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In my routine I would pause by the library to finish my coffee before going down into the metro, and I noticed that her routine was to linger momentarily at this corner as well, perhaps to meet a friend, or just waiting for her driver. Each time I saw her she was dressed entirely in black, always precise in her look and confident in her manner. I surmised she was probably a secret agent, fluent in seven languages, expert in the martial arts, and on this particular day I was giving 2:1 odds she’s wearing black underwear, 9:1 she’s commando, everything else (plausible) would be somewhere in-between. I knew that come winter she was going to look damned stunning in that black fox bomber fur hat (they all wear them here), but sadly I’d never get to see her in it. And so you can just include that among the sweet sorrows of life.
Iran’s President Reported to Be Ill
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Sunday he is suffering from exhaustion and two allies said he was suffering under the strain of his job, in a rare disclosure apparently designed to combat rumors the hardline leader is more seriously ill.
A parliament member who confirmed Ahmadinejad’s illness accused opponents of using it as an excuse to cast doubt on whether the increasingly unpopular president will run for a second term next year.
The months ahead are critical for Ahmadinejad if he wants to try to rebuild his political base and rebut critics who point to his unfulfilled campaign promises, including his pledge to extend Iran’s oil revenues to poorer provinces around the country.
With more than 10 percent unemployment and 30 percent inflation, Iran was unable to bask in record-high oil prices earlier this year. And now with oil prices falling, Iran is certain to face a budget squeeze that could severely complicate Ahmadinejad’s last months before he faces re-election.
I erased everything I said here because it doesn’t even make sense to me. I mean, at some point it must have, because I wrote it.
I’ll stick with the original link. I know it’s Remus so it’s gotta be cool.
who should be the next president of the United States.
Nick Taleb would argue that I have known this guy, so that disqualifies him.
I would agree, but point out that well, for one, I’m not giving any reasons. As far as anyone is concerned, I may have picked a name out of a hat. Maybe I did.
I’ve seen a lot of things in my life. I’ve read a lot of lies and BS. I’ve fucking read a lot.
I know people. They are the same people that Barack and Cheney know. They look like you. Are as dishonest as your sister. As fat as your brother. As drunk as your mother.
Saint Bif
[Somehow this didn't come out right. It was part of a larger work. It was just a rough draft in a paragraph that was part of a chapter called," How to become a douche in 75 words flat." But I maintain the original. I guess was that I was getting really weepy about Saint Bif and that was workin its way into my other incoherent thoughts. Bif has contacted me, so I'm psyched that he is alive, and unsurprisingly happy otherwise. I think I must have deleted a sentence or paragraph before the "Saint Bif." Who knows. I'm probably not the person you should ask.]
by Nudge
This past week, the great and famous Alan Greenspan came perilously close to committing what is probably the most cardinal of sins among the Masters of the Universe: he very nearly admitted that the models were wrong.
Instead, he took the easy way out and tried to explain it away as saying that the wrong data had been keyed into the models. Very funny, this matter of reducing to a mere clerical error the matter of crashing viturally the entire global economy. (Maybe his inspiration for saying it that way came from the movie “Brazil”?)
What Greenspan and Bernanke and Paulson have done is no less an act of wanton cluelessness than repeating the by now well-known “success” of LTCM, only this time with the fortunes of whole countries up in the air instead of the well-being of just one measley little holding firm staffed by snotty know-it-alls who didn’t, and with similar results.
Simulations & models can be very useful in terms of figuring likely subsequent scenarios, but /only/ when the models are constantly tuned and tweaked to keep them as accurate as possible ~ and when the users realize that reality has the upper hand in deciding what happens next. A really good model will sometimes show odd behavior that has a pseudo-randomness about it often seen in the real world, such as the behavior and trajectory of a flock of birds cavorting above the rubble of a cleared cornfield. By replaying the action on a low level and forensically applying game-theory math methods, it is possible to work out a set of rules for some of the obverved flock-bevior issues.
