http://coverage.sprint.com/mycoverage.jsp?id=BO543STI
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Sautéed Scallops Stuffed With Basil
http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/24/the-minimalist-sauteed-scallops-stuffed-with-basil/
Yum.
Any time you wish.
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Ross Williams
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The Death of the Open Web
Did anyone ever hear of Compuserve and AOL? They were private networks that lost the contest to the open web. I suspect Apple will end up with the same fate. The winners will be Android and/or other open mobile application platforms.I very much agree.Sprint has the winning deal at the moment.
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mikegold1950
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Does IMF Stand for Impressive Macroeconomic Flexibility?
So the IMF is holding a meeting on rethinking macroeconomic policy (I was invited but couldn’t make the timing work.) And the Fund’s chief economist has already made it clear that he’s open to some serious revision of the prevailing paradigm.Start here and work forward in time.He has posted a bunch of other things. Read or skip as seems good.
http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2012/02/22/analysis-why-mario-the-magician-will-fail-in-the-end/
http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2012/02/22/greek-crisis-to-default-or-not-default-update-trailer/
http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2012/02/22/slog-prediction-vindicated-as-fitch-downgrades-greece-to-call-default-on-bond-swap/
http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2012/02/23/cloaks-daggers-disinformation-how-the-powerful-are-fighting-to-get-the-greek-result-they-crave/
http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2012/02/24/greek-debt-exclusive-default-planners-falling-out-over-firewall-sources/
http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2012/02/24/breaking-sp-joins-fitch-credit-suisse-in-seeing-greek-bailout-as-default/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/debt-crisis
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24 Feb 2012: Legislation allowing loans held by investors to be exchanged for ones with fixed-interest rate put before parliament
(Felix Salomon:
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/02/24/greeces-bond-exchange-its-official/ ) - 23 Feb 2012: Brussels lowers forecasts – but says Britain will grow 0.6% this year while the eurozone suffers a 'mild' recession
Wishful thinking. -
22 Feb 2012: Timothy Garton Ash: Even if you disagree on who is to blame for this crisis, the responsibility for getting out of it must still be shared
185 comments -
Cartoon, 22 Feb 2012: Greeks resent terms of bailout agreement enforced by IMF, EU and European Central Bank
61 comments - 22 Feb 2012: The anger and despair in Greece has not receded after Tuesday's bailout deal, claim Athens trade union leadershttp://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/25/european-crisis-realities/ :
European Crisis Realities
This is not original, but for reference I find some charts useful. In what follows I show data for the euro area minus Malta and Cyprus — 15 countries. I use red bars for the GIPSIs — Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Ireland — and blue bars for everyone else.
There are basically three stories about the euro crisis in wide circulation: the Republican story, the German story, and the truth.
The Republican story is that it’s all about excessive welfare states. How does that hold up? Well, let’s look at public social expenditures as a share of GDP in 2007, before the crisis, from the OECD Factbook:
Hmm, only Italy is in the top five — and Germany’s welfare state was bigger.
OK, the German story is that it’s about fiscal profligacy, running excessive deficits. From the IMF WEO database, here’s the average budget deficit between 1999 (the beginning of the euro) and 2007:
Greece is there, and Italy (although its deficits were not very big, and the ratio of debt to GDP fell over the period). But Portugal doesn’t stand out, and Spain and Ireland were models of virtue.
Finally, let’s look at the balance of payments — the current account deficit, which is the flip side of capital inflows (also from the IMF):
We’re doing a lot better here — especially when you bear in mind that Estonia, a recent entrant to the euro, had an 18 percent decline in real GDP between 2007 and 2009. (See Edward Hugh on why you shouldn’t make too much of the bounceback.)
What we’re basically looking at, then, is a balance of payments problem, in which capital flooded south after the creation of the euro, leading to overvaluation in southern Europe. It’s not a perfect fit — Italy managed to have relatively high inflation without large trade deficits. But it’s the main way you should think about where we are.
And the key point is that the two false diagnoses lead to policies that don’t address the real problem. You can slash the welfare state all you want (and the right wants to slash it down to bathtub-drowning size), but this has very little to do with export competitiveness. You can pursue crippling fiscal austerity, but this improves the external balance only by driving down the economy and hence import demand, with maybe, maybe, a gradual “internal devaluation” caused by high unemployment.
