This week’s poem of the week is Animal Satisfaction. Andrew latter revised it and called Animal Sensation. Comparing the two is educational.
Poem of the Week: 1/20/08-1/26/08
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Author Archives: the editor
Rant of the Week: 1/20/08-1/26/08
This rant went nicely with this week’s essay of the week.
Essay of the Week: 1/20/08-1/26/08
Political endorsements are not usually worth much. By design they are vacuous attempts to pretend that this or that candidate truly is the ideal when anyone with half a brain knows that this is not the case. But Spengler’s political endorsement for president of the United States is sufficiently full of dry irony and considered real politic to be worth reading.
This is for Tatterdemalion
The coming epidemic
Sooner or later this is going to affect you personally (from News Target)…..
Nearly five percent of patients in U.S. hospitals may have acquired a particular antibiotic resistant staph infection, according to a nationwide survey conducted by the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC).
Researchers surveyed a total of 1,200 hospitals and other health care facilities from all 50 states, and found 8,000 patients infected or colonized with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) — or 46 out of every 1,000. This suggests that up to 1.2 million hospital patients across the country may be infected every year.
Colonized patients are those who were found to be carrying the bacteria in or on their bodies, but who had not showed any symptoms of disease.
“This rate is between eight and 11 times greater than previous MRSA estimates,” APIC wrote.
The majority of the infections had originated within the medical facility; 67 percent arose in patients being treated for general medical conditions (such as diabetes or pulmonary or cardiovascular problems) and not in intensive care patients.
The Real Bail Out
There is all this talk about stimulus plans and cutting interest rates. But there is only one thing that is keeping America from going down the tubes. And it is this….
China’s government added $430b to its foreign exchange reserves.
Russia’s government added $150b to its foreign exchange reserves.
China’s state banks likely – this is the only point here where there is some real doubt – added around $150b to their foreign portfolio, or would have, had China not made it harder to borrow from abroad and thus forced them to pay down some of their external debt. The state banks’ dollar purchases reduced the central bank’s need to intervene in the market (apparently the exchange rate risk remains with the government). The central bank basically told the state banks to hold more of their required reserves in dollars.
Brazil’s government added a bit over $90b to its reserves. Brazil’s Treasury holdings are up close to $70b for through November, in another kind of reverse bailout.
India’s government added a bit under $90b to its reserves, almost none of which seems to have been invested in US Treasuries.
The China Investment Corporation likely had about $17b to invest abroad – as the majority of the funds it raised in 2007 were used to buy the central banks’ stake in the state banks and to recapitalize China Development Bank. It will get something like $105b early in 2008. Maybe $45b to $50b of that is already committed to the recapitalize the domestic banking system, leaving up to $60b more to invest abroad. But the CIC is still the smallest official investor among the BRICs.
Sum it up and the BRICs added just a bit under $800b ($760b) to their formal foreign exchange reserves (the total would top $800b if I counted China, Russia and India’s valuation gains) even without counting the Chinese banks. Counting the state banks and the CIC, the total is more like $900b. I was conservative back in July.
Goldman started dreaming of the BRICs well before energy traders started dreaming about $100 a barrel oil. The Gulf can hardly be left out of the discussion today.
The Saudi Monetary Agency’s foreign assets likely increased by $75b in 2007 — they were up over $60b through November (Table 8a, in Saudi riyal). Saudi pension funds added another $5b.
The Gulf’s other central banks likely added close to $50b to their reserves – though we are still waiting for data from the Emirates for the second half of the year.
The big existing Gulf investment funds – the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (which, incidentally is likely to be bit smaller than the $875b to $1 trillion total that is commonly cited; see Mohsin Khan’s statements in the FT), the Kuwait Investment Authority, the Qatar Investment Authority and the confusing jumble of Dubai investment funds (some belonging to Dubai, run by Sheik Mohamed, and some belong to Sheik Mohamed, ruler of Dubai) – likely added around $100b to their assets. The $100b total doesn’t count any additional funds that they borrowed to finance some of their more aggressive strategies, or the capital gains on their existing holdings. $100b is what the funds got from their countries surplus oil revenues and the interest on their existing holdings.
Gulf central banks and sovereign funds collectively added about $225b to their foreign assets, and maybe $150b to their dollar assets. The rapid growth in central bank reserves (still mostly in dollars) likely offset the diversification done by various wealth funds.*
The obvious lie
People are having a hard time saying the truth. MBIA is rated AAA. MBIA is a company that insures bonds against default. This allows institutions who do not have a AAA rating to have their bonds rated AAA so that retirement funds and insurance companies can buy them.
Everyone knows that MBIA is no longer close to being a AAA level company. If MBIA loses its AAA rating, all the bonds that it insures lose their AAA rating. So saying that everyone knows that MBIA is not even close to being a AAA company is to say that their are a lot of bonds out there that don’t deserve an AAA rating.
With that in mind, watch the clip below (h/t Calculated Risk)
An Interesting Interview
Judah Folkman died on Monday. If you are like me and you have never heard of the man before you can read his his New York Times obituary here. But what I found to be really interesting is this interview at Academy of Achievement. The first part of the interview is nothing special. Just the typical biographical stuff. But once you get to this point it gets pretty interesting. Here is how the real meat of the interview starts….
The obstacles mainly were in the very beginning, in the late ’60s, when we proposed the idea that tumors need to recruit their own private blood supply. That was met with almost universal hostility and ridicule and disbelief by other scientists. Because the dogma at that time was that tumors did not need to stimulate new blood vessels, they just grew on old ones. And that even if they could, after we showed it, the next disbelief was it didn’t make any difference; it was a side effect like pus in a wound. So if you said you were studying wound healing and you found pus, they said you were studying a side effect, it’s not important. And then after we showed it was important, which took us about five years (and we said there would be specific signals, molecules that would stimulate this, everyone said — pathologists, surgeons, basic scientists — said, “No, that’s non-specific inflammation. You’re studying dirt.” They used to say, “You’re studying dirt. There will be no such molecules.” And then when we actually proved that there was — that was now 1983 (starting in the late ’60s), we had the first molecule. They said, “Well, but you’ll never prove that that’s what tumors use.” So it was each step.
H/T In the Pipeline
The State of California wants to control thermostats in peoples homes
This from the International Herald Tribune…..
Next year in California, state regulators are likely to have the emergency power to control individual thermostats, sending temperatures up or down through a radio-controlled device that will be required in new or substantially modified houses and buildings to manage electricity shortages.
The proposed rules are contained in a document circulated by the California Energy Commission, which for more than three decades has set state energy efficiency standards for home appliances, like water heaters, air conditioners and refrigerators.
The changes would allow utilities to adjust customers’ preset temperatures when the price of electricity is soaring. Customers could override the utilities’ suggested temperatures. But in emergencies, the utilities could override customers’ wishes.
Final approval is expected next month.
Cast your soul to the sea
The video montage is played a little too closely to the lyrics, I think, and it would have been a little closer to character to use Aragorn, but I still like this music video.