Many Latin Americans on Tuesday greeted the inauguration of Barack Obama with high hopes that the 44th president of the United States will successfully steer his nation and the world out of its current crises, but some were skeptical.

Newspapers and websites throughout the hemisphere featured exhaustive coverage of the swearing-in and other events in Washington. There were also plenty of laudatory editorials and analyses, ranging from fashion to bilateral relations.

''Obama's speech, at the center of world expectation,'' read a headline on lanacion.com in Argentina.

''Latin America maintains hope with Obama's new government,'' said the website of Lima's El Comercio, and the site of El Nacional in Caracas used the headline ``Obama is sworn in as U.S. president amid prayers, music and applause.''

The front page of Tuesday's Zero Hora of Porto Alegre, Brazil, featured a close-up portrait of Obama and the words ``A New Beginning for America.''

''There is a feeling this is a historic event,'' said Raúl Trejo, who teaches political and social sciences at the Universidad Autónoma de México. ``Seventy-six percent of those polled today by the newspaper Excelsior believe things will go better with Obama.''

At the Plaza Murillo in downtown La Paz, Bolivia, even indigenous residents from rural areas were pleased that the United States had inaugurated its first black president.

''He's not like other presidents, just like we have our first Indian president,'' said Gladys Sanjinez, referring to Evo Morales, an Aymara Indian who took office three years ago.

That's not nice, scaring people who have deadlines and such by pretending it is already tomorrow.  Unless y'all have moved to Vladivostok without informing us.  Then I extend my apologies for the misunderstanding.

Probably did not help that I saw that Lost episode last night (my friend has been nagging me to watch it) where space-time goes all berserk...

Come, my friends, 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

A Co Roscommon mother-of-six has been to sentenced seven years in prison after pleading guilty to incest, sexual assault and neglect of her children.

At Roscommon Circuit Court today, Judge Miriam Reynolds said she would have given the 40-year-old woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, a life sentence had she been a man.

However, Judge Reynolds said she was restricted by the terms of 1908 legal act, which carries a maximum seven-year sentence for incest cases involving women.

The woman had pleaded guilty to two counts of incest committed in June 2004 and on a date unknown between July and October 2004.

She had also pleaded guilty to two charges of sexual abuse against a son on the same dates and to neglecting and ill treating each of her six children from 1998 to 2004 .

The court yesterday heard details about the plight of the six children who, despite coming to the notice of social workers in 1996, were not into taken into care until 2004.

One of the children was sexually abused by his mother, while all of the family were forced to live in filthy conditions without sufficient food, clothing or heating.

Judge Reynolds asked why eight years elapsed during which social workers and home helps regularly visited the home before the children were removed from "what seems to have been an awful household".

Social workers believe that the mother received support from "a Catholic right-wing organisation" when she got a High Court injunction in 2000 to stop the children from being placed in the care of relatives.

"Boca" dir. Matt Wolf

It's incidental that this exquisite little short from a kid I knew when he was 17 and I TA'd for the summer high school film program at NYU, was shot on a cell phone.

A clause inserted during the Abu Dhabi Royal Family's investment in Barclays last October has made it practically impossible for the Government to take a meaningful stake in the bank, The Times has learnt.

News of the clause is likely to reignite controversy over the way that Barclays raised the money -- dubbed at the time by Vince Cable, Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman, as "a scandal of mammoth proportions". Barclays shares fell another 9 per cent yesterday, having collapsed by 35 per cent at one point, amid speculation that it is poised to raise more capital -- either in the market or from the Government.

But the small print in the deal, in which Barclays raised £7.3 billion from Abu Dhabi and Qatar, means that if the bank raises fresh capital before the end of June, the Middle Eastern investors would receive a greater number of shares for their original investment without paying more. If Barclays were to raise fresh capital at last night's closing price, for example, it would automatically hand almost 50 per cent of the bank to the Middle Eastern investors. The only way to get around the anti-dilution clause, should Barclays need more money before the end of June, would be if new capital was raised at more than the 153p-a-share at which paper issued to Abu Dhabi and Qatar is due to convert into Barclays stock.

This would mean that if the Government wanted to take a meaningful stake in the bank, it would have to do so by paying more than 153p for Barclays shares -- which were trading at just 66.1p yesterday. The Treasury would face accusations of wasting taxpayers' money were it to do this.

"No cookie, no content", 21 January 2009

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

ALERT
RGE Monitor
January 22, 2009

RGE Monitor Estimates $3.6 Trillion Loan and Securities Losses in the U.S.

Nouriel Roubini and Elisa Parisi-Capone of RGE Monitor release new estimates for expected loan losses and writedowns on U.S. originated securitizations:

    * Loan losses on a total of $12.37 trillion unsecuritized loans are expected to reach $1.6 trillion. Of these, U.S. banks and brokers are expected to incur $1.1 trillion.

    * Mark-to-market writedowns based on derivatives prices and cash bond indices on a further $10.84 trillion in securities reached about $2 trillion ($1.92 trillion.) About 40% of these securities (and losses) are held abroad according to flow-of-funds data. U.S. banks and broker dealers are assumed to incur a share of 30-35%, or $600-700 billion in securities writedowns.

