This week’s essay of the week is a story from Law Dog about a man with Alzheimer’s who decided to go home.
Essay of the Week: 9/7/08-9/13/08
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Category Archives: Front Page
Nice Try
But I don’t think this will work. From Wired…
The secret-spilling site Wikileaks announced this week that it’s acquired thousands of e-mails belonging to a top aide to Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. But don’t look for them online. In a departure from its full-disclosure past, Wikileaks is auctioning off the cache to the highest bidder.
Wikileaks began soliciting bids from media organizations on Tuesday, for what it describes as thousands of e-mails and attachments from 2005 to 2008 that provide insight into Chavez’s management, CIA activities in Venezuela and the Bolivarian revolution.
The winner gets exclusivity and embargoed access to the documents, though Wikileaks will publish all of them eventually.
The Mother of all Bailouts Has Begun
Reports circulating Friday night have the two companies entering conservatorship, which would nearly wipe out equity holders but preserve the interests of debt holders. The chief executives of both companies would lose their jobs, but the companies could continue to operate, with quarterly infusions of capital from the Treasury depending on losses.
Any announcement would come just weeks before the two companies have to refinance $225 billion of mostly short-term notes. Fannie and Freddie sell debt to investors regularly, but concern about their financial position threatens to scare away those needed buyers, many of them foreign banks. A solid federal guarantee would allay investor fears and allow Fannie and Freddie to continue to raise funds as needed.
Quarterly infusions of capital depending on losses sounds pretty open ended. The New York Times has more….
Then, last week, advisers from Morgan Stanley hired by the Treasury Department to scrutinize the companies came to a troubling conclusion: Freddie Mac’s capital position was worse than initially imagined, according to people briefed on those findings. The company had made decisions that, while not necessarily in violation of accounting rules, had the effect of overstating the companies’ capital resources and financial stability.
Indeed, one person briefed on the company’s finances said Freddie Mac had made accounting decisions that pushed losses into the future and postponed a capital shortfall until the fourth quarter of this year, which would not need to be disclosed until early 2009. Fannie Mae has used similar methods, but to a lesser degree, according to other people who have been briefed.
Its a bad time to be looking for a Job
The Unemployment rate is still low, but it is rising at a rapid clip. From the New York Times…
The unemployment rate jumped to 6.1 percent in August, its highest level in five years, pushing the troubles of American workers to the center of the political debate as the presidential campaign enters its final weeks.
For the eighth consecutive month, the nation’s employers shed jobs, 84,000 last month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday. In all, 605,000 jobs have been lost since January. The steady rise in unemployment, from 5.7 percent in July and 5 percent in April, is one that many economists associate with recession.
Brad Delong has a chart of a broader measure of unemployment known as U6. It will give you an idea of how rapid the rise in unemployment has been in the first part of 08
Where are all of the immigrants going to come from?
There have been all kinds of reactions to this news in individual nations. Let’s start with the smaller member-states. Observers in the Czech Republic pointed out that the Eurostat data presuming a decline from 10 to 9 million underestimate immigration and births, with some arguing that the population could instead rise to 13 million by 2060. People in the Republic of Ireland are reacting to the news that, with an estimated 2060 population of 6.7 million, the island of Ireland would have regained its pre-Famine population of eight million. News that the population of Estonia might decline by one-sixth to 1.1 million have been greeted with concern, along with the news that Bulgaria’s population is projected to fall by 29%, as have news that Romania will certainly see rapid and perhaps economically unsustainable population aging as the population falls by 4.5 million.
The changes among the largest European Union states are perhaps especially noteworthy for their influence on the balances of economic and perhaps political power, Britain’s projected growth to 77 million people, giving it the largest national population in Europe, is fitting into national concern over “uncontrolled” immigration, while metropolitan France’s expected growth to nearly 72 million–not, it should be noted, out of line with 2005 projections charting a French population of 75 million by 2050–coexists with a Gemran population projected to fall to less than 71 million and a Spain projected to grow to just short of 52 million people. Italy’s population is projected to remain stable at 59 million, but quite frankly the numbers look cooked–is a natural decrease of 12.0 million really going to be almost entirely balanced out by an immigration of 11.8 million? Who knows, perhaps it is the recent rivalry with Spain at work. Poland, at present the sixth EU member-state by population at 38 million is projected to see a fall to 31 million. Barber is quite right to note that all these changes will of necessity influence the development of Europe.
