Excerpt:
When Crossroads GPS, the conservative nonprofit started by GOP political gurus Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie, isn’t dropping millions of dollars on anti-Obama ads, it’s doling out tens of millions more to like-minded groups. “The ATM of the Right,” Politico recently called Crossroads.
The deluge continues.
Here’s an interesting essay about why book publishers will give up on Digital Rights Management: because they are more afraid of Amazon becoming a monopsony than they are of consumer piracy. I don’t know if the author will turn out to be correct, but it’s an interesting discussion of the immediate future of book publishing, and the way the Kindle has changed the marketplace.
[A monopsony is a market condition where multiple sellers, (the majority of sellers in that market) all have to sell to the same individual buyer because that buyer is buying a significant portion of the entire market. This gives the buyer the advantage because the buyer can keep asking each seller to match or undercut the competing sellers prices, thus driving down the prices of the products in that market. As the only or majority purchaser of a good or service, the “monopsonist” may dictate terms to its suppliers in the same manner that a monopolist controls the market for its buyers.]
A stunningly good article about continued rampant criminality on Wall Street, approved by our venal, corrupt elected.
MF Global: The Untold Story of the Biggest Wall Street Collapse Since Lehman
Excerpts:
Only on Wall Street can you bankrupt a company; misplace $1.6 billion of customers’ money; lose 75 percent of shareholders’ money in two weeks; speed dial a high priced criminal attorney and get a court to authorize the payment of your multi-million dollar legal tab from the failed company’s insurance policies; have regulators waive your requirements to take licensing exams required to work in the securities and commodities industry; have your Board of Directors waive your loyalty to the firm; run a bucket shop out of the UK; and still have the word “Honorable” affixed to your name in a Congressional investigations hearing.
This is not a flashback to the rotting financial carcasses of 2008. This putrid saga has been playing out in five Congressional hearings since December with the next episode scheduled for Tuesday, April 24, before the Senate Banking Committee under the auspicious title: “The Collapse of MF Global: Lessons Learned and Policy Implications.” (The title might more appropriately be, “MF Global: Lessons Never Learned and Policy Implications of a Wild West Financial System Just One Trade Away from the Next Taxpayer Bailout.”)
Proprietary trading, of the heads we win, tails you lose kind, has cost Goldman Sachs and Citigroup serious reputational damage with customers. And yet, no lessons have been learned. Off balance sheet bombs are still lurking all over Wall Street and the SEC continues to stall on outlawing proprietary trading at securities firms holding customer accounts.
Eighteen days before the firm failed, the Treasury, Finance Group, and a Senior risk officer prepared a hypothetical death spiral scenario for the firm titled “Break the Glass.” Disturbingly, the following sentence appears in the document:
“How quickly do we want to send cash back to clients, what is the message if we do not send immediately, what is the strategy if we want to keep the customer and wait until the storm passes…”
The checks that were mailed to customers who wanted their money out of MF Global after its credit ratings downgrades and announcement of a record quarterly loss bounced.
While customers on this side of the pond are left in the dark as to how the sanctity of segregated accounts was bulldozed at MF Global, a recent filing by KPMG, the administrator of the bankruptcy proceeding in the UK of a subsidiary, MF Global UK Limited, provides more fodder for Congressional hearings. The subsidiary was running an operation in the UK called spread betting. That practice was known as bucket shops in the US in the 1920s and is outlawed here. It involves making bets on the price direction of financial stocks, commodities, indexes, and other financial derivatives without the trades ever being placed on an exchange. No security asset is owned by the customer.
There is an old saying by Wall Street cynics: “Where are the customers’ yachts?” Today, the public can’t even find the customers’ funds.
Every weekend morning, a new science experiment. I make an omelet for both of us, and every time I experiment with seasonings, looking for the perfect combination. I start a skillet with a tablespoon of butter and one chopped fresh scallion. In a copper bowl[1], I whip four eggs, a dash of salt, a little chopped garlic, a dash of lemon pepper and a splash of whole milk. The rest is experimental.
Today’s combo worked well. I added finely chopped fresh sage, finely chopped fresh chives, a pinch of allspice, and a dab of blackstrap molasses. I top it with grated sharp cheddar. It’s even better with a side of French Lentils and Quinoa with Sage Butter Vinaigrette
When I lived alone, I would periodically get all excited about experimenting in the kitchen. I’d fill the fridge with all kinds of cool stuff and dreams that I usually wound up feeding to the garbage can a couple of weeks later. The key is that you have to be cooking often enough, and in enough quantity, to keep the inventory moving, because most everything you need is packaged for families. And with the economy of scale afforded by Warehouse stores, I often wind up looking for someone to share food with – either right in the package, or as a prepared meal.
This is the year I decided to stop making excuses for my lack of culinary ability and to make a serious effort to learn how to feed myself (and others) with skill and style. So far, so good. It is a very interesting journey!
[1] Years ago, I was told that the copper helps froth the eggs. I don’t know if there is any truth to that, but I love having one copper something in the kitchen, lovingly polished and beautiful. The value is clearly more about ritual than chemistry, because adding water or milk to the eggs is the proven way to get fluffy omelets.
