"I have no child for whom I could wish to make a provision-no family to build in greatness upon my Country's ruins." --Washington
For the first quarter of 2013 the Fed purchased $277.5 billion in securities (net) as their security portfolio expanded from $2.660 trillion to $2.937 trillion. A review of post-war economic history would lead to a logical assumption that the money supply (M2) would respond upward to this massive infusion of reserves into the banking system. The reality is just the opposite. The last week of December, 2012 showed M2 at $10.505 trillion, but at the end of March, 2013 it totaled only $10.450 trillion which was an unexpected decline of $55 billion. Where did the money go? The money multiplier effect where banks use the available money for loans did not occur. If this is true, the essence of the "aggregate demand" concept does not work.
Isn't this Enroll America thing peculiar; a private entity whose purpose is to support a public one. Enroll America is a private sector organization responsible for a massive public outreach campaign intended to get millions of uninsured Americans to sign up for subsidized insurance coverage of the Affordable Care Act through new online marketplaces, or exchanges, that will begin open enrollment on October 1. And they are doing this with donations. Apparently Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is soliciting private funds to bankroll this effort. This is combined with campaign-style organizations staffed with loyalists and former campaign or White House aides to mobilize grassroots support for government policies. The first involved Organizing for Action, an independent non-profit group seeking to harness both the energy and personnel from Obama's re-election campaign in support of the president's legislative agenda.
It's a national street organization.
Australia was discovered in 1606 by a Dutch explorer named Willem Janszoon when he reached the Cape York peninsula in Queensland with his ship Duyfken, or so it has been believed. But in 1944, Australian soldier Maurie Isenberg was stationed on an island off Australia's north coast. While sitting in the sand with his fishing-rod, he discovered a handful of coins in the sand. In 1979 he decided to send the coins to a museum to get them identified. The coins proved to be 1000 years old.
Riots in Sweden are rare but have been much more frequent recently. It has been blamed by commentators on the mysterious but ubiquitous "inequality." The recent riots appear to have been sparked by the police killing of a 69-year-old man wielding a machete in the suburb of Husby this month, which prompted accusations of police brutality. The ethnic makeup of the rioters is unreported. Some 15 percent of the population is foreign-born, the highest proportion in the Nordic region. Unemployment among those born outside Sweden stands at 16 percent, compared with 6 percent for native Swedes, according to OECD data.
After decades of practicing the "Swedish model" of generous welfare benefits, Sweden has been reducing the role of the state since the 1990s, spurring the fastest growth in "inequality" of any advanced OECD economy.
From an interview with Cooperman and Einhorn from Omega Advisors in Barron's:
Cooperman: We totally misunderstood the significance of the Lehman insolvency and its impact on the economy, and we weren't alone. The U.S. government didn't understand it; most people didn't understand it.
Einhorn: The surprise with respect to Lehman was the reach it had into so many other financial institutions and the freezing of credit that it brought about. The recession we experienced in 2008 and the first half of 2009 would not have been nearly as severe without the freezing of credit flows between financial intermediaries as a result of the Lehman insolvency.
Who was.....Cynthia Ann Parker?
NRDC and Ceres study says:
"A major new report on U.S. power plant emissions from the top 100 power producers shows that the electric industry cut emissions of NOx, SO2 and CO2 in 2011 even as overall electricity generation increased, largely due to increased use of natural gas and growing reliance on renewable energy."
First the erased CIA draft: "We do know that Islamic extremists with ties to al Qaeda participated in this attack."
Then Mrs. Clinton's spokesman, Victoria Nuland, and her emails to excise earlier CIA warnings of terrorism in Benghazi: ".. [this]...could be used by Members [of Congress] to beat the State Department for not paying attention to Agency warnings so why do we want to feed that? Concerned."
There is a difficult spectrum where "public relations" blends through "propaganda" into "lying."
There is a difficult spectrum where "public relations" blends through "propaganda" into "lying."
The price of luxury cars in China is falling amid a frugality push by government. (Bloomberg)
Pasquinade: lampoon or satire. In Rome in 1501 a sculpture was disinterred and placed in Palazzo Orsini. The sculpture was nicknamed Pasquino, and once a year Romans posted humorous verses to the sculpture. Over time these satirical poems became named pasquinades because of the name of the statue. The statue is still in Rome with pasquinades on its base.
James Rosen, a reporter, has been targeted by the Justice Department in a "leak" of classified material under the Espionage Act of 1917 . In 2009 the reporter published a story saying that the U.S. knew that North Korea planned to respond to looming U.N. sanctions with another nuclear test. That U.S. knowledge was classified. It is rare for the Federal government prosecute a journalist for disclosing classified information, one reason being reporters can't be sure what's classified and what isn't. (Recall the NYT's damaging story on how the government was tracking bin Laden.) In the last 95 years the only "journalist" prosecuted under the Espionage Act was Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, who isn't really a journalist and published far more damaging leaks but has never been indicted for it.
It will be interesting to see how the Press responds to this.
Unit 61398, a cyberunit of the Chinese army accused of hacking, is back in action using different techniques, according to computer industry security experts and American officials.
Golden Oldies:
A never-before-seen novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Pearl Buck was discovered in a Texas storage unit and will be published in October.
There is a new bill rattling around in Congress aimed at the "Too Big to Fail" banks called the "Terminating Bailouts for Taxpayer Fairness (TBTF) Act of 2013." It is simple, basic, requires sensible cash reserves and treats all asset classes and liabilities equally – including derivatives. No chance.
Southern Company's 582-megawatt coal gasification Kemper, Mississippi plant, that was budgeted to cost a very large $2.4 billion, now is running an astonishing $4.2 billion or $7 per watt. Ah, the merits of monopoly. Coal power plants generally run at around $2.10 a watt. The Three Gorges Dam (a hydroelectric system) is reported to have cost ¥180 billion (US$26 billion), about $1 a watt, but actual costs are widely believed to be much higher and do not translate well to the U.S.. Solar panels are currently selling for as low as US$0.70c a watt in industrial quantities.
"There's a forest of trees — trees, trees everywhere, but not a branch to burn. And that's the truth. You have no axe; you have no way of gathering wood; you can't find fallen wood because there's 3 1/2 feet of snow. And we sent Paul on a constant vigilance for anything that would burn. Fire was life, Steve, fire was life, and at different times during the night we had no fire. And I've been on many search and rescue situations as a Mountie where you'd go into these camps looking for lost hunters or motor vehicle accidents in the back bush, and you find the people, eventually, but you find them as frozen corpses. And I figured that's how we'd be found."--Scott Deschamps, a police officer and one of four survivors of a plane crash in the snows of the Canadian wilderness.
AAAAAaaaannnnnnddddd ............a graph:
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