Now, if you’re running a peripheral nation, and the troika demands austerity, you have no choice except the nuclear option of leaving the euro, coming soon to a Balkan nation near you. But non-GIPSI European leaders should realize that what the GIPSIs really need is a general European reflation. So let’s hope that they get this, and also give each of us a pony"
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/24/opinion/krugman-romneys-economic-closet.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
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Given Greek Deal, Investors May Reconsider Sovereign Debt
section B - page 2
Fiction.
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schmange19
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For Kodachrome Fans, Road Ends at Photo Lab in Kansas
“An ignoble end to a noble product. For Kodachrome Fans, Road Ends at Photo Lab in Kansas - http://nyti.ms/fzNWBd”
It did.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastman_Kodak
" On January 19, 2012, Kodak filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and obtained a $950 million, 18-month credit facility from Citigroup to enable it to continue trading.[8][9][10] On February 9, 2012 Kodak said that it will stop making digital cameras, pocket video cameras and digital picture frames in the first half of 2012. Kodak will focus on photo printing, through retail and online services as well as desktop inkjet devices and will instead license its brand name to other camera manufacturers."
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Nollywood Heights
From the Magazine
A Scorsese in Lagos
By ANDREW RICE
Kunle Afolayan wants to make huge, American-style blockbusters, and he wants to make them where he lives — in Nigeria, the world’s most prolific producer of films.
Good luck to him.The equipment is not expensive.The time and the space are what costs.No wonder Islam is causing trouble in the north.
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Nigeria: 5 Are Killed in Mosque Attack
section A - page 5
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curiouslimon
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Does IMF Stand for Impressive Macroeconomic Flexibility?
So the IMF is holding a meeting on rethinking macroeconomic policy (I was invited but couldn’t make the timing work.) And the Fund’s chief economist has already made it clear that he’s open to some serious revision of the prevailing paradigm.
We will know more soon.
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/02/24/greeces-bond-exchange-its-official/
"greece | sovereign debt
If you go to the official website for the Greek bond exchange, greekbonds.gr, you can now find an actual official document! The rest of the website, it says, “will be available shortly”, whatever that’s supposed to mean.
The document gives us most — but not all — of the information that bondholders will need in order to be able to decide whether or not they’re going to tender their bonds into the exchange. It’s written in very dense legalese — the first sentence is 70 words long, with only one comma — so let me try to pull out the important bits.
This is complicated, as you might imagine. It makes a significant difference (a) what bonds you hold, whether they’re Greek law or English law, and also (b) where you live, whether it’s in Europe or in the US. (There are also, it turns out, Swiss-law bonds as well, which have their own very special treatment.) But at the end of the day, most bondholders are going to get pretty much the same things when they tender their bonds; you’ll forgive me for ignoring some of the more niggly stuff.
Firstly, they’re going to receive new Greek bonds, maturing in 2042. It doesn’t matter whether the bonds you’re holding mature on March 20, or whether they mature in 30 years’ time — everybody gets the same new long-dated bonds, according to the face value of what they now own. In other words, the value of Greek bonds right now is wholly a function of what their face value is, and has nothing to do with their coupon or their maturity date.
The new Greek bonds have a step-up coupon: 2% through 2015, then 3% through 2020, then 3.65% in 2021, and then 4.3% from 2022 through 2042. Bondholders will receive new bonds with a face value of €315 for every €1,000 of old bonds they hold. (Again, remember that it’s face value which matters here, not market price.) What’s the market price of the new bonds going to be? Not very much; my guess is that they’ll trade at roughly 40% of face value. Which means that the “NPV haircut”, as far as the new Greek obligations are concerned, is somewhere on the order of 87%.
But bondholders will get more than just Greek bonds; they will also get new EFSF notes. The new EFSF notes come in two flavors: one-year notes and two-year notes; their face value is going to be 15% of the face value of the tendered bonds. The working assumption right now is that they’re going to be worth €150 for every €1,000 of bonds tendered: in other words, if you look at the value of what bondholders are going to be receiving in exchange for their bonds, it’s going to be split roughly 50-50 between Greek bonds and EFSF notes.
We don’t know that for sure, however, because for reasons I don’t pretend to understand, the coupon on the EFSF notes is still undetermined; we’re just told that it will be revealed on the Issue Date. (And no, we’re not told what the Issue Date is going to be.) In any event, bondholders in the US won’t receive EFSF notes at all; instead, they’ll receive “the cash proceeds realized from the sale of the EFSF notes they would otherwise have received”.
