Sunday, February 17, 2008

Tonight's Thoughts

Denk ich an die Welt bei Nacht,
bin ich um den Schlaf gebracht.

Thinking of the World at night
puts all thought of sleep to flight.

9 comments:

  1. Yes indeed. You have to read something soothing and pleasant before you turn out the light.

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  2. Oh well, I tried.
    Who gives a shit anyway
    just a bunch of self proclaiming numb nuts.
    Par for the course.

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  3. jmb,
    indeed, I should cheer me up by reading something pleasant, for a change. :)

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  4. Anon,
    continuing what I began here:

    Is it possible you did a) not thoroughly read my reply on your first comment to the Milliband post, or did you b) not understand, or is it c) due to a sagging short term memory?
    There are fortunately other things to do than sitting all the time in front of the PC, waiting anxiously for His Anonymity's comments in order to immediately reply!
    Got it?!

    And now for your comment above.

    Already when having the mixed blessing to meet your remarkable patience and cadence of prose on other occasions, I'd spontaneously feel reminded of the Muppet Show, but couldn't decide is he Waldorf or is he Stadler.

    As said, your suggestion is good, I shall seize it. But I shall do it my way. This means: You'd be guest, and thus had to patronize (sic!) yourself in order to mind your language, at least when visiting this blog.
    If that's not possible for you: Good riddance!
    In case you accept: Welcome!

    The Peace of the Night.

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  5. Sean Jeating
    Silly boy!
    I know about event horizons, speed of light, etc, but results ARE visible in theory immediately pre the horizon. I wanted to know...if you....

    Muppets? - "couldn't decide"?
    Why do you want to categorise?
    Why do you insult with muppet analogy?
    Are YOU mono abilitied? I'm not!
    Many subjects, many hats.
    Stuff you wouldn't believe!

    Cadence of prose.
    I suffer fools less and less.
    You are not in that category, yet.

    I have come across 3 bloggers who have recently given up for the reasons I spoke about. - Asinine comments from pre-arranged visits was all they could muster, and whatever you say about James, that's all he's getting! And he works so hard, but he's missing so much current activity through his preoccupations with hormones, (but that's the majority of his pre-arranged audience).

    Concerning millipedes.
    Military democracy.
    Harumph!
    And gordon and darling and balls prepare sharia compliant guilts (govt bond)issues cos they've fucked the discretionary spending power of the uk sheeple with their social engineering debts, and the major uk banks, hedge funds, and other financial bodies are solvency impaired, where else can he raise finance from to fund his never slowing kleptocratic communist financial social engineering demands? But what will the cost be?

    - Concurrent with every state and their grandmother shitting their pants about sovereign wealth fund investments in major western banks, etc, and scurrying to write rules that demand clarity of financial statements from the SVFs, when their own politicians are humping at the trough of financial corruption at the personal level, and at the UK level major clearing banks telling bare-faced lies about their provision (or non provisions) for toxic paper, and political shits listed above being barefaced liars about published inflation rates, GDP, PSBR, Off- balance sheet debts, etc, and at EU level, can't get the accounts signed off for the last 12 fucking years?
    Who are they kidding?
    The EU comes out with a set of rules for SWF investments, promoting Norwegian existing rules as being superb, and then member states come out with their own versions, most being at variance with the other member states.
    So who are the assholes? Bankrupt (financially and morally) western states holding out the begging bowl, or commodity exporting states holding massive foreign reserves, or manufacturing power-houses in SE Asia.
    Obviously the former.
    BUT "WHY" IS THE QUESTION.
    And that leads to Pandora's box.
    The last thing that came out was hope, but..... and that's a long way -- decades (if ever) away.

    Sagging short term memory?
    Never!
    If I choose not to answer a question, may be I don't think the answer will be understood. Maybe I thought millipede was spouting bullshit. (see above) You have to understand that he is a liar on this subject, - criticizing China when he is a communist (check his background, father, check the labour peer who kept his father from conscription, etc)
    It amazes me that it's taken so long for them to recognize the threat from China. But to take the military route, - they must be MAD.
    So China would invade us?, or the west?, -
    Their best export market?
    If you believe that, I've got a bridge I could sell you!
    Besides how would the UK, US fund the military expansion? We are nationally bankrupt and already taxed to the point of insurrection, and certainly to the point of GDP growth inflection.
    Do you seriously believe China would use it's foreign reserves to bail-out a failed western civilisation (because in all seriousness, THAT is what is happening) if it saw that the funds were being used to expand the military?????