I think that Randy’s point about Italy could be made for Europe as a whole. It is taken for granted that there will always be this endless supply of immigrants looking to get into Europe. But the nations that are currently supplying Europe with immigrants simply can not keep up the current pace with out destroying their own nations.
As Randy himself notes, Eastern Europe is already being destroyed by the huge amounts of people leaving their country. Since Britain has been a huge beneficiary of Eastern Europe’s loss, it is unlikely that Britain will continue to grow at the current rate. There is not many young people left in Poland as it is.
Moreover, North African and Turkey have sharply falling birth rates. That will cut down on the amount of young people willing to immigrate from those countries.
There will be large numbers of immigrants into Europe for the foreseeable future, but I do doubt it will happen at the rates the Eurostats predict.
You knew this was coming
From the New York Times….
China’s central bank is in a bind.
It has been on a buying binge in the United States over the last seven years, snapping up roughly $1 trillion worth of Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed debt issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Those investments have been declining sharply in value when converted from dollars into the strong yuan, casting a spotlight on the central bank’s tiny capital base. The bank’s capital, just $3.2 billion, has not grown during the buying spree, despite private warnings from the International Monetary Fund
Sarah Palin's Speech
Not sure we want to get drawn into this, but here is Sarah Palin’s speech.
But it is a good political speech and they don’t come along every day. In fact, it is so good that people are trying to point out that it was not written by her but by President Bush’s speech writer in an effort to deny her credit. All I can say is that the speech writer must have been holding out on President Bush. He never gave a speech like this.
It is slow in the beginning but then it picks up steam for those who get bored by the beginning. That is because defending herself comes more naturally then praising McCain.
Secret deal or dare you to do something about it?
Helicopter-borne American Special Operations forces attacked Qaeda militants in a Pakistani village near the border with Afghanistan early Wednesday in the first publicly acknowledged case of United States forces conducting a ground raid on Pakistani soil, American officials said.
Until now, allied forces in Afghanistan have occasionally carried out airstrikes and artillery attacks in the border region of Pakistan against militants hiding there, and American forces in “hot pursuit” of militants have had some latitude to chase them across the border.
But the commando raid by the American forces signaled what top American officials said could be the opening salvo in a much broader campaign by Special Operations forces against the Taliban and Al Qaeda inside Pakistan, a secret plan that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has been advocating for months within President Bush’s war council.
This may be part of the US decision to give up on Musharraf. By letting go of Musharraf the US no longer has to worry about eroding his public support. As the New York Times says later in the same article….
Former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had weighed plans to kill or capture top leaders of Al Qaeda inside Pakistan, but Mr. Rumsfeld, for all his public bravado, wanted to tread cautiously in Pakistan for fear of undermining Mr. Musharraf. With Mr. Musharraf’s resignation, that issue is no longer a concern.
Needless to say, Newspapers in Pakistan are going ballistic. This from the Nation….
THE US has an ignominious record of violating Pakistan’s territorial sovereignty in pursuit of its targets, killing innocent tribesmen and not sparing even security personnel. The humiliations to which Pakistan has been subjected include repeated violations of its airspace by US drones, helicopters and warplanes, wanton rocket and missile attacks and shelling from the other side of the border. Over a dozen people had died and many more were injured in the Damadola attack two years back. In June this year, 11 Pakistani troops were killed in a US air strike on a checkpost in Mohmand Agency. Last month, 20 persons died in another strike in South Waziristan. The latest incident, wherein US commandos landed in a FATA village and killed 20 civilians, including women and children, and flew back with impunity, is the most outrageous. Like Kabul, Islamabad has not gone beyond an impotent protest.
Eventually, Pakistan is going to have to go beyond impotent protests or everyone is going to believe that a secret deal has been made. Which may in fact be the case.
Realistic First Aid Clip
This training clip for the Marine Core is not for the faint of heart.
Is a month without sunspots a big deal?
Summary: Sunspot counts and other indicators of solar activity continue at low levels. The last month with zero sunspots was June 1913. August had zero spots, or one (there is some debate about this). How solar cycle 24 develops deserves to be on the list of things to watch for anyone interested in geopolitics. A “small” solar cycle — a period in which the global climate cools — would have substantial effects. Esp. with global grain inventories at such low levels. As always, links to more information are at the end of this post.
He then goes on to offer a round up of people who are discussing the issue on the Internet. (h/t Instapundit)