Cab Thoughts 6/20/15

"As the saying goes, if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, but if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. Community organizers like Huerta don't teach anyone how to fish: they teach activists how to steal their neighbors' fish. This is what Huerta and her ilk call social justice." --Matthew Vadum        


The exhibition “ Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971” has opened at the Museum of Modern Art. People who liked The Beatles have significant antipathy towards Ono as they feel she was responsible for the very talented band's dissolution. But the truth is, she may have been a symptom, not a cause, of Lennon's disillusion. MoMA is taking her seriously enough to have a show centered on her. And she said something quite interesting: “Artists are not here to destroy or to create,” she wrote in 1971. “The job of an artist is . . . to change the value of things.”

News anchor and co-host of “Good Morning America,” George Stephanopoulos, donated $75,000 to the Clinton Foundation but neglected to disclose that information while interviewing Peter Schweizer, author of “Clinton Cash,” a book critical of the foundation and the Clintons. Following this revelation, Politico reported that dozens of media organizations donated money — from the thousands to the millions of dollars — to the Clinton Foundation.

A 2014 Gallup poll found that “Americans' confidence in the media's ability to report ‘the news fully, accurately, and fairly' has returned to its previous all-time low of 40 percent.” 

At Fort Bragg on Dec. 14, 2011, Obama said, "We are leaving behind a sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people." This was, he said, a "moment of success." So, we had a stable independent Iraq? What happened?

Who is....Slava Fetisov?

Five of the world's biggest banks, including JPM, Citi and Barclays, agreed to plead guilty in a currency-rigging probe. There will be no actual convictions. No one will go to jail. There will be fines. The fines will be paid by the banks'....shareholders. Yes, shareholders.

"The word caviar is of Turkish derivation and refers to the eggs of the sturgeon -- a prehistoric animal that has not evolved in 180 million years. It is a huge migratory fish that, like the salmon, is anadromous, that is, it lives in saltwater but swims upstream to spawn in the freshwater place of its birth...The medieval rivers of Europe were full of egg-bearing sturgeon. They were common in the Seine, the Gironde, the Thames, the Po, the Danube, the Ebro in northern Spain, and the Guadalquivir in southern Spain. The fish were often a subject of royal privileges....Sturgeons, which can weigh up to two tons, have little resistance to industrial pollution....During the twentieth century, as industrial pollution and oil spills killed off sturgeon around the world, commercial caviar fishing was largely reduced to the Caspian Sea. Historically the Caspian has always been controlled by Russia from the northern shore and Iran from the southern shore, giving these two nations a virtual monopoly on caviar...The prices of the caviar from the three varieties -- beluga, ossetra, and sevruga -- are not a reflection of quality but rather of the rarity of the fish. The giant beluga are hardest to find, and therefore their caviar is the most expensive. It takes twenty years for a female beluga to mature, and at that point she can weigh as much as 1,800 pounds and be up to twenty-six feet in length. Such a fish could yield twenty pounds of eggs."--Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky

The percentage of the population employed by the Government in Europe range from 30% in Germany (the most free-market) to 56% in France (the most socialist). You’re talking about a joint economy of $16 trillion in which 30%-56% of the population is employed by the Government.

In October 2012, potentially market-moving information about highly confidential Federal Reserve monetary deliberations made its way into a financial analyst's private newsletter. The leak occurred the day before the scheduled public release of meeting minutes that shed new light on the Fed's decision to embark on a third round of bond buying to boost the economy, according to ProPublica. The newsletter containing the leaked material came from an economic policy intelligence firm called Medley Global Advisors whose clients include hedge funds, institutional investors and asset managers. On Oct. 3, 2012, Regina Schleiger, an analyst with the firm, sent clients a "special report" titled "Fed: December Bound." The report focused on the Sept. 12-13 open market committee meeting, where the panel had approved what's called "QE3," a new program of large-scale purchases of mortgage-backed and Treasury securities.
According to the WSJ, The Federal Reserve is providing a congressional panel with the names of its staffers who had contact with a consulting firm that published details of market-sensitive policy deliberations in October 2012, “with the understanding that the names will be kept confidential,” Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen said. Huh?

Although the Bernanke Fed has disbursed $2.284 trillion in new money (the monetary base) since August 1, 2008, one month before the 2008 financial crisis, 81.5 percent now sits idle as excess reserves in private banks. The banks are not required to hold excess reserves. The excess reserves exploded from $831 billion in August 2008 to $1.863 trillion on June 14, 2013. The excess reserves of the nation’s private banks had previously stayed at nearly zero since 1959 as seen on the St. Louis Fed’s chart. The banks did not leave money idle in excess reserves at zero interest because they were investing in income earning assets, including loans to consumers and businesses.