Finally, bondholders will receive GDP warrants of some description, which are the vaguest thing of all. “The GDP-linked Securities will provide for annual payments beginning in 2015 of an amount of up to 1% of their notional amount in the event the Republic’s nominal GDP exceeds a defined threshold and the Republic has positive GDP growth in real terms in excess of specified targets.” How much are these warrants going to be worth? The working assumption has to be zero, at least until we get some numbers for the minimum GDP and GDP growth that Greece needs in order to pay out on them.
When bondholder tender their old bonds to receive new ones, two things will happen. First, the old bonds will have been accruing interest since their last coupon payment. That interest will not be paid out in cash; instead, it will be paid out in the form of six-month zero-coupon EFSF notes. Why? This is just stupid nickel-and-diming: is there any reason why the EFSF is better off paying that money in six months rather than just paying it now?
Second, the bondholders will almost certainly vote, when they tender their old bonds, to bail in everybody who doesn’t tender their bonds, and force them to accept the same deal. That’s the Collective Action Clause (CAC) that you might have been reading about.
Will the CACs be used? Will the exchange even happen? That depends entirely on how many bondholders decide to tender into the exchange. (We’ll assume for the time being that if you tender, you’ll also consent to implementing the CACs; there’s no obvious reason why anybody would do the former without doing the latter.)
In order for the CACs to even come into existence, let alone be triggered, Greece needs two-thirds of its old bonds to be tendered. If it doesn’t reach that threshold, then the whole exchange is a bust and won’t happen at all. Indeed, Greece says in this release that it won’t go ahead with the exchange unless it gets at least 75% participation. If fewer than 75% of Greece’s bondholders tender into the exchange, then Greece won’t accept those tenders, and we’ll have a chaotic default.
If more than 90% of Greece’s bonds are tendered, then the exchange will be a success, the CACs will be triggered, and Greece’s old bonds will be replaced by new bonds. And because the CACs will be triggered, you can be sure that CDS will be triggered as well.
And what happens if the participation rate is between 75% and 90%? That’s vaguer. In that case, says the press release, “the Republic, in consultation with its official sector creditors, may proceed to exchange the tendered bonds without putting any of the proposed amendments into effect”. Which seems to me to say that if you tender into the exchange then you’ll get new bonds, and if you don’t tender into the exchange then, um, well, you’ll be left with your old bonds. The implied threat here is that Greece will pay out on its new bonds but won’t pay out on its old bonds — and bondholders who didn’t participate in the exchange will be left with claims on the Greek government which they’ll be lucky to ever collect on. Of course the CDS would be triggered in that case, too — it would be a clear-cut default. But Greece would have a large outstanding stock of unpaid debt for the foreseeable future.
The idea here is to prevent would-be free-riders from holding out in the exchange, refusing to tender their bonds on the basis that if they hold out, then they’ll just get bailed in by the CACs anyway. That strategy works if there’s more than 90% participation, but it becomes very dangerous if there’s less than 90% participation.
Will this strategy be enough to get 90% of Greece’s bondholders to tender into the exchange? I suspect it might. And of course if the takeup is between 75% and 90% Greece still has the option of exercising the CACs and bailing everybody in anyway. (Note that “may” in the press release which I bolded.) Chances are, that’s what it would do: it’s better for Greece to have one series of bonds outstanding which it isn’t in default on, rather than lots of series of bonds outstanding where it’s in default on most of them. But we won’t know for sure until after the results of the bond exchange are made public. And we won’t even know what bondholders are thinking with respect to the terms of the exchange until we get more details on the GDP warrants and the coupon on the EFSF notes. When will that come? Your guess is as good as mine."
