yen — determined its value. Some countries, like Latvia, pegged their currencies to the value of the SDR. But most just used their allocated portion in various international transactions.
But, just a few years after the IMF bothered to make the SDRs, the Bretton Woods fixed-rate system collapsed and the modern world currency market, where exchange rates float freely, emerged. This rendered the SDRs pretty much useless.
Indeed, the current market for SDRs, until the I.M.F. injection, was just $32 billion. The value of current oustanding U.S. currency? Just over $1 trillion.
Krugman gives his usual treatment to an important topic. Some excerpts:
The big news last week was a speech by Zhou Xiaochuan, the governor of China’s central bank, calling for a new “super-sovereign reserve currency.”
The paranoid wing of the Republican Party promptly warned of a dastardly plot to make America give up the dollar. But Mr. Zhou’s speech was actually an admission of weakness. In effect, he was saying that China had driven itself into a dollar trap, and that it can neither get itself out nor change the policies that put it in that trap in the first place.
Some background: In the early years of this decade, China began running large trade surpluses and also began attracting substantial inflows of foreign capital. If China had had a floating exchange rate — like, say, Canada — this would have led to a rise in the value of its currency, which, in turn, would have slowed the growth of China’s exports.
But China chose instead to keep the value of the yuan in terms of the dollar more or less fixed. To do this, it had to buy up dollars as they came flooding in. As the years went by, those trade surpluses just kept growing — and so did China’s hoard of foreign assets.
The Chinese have mainly horded secure U.S. Treasury Bills,
But while T-bills are as safe from default as anything on the planet, they yield a very low rate of return.
Was there a deep strategy behind this vast accumulation of low-yielding assets? Probably not. China acquired its $2 trillion stash — turning the People’s Republic into the T-bills Republic — the same way Britain acquired its empire: in a fit of absence of mind.
And just the other day, it seems, China’s leaders woke up and realized that they had a problem.
The low yield doesn’t seem to bother them much, even now. But they are, apparently, worried about the fact that around 70 percent of those assets are dollar-denominated, so any future fall in the dollar would mean a big capital loss for China. Hence Mr. Zhou’s proposal to move to a new reserve currency…
Here’s the first story from WSJ.
North Korea launched a multi-stage rocket Sunday in defiance of international pressure. The rocket passed safely across Japan and over the Pacific Ocean, Japanese authorities said.
The rocket lifted off shortly after 11:30 a.m. local time from a military site in a rural area called Musudan-ri, near the town of Hwadae, on the country’s northeast coast, then arced over the Sea of Japan and Pacific Ocean.
There was no immediate word how far the rocket flew or if it made it to space to deliver a satellite, as North Korea said it intended.
This appeared on North Korea’s official new agency website earlier today:
DPRK to launch Its Satellite Soon
Pyongyang, April 4 (KCNA) — Preparations for launching “Kwangmyongsong-2,” an experimental communications satellite, by carrier rocket “Unha-2” have been completed at the satellite launching ground in the east coastal area of the DPRK, according to the information available from the Korean Committee of Space Technology. The satellite will be launched soon.
There is no change in the technological indexes necessary for the safe navigation of airliners and ships provided to the international organizations and the countries concerned in advance.
UPDATE
From Reuters:
The U.S. State Department confirmed North Korea had launched the rocket but had no further details. South Korea’s presidential Blue House would make a statement at 11:00 p.m. EDT, local TV said.
Japan said the rocket’s second booster stage had splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, indicating the launch had been successful.
Interesting findings here. Looks like the U.S. citizenry is engaged on the main issues, surprisingly so I have to admit.
What the American Public Knows
The always clever Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, has an interesting column here. Here’s his main conclusion:
The conclusion is straightforward: the ability to navigate through the crisis, using either fiscal or monetary measures effectively and at modest overall cost, depends in both of these cases on the credibility of the authorities’ commitment to long-term monetary stability. Neither huge fiscal deficits nor massive monetary expansions are themselves an unmanageable threat, provided the regime itself remains credible. This is crucial even for a country as indispensable to the global economy as the US. For the UK, it is close to a matter of economic life and death.
So thinks Ian Roderick:
By relentlessly taking to the airwaves, Cheney is re-politicizing issues that should be strictly legal ones. And as long as the issue of law-breaking remains political, and not legal, in nature, Cheney and his cohorts Donald Rumsfeld and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez can rest easy. By becoming the voice and face of the Bush administration’s wrongdoings, Cheney is gambling, so far correctly, that Obama won’t have the political guts to pursue him.
The U.S. Navy will likely reduce by one if not two, the amount of aircraft carriers that Congress had dictated (11) once U.S. Defense Secretary Gates makes his highly-anticipated announcement Monday.
The aircraft carrier is unquestionably the most direct and visible way America projects its power abroad. Arguably it’s ICBM submarine fleet is more deadly, but you can’t see them hovering off your coast to inspire fear or hope – whichever the U.S. is intending. Reducing the number of carriers, and by implication carrier fleets, that the U.S. has in rotation for deployment could have consequences.
Folks that likely aren’t reducing the number of carriers in their fleet:
It doesn’t sound pretty.
Have no doubt, Phase II is coming. At best, it will require hundreds of billions of dollars more, at worst more than a trillion, to deal with more bad loans and toxic assets weakening the economy — problems that Phase I can’t fully absorb. Because unemployment is still rising — ensuring that the initial spate of mortgage defaults, which came from loans to people who could never repay, will be followed by another spate of defaults from those who could repay but now can’t because the deteriorating economy has stripped them of their jobs, their businesses or their credit lines.
But there is reason to hope – that’s what we do these days, right?
The success of the president’s approach, added Hormats, will depend on everything, indeed, working together — “that the fiscal stimulus will improve the housing markets by creating more employment and growth, the improvement in housing will take pressure off banks, and less pressure on the banks will improve the availability of credit that will help housing and business job creation.”
Not being a woman, let alone a mother – I’ll leave it to them to decide on this one.
Here’s the bait:
Is it at long last possible – on this side of the Atlantic – to suggest that we’ve maybe taken “breast is best” a bit too far? That a mother’s need for some semblance of physical dignity is perhaps a right worth respecting? That supplementing with formula – if it makes for greater happiness (and emotional availability) in the baby’s most important caretaker – isn’t necessarily an act of gross irresponsibility?
Maybe. Maybe we’re even at a point where it’s permissible to insist that the needs of a mother and the needs of her baby, rather than being opposed are, in fact, linked, and that the best way to meet both is to scale down the demands now put on mothers and beef up support for them.
Read the full New York Times piece by Judith Warner, author of “Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety” (excerpt, NPR interview).
Here’s the much longer Atlantic piece by Hanna Rosin.
Regardless of all this discussion about breast feeding, their is still one fact that is indisputable: mother’s everywhere have too much on their hands these days. We went from the days of women “wanting it all” to women being expected to do it all. The fact that women (rather then men) are faced with just these sorts of quandaries during and after pregnancy demonstrates the added pressure the must deal with when a couple decides to have children.
From Dish:
Obama has an 81 percent favorable rating among the under-30s. The Congressional Republicans get an 8 percent favorable rating.
Everything moves in cylces, and I guess for Republicans this is wha you call the bottom of the cycle.
Alex P. Keaton is dead (someone recently said).
So after all those years of rushing to turn your cell phone off before taxiing onto the runway and waiting until the plane has come to a complete stop before turning them on again might be over! Details here.
Concerns about the impact on safety of the aircraft itself seem dismissed, we now have to worry about the safety of those who will inevitably chat on their phones the entire flight. Methinks the airlines will now move from safety messaging about cell phones on commercial flights to the courtesy request to turn phones off, like in the movie theatres.
Disturbing news from Iraq today.
The decline accelerated in 1984:
You’ve likely all seen the famous Battle at Kruger video, but here it is via Japanese game show. I have to say, having the music, graphics and audience oohs and aahs does make it even more intense than the original.