    The west, particularly US and UK are hollowed out, bankrupt, dysfunctional, spiritless, dispirited, immoral, militarily over-extended societies, analogous to the fall of the roman empire, who had to invoke religion at the meeting at Nicea in order to maintain some sort of ailing, final control. That's the way we are going, and I don't see a reverse gear!
    ASK "WHY" ON THAT, AND YOU GET TO THE SAME PANDORAS BOX

    SO WHAT WAS MILLIPEDES REAL AGENDA?

    No, No, and No, the war is now economic, - control of the worlds finite resources.
    Why do you think gold, silver, platinum are all trading at record levels vs the dollar/sterling?
    Why are wheat, barley, maize, soya beans, rice, soya oil, palm oil, all trading at record levels?
    Why are certain countries (including China) banning the export of many of these commodities?
    Why are Chinese authorities and Chinese companies racing to acquire strategic share holdings in major western global mining companies, and global infrastructure companies?
    Is it because the world is exiting dollar and sterling denominated assets, and dollars and sterling, and a new commodity bubble is growing, sustained by the re-emergence of the yen carry trade, soon to be joined by the dollar carry trade, when fed interest rates go a little lower?
    Is it because China above all has realised that state continuity and survival in the coming decades will depend on access to the commodities, and that the west is economically powerless to prevent these moves?

    Or has somebody got the prayer mat facing the wrong direction?

    An economic war needs an economic response, but we're fresh out of economic bullets. All we've got is the begging bowl.

    Why would China attack? She can win, if win is what she wants, (and I doubt she wants to "win" in western terms anyway), when she can succeed by doing what she does so admirably now!

    Honestly, the ordinary person in the street has more brains in his pecker than millipede and his advisers will ever have.

    Inexorable fall of $, £ in terms of Asian currencies. All we do is pass paper around, and think we are productive. Step one is execute the current crop of politicians.

    And now I see sarkozee, and bent mandelson agreeing a deal for blair to get the top EU job! corruption!

    As to my language, you may take it or leave it.

    I choose to honour you with my presence and input. If you don't feel honoured, that's your problem, but you can't, in all honesty, link to certain websites ever again.

    Or do you, in common with others, have as many faces as my local parish church clock?

    Come back?

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  6. The Tsunami is only beginning

    The nature of the fatally flawed risk models used by Wall Street, by Moody’s, by the securities Monoline insurers and by the economists of the US Government and Federal Reserve was such that they all assumed recessions were no longer possible, as risk could be indefinitely diffused and spread across the globe.

    All the securitized assets, the trillions of dollars worth, were priced on such flawed assumption. All the trillions of dollars of Credit Default Swaps—the illusion that loan default could be cheaply insured against with derivatives—all these were set to explode in a cascading series of domino-like crises as the crisis in the US housing market unraveled. The more home prices fell, the more mortgages facing sharply higher interest rate resets, the more unemployment spread across America from Ohio to Michigan to California to Pennsylvania to Colorado and Arizona. That process set off a vicious self-feeding spiral of asset price deflation.

    The sub-prime sector was merely the first manifestation of what was to unravel. The process will take years to wind down. The damaged products of Asset Backed Securities were used in turn as collateral for yet further bank loans, for leveraged buyouts by private equity firms, by corporations, even by municipalities. The pyramid of debt built on assets securitized began to go into reverse leverage as reality dawned in global markets that no one knew the worth of the securitized paper they held.

    In what would be a laughable admission were the consequences of their criminal negligence not so tragic for millions of Americans, Standard & Poors, the second largest rating agency in the world stated in October 2007 that they “underestimated the extent of fraud in the US mortgage industry.” Alan Greenspan feebly tried to exonerate himself by claiming that lending to sub-prime borrowers was not wrong, only the later securitization of the loans. The very system they worked over decades to create was premised on fraud and non-transparency.

    Credit Default Swap crisis next

    As of this writing, the next ratchet down in the US financial Tsunami was the monoline insurers where, short of a US government nationalization, no solution was feasible as the unknown risks were so staggering.

    Next to explode will be the imminent probability of meltdown in the $45 trillion market in Over-the-Counter Credit Default Swaps (CDS), the brainchild of J.P. Morgan.

