But I always decided against it. You all know that I write long, detailed posts that try to explain what really is going on behind the scenes. Which is absolutely necessary. You cannot explain complex international events and developments with thousands of years of history behind it in a soundbite of seconds. As the blog, it is going to be a frank, open and interesting forum. You find it here: I would like to take this opportunity to wish all my readers a Happy New Year! I would like to take this opportunity to wish all my readers a Merry Christmas!
The Recent 12 Months for the year of U. So far I have shown you the 1 month, 2 months, 3 months, 4 months, 5 months, 9 months and 10 months trend for US temperature Recent 2 Months U. Recent 3 Months U. Recent 4 Months U. Recent 5 Months U. Recent 9 Months U. Recent 10 Months U. To see how the decade trends have evolved during the last years. Especially to see how the decade trends have evolved during the last 43 years. The period that according to the Global Warming Hysterics and computer models they worship should show a steady and accelerated increase in temperature.
Remember, these are the official figures. Oddly enough many of them in cold places — Hmmm? Now the number of GHCN stations is back at the same numbers as in US temperature recent 12 months Jan- Dec Notice how distorted the trend line of this official graph is.
It looks gigantic because they on purpose chose different scale for the different axis. The trend for to is 0. The trend for to is — 0. That is — 0. This is a perfect example of what I have been saying all along, it has always been a political agenda — anti human, anti freedom, anti development and anti capitalism. And this Global Warming Hysteria is part of that agenda. It has nothing to do with science, facts or saving the environment or the Earth. All of this, as always, paid by us, the common people, in the form of taxes, high energy costs and reducing our living standard back to the Stone Age.
And for this predicted trend the politicians want to take our societies back to the Stone Age. The recent 12 months trend is exactly 0. The recent 12 months trend is exactly — 0. Especially during the last 43 years. Temperature , January-December U. Temperature , January-October U. Temperature , Recent 10 Months U. Temperature , Recent 12 Months U. Temperature Trend , regional climate change , Regional temperature , Site Information Handbook , smoothing radius , State high temperature records , Surface stations , Temperaturdata , Temperature data , temperature measurement , Temperature trend , the National Climatic Data Center , thermometers , trend per decade , Trends per decade , tweaking , U.
So for I am looking forward to that the biggest political and scientific scandal in modern time — The Global Warming Hysteria — is not only going to implode, which it already has, it is going to vanish into the thin air. With great help from all the vested interest groups that earn a good living and career of keeping this scam going. So we, the common people, are still going to pay dearly for this hysteria. This absurd Alice in Wonderland economic and political farce has been going on now for some time.
And the Rabbit Hole is getting deeper and deeper because of the actions, and inactions, of the people mentioned above. When you start analyzing these figures you get utterly horrified of the totals of the open derivatives positions in the US and European markets. Just as an example: If you do the math for example for Goldman Sachs, it has a total exposure to derivatives contracts that is more than times greater than their total assets!
There a lot of different way to calculate GDP and the figures for each year. Add to that exchange fluctuations, conversion rates etc. So the figures below come from the same source IMF to make the comparison easier. And it is their conversion. Forgive us for not arresting those truly responsible for this crisis: Below are some observations from people with very long experience in the investment and economical field.
John Mauldin is a renowned long time financial expert who has written extensively and in depth about the world markets and economic situation. He has his own investment companies; he is an advisor to hedge funds, he an author of several books etc. Most of the bold are mine and all underlining is mine. And the charts are mine. I rather think the stock market is acting like we did at dinner. When the alarms go off, we note that we have heard them several times over the past few months, and there has never been a real fire.
Sure, we had a credit crisis in August, but the Fed came to the rescue. Yes, the subprime market is nonexistent. And the housing market is in free-fall. But the economy is weathering the various crises quite well.