There was a wonderful story on HBO on hockey; one of the players that was focused on was former NHL star Slava Fetisov whose story is compelling. In the late ‘80s, Fetisov famously fought the Soviet bureaucracy to make the move to the NHL--banned by the Soviets-- before he got too old to be effective. Now Fetisov, a current Russian senator, has called for rules that would prevent Russian hockey players from going to the NHL before they turn 28. 

In 1755, an earthquake flattened Lisbon, set it aflame, and then caused a massive tsunami that swept the Tagus River into the city, killing more than 40,000 people. Theologians claimed the disaster was divine retribution for earthly pride and sin.The French philosopher Voltaire argued, though, that it was simply nature’s systems that had caused the movement of the earth’s crusts. He criticized the Catholic Church for claiming God was behind the disaster rather than the clock-maker master of the system of nature. Voltaire’s opinion led to a famous international debate that helped him move public opinion away from mystical explanations of natural phenomena and toward scientific authority. It is seen by many as a brick in building the Enlightenment.

Publishing in Current Biology, authors of a new study looked at the genome of a 35,000-year-old wolf from the Taimyr Peninsula in northern Siberia. "We find that this individual belonged to a population that diverged from the common ancestor of present-day wolves and dogs very close in time to the appearance of the domestic dog lineage," they wrote in the abstract.
That makes the dog a much earlier development--and an earlier Man's BFF.

Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2012/04/liberal-fundamentalism.html

The potato in its various sizes and colors shaped the eating habits of northern Europeans -- with devastating effect in nineteenth-century Ireland where the population had become too reliant on this one crop for sustenance. Spanish conquistadors introduced tomatoes to Europeans. The Three Sisters --corn, beans, and squash --became European staples. So many foods we identify with non-American cultures originated in the Americas.

Before and during the American Civil War, church denominations split over the issue of slavery. The Methodist Church, the largest American denomination at the time, split in 1844 due to divisions over slavery. Southern Baptists split from northern Baptists in 1845 over the issue of forbidding Southern slave-owners from becoming ordained missionaries. In 1861, Presbyterians in the Southern United States split from the denomination because of disputes over slavery, politics, and theology precipitated by the war. After the war, southern churches struggled as membership declined, but these division had been so bitter that they refused financial help from the north. 

Outer space is really that: Space. The Milky Way has about 300 billion stars but those stars are dispersed across a chasmic piece of three dimensional property 100,000 light-years in diameter. That's roughly 6 trillion miles. If Earth is a fine grain of sand, "...the sun, then would be an orange-sized object twenty feet away while Jupiter the biggest planet of the solar system would be a pebble eighty-four feet in the other direction-almost the length of a basketball court -- and the outermost orbs of the solar system, Neptune and Pluto, would be larger and smaller grains, respectively, found at a distance of two and a quarter blocks from Granule Earth.....Beyond that, the gaps between scenic vistas become absurd and it's best to settle in for a nice comfy coma. Assuming our little orrery of a solar system is tucked into a quiet neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey, you won't reach the next stars -- the Alpha Centauri triple star system -- until somewhere just west of Omaha, or the star after that until the foothills of the Rockies."--The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science by Natalie Angier

Codex: n. A manuscript volume (as opposed to a scroll), especially of an ancient text. ety. From Latin codex (tree trunk, wood block, book.) Earliest documented use: 1581

Putting it all together, the economic projections of most members of the FOMC call for growth in real gross domestic product of roughly 2-1/2 percent per year over the next couple of years, a little faster than the pace of the recovery thus far, with the unemployment rate continuing to move down to near 5 percent by the end of this year. And for inflation, as I noted earlier, my colleagues and I expect inflation to move up toward our objective of 2 percent as the economy strengthens further and as transitory influences wane.

Of course, the outlook for the economy, as always, is highly uncertain. I am describing the outlook that I see as most likely, but based on many years of making economic projections, I can assure you that any specific projection I write down will turn out to be wrong, perhaps markedly so. For many reasons, output and job growth over the next few years could prove to be stronger, and inflation higher, than I expect; correspondingly, employment could grow more slowly, and inflation could remain undesirably low.--This is from a speech by Red Chairman Janet Yellen in Providence, Rhode Island.

" I can assure you that any specific projection I write down will turn out to be wrong, perhaps markedly so." Well, that's reassuring.

George Soros at the World Band Bretton Woods Conference warned that unless the U.S. makes 'major concessions' and allows China's currency to join the IMF's basket of currencies, "there is a real danger China will align itself with Russia politically and militarily, and then it is not an exaggeration to say that we are on the threshold of a third world war."

AAAAAaaaaannnnnddddd.....an astonishing graph showing that the Fed is giving banks money but they are keeping it. 81.5 percent now sits idle as excess reserves in private banks: