Promises, promises.

The fact is that what we're experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. -Paul Krugman

Does anyone know what you call it when all letters take up the same amount of space and how to achieve it with Word or Open Office?

The SZ has an article on Mollath and how he was locked up. Mollath is the guy who was crazy enough to think that illegal activity was going on at the Hypo-Vereinsbank. It turns out that most of the people who provided the evidence to lock him up never actually saw him....

Are you sure the world isn't at the beginning of the end? Half of South Wales seems to be underwater right now with more rain on the way.

Ad astra per aspera

Just signed a contract for paid employment, starting mid-January.

With some Very Serious People.

It'll be fun. And it'll be nice being able to make rent again, instead of bumming a room off random family.

- Jake

If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.

Italy waits impatiently to hear if Mario Monti will run again

Did I miss something? I can't remember him running before.

The perfect Yule song, by my very good friend and landlord.

You can't be me, I'm taken

Washington Post

Elmar Uy thought his software was acting up when he first saw the huge jump in sales of bulletproof backpacks last Friday. He checked the figures and discovered the Web site's traffic had jumped tenfold.

Then he turned on CNN, and it made sense.

Following the fatal shootings of 20 children and six adults last week at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., BulletBlocker said it is struggling to keep up with demand for its bulletproof backpacks for children.

"We sell 15 to 20 backpacks in a good week," said Uy, the company's vice president of sales. "Since the shooting, we've sold 50 to 100 per day."

Will Hutton graduates from the School of the Bleedin' Obvious

Guardian - Will Hutton - Bank rate-fixing scandals reveal the rotten heart of capitalism

What makes your head reel is the size of this global (Libor) market. World GDP is around $70tn. The market in interest rate derivatives is worth $310tn. The idea that this has grown to such a scale because of the demands of the real economy better to manage risk is absurd. And on top it has a curious feature. None of the banks that constitute the market ever loses money. All their divisions that trade interest rate derivatives on their own account report huge profits running into billions. Where does that profit come from?

The answer is it comes largely from you and me. Global banking, intertwined with the global financial services and asset-management industry, has emerged as a tax on the world economy, generating much activity and lending that has not been needed, but whose purpose is to make those who work in it very rich. The centre-left thinktank IPPR reports that people with identical skills earn on average 20% more in financial services than in other industries, with the premium rising the higher the seniority. That wage premium does not come from virtuous hard work or enterprise. It comes from how finance is structured to deliver excessive profit.

The Libor scam is an object lesson in how finance taxes the rest of the economy. Plainly, the final buyers of the mispriced interest rate derivatives could not have been other banks, otherwise they would have lost money and we know that they all made profits. In any case, they were part of the scam. The final buyers of the mispriced derivatives were their customers. Some must have been large companies, but many were those - ranging from insurance companies and pension funds to hedge funds - who manage our savings on our behalf.

Here a second scam kicks in. One of the puzzles of modern finance is why the returns to those who buy shares in public stock markets are so much lower than the profits made by the companies themselves. One of the answers is that there are so many brokers, asset managers and intermediaries along the way all taking a cut

keep to the Fen Causeway

Well, the world might not have ended but I have now ended my sixth decade of infesting the planet Earth. Given that dubious accomplishment I appear to have a slightly better than even chance of continuing to do so until age 90+, if Social Security and Medicare continue to provide close to what they do now, on a COL adjusted basis, and if any of what is left of my savings remain. But I am left wondering if this is a boon or a bane. I will go with boon for now. Living still beats the alternative by a considerable margin.

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

Rolling Stone

A few months ago, the Dean of Columbia's business school was a leading economic advisor to Mitt Romney and a rumored (perhaps even consensus) candidate for the Treasury Secretary job.

Now Romney's out of the presidential picture and Hubbard - well, he's just yet another grasping jobholder who's been exposed as a paid mouthpiece in a court proceeding.

[...]

In other words, the Dean of the Columbia University business school testified that the fact that Countrywide claimed to have conducted thorough due diligence when in fact it was pressuring underwriters to approve 60 to 70 mortgage applications a day and failing to verify any income levels or other key information (to say nothing of the outright falsification of such data, which also went on on a mass scale) - he testified that these issues were irrelevant.

[...]

So how much does it cost to get the Dean of Columbia Business School to say that Countrywide customers weren't injured by fraud? Well, MBIA's lawyer, Phillipe Selendy of Quinn Emmanuel, asked Hubbard that very question:

Q. How are you being compensated?

A. I'm being compensated at an hourly rate for my work.

Q. Do you know your hourly rate?

A. Yes, it's $1200 an hour.

For comparison's sake, $1200 an hour is about what Natalia, the woman New York Magazine called "America's #1 escort" in a famous profile many years ago, made early on in her career working for Jason Itzler, the self-described "King of All Pimps."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZcuujvBYuw

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.