    * Total loan losses and securities writedowns on U.S. originated assets are expected to reach about $3.6 trillion. The U.S. banking sector is exposed to half of this figure, or $1.8 trillion (i.e. $1.1 trillion loan losses + $700bn writedowns.)

    * FDIC-insured banks' capitalization is $1.3 trillion as of Q3 2008; investment banks had $110bn in equity capital as of Q3 2008. Past recapitalization via TARP 1 funds of $230bn and private capital of $200bn still leaves the U.S. banking system borderline insolvent if our loss estimates materialize.

    * In order to restore safe lending, additional private and/or public capital in the order of $1 - 1.4 trillion is needed. This magnitude calls for a comprehensive solution along the lines of a `bad bank' as proposed by policy makers or an outright restructuring through a new RTC.

Perhaps I'm overstating it, but I think this is the abridged version of the Bush Administration's perspective on how we got into the financial mess we find ourselves in. You might ask why I focus on the ideas of the outgoing government. Well, it's because I'm confident that this will be a thesis pushed by some commentators eager to absolve previous policymakers of blame [1]. And indeed (as Mish points out), this view has apparently adherents in high places.

...

Econbrowser: A New Meme: Blame It on Beijing (and Seoul, and Riyadh...)

Well, I think this last point leads us to my critique. Was it really sophisticated capital markets in the US, or a mania in which either agents made implausible assessments of future risk/return tradeoffs, or were engaged in "looting" the system by exploiting implicit guarantees and building up contingent liabilities for the taxpayers, that sucked in capital from the rest of the world.

Three years ago, I'd surely have a difficult time convincing people that US capital markets weren't completely self-regulating and self-correcting. Maybe it's time to revisit the "saving glut" hypothesis, and say that perhaps capital "sucked" into America, rather than "pushed" into America.

Even if one were to say that the excess saving from East Asia -- and the oil exporters as we enter 2005-08 -- drove the bubble (and I'm willing to admit that there is something to the argument that global imbalances exacerbated domestic imbalances, especially related to the housing sector), I have two big caveats.

The argument that the saving glut led to low interest rates is not unambiguously accepted. [2], [3], [4], [5] [6] [7]. Consider Wright's work [pdf] on how the conundrum can be explained without resort to a central role for international factors (although he allows for some; see also this post). Also consider the correlation between low interest rates and the US current account. Below is a graph from a post two years ago.
Figure 1: The Net Export to GDP ratio and the ten year constant maturity yield (end of quarter) yield minus the ten year ahead (median) expected CPI inflation rate. Source: FRED II and Philadelphia Fed.

But, thinking again about exogeneity, why were funds flowing to the US. Some of it was low national saving. And why was that saving low? Because we were piling tax cuts upon tax cuts (admittedly I'm sounding like a broken record here: [8] [9]). But then add to this question why did the oil exporters start building up current account surpluses of enormous magnitudes? Because demand for oil rose in China, and the US (some observers conveniently ignore the US and focus on China, but it was adding substantial amounts of incremental demand up to 2005 or so). But some of that Chinese demand for oil was "derived demand", driven by US consumption of Chinese made goods.

Former National Security Agency analyst Russell Tice, who helped expose the NSA's warrantless wiretapping in December 2005, has now come forward with even more startling allegations. Tice told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann on Wednesday that the programs that spied on Americans were not only much broader than previously acknowledged but specifically targeted journalists.

"The National Security Agency had access to all Americans' communications -- faxes, phone calls, and their computer communications," Tice claimed. "It didn't matter whether you were in Kansas, in the middle of the country, and you never made foreign communications at all. They monitored all communications."

Tice further explained that "even for the NSA it's impossible to literally collect all communications. ... What was done was sort of an ability to look at the metadata ... and ferret that information to determine what communications would ultimately be collected."

According to Tice, in addition to this "low-tech, dragnet" approach, the NSA also had the ability to hone in on specific groups, and that was the aspect he himself was involved with. However, even within the NSA there was a cover story meant to prevent people like Tice from realizing what they were doing.

"In one of the operations that I was in, we looked at organizations, just supposedly so that we would not target them," Tice told Olbermann. "What I was finding out, though, is that the collection on those organizations was 24/7 and 365 days a year -- and it made no sense. ... I started to investigate that. That's about the time when they came after me to fire me."

When Olbermann pressed him for specifics, Tice offered, "An organization that was collected on were US news organizations and reporters and journalists."

But seriously, this is amazingly accessible, user-friendly and informative.  It just has the feel of 1) a younger Administration and 2) being designed to make people feel welcome.  I like the vibe.  I like the tone.  Going to the old White House site used to give me a serious case of the creeps.  

Damn.  I like the tone of this whole Administration.  Ok.  It's only been 2 days.  Still, Obama's done more constructive stuff in 48 hours than Bush did in 8 years.  I hope he can keep up the pace.  

I kinda like the real President Obama a lot more than the campaigning-for-President Obama.

And it wasn't until I saw this photo this morning that it hit me: This is for real.

Come, my friends, 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.