The Failure of LTCM and the Russian Crisis
However, I think when we look out the window from the lofty market heights, we see a few fire trucks starting to gather, and those sirens are telling us that more are on the way. There is smoke coming from the building. Attention must be paid. I was wrong when I took the decidedly contrarian position that we were in for a mild recession. It turned out to be much worse than even I thought it would be , though I had the direction right. Sadly, it usually turns out that I have been overly optimistic. This year we again brought my nowyear-old mother to my new, not-quite-finished high-rise apartment to share Thanksgiving with 60 people; only this time we had to contract with a private ambulance, as she is, sadly, bedridden, although mentally still with us.
My London partner, Niels Jensen, reminded me in his November client letter that,. Keynes argued that interest rates should be lowered to the point where it secures full employment through an increase in investments. At the same time he recognized that such a policy would probably destroy the livelihoods of those who lived off of their investment income , hence the expression.
The counterproductive fact that savers and retirees have less to spend and therefore less propensity to consume seems to be lost in the equation. It is financial repression of the most serious variety , done in the name of the greater good; and it is hurting those who played by the rules, working and saving all their lives , only to see the goal posts moved as the game nears its end. Central banks around the world have engineered multiple bubbles over the last few decades, only to protest innocence and ask for further regulatory authority and more freedom to perform untested operations on our economic body without benefit of anesthesia.
Their justifications are theoretical in nature, derived from limited-variable models that are supposed to somehow predict the behavior of a massively variable economy. The fact that their models have been stunningly wrong for decades seems to not diminish the vigor with which central bankers attempt to micromanage the economy. The destruction of future returns of pension funds is evident and will require massive restructuring by both beneficiaries and taxpayers.
People who have made retirement plans based on past return assumptions will not be happy. I can see how this is good for bankers and the financial industry , and any intelligent investor will try to take advantage of it; but dear gods, the distortions in the economic landscape are mind-boggling. In this section, we deal with the topic of central banking and its failures and ponder the implications of continuing to give the same people ever more authority and responsibility. This is from Chapter 5, called:.
In the old days, central banks raised or lowered interest rates if they wanted to tighten or loosen monetary policy. In a Code Red world everything is more difficult. Knowing how much money to print and when to undo Code Red policies will require wisdom and foresight. Putting such policies into practice is easy, almost like squeezing toothpaste. But unwinding them will be like putting the toothpaste back in the tube. In Congress created the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission to uncover the causes and consequences of the financial catastrophe that almost brought down the world financial system.
They roundly condemned the Federal Reserve:. We conclude this crisis was avoidable. The crisis was the result of human action and inaction…. The Federal Reserve was the one entity empowered to do so and it did not …. The Federal Reserve performed disastrously before the Great Financial Crisis, but almost all central banks were asleep at the wheel. The record of central banks around the world leading up to the Great Financial Crisis was an unmitigated disaster. All countries that had housing bubbles and large bank failures failed to spot them beforehand. In the case of England, where almost all major banks went bust some rather spectacularly!
According to published reports, the Bank of England only learned about the bankruptcy of one huge bank after another a few days before the actual public announcement. So much for staying on top of the situation.
The regulators were captured by the very institutions they were supposed to regulate, with neither the banks of the regulators understanding the serious nature of the problems they were creating with their actions. Housing bubbles swelled and burst everywhere: Countries that had to recapitalize or nationalize their banks were broadsided by a disaster they did not anticipate, prepare for, or take action to prevent. In the case of Spain, even after the crisis unfolded, the Bank of Spain acted like a pimp for its own banks.
It insisted nothing was wrong and proceeded to help its banks sell loads of crap to unsuspecting Spaniards in order to recapitalize the banks. We apologize for our language, but there is no other word besides crap that properly characterizes selling worthless securities to poor pensioners — well, there are, but they are even less suitable for public consumption. In fairness, central bankers did save the world after the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy.
The money printing that the Federal Reserve oversaw after the failure of Lehman Brothers was entirely appropriate to avoid another Great Depression. But giving them credit for that is like praising an arsonist for putting out the fire he started. The failure of central banks makes it all the more remarkable that they were given even more responsibility in the wake of crisis.