If you want to watch the full, original video, here it is:
As Reuters reports:
North Korea has announced a launch window of 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. (0200 to 0700 GMT) sometime from Saturday to Wednesday.
We’ll be watching….
This graphic was done by Virgil Griffith, a CalTech graduate student. Thanks to FlowingData once again.
The graph displays the names of music artists along a spectrum of SAT scores of those who like said artists. My husband loves Sufjan, however I do not. Guess we know who has the brains in this relationship!
Cool map from Dan Meth.com via FlowingData showing where sitcoms are/were supposed to be located in the United States. Click on the image to see it much larger.
North Korean Mig-23
Closing Velocity reports that North Korea’s Taepodong-2 missile is now fueled. Pyongyang has also moved several of its Mig-23s to the launch vicinity “to guard against attempts to intercept its rocket when it launches within days.”
Hot Air does not say he did, but you have to watch the video for yourself. First, here are the Obama’s being received by HM The Queen – she seems to get a very slight head nod. Appropriate from one head of state to another, surely.
Now check out the greeting King Abdullah receives. It repeats the central moment several times.
It is such a deep bow it just can’t be what it looks like on the surface. If Her Majesty only got the Presidential nod, I can’t imagine Obama would make such a different reverence to King Abdullah.
More to follow on this I’m sure.
UPDATE
Perhaps I shouldn’t be, but I’m shocked at the lack of coverage this is receiving. Let’s be clear – I think everyone SHOULD bow before royalty, so that’s not my issue. My issue is why HM The Queen received such different treatment. Perhaps the President knew that The Queen has ordered (confirmed yesterday by Palace officials) that strict protocol around her be reduced, especially with foreign dignitaries, and wanted to honour that. We now know the infamous Michelle Obama hugging The Queen incident was actually the other way around – The Queen reached out to FLOTUS, not vice versa. Knowing the Saudi King had not issued such orders, he felt it suitable to show the appropriate level of respect to a reigning monarch. Perhaps we’ll never know, but this image (a clearer shot than the video) seems to confirm POTUS wasn’t just stooping to pick up a dime.
UPDATE
Anderson Cooper’s page on CNN.com has this from thier international correspondent Richard Quest:
Richard Quest
CNN International CorrespondentDid he or did she? Bow to the Queen that is!
Americans are often in a dither about whether or not they should give the traditional stiff bow from the neck, or a curtsy for women. It goes against the republican grain to make such a sign of respect to a monarch!
Of course there is absolutely no obligation for ANYONE — not even Brits these days — to bow to the Queen. It is not requested nor required. That was changed years ago.
When I met the Queen some years back, no one said a word about having to do it. But I did since I am a British national.
When President and Mrs. Obama met the Queen tonight, there was a handshake, and both the President and the Queen both nodded respectfully to each other.
Was it a bow? Not quite. It was more of a, “I know you are a head of state and so am I. We are both heads of state together and this is what heads of state do when they meet other heads of state.” In other words they bow to each other without actually bowing.
However, Tim Geithner, the US Treasury Secretary was much more upfront about showing his respect to Her Majesty. A handshake and a firm nod of the head. No doubt about it. A sign of respect to one of the world’s most respected heads of state.
This level of analysis is put into The Queen’s head nod, but nothing about the deep bow to King Abdullah? Interesting that there are only 5 comments on the report and for some unknown reason “comments have been closed for this article”. Might that be because folks were trying to point the bow out? Why else would CNN shut it down after only 5 comments.
I hate conspiracy theories and I just don’t want to believe the mainstream press is ignoring this out of some need to “protect” the President. If they were ignoring both greetings that would be fine, but to focus on the greeting The Queen received, but not even mention the King Abdullah one (which is clearly the bigger story) takes some mental acrobatics in order to reconcile.
UPDATE:
CNN and the White House press corps have covered it now. Not in the “news” fashion you’d expect, but perhaps that’s wise as we really don’t know what the motive was. Watch the CNN clip here:
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/offbeat/2009/04/09/moos.bow.or.no.bow.cnn?iref=videosearch
G20 Leaders Group Photo - London
Krugman has a quick post to say he’s moderately pleased with the G20’s main deliverable – $1.1 trillion in additional loans and guarantees to finance trade and bail out troubled countries
[The outcome was] better than I expected, with something substantive and important emerging — namely, much bigger funding for international financial institutions (IFIs), plus expanded trade credit. This will help smaller, currency-crisis countries a lot.
A turning point? No. But realistically, most big-time international meetings produce nothing; this did something significant.
There was also broad agreement on various new international rules to cap the remuneration of bankers, as well as a common approach to dealing with the toxic assets legacy assets on the balance sheets of the world’s banks.
Several sources are reporting that China has developed what is being termed a “kill weapon” that will be able to target and take out an aircraft carrier. The Chinese have apparently resolved the always present problem of targeting a moving object. As the U.S. Naval Institute states:
The range of the modified Dong Feng 21 missile is significant in that it covers the areas that are likely hot zones for future confrontations between U.S. and Chinese surface forces.
The size of the missile enables it to carry a warhead big enough to inflict significant damage on a large vessel, providing the Chinese the capability of destroying a U.S. supercarrier in one strike.
Because the missile employs a complex guidance system, low radar signature and a maneuverability that makes its flight path unpredictable, the odds that it can evade tracking systems to reach its target are increased. It is estimated that the missile can travel at mach 10 and reach its maximum range of 2000km in less than 12 minutes.
__
While the ASBM has been a topic of discussion within national defense circles for quite some time, the fact that information is now coming from Chinese sources indicates that the weapon system is operational. The Chinese rarely mention weapons projects unless they are well beyond the test stages.
If operational as is believed, the system marks the first time a ballistic missile has been successfully developed to attack vessels at sea. Ships currently have no defense against a ballistic missile attack.
BBC economics editor, Stephanie Flanders, had a nice piece on her blog yesterday which she called “The Best Prepared Award”. Although full of the usual Canadian descriptors (she uses variants of boring several times) she does use most of her time to praise the Canadian banking system. She doesn’t ascribe who might be responsible for the fact that, as she puts it, “Canadians are coming out of this crisis in a league of their own.” We know it was because of the prudent measures the Rt. Hon. Paul Martin put in place during his successful tenure as Minister of Finance and then PM. He stood up to the banks that wanted more fiscal flexibility, including more mergers.
Here are some of the best bits:
Canada’s banks have not just had fewer bailouts than other countries. They’ve had none. Zero. Not a dime.
As the FT pointed out today, of the seven institutions in the world that still retain a triple-A Moody’s credit rating, two are Canadian banks. And as their competitors have tumbled, so they have ascended the global rankings: all five Canadian banks now rank in the world top 50.
Didn’t they pay a price for that boring banking – the distinct lack of securitisation and innovation? Well, it’s true, Canada didn’t have a nationwide house price bubble in the lead up to this crisis. And they didn’t have the same kind of rise in personal debt. That’s one reason the IMF used words like “resilient” and “well-placed” in its latest survey of the country’s prospects.
You can see the results of this rather old-style approach in Canada’s boringly consistent rate of growth. On average, between 2001 and 2007, its economy grew by 2.6%.
Across the ocean, the City was a hotbed of global financial innovation, and we were riding a heady stock market and housing boom on a sea of debt. The result? Average economic growth between 2001 and 2007 of, er, 2.6%.
_
I’m sure someone will write to tell me the blot on Canada’s economic record, the fatal policy error that will cause me to sheepishly revoke its award in a few days’ time. But I haven’t found it yet.
Its sober management of the public finances has even left it room for a decent-sized stimulus package for this year and next. Net debt last year was an irritating 22% of GDP.
And the most impressive thing of all about Canada’s position is that you are probably reading about it for the first time. Canadians are so sensible they even have the sense not to brag, in case things turn out badly for them after all.