    As Greenspan made certain, the CDS market remained unregulated and opaque, so that no one knew what the scale of the risks in a falling economy were. Because it is unregulated it often was the case that one party to a CDS resold to another financial institution without informing the original counterparty. That means it is not obvious that were an investor to try to cash in his CDS he could track down its payer of the claim. The CDS market was overwhelmingly concentrated in New York banks who held swaps at the end of 2007 worth nominally $14 trillion. The most exposed were J.P. Morgan Chase with $7.8 trillion and Citigroup and Bank of America with $3 trillion each.

    The problem had been exacerbated by the fact that of the $45 trillions of credit default swaps, some 16% or $7.2 trillion worth were written to protect holders of Collateralized Debt Obligations where the mortgage collateral problems were concentrated. The CDS market was a ticking time bomb with an atomic detonator. As the credit crisis spreads in coming months, corporations will be forced to default on their bonds and writers of CDS insurance will face exploding claims and non-transparent rules. A claims settlement procedure for a market nominally worth $45 trillion did not exist as of February 2008.

    As hundreds of thousands of Americans over the coming months find their monthly mortgage payments dramatically reset according to their Adjustable Rate Mortgage terms, another $690 billion in home mortgage debt will become prime candidates for default. That in turn will lead to a snowball effect in terms of job losses, credit card defaults and another wave of securitization crisis in the huge market for securitized credit card debt. The remarkable thing about this crisis is that so much of the sinews of the entire American financial system were tied in to it. There has never been a crisis of this magnitude in American history.

    At the end of February the Financial Times of London revealed that US banks had “quietly” borrowed $50 billion in funds from a special new Fed credit facility to ease their cash crisis. Losses at all the major banks from Citigroup to J.P.Morgan Chase to most other major US bank groups continued to mount as the economy sank deeper into a recession that clearly would turn in coming months into a genuine depression. No Presidential candidate had dared utter a serious word about their proposals to deal with what was becoming the greatest financial and economic meltdown in American history.

    By the early days of 2008 it was becoming clear that Financial Securitization would be the Last Tango for the United States as the global financial superpower.

    The question now was posed what new center or centers of financial power could conceivably replace New York as the global nexus.

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  7. Anon,
    to begin with the second: Good summary, in so far interesting, but nothing's essential new for me.

    As for the first comment: Interesting, too.
    One request: It would be a great help for me, would you when mentioning an organization for the first time, write it out and add the abbreviation in bracelets.

    And now, just to make sure:
    You wrote '[...] but results ARE visible in theory [...]'.

    That's it. In theory!
    You did not ask for theory, though, but 'Is your lens good enough to see [sic!! emphazise mine] the effects of the black hole at the centre of the spiral, the event horizon?, the dust spreads?

    In my answer I tried to anticipate other readers interest/questions and therefore wrote more than I'd usually do.

    Finally for tonight: What do you mean by writing 'but you can't, in all honesty, link to certain websites ever again.'?

    :) Ah yes, and instead of 'silly boy' could you next time call me 'silly sod'? Sounds just more familiar, and is closer to the truth. :)

    The Peace of the Night.

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  8. "can't link to ...[...]
    I was meaning devils kitchen, whose language is far superior to mine :)

    Silly Sod?
    I never really knew what "sod" meant, in this context.
    You obviously hold a meaning.
    Please do enlighten me.

    Peace of the night, silly ??? :)

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  9. Ha ha, good that I asked: I was close to completely misunderstand.

    DK - to cut a long story short - helps me to keep my promise not to swear. :)

    As for 'silly sod'. Once I heard it in Ireland. Since, when 'deserving' it I'd say 'Ah, I am a silly sod.' or 'Ah, Sean, what a silly sod you are.'
    As you might be able to imagine, I'd not call anybody else what I do sometimes call myself. :)
    Apropos, Waldorf and Stadler. I like them. Sometimes, when my son and I'd be commenting on this and that Mrs J. would ask: 'Sitting on the balcony again? Who of the gentlemen is Waldorf, who Stadler?'
    :))))

    All this, Anon, just to say I am glad we seem to have found a way. It is so easy to (cause) misunderstand(ing).
    On the other hand, a little portion of good will, a smile, a friendly word, and mostly one would get a friendly reaction. :)

    As last night I was pretty tired and therefore brief, here one sentence more: I do suggest we should 'speak' via email.

    The Peace of the Night.

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