They have exceeded the limits of conventional monetary policy by buying massive amounts of long-dated government bonds, mortgage-backed securities, and other assets. The Banking Act of , more popularly known as the Glass-Steagall Act, forced a separation of commercial and investment banks by preventing commercial banks from underwriting securities.
Investment banks were prohibited from taking deposits. Until it was repealed in , the Glass-Steagall Act worked brilliantly, helping to prevent a major financial crisis. It was replaced by the Graham-Leach-Bliley Act, which ended regulations that prevented the merger of banks, stock brokerage companies, and insurance companies. The act was only 37 pages long, but it had worked incredibly well. Instead, after an orgy of bank lobbying and Congressional kowtowing to the bankers who had brought the world to the brink of a global depression , Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Act. It is over 2, pages long ; no one is sure what is in it or what it means; and it has added a dizzyingly complex tangle of regulations and bureaucracy to what should have been a simple, straightforward reform of the financial sector.
Please note that it was the same banks and investment firms that lobbied to repeal Glass-Steagall in that so aggressively and successfully lobbied for the Dodd-Frank Act. While there are some features contained in the plan that are good, the basic problems still remain. Industry insiders were able to assure that business as usual could continue. And to judge from their profits, it has done so remarkably well. In the years leading up to the Great Financial Crisis, the Fed already had almost all the tools it needed to prevent the subprime debacle.
It simply failed to use them. You could call that lapse nonfeasance, dereliction of duty, going AWOL, or anything other than doing their duty. Dodd-Frank merely gave them more regulations not to enforce. It is the mindset that needs changing, not simply the regulations. According to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, the Federal Reserve failed to use the tools at its disposal to regulate mortgages or bank holding companies or to prevent the abusive lending practices that contributed to the crisis.
The most sordid part of the Great Financial Crisis was not the extreme failure by central banks to regulate. The most egregious violation of the public interest came in the form of the massive subsidies and aid the central banks gave to the banking system when the crisis was underway. The great journalist and essayist Walter Bagehot argued in the mid th century that during a financial crisis central banks should lend freely but at interest rates high enough to deter borrowers not genuinely in need, and only against good collateral.
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During the crisis, the Fed and other central banks lent trillions of dollars at zero cost against the shoddiest of collateral. And the Fed went out of its way to provide gifts to Wall Street banks via the back door. Geithner did not even negotiate a haircut. The money went to dozens of banks, many which were not even American. Our good friend Dylan Grice wrote a fascinating piece on what happens when you have too many rules and too little common sense. In a Dutch town called Drachten, local government decided to take out all traffic lights and signs.
They hoped people would pay more attention to the road rather than fixate on rules and regulations. In Drachten there used to be a road death every three years, but there have been none since traffic light removal started in There have been a few small collisions, but these are almost to be encouraged. But I think they do. But central bankers and parliaments prefer extensive rules to a common-sense approach. Unlike the planners of Drachten, the Federal Reserve and central banks around the world issue extensive sets of regulation, fail to enforce them, encourage everyone to speed, and then when crashes happen they protect as many banks as possible from the consequences of their own actions.
The Federal Reserve is in desperate need of reform. But central bankers should be answerable to the public for how they do their jobs.
How in the HELL DID HE KNOW THAT??????
Accountability has been completely missing throughout the entire crisis. Almost all central banks failed to do even the basics of their job. The regulations they created, especially in Europe, made it possible for banks to take massive risk and make huge profits that ultimately had to be bailed out by taxpayer s.
They believe the banks and other institutions they were regulating when they showed the models which they created which demonstrated conclusively there was no risk. They failed miserably at even carrying out the simple job they had. The regulatory functions of central banks should be treated like those of any other regulatory agency. It is critical that we hold central bankers accountable for their management of the banking system. It was utterly devastating, leaving more than 50, British wounded and almost , dead. Winston Churchill, first lord of the Admiralty, was one of the architects of the campaign.
In the wake of the outcome, he resigned his post to become a soldier in the war. Churchill was a humble man who felt he was at fault. But if Churchill had been a central banker, he would never have had to accept responsibility or resign. He would have kept his job and been given even more far-reaching powers and a big pay raise to boot. For the past few years, central bankers have been living large.
