Two top advisers to Alan G. Hevesi, the former state comptroller, were charged Thursday in a 123-count grand jury indictment that said they had turned New York’s $122 billion pension fund into a criminal enterprise. The scheme netted them and other Hevesi associates tens of millions of dollars in kickbacks from firms investing the fund’s money, the indictment said.
Evidence suggests that grief counseling may not be helpful. What a shock. Better talk this over with my therapist.
The Labor Department reported Wednesday that consumer inflation rose 0.4 percent in February, the biggest one-month jump since a 0.7 percent rise in July. Two-thirds of last month’s increase, which was slightly more than analysts expected, reflected a big jump in gasoline pump prices.
Core inflation, which excludes food and energy, rose 0.2 percent in February, also slightly higher than the 0.1 percent rise economists expected.
I wanted to highlight one trend that I glossed over on Monday, namely that foreign demand for long-term Treasuries has disappeared over the last few months.
This is a problem. But the Fed is going to solve it. From a Federal Reserve press release….
To provide greater support to mortgage lending and housing markets, the Committee decided today to increase the size of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet further by purchasing up to an additional $750 billion of agency mortgage-backed securities, bringing its total purchases of these securities to up to $1.25 trillion this year, and to increase its purchases of agency debt this year by up to $100 billion to a total of up to $200 billion. Moreover, to help improve conditions in private credit markets, the Committee decided to purchase up to $300 billion of longer-term Treasury securities over the next six months.
Buying agencies is old hat. The Federal Reserves started doing that around the same time foreign central banks stopped buying them. It is the long dated treasuries that are new. The Belmont Club has a round up of how various newspapers are reacting to this news.
What will the effects of this be? The Times reports in a different context….
The Bank of England believes that it may take “many months” before the full benefits of its radical strategy of creating new money to boost the economy will be felt, it emerged today.
The same could be said for any negative effects.
Huge news for real-life ray guns: Electric lasers have hit battlefield strength for the first time — paving the way for energy weapons to go to war.
In recent test-blasts, Pentagon-researchers at Northrop Grumman managed to get its 105 kilowatts of power out of their laser — past the “100kW threshold [that] has been viewed traditionally as a proof of principle for ‘weapons grade’ power levels for high-energy lasers,” Northrop’s vice president of directed energy systems, Dan Wildt, said in a statement.
For more than six decades scholars have believed the scrolls originated with a different, ascetic Jewish sect called the Essenes.
The Essenes are said to have lived in the 1st Century, in mountains in Palestine, where they recorded religious practices on parchments.
But Rachel Elior, a professor of Jewish philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, claims the 930 scrolls were written by the Sadducees, a group of Jewish priests living in Jerusalem, and that the Essenes did not exist.
The article is mostly worthless because all that it amounts to is a he said/she said type of thing. The evidence for and against is not really gone into. On the other hand, I have always thought that the evidence for the existence of the Essenes was awful thin. So I was interested to see that a scholar got up and said the same thing (except in stronger terms than I would use).
The Feb. 21 attack on police headquarters in coastal Zihuatanejo, which injured four people, fit a disturbing trend of Mexico’s drug wars. Traffickers have escalated their arms race, acquiring military-grade weapons, including hand grenades, grenade launchers, armor-piercing munitions and antitank rockets with firepower far beyond the assault rifles and pistols that have dominated their arsenals.
The title is sarcastic for those who have trouble with such things.
The Federal Reserve reported that industrial production fell 1.4% in February, and output in February was 11.2% below February 2008. The capacity utilization rate for total industry fell to 70.9%, matching the historical low set in December 1982.
He also has a post on the record lows set by New York’s manufacturing index.
From the Belmont Club on Sunday…..
Meanwhile, Pakistan’s government continues to implode. The VOA reports that it has put a former Prime Minister under arrest and sealed off the capital against protesters.
Only he did not stay in jail very long. This from Economist today….
IF PAKISTAN’S president, Asif Zardari, had ever wondered who rules the roost in Punjab, the country’s most populous province, he found out on Sunday March 15th. As an angry crowd gathered outside the house—and temporary prison—of Nawaz Sharif, Mr Zardari’s great rival, the provincial police melted away.
With a roar of sports utility vehicles, Mr Sharif, the “lion of Punjab”, then swept forth to lead a protest march to Islamabad. “This is a prelude to a revolution,” he declared. Faced, at least, with a continuation of political unrest that had included a small riot that day in Lahore, Punjab’s capital, Mr Zardari proceeded to bow to his rival’s main demands.