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Amir
Prostate Cance Surgery More Common in Hospitals With Robots
After annual PSA testing, from normal it began to increase, the rate of increse is what is significant. After talking with more than a few urologists, & others -- pay attention & you can tell which is the best choice. (like any illness you may have). As PSA rose to 9 & found probably the best, highly regarded oncologist in mid-america. Underwent 7 weeks of daily radiation. First a catheter injection into your bladder (not pleasant) to "see" (map) your prostate. Next a intervenous injection of Technetium (Tc) isotope, wait 4 hours for it to spread thru your body, and a full body scan to see if cancer has spread. The radiation is thru a intriciately cut pattern in a 4 inch thick brass block, from 7 positions, a different block for each position. Yes, like cooking a hot dog on a stick. Point is to go at the cancer tissue, avoid good tissue & body parts, & don't burn a hole thru you from a single path of radiation. A long way from the era when they just sat you on a lead "pig" of Cobalt-60. After 4 years my PSA is 0.4 from last week check. First uroligists just wanted to do surgery, check nothing. Any profession has some "bad actors". It is up to you to do you own inquiries, ask questions, listen very carefully to the answers. Be careful when "answers" don't seem very convincing when compared with others. Read & inform yourself on the issue. It's your life ! PS I went to Los Alamos (nuclear) Lab from Grad School; little significant I do not know about nuclear bombs, reactors, radiation, etc.
I hope never to need the surgery.I like my erections.The surgery almost always destroys the critical nerves. -
ke stans
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Maybe He's a Moderate on the Issue of Race - Room for Debate
“Maybe He's a Moderate on the Issue of Race - Room for Debate - http://nyti.ms/ojAKZt”I doubt that."As Professor Kennedy remarks in his book, voters of color, particularly African-American voters, are willing to give the president a lot of leeway in defining his racial policy. This leeway necessarily puts voters of color in a difficult and perhaps ironic position: They can ask less from the first black president when it comes to race than they could of other modern presidents. They understand that the president cannot be seen to cater to the African-American community."He is blocked by an hostile Senate, House and Court.Nothing will change before the election in November.
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kunosoura
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Prostate Cance Surgery More Common in Hospitals With Robots
After annual PSA testing, from normal it began to increase, the rate of increse is what is significant. After talking with more than a few urologists, & others -- pay attention & you can tell which is the best choice. (like any illness you may have). As PSA rose to 9 & found probably the best, highly regarded oncologist in mid-america. Underwent 7 weeks of daily radiation. First a catheter injection into your bladder (not pleasant) to "see" (map) your prostate. Next a intervenous injection of Technetium (Tc) isotope, wait 4 hours for it to spread thru your body, and a full body scan to see if cancer has spread. The radiation is thru a intriciately cut pattern in a 4 inch thick brass block, from 7 positions, a different block for each position. Yes, like cooking a hot dog on a stick. Point is to go at the cancer tissue, avoid good tissue & body parts, & don't burn a hole thru you from a single path of radiation. A long way from the era when they just sat you on a lead "pig" of Cobalt-60. After 4 years my PSA is 0.4 from last week check. First uroligists just wanted to do surgery, check nothing. Any profession has some "bad actors". It is up to you to do you own inquiries, ask questions, listen very carefully to the answers. Be careful when "answers" don't seem very convincing when compared with others. Read & inform yourself on the issue. It's your life ! PS I went to Los Alamos (nuclear) Lab from Grad School; little significant I do not know about nuclear bombs, reactors, radiation, etc.
What a mess.
The local docs will be some of the best in the world.Sloan Kettering is another center. Mayo has the repute.Often the best choice is not to treat.
My nasty mind throws up the possibility of a tactical announcement.
Find out.
Rudie Giuliani worked this one.
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Brian
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Does IMF Stand for Impressive Macroeconomic Flexibility?
So the IMF is holding a meeting on rethinking macroeconomic policy (I was invited but couldn’t make the timing work.) And the Fund’s chief economist has already made it clear that he’s open to some serious revision of the prevailing paradigm.
The story at this point is a simple one:Contagion.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17062333
"Greece: Costing the exit Stefanie Flanders, Economics Editor
Greece isn't "ready" to default, or leave the eurozone. I suspect it never will be.Even if politicians - and economists - can see the long-term case, the internal turmoil that would come first is hard for anyone willingly to sign up to.
But, you can't help thinking, the eurogroup negotiating the Greek deal is getting readier for a Greek exit by the day.
On balance, a majority of the European officials on Wednesday's conference call probably want Greece to stagger on.
For them, the "no crisis tomorrow" imperative still holds, as it usually does. Given the choice, policy makers nearly always want to buy more time.
