By LOREN STEFFY May 8, 2008 Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle Source The fear in Wednesday's stock decline was palpable. Wall Street was responding to the specter of transparency the way it always does — with alarm. Big brokerage firms, led by Merrill Lynch and Lehman Bros., plunged after the nation's top securities cop called for more disclosure of Wall Street's financby ProjectC - Project C
"Cary Cooper, Professor of Organisational Psychology and Health at Lancaster University, said excessive drinking was a manifestation of stress, and it was endemic in certain industries." Third admit to hangover at desk BBC News 6 May 2008 Source One in three employees admits they have been to work with a hangover and more than one in 10 has been drunk at their desk, a studyby ProjectC - Project C
By Sue Shellenbarger 2008 Source Lots of employers would like to be able to hire cheap, temporary teams of seasoned pros with experience managing $2 billion investment portfolios, running ad campaigns or earning Ph.D.s in neuroscience. But few know the secret to finding temps of that caliber: Look on playgrounds and at PTA meetings. The decision among some highly educated women to stayby ProjectC - Project C
Many Western countries have a binge drinking problem Australian state in drink purge By Phil Mercer BBC News, Sydney 5 May 2008 Source Undercover teenagers could soon be the police's latest weapon in one of the biggest alcohol abuse clampdowns led by the Australian state of Victoria. The authorities have begun covert surveillance to catch bars illegally serving drunk andby ProjectC - Project C
“In the present stage of development the financiers are not acting as the ephors of the economy, editing the financing that takes place so that the capital development of the economy is promoted. Today’s managers of money are but little concerned with the development of the capital asset of an economy. Today’s narrowly-focused financiers do not conform to Schumpeter’s vision of bankers as the eby ProjectC - Project C
"He had plans to build a ring around the equator so that just by staying stationary, you would be able to travel around the world in 24 hours. And plans that almost seem like dreams. He was thinking about wind power, thinking about solar power, thinking about batteries that are far, far more efficient than the batteries that we even have here 110 years later. He had plans to photograph thougby ProjectC - Project C
By Martin Hutchinson Contributing Editor Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 Source At their two-day meeting that starts today (Tuesday), U.S. Federal Reserve policymakers will have to grapple with a moral choice that is well beyond the pay grade of central bankers - choosing between the financial stability of U.S. homeowners and world hunger. That’s not an exaggeration. Interest-rate policy normaby ProjectC - Project C
By Wolfgang Münchau April 27 2008 Source So this crisis is about to end, right? There are two failsafe ways to justify a solid dose of optimism: define the crisis in a sufficiently narrow way; and, even better, look at the wrong crisis. In that spirit I am happy to state my optimism about the prospective end of the subprime crisis. But this would be disingenuous. It is no accident that ouby ProjectC - Project C
Reuters April 28, 2008 Source NEW YORK (Reuters) — Warren Buffett, the world's richest person, said Monday that the U.S. economy is in a recession that will be more severe than most people expect. Buffett made his comments on CNBC television after his Berkshire Hathaway (BRKA, BRKB) agreed to invest $6.5 billion in the takeover of chewing gum maker Wm Wrigley Jr (WWY) by Mars in a $2by ProjectC - Project C
By JIM MCTAGUE MONDAY, APRIL 28, 2008 Source WE'VE FOUND IT -- A COPY OF ALAN Greenspan's long-lost Ph.D. thesis! Or, more accurately, a rare copy of the elusive document, in Lassie-Come-Home-fashion, found us. The dissertation, written in 1977 when Greenspan received his coveted degree from New York University, had been tucked away on a professor's sagging bookshelf for 31by ProjectC - Project C
One of Peter Bernstein's worries: 'If China goes into a recession, God knows.' One Guy Who Has Seen It All Doesn't Like What He Sees Now By E.S. BROWNING April 26, 2008; Page B1 Source Peter Bernstein has witnessed just about every financial crisis of the past century. As a boy, he watched his father, a money manager, navigate the Depression. As a financialby ProjectC - Project C
By Juliana Liu BBC correspondent, China's Hunan province 19 March 2008 Source On the outskirts of Changsha, capital of China's Hunan province, stand a 130-foot tall gold Egyptian pyramid and a full-size replica of the Versailles palace. They are the icons of Broad Town, a huge factory campus owned by middle-aged businessman Zhang Yue. The pyramid and the palace, rather incoby ProjectC - Project C
"Otherwise intelligent financial commentators argue that today’s rising energy and food prices are not a “monetary phenomenon.” Instead, these price pressures are said to be due to strong demand from China and India – wealthier consumers choosing to upgrade their diets. But both the Chinese and Indian economies (and many others) are now operating with virtually unlimited Credit – a uniqueby ProjectC - Project C
By CNBC.com 25 Apr 2008 Source The U.S. economy is already in recession -- and may echo the 1930s, Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz said Friday. "The big question is: how will the government respond?" said Stiglitz, in an interview with CNBC. Stiglitz, a Columbia University professor and 2001 winner of the Nobel prize, detailed his bleak outlook for the American economy. "by ProjectC - Project C
"There are so many stories we can tell ourselves to justify doing nothing, but perhaps the most insidious is that, whatever we do manage to do, it will be too little too late. Climate change is upon us, and it has arrived well ahead of schedule. Scientists’ projections that seemed dire a decade ago turn out to have been unduly optimistic: the warming and the melting is occurring much fasterby ProjectC - Project C