If the UK had these vital statistics, by now the world would be sick of hearing about them. But on top of everything else, the Canadians have guarded against hubris as well.
Oh, our poor current PM, Mr. Harper. He has had to go against almost every neoconservative value he holds in order to manage the global economic crisis. He barely knows who he is anymore; but to add insult to injury he now has to listen to the rest of the world praise as “genius” the far-sighted policies of his hated foes – the Liberals. He railed against Mr. Martin’s moves to protect our banking system through regulation – telling anyone who would listen that we should be following the examples of our southern cousins and loosing the free market so that Canada could achieve it’s true potential and take its rightful place among the advanced nations of the world who had seen the light and unfettered their financial sectors.
Final humiliation for Harper – he’s a trained economist – and everything he spent his life believing in has evaporated in front of him – all while he has been in power. It just can’t be worse than this for him. Unless you take this into account as well.
HM The Queen, HRH Prince Philip, President Obama and the First Lady
A fun initiative from NASA.
Check out this award winning New York Times/FlowingData graphic entitled: The Ebb and Flow of Movies: Box Office Receipts 1986 – 2008. Click on the graphic to link to the interactive (you can move this graphic throughout the years).
Growing and growing. It will be interesting to see how the recent rise of Twitter impacts the continued growth of Facebook. Does anyone even talk about MySpace anymore?
Courtesy: FlowingData
Taepodong-2 on launch pad at Musudan
Courtesy of: Closing Velocity
Check out this interesting piece from Jonathan Rosenberg, SVP, Product Management at Google. I think the most fascinating part is the discussion of how we’ll all be working, and networking, in “the cloud”.
If you don’t already subscribe to The Official Google Blog you should. They don’t post too often and what they do post is usually of value.
Staff at LEGO have business cards with their details printed on a toy figure which looks like them!!!!
Lego staff business "cards"
Thanks to FlowingData we have this:
Mark Leibovich gets into the psyche of U.S. Vice President Joe Biden in a commendable piece in the New York Times. The President apparently wants this to be the VPs capstone to his political career; Biden joked he just hoped it wasn’t the tombstone; and a few think it just might be the stepping stone he needs to fulfill his still-cherished Presidential ambition. Leibovich also relates how the relationship between the Obama and Biden is developing.
Early indications are that the partnership has evolved as they had imagined. “I think he’s playing the role as ‘adviser in chief’ that he has foreseen,” Mrs. Clinton said of Mr. Biden, adding that he was “involved in the whole agenda of the president.”
When both men are in town, Mr. Biden regularly makes the 17-step walk from his West Wing office to the president’s. They speak by phone (communicating rarely if ever by e-mail), and Mr. Obama will spontaneously call and ask the vice president to join him in meetings.
Mr. Biden attends Mr. Obama’s morning briefings on national security and the economy. He has full access to the president’s schedule and is free to attend anything.
Biden is becoming Obama’s shadow. Although this is positive overall, and it’s a good thing he has access and gets cold-called into meetings at will, it also says something about the inherently rather irregular and random constitutional nature of the American vice presidency. The fact that Biden is really not managing a specific file nor directing a department or agency of the Government means he is actually available to jump into a meeting when necessary. He’s akin to any other White House staffer in that way. Although I’m pretty sure anyone drops what they’re doing when the President asks you to come on over – one of Obama’s Secretary’s, the ones who are actually implementing policy through their departments and/or agencies, would have to take time away from implementing policy decisions to come in to advice about future ones. Obviously this happens, but it’s much more structured around scheduled meetings – Cabinet and others. Any Vice President, much like any First Lady, must decide what they want to make out of their office and try to achieve that without the benefit of the either of the necessary policy levers: Budget (provided by Congress) or Regulation (the State’s power to make and enforce laws).
Their relationship will likely continue to improve in the short term; however over time (especially in a second Obama term) Biden may tire of constantly having his sage advice solicited, and accepted, but not actually getting to implement those excellent ideas. For an action-oriented guy like Biden this could get very irritable over time. One doubts whether, given his vast experience (the reason he was selected), he will feel others (who are by implication less experienced) are implementing his ideas as capably as he would himself. He may start to consider the stepping stone option if he feels he still has work to do.
Politico is reporting that GM CEO Rick Wagoner will resign.
The Obama administration asked Rick Wagoner, the chairman and CEO of General Motors, to step down and he agreed, a White House official said.
Japanese daily, Sankei reports (covered by the always up to speed Closing Velocity) today:
… in a separate dispatch from Washington that 15 personnel from the Iranian satellite and missile development company Shahid Hemmat Industrial Group are staying in North Korea at the invitation of the North Korean government.
Quoting unnamed intelligence sources in Washington it said are close to North Korean affairs, Sankei said the Iranians are likely to join North Korean preparations for the launch and also observe it. The report said North Korea sent missile experts to Iran when it launched a satellite in February.
North Korea is believed to have sold missiles to Iran, and Iran’s Safir-Omid space launch vehicle owes much to the North’s Taepodong missile.
In a fantastic run-down, CV lists the opposing cycles that NK/Iran and the Obama administration seem to be following, and he asks – which cycle is the winner?
North Korea-Iran Ballistic Missile Proliferation Cycle
- NK mass produces basic ballistic missiles (Scuds), sells them to Iran & others.
- NK uses the proceeds to fund advanced ICBM development & deployment.
- NK sells advanced missile technology to Iran.
- Iran utilizes NK’s advanced technology to fire its first space launch vehicle (SLV), aka ICBM. NK is on-site for the launch and takes copious notes, both on the technical aspects and the West’s (non)response.
- NK quickly labels its ICBM test a “space launch,” too. NK improves its own ICBM, with the Iranians on-site, taking their own copious notes.
- Rapidly repeat Steps 1-5 until each party has long range ICBMs capable of reaching the United States.
Meanwhile, the Obama Administration has its own audacious cycle; his famous Hope plays a big role:
- Allow the North Korean Taepodong-2 test go off without a hitch, with Hillary Clinton (and now Bob Gates) proclaiming that the US has no plans to intercept a possibly US-bound ICBM. Completely ignore the deterrent value of missile defense.
- With unopposed missile launches, North Korea & Iran share ICBM technology (see 5 above). The speed at which Iran builds an ICBM capable of reaching Europe and the eastern seaboard of the US increases dramatically.
- Scrap European-based defense against long-range Iranian ICBMs, thus having no plans to intercept a possibly US-bound ICBM. Completely ignore the deterrent value of missile defense. Again.
We all know Washington has more on its plate these days than at almost any other time in its history, but as I pointed out in a previous Iran-related post, Obama and Clinton have made it clear that Washington’s overarching foreign policy priority is Af/Pak, and specifically the stability of Pakistan. Of course they can’t ignore the serious moves towards ICBM development by Pyongyang and Tehran, but they must have some lowering of rhetoric and hostility between themselves and Tehran if they have any hope of stabilizing their positions in Iraq and Afghanistan enough to allow for the necessary focus on Pakistan.
Complicating this will be Israel’s determination, for it’s own national interests, in preventing an Iranian bomb becoming a reality.
Billionaire businessman George Soros notes that the G20 summit in London
… [is] the last chance to avert a full-scale depression that could prove worse than that in the 1930s.”
Mr Soros made his comments just days after an auction of government bonds failed for the first time in 14 years, signalling serious issues about Britain’s ability to fund its increasing debt load.
It doesn’t seem like much of a question after you see this:
| THE ‘NO POLICY’ GAMBLE (2002 V. 2009) | |
|---|---|
| 2002 | 2009 |
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| These wheels assume a scenario in which “no policy” action is taken to try to curb the global emissions of greenhouse gases. In the previous wheel the likelihood of exceeding 5°C was about 4%, but in the new wheels that likelihood is 57%. MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, 2009. |
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| THE ‘POLICY ACTION’ GAMBLE (2002 V. 2009) | |
|---|---|
| 2002 | 2009 |
 |
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| If greenhouse gas emissions are controlled to relatively low levels then the Earth systems feedbacks are much lower, but there is no longer any possibility of less than 1°C warming. MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, 2009. |
|
Roger Cohen has some interesting comments in the NYT on how far Tel Aviv will allow Tehran to go before taking action to prevent an Iranian bomb.
A senior Israeli official told me Iran has 1,000 kilos of low-enriched uranium and will have 500 more within six months, enough to make a bomb. It could then opt for one of three courses.
Rush for a bomb by shredding the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, adapting its centrifuges and producing enough highly enriched uranium within a year.
Move the process to a secret site, in which case getting a bomb would take longer, perhaps two years.
Or continue making low-enriched uranium so that “it would have enough for 10 bombs if it decides to rush at a later stage.”
And where, I asked, is Israel’s red line? “Once they get to 1,500 kilos, nonproliferation is dead,” he said. And so? “It’s established that when a country that does not accept Israel’s existence has such a program, we will intervene.”
(1) Paul Krugman is always right.
(2) If your analysis brings you to the conclusion that Paul Krugman is wrong, refer to rule #1.
– Brad Delong
Krugman comments on the Obama administration’s new found love of all things free-market (to bolster Geitner’s plan), even given some recent and some would say serious (!) evidence to the contrary. He notes relative to the Geitner plan:
… administration officials tout the virtues of markets in general, and say, hey, this creates a market, so it must be good.
It’s a bit disappointing to see the Obama administration engaging in this sort of market-worship — hailing markets as a Good Thing in themselves, rather than as an often but not always useful means to an end. But I have reason to think that unlike the Bushies, they don’t really believe it; it’s just politics. Which is actually better than having genuine market fanatics running things, I guess.
Just as Harper lowers expectations on Afghanistan, David Brooks (who recently spent 6 days there) has a different view. Key for Brooks is understanding the difference between Iraq and Afghanistan, and why it is still possible to succeed in the latter:
In the first place, the Afghan people want what we want. They are, as Lord Byron put it, one of the few people in the region without an inferiority complex. They think they did us a big favor by destroying the Soviet Union and we repaid them with abandonment. They think we owe them all this.
That makes relations between Afghans and foreigners relatively straightforward. Most military leaders here prefer working with the Afghans to the Iraqis. The Afghans are warm and welcoming. They detest the insurgents and root for American success. “The Afghans have treated you as friends, allies and liberators from the very beginning,” says Afghanistan’s defense minister, Abdul Rahim Wardak.
Second, we’re already well through the screwing-up phase of our operation. At first, the Western nations underestimated the insurgency. They tried to centralize power in Kabul. They tried to fight a hodgepodge, multilateral war.
Those and other errors have been exposed, and coalition forces are learning. When you interview impressive leaders here, like Brig. Gen. John Nicholson of Regional Command South, Col. John Agoglia of the Counterinsurgency Training Center and Chris Alexander of the U.N., you see how relentless they are at criticizing their own operations. Thanks to people like that, the coalition will stumble toward success, having tried the alternatives.
Third, we’ve got our priorities right. Armies love killing bad guys. Aid agencies love building schools. But the most important part of any aid effort is governance and law and order. It’s reforming the police, improving the courts, training local civil servants and building prisons.
In Afghanistan, every Western agency is finally focused on this issue, from a Canadian reconstruction camp in Kandahar to the top U.S. general, David McKiernan.
Fourth, the quality of Afghan leadership is improving. This is a relative thing. President Hamid Karzai is detested by much of the U.S. military. Some provincial governors are drug dealers on the side. But as the U.N.’s Kai Eide told the Security Council, “The Afghan government is today better and more competent than ever before.” Reformers now lead the most important ministries and competent governors run key provinces.
Fifth, the U.S. is finally taking this war seriously. Up until now, insurgents have had free rein in vast areas of southern Afghanistan. The infusion of 17,000 more U.S. troops will change that. The Obama administration also promises a civilian surge to balance the military push.
Sixth, Pakistan is finally on the agenda. For the past few years, the U.S. has let Pakistan get away with murder. The insurgents train, organize and get support from there. “It’s very hard to deal with a cross-border insurgency on only one side of the border,” says Mr. Alexander of the U.N. The Obama strategic review recognizes this.
Finally, it is simply wrong to say that Afghanistan is a hopeless 14th-century basket case. This country had decent institutions before the Communist takeover. It hasn’t fallen into chaos, the way Iraq did, because it has a culture of communal discussion and a respect for village elders. The Afghans have embraced the democratic process with enthusiasm.
Congresswoman Michelle Bachman has been on a warpath recently telling anyone who will listen, and ignorantly questioning the Chairman of the Federal Reserve and Sectretary of the Treasury about the grave danger that China, Russia and other ‘evil’ nations are putting America in by plotting to dump the dollar and create some new currency between them that they will then coerce the rest of the world into adopting as the new, “one world currency”. Using the therm “one world”, repeatedly, is designed to conjure up Stalinist-era rhetoric of Communist world domination.
Matthew Yglesias gives the best explanation I’ve read of what sparked her rampage and why she’s so wrong:
“[M]ost countries hold “reserves” of various kinds—foreign currency and gold. Most countries, right now, primarily hold dollars. Euros are also popular, and Yen and British Pounds somewhat less so. The United States of America does not, obviously, hold any dollars in our reserves. We actually have quite a lot of gold. And different countries vary their practices in this regard. But most countries mostly hold their reserves in dollars. So the dollar is, in effect, the “global reserve currency.” The IMF also issues something called Special Drawing Rights that countries can use as a reserve asset. SDRs work as a kind of meta-currency, with their value based on a basket of major world currencies. A Chinese official suggested that it might be good for the world to tilt away from such a heavy reliance on dollars as the reserve currency of choice, since this leaves countries exposed to policy decisions in the United States, and toward something more SDR-like that would be balanced between dollars and euros and yen and pounds and so forth.
George Packer makes some insightful observations in his latest semi-regular New Yorker column on why the far right in America is so much more influential than the far left. Here’s the best part:
The views of right-wing commentators in the grip of the paranoid style (Obama is a stealth radical, the Democrats are imposing socialism) are much closer to mainstream conservative and Republican belief than the views of their counterparts on the left (the levees in New Orleans were blown up by the government, the White House had something to do with 9/11) are to mainstream liberal and Democratic belief. The reasons are complex, but I would list these: the evangelical and occasionally messianic fervor that animates a part of the Republican base; the atmosphere of siege and the self-identification of conservatives as insurgents even when they monopolized political power; the influence of ideology over movement conservatives, and their deep hostility to compromise; the fact that modern conservatism has been a movement, which modern liberalism has not.
The SEIU laid off 75 of its own unionized employees. Today those workers picketed the union in protest of the union’s “union busting.” It doesn’t get much richer than that! Did the SEIU office workers cross the picket lines to go to work?
Now behold what Ed Morrissey of Hot Air called: the “Most awesomely awesome video ever: SEIU pickets … SEIU.”
Anyone who was breathing and had even a rudimentary knowledge of tax policy knew that the federal Conservatives campaign pledges to reduce the GST had nothing to do with sound tax policy, and everything to do with sound political strategy. You tend to do things like this when you assume the vast majority of the electorate does not possess even a rudimentary knowledge of tax policy. We know this, but it’s still pretty galling to have Prime Minister Harper’s former Chief of Staff, Ian Brodie, say this:
“Despite economic evidence to the contrary, in my view the GST cut worked,” Brodie said in Montreal at the annual conference of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada. “It worked in the sense that by the end of the ’05-’06 campaign, voters identified the Conservative party as the party of lower taxes. It worked in the sense that it helped us to win.”
The icing on the cake was that this was in response to a question raised during a session entitled: Does Evidence Matter in Policy-Making?