Swarm of mini earthquakes recorded throughout W. Washington
Excerpted:
Western Washington has experienced dozens of earthquakes so far this week, but nearly all of them have been too small for most people to notice.
As of 5 p.m. PT Thursday, eight quakes were recorded in Washington state, ranging from less than a magnitude one to a 2.6 (big enough for that some people could have felt it). Fourteen earthquakes were recorded on Wednesday, and six on Tuesday.
One quake on Wednesday — a 1.8 near Skykomish — set a record for depth, occurring 60 miles down. At that depth, the quake was in the so-called Cascadia subduction zone, where the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate is being pulled and driven beneath the North American plate. It’s that zone that has caused huge earthquakes in the Pacific Northwest’s past … and one day will again.
My son sent me a link to an AP article, “Hundreds of thousands may lose Internet in July”
The article claimed that the FBI had been running an op that reroutes internet traffic through some of their servers, and that those servers will be turned down in July. According to the article, people who have computers infected with a DNSChanger virus will lose Internet access when those servers go dark.
I didn’t trust the embedded link to a company I’ve never heard of, so I went to the FBI site and searched backward from there. It turns out, yes, the Manhattan U.S. Attorney has charged seven people with infecting millions of computers with malware that alters DNS addresses in order to reroute traffic through sites that generate ad revenue for the criminals.
“Six of the defendants, VLADIMIR TSASTSIN, 31, TIMUR GERASSIMENKO, 31, DMITRI JEGOROV, 33, VALERI ALEKSEJEV, 31, KONSTANTIN POLTEV, 28, and ANTON IVANOV, 26, all Estonian nationals, were arrested and taken into custody yesterday in Estonia by the Estonian Police and Border Guard Board. The U.S. Attorney’s Office will seek their extradition to the United States. The seventh defendant, ANDREY TAAME, 31, a Russian national, remains at large.”
“Manhattan U.S. Attorney PREET BHARARA said: ‘These defendants gave new meaning to the term, ‘false advertising.’ As alleged, they were international cyber bandits who hijacked millions of computers at will and re-routed them to Internet websites and advertisements of their own choosing—collecting millions in undeserved commissions for all the hijacked computer clicks and Internet ads they fraudulently engineered.’ “
The FBI had an operation running on this, “Operation Ghost Click,” and they have a lot of useful information about the DNS Changer malware, and a way to see if your machine has been hijacked.
DCWG also provides a tool to check your routing here.
While we’re talking about Internet security, Facebook does not allow you to see who’s viewing your profile, so don’t fall for this scam.
FDIC Filing MBS Lawsuits Based on Appraisal Defects as Determined by AVMs
By Peter Christensen
Excerpt:
The FDIC’s complaint in this case is virtually identical to the dozens of other MBS complaints against mortgage originators and aggregators filed by pension funds, insurance companies, banks and other MBS investors. The newsworthy point here is that the FDIC is deciding to join in this litigation boondoggle and is doing it exactly in the same way as many “civilian” MBS investor plaintiffs.
For the appraisal industry, it’s also worth observing that the FDIC is using the same retrospective AVM model as the other MBS plaintiffs to claim the appraisals at issue were flawed and failed to comply with USPAP.
More diffusion and misdirection of accountability. AVMs are notoriously inaccurate on anything oither than “cookie cutter” tracts less than ten years old, so basing litigation on that form of analysis is simply economic terrorism.
Excerpt:
The agreement with the 49 state attorneys general, the Justice Department and the Department of Housing and Urban Development settles a wide-range of foreclosure abuses from improperly prepared affidavits to allegedly forged notarization signatures and botched modification attempts.
The five servicers, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Ally Financial will provide $17 billion in different forms of homeowner relief, $5 billion in remediation payments to borrowers and $3 billion in fines to the states.
Because of the way the relief was structured into partial credits, the total amount of principal reduction and other actions could total as high as $40 billion, according to some government estimates.
The deal was originally announced in February after more than one year of negotiations, and it was filed in court in March.
Yes, $25B sounds like a lot of money, but this is a pathetic slap on the wrist for lenders who screwed thousands of borrowers out of billions of dollars. The final arithmetic is that the fraud committed was profitable, even after these “punitive” judgments. The $5B in remediation payments to borrowers works out to about $6,000 each – an insult in view of the magnitude of the fraud committed. If any of us had committed any of these crimes, we’d be in jail.
Finally! The truth revealed!
Lani has made it through brain surgery and is responsive to her surroundings, can follow commands (the nurse to give her a thumbs up, and Lani lifted her arm and did so. She also opened her eyes half-way.)
Her swelling has decreased, and continues to decrease, and they have tightened her neck brace and the tape holding things in/on because they were getting too loose.
I am very optimistic!
Lani is sitting front right. My dad sitting next to her.
Behind them, left to right, my Aunt Marlene, Uncle Gene and Aunt Denise (my father’s siblings).
At the Central Terminal, Buffalo, New York:
Image Copyright: Joe Cascio.