What’s happening now is a sharp break from the predictive models used in finance & treasury. The flock has just taken off (or landed) unexpectedly. Despite a cheapening of motor fuel, people are not rushing out to buy guzzlers. Despite ridiculously low interest rates, people are generally not enticed to buy things on debt right now, at least not at the frenzied levels of purchasing activity seen back in 2004-2005. Instead of living for the moment, people are hanging onto more of their money in apparent anticipation of possible rainy days approaching.
What our grid-modeling overlords never apparently took into account was any fluctuation in (much less outright reversal of) the willingness on the part of people to whoop it up, on credit or cash, whenever the opportunity presents itself. The great spending pullback now visible today in fact began sometime back in 2007, but was not commented on as such except on the more asute blogs like the HBB. (Ben, you are the Man ~ kudos!) In terms of sales trends for big-ticket items (houses and cars) it was visible even before then. Again, it was amply covered on the HBB.
As full of bullshit as ever, Alan Greenspan is trying to palm off the fiction of the establishment’s very-faulty models as being a matter of the data put into them and not the models themselves. The truth in the matter is that guaranteed returns are a myth. Larger events and trends are not really modelable in any sense of the word. (Or if you prefer the simpler form of this rule, Shit Happens.)
What Greenie apparently said, back in the heyday of the bubble, was that every investor could put one buck in and get two bucks out, as reliably as the spinning of a planet, all due to the magic of prosperity. The less gullible among us will of course know this is a fiction ~ because after all, the system is more like a poker game, with money flowing from the less-skilled or less-lucky to their betters ~ but we know well our minority position in the game, and avert our eyes when we hear standard NAR lines like “real estate always goes up” etc.
But now an even deeper and more noteworthy event has occured: ordinary people are getting a very personal lesson in the poker-game nature of the stock market as they see their life savings in 401(k) accounts evaporate by double-digit percentages ever quarter. Had we stuck to the old system of company pensions, this lesson might have been lost on most people, but no, our “free market uber alles” leaders said to just put everything into the market and count on unfettered greed-is-good capitalism to set free all that latent value.
Some free market. All you can say about its “distance” (haha) from government now is that it generally asks for less freebie bailout money when the bubbles are expanding madly, and always asks for it when things are going down. The relationship of the free-market-espousing protagonists to bailout desperation is the same as the obnoxious lifeguard coach telling everyone on the cruise ship to ignore their life vests, but then shrieks like a cheerleader to be tossed a lifejacket as soon as he falls overboard.
Considering the nature of this lesson about the free markets, now being given to people everywhere, it’s worth wondering where people will put their savings in the coming months and years. How much smaller would the market be if 401(k) accounts went common to uncommon over the next two years? Will it go into paying down existing debts and then scrupulously avoiding any further entanglements with debt? Will it go into certain classes of, ahh, non-standard investment vehicles, some of which get discussed here?
One of my deep moles at an un-named major credit card company told me last week that people in general have switched to charging far less and paying down their balances far more slowly. Interesting stuff .. meaning that the debt load exposure is being capped by many, and people would rather pay a balance interest penalty just to remain cash-heavier in the short term.
One thing is clear from this: the private prison industry will be booming the next few years from the cost of institutionalizing all the obviously guilty players in this giant financial sh!tstorm of a mess. That for instance that one guy, already known to the FBI, who said in an email something like “Let’s hope we’re long gone before this scam is discovered”. He, and perhaps another hundred thousand like him, will be turned into examples. Personally I hope the perp gets a small cell with a really big ethnic guy in it called “Bubba”.
There were many that committed crimes like this and left a paper trail that even Helen Keller could follow. Look at the string of prosecutions in the mortgage-fraud racket in Florida. The enforcement organs are now under enormous pressure to look like they’re hunting down bozo fraudsters like that. It will of course need to be a very public affair. Maybe America’s Most Wanted will spin off a sub-show specializing in mortgage fraud or investment fraud. Folks will be encouraged to report who was wallowing in cash, bimbos, and new Porches back in 2003-2006 and who’s now trying to lay low.
Meanwhile, let’s enjoy the sights and note the events. It’s not often that you see such a collapse of such a large socio-economic edifice as the Infallibility of Investment coupled with the end of the Nonstop Shopping Lifestyle.
make sure it is this one:
LEGACY OF ASHES – The History of the CIA
by Tim Weiner
Update: Don’t buy oil at $62. It’s falling too fast. Wait for it to go lower.
I fretted over naming this post. I thought maybe. The Mahdi. Chinese Gordon. In a nutshell. Politics. The Suez Canal. The Nile. Khartoum. Charlton Heston. Pyramids.
Khartoum (1966) moves to the top of the best war movies of all time list.
“your wages will be 6000 Pounds, it’s all I can afford”
-The Pasha
“I’ll take 2000, it’s all I need”
-Chinese Gordon
“There’s no one to tell him, but you.”
What a great fucking movie.
How We Lost the War We Won
A journey into Taliban-controlled Afghanistan
Rolling Stone
Oct. 20th
okay. is it just me or does one of these Taliban look too young to be playing with guns?
As we drive away, Ibrahim laughs. The soldiers, he explains, thought I was a suicide bomber. Ibrahim did not bother to tell them that he and Shafiq are midlevel Taliban commanders, escorting me deep into Ghazni, a province largely controlled by the spreading insurgency that now dominates much of the country.
Until recently, Ghazni, like much of central Afghanistan, was considered reasonably safe. But now the province, located 100 miles south of the capital, has fallen to the Taliban. Foreigners who venture to Ghazni often wind up kidnapped or killed. In defiance of the central government, the Taliban governor in the province issues separate ID cards and passports for the Taliban regime, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Farmers increasingly turn to the Taliban, not the American-backed authorities, for adjudication of land disputes.
By the time we reach the town of Salar, only 50 miles south of Kabul, we have already passed five tractor-trailers from military convoys that have been destroyed by the Taliban. The highway, newly rebuilt courtesy of $250 million, most of it from U.S. taxpayers, is pocked by immense craters, most of them caused by roadside bombs planted by Taliban fighters. As in Iraq, these improvised explosive devices are a key to the battle against the American invaders and their allies in the Afghan security forces, part of a haphazard but lethal campaign against coalition troops and the long, snaking convoys that provide logistical support.
Grim Forecast for Afghanistan (from US) – Oct. 9
U.S. Says Afghan War [UK] Comments “Defeatist” - Oct. 7
How To Win Afghanistan’s Opium War
The best way to deprive the Taliban of drug profits? The United States should buy Afghanistan’s poppy crop instead of trying to eradicate it.
By Christopher Hitchens
Oct. 6th, 2008
Surely a smarter strategy would be, in the long term, to invest a great deal in reforestation and especially in the replanting of vines. While in the short term, hard-pressed Afghan farmers should be allowed to sell their opium to the government rather than only to the many criminal elements that continue to infest it or to the Taliban. We don’t have to smoke the stuff once we have purchased it: It can be burned or thrown away or perhaps more profitably used to manufacture the painkillers of which the United States currently suffers a shortage. (As it is, we allow Turkey to cultivate opium poppy fields for precisely this purpose.) Why not give Afghanistan the contract instead? At one stroke, we help fill its coffers and empty the main war chest of our foes while altering the “hearts-and-minds” balance that has been tipping away from us. I happen to know that this option has been discussed at quite high levels in Afghanistan itself, and I leave you to guess at the sort of political constraints that prevent it from being discussed intelligently in public in the United States. But if we ever have to have the melancholy inquest on how we “lost” a country we had once liberated, this will be one of the places where the conversation will have to start.
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