The lunacy of many of the Conservatives policies has been reported and discussed ad nauseum, but to hear someone of this former stature outright declare that they decided to lie to Canadians because it was good politics calls out for even more discourse.
Anyone involved in politics knows that evidence is key when it works for you, and to be discarded and ridiculed when it doesn’t. This is the nature of living in a democracy. The premise is that the all-knowing and infallible citizens (ie: John Tory’s recent statement: “… the voters can never be wrong in what they decide…) always make the right choice. They will seriously consider the issues before them in the election and who would be best to lead them. In fact, the majority of the electorate is vastly unaware of the actual details of almost all public policy and it makes it almost irresistible for political parties to use smoke and mirrors and lots of mumbo-jumbo spin to convince voters what they’re saying is reality. No matter how many times politicians let voters down, they still somehow keep believing that this time they’re telling them the truth.
News flash people – they never are. They can’t. This is a democracy and to paraphrase Jack Nicholson, “[They] can’t handle the truth.” I’d add that they can’t discern the truth even when it’s right before they’re eyes. There was no economist worth his economics degree that would back up the Conservatives assumptions around the GST cuts, but that didn’t seem to bother the thousands of voters who thought a 2% GST cut would be the solution to their problems, monetary and otherwise. How’s that working out for you? Banked all those massive savings did you? Took the family south this winter on all those thousands you’ve saved, you say?
Even though the cut has made not a whit of difference to any Canadians life (relative to their disposable income) the federal government has actually seen an impact, and by extension so have we all. The GST cuts “have cost the federal government about $12 billion a year at the worst possible time.” That’s right – $12 billion a year is now missing out of federal coffers – all so that we can all save a few cents on our latest trip to Winners.
As long as we continue to allow the ‘demos’ to call the shots, while being totally ignorant of the details of the issues, when most stay home on election night, and those that do vote do so based on whatever political spin was most effective on them, then George Bernard Shaw’s famous quote will continue to be our prophetic reality.
“Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.”
Thanks to Boing Boing.
From the 11/5/99 New York Times: “CONGRESS PASSES WIDE-RANGING BILL EASING BANK LAWS By STEPHEN LABATON“:
”Today Congress voted to update the rules that have governed financial services since the Great Depression and replace them with a system for the 21st century,” Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers said. ”This historic legislation will better enable American companies to compete in the new economy.”The decision to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 provoked dire warnings from a handful of dissenters that the deregulation of Wall Street would someday wreak havoc on the nation’s financial system
CONGRESS PASSES WIDE-RANGING BILL EASING BANK LAWS (11/5/99)
Make sure you participate in this important initiative. It’s only an hour and the visual impacts are huge!
Facebook Info
Thanks to FlowingData.
This is very cool. Check it out.
As Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert prepares to hand over power to his successor, Benjamin Netanyahu, we’re reminded in a piece by Haaretz’s Amos Harel that even though Olmert’s tenure was beset with political troubles, international and sub-national crisis and a massive corruption scandal, Israel’s enemies could not relax.
Despite his deficiencies, the prime minister has throughout his term demonstrated a steely determination in leading military operations into enemy territory. A series of decisions, some of which we only learn of through reports in foreign media, reflect a willingness to take risks in approving distant, secret operations aimed at ensuring Israel’s strategic position.
First and foremost is the decision to destroy the nuclear facility in Syria. Also of paramount importance was the attack on the cache of Fajr missiles on the first night of the Second Lebanon War and (according to foreign media), the bombing in Sudan, and the liquidation of senior Hezbollah operative Imad Mughniyeh and Syrian general Mohammed Suleiman.
The Mexico-U.S. border.
South Korea has sent it’s sole missile defence vessel, the Sejong the Great, to monitor the North Korean missile launch which will likely occur on April 4th or 5th.
There are already four American and Japanese missile destroyers in the area. If any shots are taken, it is very unlikely that they will be from the South Korean vessel – Koreans firing on Koreans and all that stuff.
The North had a rather robust, if typical, reply to the new movements:
“The Lee Myung-bak [South Koren President] group of traitors is showing themselves in their true color as confrontational maniacs who spread malicious insults at whatever their brethren does,” countered the Minju Joson, a newspaper of the North’s Cabinet.
Thanks to Closing Velocity for the image and the info.
We love to hate it but you can’t knock success. A reader of Daily Dish writes about the elephant in the Oval Office:
On revenue, you know the answer as well as I do. Obama needs to move to a VAT/Consumption tax. These things pee money and it was key to Canada turning away from the debt wall it was about to smack into in the mid 90’s. Needs to be sold along with an income tax reduction. Congress will be skittish but it is the right answer.
Bad news for Britain though.
Now on to wrong answers, Gordon Brown. I see the Brit Treasury couldn’t sell all the debt it needed to today … gulp. Gordon Brown, along with Tony Blair, has shown what the ultimate result of Tax AND Spend does. For all its faults, having a lot of debt, the US still maintains an enormous tax capacity. The UK does not and now when they might need to spend the UK government is coming close to a line where it cannot. So while a VAT shoots out money like a firehose in good times it means those surpluses need to be used to pay down the debt incurred in bad times. Do Americans have the discipline the UK under New Labour failed to show?
Both Liberals and Conservatives have made efforts to use the good times to pay down debt. Although folks were often outraged by the massive surpluses the federal government would regularly run, the difference was always paid down on debt – something that would have been harder to achieve if they had tried to do it via Budget. Underestimating revenues was a way to ensure debt repayment, and it worked. The U.K. instead spent the difference.
North Korean Taepodong-2 Missile vs. "Iraqi" Scud-B
Reports from U.S. officials are confirming (here, here and here) that North Korea has positioned a Taepodong-2 missile on the launch pad at it’s missile base in Musudan. Ostensibly they are preparing to launch a communications satellite, you know because they have so many friends they want to communicate with.
Japan has said it will shoot it down via its Patriot anti-missile systems if it threatens to hit the country. North Korea has announced it will interpret any attempt to shoot it’s missile down as an act of war.
Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair testified before Congress that a successful test of a three-stage rocket would demonstrate North Korea’s ability to reach the continental United States with a ballistic missile.
As for US intercept plans, the Navy left two Aegis missile defense ships behind from the armada sent to the Sea of Japan for war games.
Stay tuned.
Ouch.
Some are warning us not to take Krugman’s every word as Gospel.
He’s getting to be one of those people whose every statement is treated as oracular. Which I tend to take as a dangerous sign.
For my money (and isnt’ that what it’s all about these days?) I’m going to follow what Krugman has to say very closely – but only pseudo-religiously. I might make a graven image of Krugman, but I promise not to worship it.
The following are from the great site FlowingData, which reports on GOOD magazine’s recent contest to make visual sense of the econopocalypse:
The Beginning to the End and Back Again
Where did all the money go?
Economic Meltdown of 2008 - 2009
Now doesn’t that clear it all up for ya?
As I suggested in a post last week, it seemed to be more than coincidental that the U.S. and Israeli President’s would both issue Nowruz messages to Iran without any forethought or coordination. I postulated that the difference in tone and audience (Obama’s was to the Iranian people and their leadership, while Peres’ was only directed at the citizens of Iran) did not suggest to me a lack of coordination of effort (as was suggested by many), rather it seemed to display a tacit understanding that Washington was going to make the statement and Tel Aviv decided to follow suit, in their own way.
Now, Haaretz is reporting:
Senior U.S. officials are preparing to present President Barack Obama with a plan for dialogue with Iran on its nuclear program, including increased international sanctions against Tehran alongside dialogue. Top Israeli and U.S. officials have been holding meetings on Iran.
To think that officials at the level that would be discussing Iran strategy would not have discussed the Nowruz message from Obama is naive at best. It appears that when Tel Aviv could not dissuade Washington from making the statement, it determined on it’s own message, with it’s one tone.
