A Little Handel For Your Christmas Day
Reply
Author Archives: the editor
Israel is going back into Gaza
The defense establishment is currently preparing for a military move against Hamas targets in Gaza, after the Islamist group launched more than 70 rockets into Israel on Wednesday.
As an initial retaliatory measure, an Israel Air Force strike killed a Hamas gunman in the southern Gaza Strip on Wednesday. Israel’s response will go beyond the air raid, an Israeli official told Haaretz.
Russian Problems
Russia had to devalue the rubble again. From Bloomberg…..
Russia devalued the ruble for the third time in a week, sending the currency to its lowest level against the dollar since January 2006, as oil’s drop below $37 a barrel dimmed the outlook for growth.
To help pay their bills, the are trying to get blood out of a stone. From a different Bloomberg article….
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev threatened sanctions against Ukraine, and state-run OAO Gazprom said it might cut off natural gas to the former Soviet republic if it fails to pay $2.1 billion it owes by next week.
Meanwhile, even their victory over Georgia is giving them problems. From Spiegel…..
In the city, 10 schools, kindergartens and the hospital have been rebuilt. But in many houses there are now plastic tarps and blankets where windows used to be. “We brought enough glass to Tskhinvali to provide it with three times as many windows as it needs,” Russian Disaster Protection Minister Sergei Shoigu said angrily.
No one knows exactly what happened to all the glass and other building materials. The same appears to apply to much of the €350 million ($490 million) in Russian reconstruction aid. To be on the safe side, Moscow did send two of its own people to Tskhinvali to serve as prime minister and finance minister. But President Kokoity has declared the budget, filled almost exclusively with Russian funds after the war, a state secret. A former security advisor accuses Kokoity of having surrounded himself with confidants from the Russian regions of Samara and Ulyanovsk and of conducting money-laundering operations with dubious companies.
Yuri Morosov, the former prime minister who resigned after the war — supposedly of his own free will — voices similar complaints. According to Morosov, 100 million rubles or about €2.7 million ($3.8 million) in salary payments for public servants were embezzled shortly before the conflict. Most of the money was intended for South Ossetia’s armed militias.
The above might seem just like western tut tuting. But the problems in South Ossetia have gotten so bad that even the normally compliant Russian media have been talking about them.
The Games We Play
GMAC is now a bank, even though they haven’t reached requested levels of capitalization.
To me, the most interesting part of the Fed’s decision to allow GMAC to become a bank is the fact that it will be broken up to the point at which its owners will effectively have no control over it any more. The Fed seems to have concluded that GMAC has a strong management team in place, and that its current woes are more a function of its shareholders than they are of GMAC’s own internal mismanagement.
The total disregard for anything that resembles rules is going to cause big problems down the road.
Dumb
The city’s approach means crews clear the roads enough for all-wheel and four-wheel-drive vehicles, or those with front-wheel drive cars as long as they are using chains, Wiggins said.
The icy streets are the result of Seattle’s refusal to use salt, an effective ice-buster used by the state Department of Transportation and cities accustomed to dealing with heavy winter snows.
From later on in the article….
Seattle also equips its plows with rubber-edged blades. That minimizes the damage to roads and manhole covers, but it doesn’t scrape off the ice, Wiggins said.
That leaves many drivers, including Seattle police, pretty much on their own until nature does to the snow what the sand can’t: melt it.
The city’s patrol cars are rear-wheel drive. And even with tire chains, officers are avoiding hills and responding on foot, according to a West Precinct officer.
I could almost understand this if the stated reason was to save money. Seattle does not get that much snow and everyone has to pinch pennies these days. But the stated reason for not using salt is the desire to protect the Puget Sound.
This does not make any sense to me. To best of my memory the Puget Sound is a body of salt water so what harm could a little salt do to it?
A new Marshall Plan?
Japan should write-off its holdings of Treasuries because the U.S. government will struggle to finance increasing debt levels needed to dig the economy out of recession, said Akio Mikuni, president of credit ratings agency Mikuni & Co.
The dollar may lose as much as 40 percent of its value to 50 yen or 60 yen from the current spot rate of 90.40 today in Tokyo unless Japan takes “drastic measures” to help bail out the U.S. economy, Mikuni said. Treasury yields, which are near record lows, may fall further without debt relief, making it difficult for the U.S. to borrow elsewhere, Mikuni said.
From later on in the article….
Combining debt waivers with infrastructure spending would be similar to the Marshall Plan that helped Europe rebuild after the destruction of World War II, Mikuni said.
“U.S. households simply won’t have the same access to credit that they’ve enjoyed in the past,” he said. “Their demand for all products, including imports, will suffer unless something is done.”
This plan has no chance of happening. At least not officially. But it does reveal the extent to which Japan feels that its economic future depends on the US.
Water Main Break
It you want to understand more about why the rescue people behaved the way they did, you can go here where Megan Mcardle talks trash and gets slapped down by her comment section.
Games are being played
The Treasury Department’s inspector general is probing the Office of Thrift Supervision for permitting a backdated capital infusion into IndyMac Bancorp a few months before its collapse in July.
The infusion allowed the bank to be classified as “well capitalized,” instead of “adequately capitalized,” at the end of the first quarter. That let IndyMac avoid having to take certain steps with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
I would worry more about the safety of the residents
Frustration over lingering power outages is turning to outrage in some New Hampshire communities, and police say they are concerned for the safety of line crews.
Unitil officials say that in some cases, residents have parked cars in front of utility trucks to keep them from leaving neighborhoods.
I find it hard to believe that there are enough residents of New Hampshire who can plausibly threaten the safety of an average line crew to be worth worrying about. I think the real police concern is that they not have to arrest a line crew for beating the snot out of somebody who deserves it.
I feel for the foremen though. Trying to keep the hot heads on your crew in line has to be a problem that they don’t need right about now. They are already working 16 hours or more a day from what I hear.