"I read a few prospectuses for residential-mortgage-backed securities - mortgages, thousands of mortgages backing them, and then those all tranched into maybe 30 slices. You create a CDO by taking one of the lower tranches of that one and 50 others like it. Now if you're going to understand that CDO, you've got 50-times-300 pages to read, it's 15,000. If you take one of the loby ProjectC - Project C
"On our historical radars, not even Crassus appeared, the wealthiest Roman general of all, who demanded an emperorship after conquering Macedonia – "Mission Accomplished" – and vengefully set forth to destroy Mesopotamia. At a spot in the desert near the Euphrates river, the Parthians – ancestors of present day Iraqi insurgents – annihilated the legions, chopped off Crassus'sby ProjectC - Project C
Westerners assume that anyone with a Canadian passport is safe By Robert Fisk Saturday, 5 April 2008 Source I was given the chance to talk to 600 Muslim Canadians a few days ago. The dinner was in an Ottawa banqueting room and the guests also included the imam of the Ottawa mosque, the Ottawa chief of police and sundry uniformed Canadian army officers. The imam sat between me and the Cby ProjectC - Project C
"In his April 2 testimony, Bernanke pointed out that the Federal Reserve was created in 1913 in response to another market meltdown, the Panic of 1907. On March 14 of that year, exactly 101 years before the Fed's Bear Stearns intervention, the stock market fell 8.3 percent, touching off a number of bank failures. ... ``One of the reasons we are in this particular predicament is beby ProjectC - Project C
Thomson Financial News April 20, 2008 Source ZURICH (Thomson Financial) - The international financial system was close to the brink in March when joint action by the U.S. Federal Reserve and JP Morgan Chase & Co. avoided the collapse of investment bank Bear Stearns, Credit Suisse Group's ex-CEO Oswald Gruebel said. The breakdown of the comparatively small investment bank would hby ProjectC - Project C
By Carola Hoyos in Rome April 20 2008 Source Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil producer, has put on hold any plans to further increase long-term production capacity from its vast oil fields, its most powerful policymakers have said. In a series of statements, including one by the king himself, the kingdom has warned consumers it does not reckon there is a need for further expansion, aby ProjectC - Project C
By Dr. Housing Bubble April 10th, 2008 Source This is going to be a rather long post but I think it warrants a full reading. These excerpts were written in 1935 during the Great Depression. They give us a look at an overall perspective of what happened both politically and economically to exasperate the current situation. The parallels are uncanny and of course, we are in different times, yeby ProjectC - Project C
By Doug Noland April 18, 2008 Source - (Comment: Deflation In A Fiat Regime? - By Mish ) Martin Feldstein, Harvard professor and former chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors, wrote an op-ed piece in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal – “Enough with Interest Rate Cuts” – worthy of comment. “It’s time for the Federal Reserve to stop reducing the federal funds rate, becauseby ProjectC - Project C
"But imagine if we lived on an outer planet where the seasons were longer, such as Saturn if it didn’t have such a wickedly hostile environment and actually had solid ground. If we had grown up under the stunningly beautiful rings of that planet, our seasonal perceptions would be radically different. This is because Saturn, since it is so far away from the sun, takes a whopping 29 Earth yeby ProjectC - Project C
By Gabor Steingart in Washington April 14, 2008 Source The dollar is in a tailspin, the trade deficit is growing and a recession is on the horizon. The American way of life is in serious danger. But the head of the Federal Reserve keeps on pumping easy credit into the system -- a crazy policy that will worsen the crisis. Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke have more in common with the big caby ProjectC - Project C
"In other words, the structure of finance, like the principles of accounting, needs to revert at least 40 years; probably, in the United States, 80 years." The degradation of accounting By Martin Hutchinson April 14, 2008 Source Martin Hutchinson is the author of "Great Conservatives" (Academica Press, 2005) -- details can be found on the Web site www.greatconservby ProjectC - Project C
( Rothbard - America’s Great Depression (pdf) ) "Another explanation comes from the Austrian School of economics. Austrian theorists who wrote about the Depression include Hayek and Murray Rothbard, who wrote "America's Great Depression" in 1963. In their view, the key cause of the Depression was the expansion of the money supply in the 1920s that led to an unsustainable crby ProjectC - Project C
By LOUISE STORY April 11, 2008 Source George Soros will not go quietly. At the age of 77, Mr. Soros, one the world’s most successful investors and richest men, leapt out of retirement last summer to safeguard his fortune and legacy. Alarmed by the unfolding crisis in the financial markets, he once again began trading for his giant hedge fund — and won big while so many others lost. Mr.by ProjectC - Project C
"Expect the landslide to cascade through high-yield bonds, commercial mortgages, leveraged loans, credit cards and -- the big unknown -- credit-default swaps, Morris says. The notional value for those swaps, which are meant to insure bondholders against default, covered about $45 trillion in portfolios as of mid-2007, up from some $1 trillion in 2001, he writes. ... CMOs transformed thby ProjectC - Project C
By Krishna Guha in Washington April 6 2008 Source Government intervention at a global level is required to tackle the credit crisis, according to the head of the International Monetary Fund, who has warned that market turmoil will take a serious toll on world growth. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, IMF managing director, told the FT: “I really think that the need for public intervention is becomiby ProjectC - Project C