As M.J. Rosenberg notes, it hardly seemed coincidental that Peres, a long-time Israeli uberhawk on Iran,
suddenly sends “greetings” to the Iran people urging them to rise up against their government at the same moment that Obama respectfully addressed the “Islamic Republic of Iran” with the most conciliatory US message in decades….
As one close observer of Iran-Israel matters put it, “there is little doubt that Shimon Peres’ subversion of Obama’s Nowruz message was as deliberate as it was destructive.”
The reports that Washington is “furious” at Tel Aviv over the message are likely more for show (to Iran and others in the region) than of any real substance. For all their alignment on substantive policy issues, Israel has always charted its down path in diplomacy and there is no indication this is about to change just because Washington’s tone towards Iran has started to. This all seems like much ado about nothing – the United States (because of too many reasons to note here) will never abandon its special “protector” relationship with Israel and any divergence in approach (coordination) to Iran will be surface at best. Underneath the covers, Washington and Tel Aviv are pretty straight with each other (their relationship allows for divergence of action) and that is not likely to change. Whether they act out publicly as seems likely in the Peres case, the foundation of the relationship is too deep, and necessary, on both sides to be seriously damaged.
King Banaian has a great explanation of the debt and deficit implications of the current range of stimulus and rescue injections the U.S. gov’t is making.
Managing debt to GDP post the econopocalypse will likely be harder than we think. Banaian notes that the real way to understand the entire situation is to understand the concept of “primary deficit”:
Suppose you are paying on a credit card you’ve decided not to use any more. They are charging you high interest. You have to pay off at least all of the interest each month, plus some of the principal, for you to make any progress towards paying that debt off. Likewise, if the government wants to make any progress towards paying off its debt, it must collect enough in taxes, or cut spending enough, to not have to borrow all of what it needs to pay the interest on the debt. Now, it can hope to have an easier time paying back the debt because the economy grows, and it will if GDP growth should exceed the real interest rate it has to pay on the debt. But each year we add to the debt it gets a little harder. And doubling the debt-to-GDP ratio in ten years, with a forecast for real interest rates near 3% in their figures, that’s quite hard to do.
Things have already changed, but Canada has had the lowest debt to GDP ratio in the G7 since 2004. Canada was on track to eliminate total government net debt by 2021. These are 2008 numbers, so brace yourself for the next set!
A little revision will likely be needed in the stated GDP numbers for most of the world’s advanced nations for the past few years.
A great video.
A-MA-ZING. Watch the full video. Starts a bit slow, but you need the intro and it is worth the 8 minutes. If you’ve never done so, check out some of the other TED videos here.
John Harlow and Sara Hashash report that an American computer scientist is going to destroy the trasnit commuting past-time of millions.
Well, maybe destroy is too harsh as they note:
The drawback: it takes ages – typically an hour. Yet through logic and intuition, most Sudoku puzzles can be solved in 20 minutes or less.
Play on!
I noted President’s Obama’s remarkable Nowruz message to the people and government, of Iran earlier. Following the President’s message Israeli President Shimon Peres sent a message of his own – directed only at the people of Iran, not their leaders. As Ben Armbruster reports, Peres called on Iranians to topple their government:
I think that the Iranian people will topple these leaders…these leaders who don’t serve the people, in the end the people will realize that.
Obama had taken pains to spell out the opposite in his message:
In particular, I would like to speak directly to the people and leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran. […] The United States wants the Islamic Republic of Iran to take its rightful place in the community of nations. You have that right — but it comes with real responsibilities.
President Obama and Secretary Clinton look willing to try some creative diplomacy on the Iran file. They have both made it clear that they view Pakistan and the amorphous Tribal Areas bordering Afghanistan as the United States’ clear strategic focus and they would be happy to ratchet down the rhetoric with Iran, who also has a major stakes in the region, and put State Dept resources behind the coming challenges in Pakistan. Undoubtedly some Iran watchers will be disappointed that Israel seems to have evaporated the possibility of building on this initial outreach by Washington by demonstrating that without an engaged Tel Aviv there is no substance behind the President’s overture. However, given the current Israeli domestic political situation where sometime next week right wing Jewish settlers’ rights champion, Avigdor Lieberman, is likely to be named as the new Israeli Foreign Minister in the Netanyahu Cabinet, Peres could hardly have followed up Obama’s message with a similar one. The difference in tone between the two messages does not mean that Washington and Tel Aviv are not coordinating behind the scenes as Armbruster thinks. Unlike the previous administration’s world-view, international relations are all about compromise. There may have been tacit acknowledgement at lower bi-lateral levels that the President was going to make this overture and Israel would respond, after a fashion. The fact that Israel purportedly did not provide the text of their message to the White House does not surprise me. If from the beginning there was never going to be a coordinated message track it wouldn’t be necessary to share the text especially, as is likely, if Israel is less than overjoyed at Washington’s change of tone with Tehran. I stand to be corrected, but I don’t recall very many previous Nowruz messages from sitting American President’s, or Israeli ones. That they both did so this year could speak to some level of ‘compromise coordination’.
Some of the world’s top wine experts recently had a “once in a lifetime” experience.
Krugman has followed up his earlier piece rejecting Treasury’s bank plan with a reiteration and deeper explanation of his serious concerns. He is so “vehement” in his opposition to the plan because he feels:
… that this will be the administration’s only shot — that if the first bank plan is an abject failure, it won’t have the political capital for a second. So it’s just horrifying that Obama — and yes, the buck stops there — has decided to base his financial plan on the fantasy that a bit of financial hocus-pocus will turn the clock back to 2006.
The real distinction as he clearly points out is whether you think the current financial crisis was cauased mainly because of undue panic in the financial markets or if you think the banks took massive risks and actually made bad investments.
President Obama, Secretary Geitner and to some extent, Fed Chairman Bernanke seem to believe (or need to believe?) in the panic explanation. Even with such august company on the panic side, I have to agree with Krugman’s analysis (as I almost always do) – these were in effect toxic assets from the beginning, it just took awhile for that toxicity to work its way through the system. As the government and the Federal Reserve both worked to prevent the insolvency of Bear Stearns by forcing a merger with JPM Chase they were clearly aware that the cause was the underlying sub-primce mortgage and hedge fund investments that Bear had tried to save, but was unable to. In July, 2007, Bear Stearns disclosed that two of its sub-prime hedge funds had lost nearly all of their value amid a rapid decline in the market for sub-prime mortgages.
The panic trigger was pulled when the powers that be allowed Lehman Brothers go under in the fall of 2008 and the subsequent failure of Congree to pass the $700 billion bank bailout package the first time.
Wide-spread investor panic wasn’t the cause, but the result.
LP 36, CP 33, NDP 13, BQ 10, GP 8
Details here.
Krugman:
This plan will produce big gains for banks that didn’t actually need any help; it will, however, do little to reassure the public about banks that are seriously undercapitalized. And I fear that when the plan fails, as it almost surely will, the administration will have shot its bolt: it won’t be able to come back to Congress for a plan that might actually work.
Krugman has done some calculations, and as any good economist has put those into a handy graph. The graph represents the change in industrial production, measured in logs (multiply by 100 to get the percent change), from the previous peak in 1929-30 and 2007-9.
Change in industrial production from peaks
Paul Krugman absolutely supports the quantitative (actually, as he correctly notes, qualitative) easing that the Fed’s purchase of long-term bonds will bring. He is clear however, to note the underlying risk:
The problem may come when the economy recovers, and inflation starts to become a problem rather than a hoped-for outcome. Basically, there will come a time when the Fed wants to withdraw that extra $1 trillion of money it created. It will presumably do this by selling the bonds it bought back to the private sector.
But here’s the rub: if and when the economy recovers, it’s likely that long-term interest rates will rise, especially if the Fed’s current policy is successful in bringing them down. Suppose that the Fed has bought a bunch of 10-year bonds at 2.5% interest, and that by the time the Fed wants to shrink the money supply again the interest rate has risen to 5 or 6 percent, where it was before the crisis. Then the price of those bonds will have dropped significantly.