But, as Evan Davis and I discussed on the Today programme today (see right), the hardline rhetoric we have been hearing this week is surely a reflection of the fact that the perceived costs of a Greek disaster are not as high as they were in 2010.Cannot play media. You do not have the correct version of the flash player. Download the correct version
In fact, they are a fair bit lower than they were at the start of this year.
Here's why.
First, thanks to the ECB, there's a lot more money sloshing around the European financial system than there was a few months ago. Put simply, the balance sheets of some Spanish and Italian banks no longer look like one more push would send them over the edge.
Second, investors are increasingly seeing Greece as a special case. You can debate how far the Greek domino is now from Portugal or Cyprus (more on that later). But if you look at the bond market, or the cost of insuring against sovereign defaults, the gap with Spain and Italy is much larger than it was.
Third, everyone - including the private sector - has now had plenty of time to prepare for this and make their contingency plans. The banks have also had time to slash their exposure to Greek assets.
The combined exposure of foreign banks to Greek entities - public and private - is now around 80bn euros. In 2009 they were in for well over 200bn euros.
And remember, a good chunk of the Greek assets that are still on their balance sheets has already been marked down.
Which brings me to the last reason why a Greek exit looks less terrifying than it did, which is that the prospect of keeping Greece on track is looking a lot worse, especially if you're one of the Northern European politicians who always thought the money was heading down a black hole.
As Willem Buiter pointed out recently, these officials and politicians worry deeply about the message that is being sent to other members of the club - if a country can repeatedly miss its targets and yet still qualify for support.
For them, pulling the plug on Greece would send a powerful message.
Or at least, that's what one side of their brain is telling them. The other side is saying "don't forget Lehmans".
In October 2008, officials at the US Treasury and the New York Federal Reserve also thought that the private sector was prepared for Lehmans to go bust (after all, they'd had six months to think about it, since the authorities managed the collapse of Bear Stearns).
Back then, the US Treasury Secretary, Hank Paulson, was also very worried about moral hazard, and the need to send a message that failing institutions would not always be bailed out.
There are plenty of differences between 2008 and now. But when it comes to contagion and Greece there's still a lot that policy makers cannot know for sure.
They cannot know for sure that the financial markets will take Greece as a "one-off". Even if Italy and Spain can be kept out of it, officials have still to work out what to do about Portugal - and Cyprus.
They also can't be sure that the tools they have for protecting Italian or Spanish banks from any fallout will be strong enough - and credible enough - to persuade ordinary depositors that their money is safe.
Put it another way: when it comes to Greece, European policy makers would still rather not have a crisis tomorrow.
The worse the rhetoric gets, the more I wonder how long they will be in a position to choose."
Behind the curve.
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I looked at Zero Hedge for how the traders were thinking:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/icecap-asset-management-tug-war
Next thing you know they will admit that the "Liquidity Trap" is real.
"In Berlin June 1922, Alia Schmidt paid 3 German Marks for a really nice loaf of bread. A very quick six months later, the same loaf of bread cost her 700 German Marks. The German decision to print money caused inflation to skyrocket. No one was happy and Mrs. Schmidt had to stop eating bread.
In Tokyo 1994, Makishi Satou paid a whopping 217 Japanese Yen for a delicious McDonalds hamburger. A very long 18 years later, Mr. Satou is still enjoying hamburgers, yet he is only paying 216 Japanese Yen for this very same delicacy.
The Japanese decision to print money resulted in zero inflation. Yet, despite a full belly, Mr. Satou and others are not at all happy with their money printing experience and the subsequent -77% decline in their stock market and the -90% fall in their property market.
Today, future economic historians are lucky enough to both see and experience what will happen as Europe (lead by Germany), Japan, Great Britain and the United States fully engage in the biggest, coordinated, money printing experiment in the history of the Universe. In its simplest form, only three scenarios are possible:
1) Money printing has absolutely no impact on prices rising or falling
2) Money printing results in a return to the 1922 German experience
3) Money printing results in a return to the modern day Japan experience
No worries though - the very competent hands of today’s central bankers, on the surface at least, appear quite confident that their money printing games will successfully engineer a very serene road to prosperity. The mere mention of the probability of scenarios 2 or 3 occurring are casually dismissed as easily as an offering of a third espresso.
However, what should make you a little concerned is that central bankers in both 1922 Germany and 1990 Japan came to the very same conclusion before they commenced their devastating money printing strategies.
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