And this also means that selling the bonds at market prices won’t be enough to withdraw all the money now being created. So the Fed will have to sell additional assets; if the rise in interest rates is at all significant, it will have to get those assets from the Treasury. So the Fed is, implicitly, engaged in a deficit spending policy right now.
My back of the envelope calculation looks like this: if the Fed buys $1 trillion of 10-year bonds at 2.5%, and has to sell those bonds in an environment where the market demands a yield to maturity of more than 5%, it will take around a $200 billion loss.
The Fed’s juggling act is far from over and there will be much more quant/qual easing before we’re done.
Poor Gordon Brown. On his recent visit to Washington British PM Brown gave Pres. Obama a truly touching gift – a pen set made from the timbers of a British anti-slavery vessel. The President return the kindness by giving the PM a boxed set of 25 American movie classics. Not exactly touching, but then the President does have other pressing matters to attend to.
Outrage in the British press ensued and just as it seemed to be dying down, the Times reports that when the PM recently sat down to view his first selection from said set – Psycho (there’s surely much we could read into that) – he was surprised to see this:
Did they realize I live in Europe?
Another “learning experience” for the White House staff perhaps?
Many will appreciate this.
Great point, but strange coming from Steves, isn’t it?
March 20, 2009
Dear Fellow Progressive Conservatives:
Today, I stepped aside as the Leader of our great Party, safe in the knowledge that the leadership will be in the capable, experienced hands of Bob Runciman while we await the selection of my successor. I hope you will give Bob your complete and total support in the months ahead.
I wanted to write you this short note, inadequate as it may be, to express my thanks to each and every one of you for the privilege I was given to serve as your Leader.
40 years ago this year, I signed up the same way most of you did to help a local candidate deliver flyers. Since then, I have been given the opportunity, almost always as a volunteer, to do every possible job one could do in the political world. In that process, I have made many friends, and I have learned a lot about other people, about the difference one can make and about myself. I have learned a lot about the Party too.
I have learned that we are at our best when we are united and we don’t do well when we aren’t. In my experience, the unity that is so necessary only comes when the Party members, starting with the Leader and the Caucus place the Party’s interests first. When they do that, it is because they have come to understand an important reality, namely that the Party and the enduring values it stands for, are bigger and more important than any one of us. So too, is the public interest which we should all be seeking to advance through the political process.
I have learned that we are at our best when we make everyone feel welcome in our Party and don’t try, intentionally or otherwise, to treat our membership as any kind of exclusive preserve, not open to anyone and everyone who wants to join our cause. I worked very hard to reach out to people who had incorrectly concluded we weren’t interested in having them involved in our Party. It is crucial to continue with that work so that our ideas, policies and candidates can truly represent all of the people of Ontario. The easier part is to make Progressive Conservatives feel good about themselves and that is important. The harder part is to make more people in Ontario feel good about becoming Progressive Conservative supporters. We can’t form government if we don’t do both.
I have also been reminded by this experience how important it is to maintain your integrity at all times, even as one may be tempted to do otherwise. While I am disappointed that we did not win the government on my watch, I would be even more disappointed if we had adopted the kind of “winning at all costs” approach which has dragged down the reputation of politicians and has contributed to the current shambles in parts of the business community. Whether you pick a man or woman, rural or urban, veteran or newcomer, make sure you pick a person of steadfast integrity to lead us. It matters more than anything else.
People all across Ontario are looking to us for leadership now. They feel abandoned by a government that only knows how to tax and to spend. Once there was no more money and once the public relations flim-flam was exposed, they too were exposed as having no plan and no idea what to do.
That is why we must get through the leadership process without a lot of internally inflicted wounds. Quite frankly, I have always disliked leadership selection processes, as a participant and as a candidate, because they forced our membership to divide up. That is a part of democracy, but there is a special responsibility we have to place limits on how we compete within the family and to make a special effort after the contest is over to come back together as quickly as we can. I will be most anxious to help in that process in any way possible.
While we can point to some significant successes in outreach, a new and hugely open policy development process and in the financial position of our Party under my leadership, I am sorry we didn’t do better than we did in the Party standings during my tenure. I must ultimately accept responsibility for that, regardless of the contributing factors.
But I think the foundation has been strengthened and I know the will is there among the Party membership to go that next step not for us, but for the people of Ontario.
I want to conclude by thanking you for the warmth of the greeting you always given me as I travelled the province. I almost completed three visits to every riding in the province in less than five years as Leader, and without exception, I was enthusiastically welcomed by people who love our Party and our Province as I do.
I want to thank you for your patience. We didn’t get everything we wanted, but we made progress on rebuilding a great and enduring Party, at opening it up, at re-establishing grassroots policy making and making sure our Party was in the mainstream of Ontario thinking.
While I have retired from the leadership of the Party, I couldn’t possibly retire from the Party itself. And so, I am back to where I started 40 years ago, as a member of the Party like you, looking for the opportunity to serve and to work hard for our election in 2011, in whatever way will help the most.
Thank you for giving me this wonderful opportunity to serve and to lead. I will look forward to seeing you at the riding meetings, the policy conferences and on the campaign trail in the years to come.
Sincerely,
John Tory
Verne Gay, who has covered TV for Newsday for 16 years, has a piece on Newsday’s website on why President Obama appeared on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, rather than using the more staid vehicle of Sunday morning’s Meet the Press.
BOTTOM LINE “Meet the Press” is now the de facto safe show on Sunday morning – “safe,” that is, for those being interviewed.
As Gay points out, it also likely had much to do with Leno’s audience size vs. MTP’s, but the points he makes against David Gregory are honest and ring true. As an avid MTP watcher I have to agree with this assessment by Gay:
Gregory is terrifically polished, well-informed, a good listener and has the talking points of both sides down cold. But he also seems more intent on covering the waterfront than digging for news, or in pushing the talking heads off their talking points.
Gay notes the importance of MTP to journalism as a whole. Under Tim Russert’s (rest his soul) leadership MTP became THE Sunday morning must see TV, now I often skip through the interview segments at the beginning (thanks PVR) because I can’t stand listening to straight talking points one after another. Gregory seems quite pleased with himself watching the dueling sound-bites when he has opposing sides of an issue on together. He lacks Russert’s knack for genially giving folks enough rope to hang themselves. When guests wander off message, Gregory almost always pulls them back with a lob question that relates directly back to a talking point, rather than taking the opportunity to push the guest into an uncomfortable area.
Russert had a gleam in his eyes that you only get when you’re doing something you were born to do. Gregory does not have that, and likely never will. He is new, and no one will ever be Tim Russert, but pulling in the big names to appear on the show is only one step, not knowing what to do with them once they’re there is the bigger task. Russert was a master, let’s hope Gregory will find his feet soon.
Underwater volcano erupts - and is caught on camera.
If Vladimir Putin (the PM of Russia) thinks the annual seal hunt is a “bloody trade” and that “it’s clear that it should have been banned long ago” and has now banned it, will be interesting to see the defence Canadian politicians and sealers put up this year as the annual cull begins. As the Times article points out:
The world’s largest annual commercial seal hunt, due to begin this month, takes place in Canada
— 207,000 seals were caught in Canada last year, earning the 6,000 licensed sealers a total of $7 million (£4.8 million).
First it was Sir Paul and Heather, clearly easier to dismiss, they now must answer how they can justify it when one of the world’s most unemotional leaders speaks of it as he has.
President Obama today delivered a video message to all those celebrating Nowruz, or New Year; but it was mainly targeted at those living inside Iran. The Administration hopes that the millions of secret satellite dishes in Iran will deliver his message to the Iranian populace. The thaw continues. The Administration’s recent attempts to lower the tension with Iran have been nothing if not inspired. This video message continues in that vein. It will be increasingly difficult for the Iranian leadership to continue to demonize the United States as the ‘Great Satan’ if said devil is speaking openly, honestly and directly to the Iranian people – so many of whom are under 35 and are the real people he’s attempting to impact.
More on peak oil: http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/03/how-peak-is-o-1.html
And more: http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/03/how-peak-is-o-2.html
The Washington Post is reporting that Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki has formed a coalition of sorts with Sunni Arab nationalist Saleh al-Mutlaq.
Minxin Pei has an interesting piece on Foreign Affairs.com about the current state of the Chinese Communist Party and the potential dangers the seemingly resilient autocrats in charge are facing as the global economy continues it’s decline.
Every year, the Chinese labor market grows by more than ten million workers, the bulk of whom are leaving the countryside for urban areas in search of employment. Each percentage point of GDP growth translates into roughly one million new jobs a year, which means that China needs GDP to rise at least ten percent every year in order to absorb the influx of laborers.
Yikes. At a current GDP growth rate of 7% the anecdotal stories of mass exodus of labourers from the major cities back to their rural villages seems likely to be factual. Does this mean the rural population will begin to blame the CCP or “capitalist imperial powers”?
Minxin thinks the CCP will be in their sights:
Strong economic performance has been the single most important source of legitimacy for the CCP, so prolonged economic stagnation carries the danger of disenchanting a growing middle class that was lulled into political apathy by the prosperity of the post-Tiananmen years. And economic policies that favor the rich have already alienated industrial workers and rural peasants, formerly the social base of the party.
But he doesn’t think there is much danger for CCP mandarins, at least not from the lowly masses anyway:
If those groups were in fact to band together in a powerful coalition, then the world’s longest-ruling party would indeed be in deep trouble. But that is not going to happen. Such a revolutionary scenario overlooks two critical forces blocking political change in China and similar authoritarian political systems: the regime’s capacity for repression and the unity among the elite.
For Minxin, the real threat could be internal disunity among the Communist elite, the ones who have the most to lose in any reversal of fortune for the Party:
Those who talk of China’s “authoritarian resilience” consider elite unity to be one of the CCP’s most significant achievements in recent decades, citing as evidence technocratic dominance, a lack of ideological disputes, the creation of standardized procedures for the promotion and retirement of high officials, and the relatively smooth leadership succession from Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao.
But there are reasons to remain skeptical of such apparent harmony — arrangements of power that are struck in times of economic prosperity often come undone when crisis hits.
The elite, he says, have been virtually paid off by the State via enormous amounts of pork in the economic apparatus of the country. If that begins to dry up there is no loyalty to a grand leader that will keep the elite in line.
Rising social discontent may not be enough to force the party out of power, but it might be sufficient to tempt some members of the elite to exploit the situation to their own political advantage. Such political entrepreneurs could use populist appeals to weaken their rivals and, in the process, open up divisions within the party’s seemingly unified upper ranks.
Although fragmentation in the leadership is surely possible, I tend to feel that if that were a likely outcome we would have seen something of this “political entrepreneurship” from a leader-in-waiting who would see the obvious advantage and try to fill the obvious void, but at Pei notes:
No single individual [in the CCP leadership] towers above the others in terms of demonstrated leadership, vision, or performance …
Minxin believes this sets the stage for possible “jockeying for preeminence” among the top brass, but it just as likely sets the stage for a non-entity caretaker leader (in the post Wen/Hu period), not concerned about his own aggrandizement (read old and/or infirm here) to assume the reigns and weather the economic storm. One must remember that although the elite have been enjoying amassing and consuming vast amounts of wealth in the last two decades they are more likely, when faced with unrest in the nation, to accept somewhat less wealth, knowing that there is comfort in controlling at least what wealth there is, rather than taking a chance on no wealth at all.
However, in a country with the resources, potential and drive to be the world’s preeminent power, it is only a matter of time until some individual or group within the Politburo Standing Committee (the country’s de facto top power organ) rises to the challenge and provides China with some specific direction and ambition.
Admittedly I’m reaching on this one, but could China be sending a message to the United States via always helpful North Korea?
A well-site geologist from the U.S. has some interesting comments on peak oil and technological advancement in North America relative to extraction.
If you look at the rotary rig count – rigs around the world actively drilling for oil and gas, there are about 1100 rigs drilling in North America (US and Canada) and another 1000 rigs drilling in the rest of the world. Doesn’t this seem surprising?
Surprising yes, but let’s check those rotary rig count numbers a year from now once the impact of $50 oil fully processes through the NA oil industyr. The very innovations he notes are costly, especially for Canadian oil/tar sands extraction, and the conventional wisdom is that extractors require something north of $60 a barrel to really make the oil/tar sands profitable.
Thanks to the rather intesne coverage of President Obama’s “bracket” selections for the upcoming NCAA championships/playoffs – whatever – I now know what a “bracket” in this context means. (Thanks Paul)
For those who don’t know, or want to know more about the President’s official picks you can read all about it here.
The Bracket-in-Chief
CNN carried a story yesterday that gives a glimpse into the intriguing relationship between fast-friends Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez. Former Mexican Foriegn Minister Jorge G. Castaneda postulates in the current issue of Newsweek that Chavez is worried Fidel’s brother Raul (who took over day-to-day control of the State from Fidel in 2006 and offically became Cuba’s President in February of 2008) will be forced to make economic and political concessions to the United States because:
“… they [the supposed coup plotters] also feared that the leader was beginning to feel threatened by the reaction of the Cuban people to excessive economic and social deprivation, and after his brother’s demise would be unable to control the flow of events. Consequently, he would accept a series of economic and political reforms to normalize relations with the United States….”They believed this to be a betrayal of the revolution, and the beginning of the end of its survival.”
Castaneda thinks the reason two highly placed officials were replaced by Raul because they were plotting a coup against him – at the instigation of Huga Chavez! Raul apparently got Fidel’s approval for the removals. No word on how Fidel felt upon learning that someone he desribed this way: “We are like brothers” was plotting to overthrow his actual brother.
Castaneda seems to think Fidel is looking out for his younger sibling by sending coded messages of thanks and warning to Latin American leaders:
[…] Castaneda points to an “enigmatic” comment former leader Fidel Castro made in a column after the two men were removed.
“He resorted to a baseball metaphor on the occasion of the World Baseball Classic to praise Dominicans for not participating (the team’s plans had been unclear) and to claim that Chavez‘s baseball players, ‘as good and young’ as they might be, were no match for ‘Cuba’s seasoned all-stars,’ ” Castaneda wrote in the Newsweek article.
Castaneda says Castro was thanking Dominican President Fernandez and sending a veiled message to Chavez.
Only time will tell.
We’re often asked to consider the serious risk of rapid inflation once the economy rebounds and the full impact of literally trillions of dollars in global stimulus is upon us, but even the most gloomy economist isn’t forecasting anything like this. However, even inflation at those levels might not be the most serious economic time bomb quietly ticking away.
What isn’t going down these days? It appears our supply of easily accessible oil is as well.
Hold on to you hats - that looks like a steep drop coming our way
Read all about it courtesy of The Oil Drum
Taking time out of managing the econopocalypse, President Obama today corrects one of the Bush administration’s most contemptible refusals to do the right thing.
http://politicalwire.com/archives/2009/03/18/obama_backs_gay_rights_declaration.html
Will we all be kicking ourselves in ten years that we didn’t all run to Detroit and pick up some cheap property??
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/opinion/08barlow.html?_r=3
Okay, the company’s webiste actually starts off by suggesting that this is a good tool to remind your kids not to use drugs. So thier marketing pitch needs some help, but he coolness factor makes up for it! Check it out, thanks to BoingBoing Gadgets.
Seriously, someone has too much time on their hands – but thank goodness they do as this is amazing!
The Porphyrogennetos 
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