The same people who brought us the Great Financial Crisis are now bringing us a world of Code Red policies and financial repression. The arsonists are running the fire brigade. Where is the central banker who has apologized for contributing to the crisis or for being asleep at the wheel? Given how disastrous their performance has been, it is extraordinary that the same cast of characters is still running the show. Central bankers are lucky that they still have jobs. As far as we are aware, no central banker was fired for incompetence or mismanagement.
Many have retired and are now enjoying generous pensions and highly paid consulting careers advising investment funds as to what their former colleagues might do next. Central bankers have had plenty of time to discuss the financial crisis since , but they have provided only scholarly disquisitions as to what went wrong in the banking crisis, without accepting any responsibility at all. At no time have any central bankers admitted that they might have ignored the warning signs of excessive debt, kept interest rates too low for too long, ignored bubbles in housing markets, failed to regulate banks correctly, or proved themselves even mildly incompetent.
Not only were central bankers not fired, many were promoted instead and given pay raises. Timothy Geithner, who headed the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, not only failed to regulate a host of banks that needed massive government bailouts but was an active apologist for Wall Street banks. For his efforts he was promoted to Secretary of the Treasury under President Obama.
In Europe, Spanish central bankers stand out as perhaps the most incompetent ever , having overseen dozens of banks that created the biggest housing bubble in European history and having failed to recognize problems not only before but after they happened. Granting extra powers to central banks without a change in the philosophy behind their management is like encouraging an irresponsible teenager. Imagine your teenage son borrowed the family car and crashed it , and instead of punishing him you bought him a new Ferrari to test drive.
Conventional monetary policies are like a sturdy old family station wagon, but Code Red policies are like a modified Ferrari GTO capable of hitting miles per hour. You might get from reading this that we are against rules and regulations. We just like very simple, workable rules. Limit the ability of banks to create leverage, and require even more capital as they get larger. Banks that are systemically too big to fail are too big, period.
Take away the incentive to grow beyond what is prudent for the deposit insurance scheme of a nation to maintain. But, alas, such hopes may remain dreams deferred until there is yet another crisis and taxpayers are asked to absorb even greater losses but we can always hope! So, in the meantime, as prudent investors and managers, we must be aware of the realities we face.
The saying in Africa is that it is not the lion you can see that is the danger, instead it is the one hidden in the grass that leaps out at you as you try to escape the one you see. Later we will talk about a few strategies that can help you handle the risks that crouch hidden in the grass. Second this presentation from Grant Williams , investment and financial expert from Singapore, with 28 years of experience of world markets, to get another angle of the same problem.
He is now a portfolio and strategy advisor for a hedge fund in Singapore. Third , just to remind us that it is the normal, hardworking people that are following the rules that are getting screwed , just take a look at this graph from USA below:. I get to sit around all day, visit my friends, smoke weed.. She intends to stay on welfare her entire life, if possible, just like her parents and expects her kids to do the same.
Alas, none of that changes the matrix of incentives for most Americans who find themselves in a comparable situation: And the cooling continues. Sorry — I mean that Global Warming is really an imminent threat to humankind. As I promised in my previous post from yesterday Recent 9 Months U. As I said, all inspired by the shenanigans going on in Warsaw. US temperature recent 10 months Jan- Oct That is — 1. US temperature recent 9 months Jan- Sep The recent 10 months trend is exactly 0.
The recent 10 months trend is exactly — 0. You never know, there may be someone out there. But I was so inspired by the shenanigans going on in Warsaw that I felt I had to. So here it comes, first the 9 month trend and in a later post the 10 month trend. They were supposed to finish today but, as usual they have prolonged the proceedings. The recent 9 months trend is exactly 0. The recent 9 months trend is exactly — 0. Temperature , January-September U. Temperature , regional climate change , Regional temperature , September temperature , September temperature trend , Site Information Handbook , smoothing radius , State high temperature records , Surface stations , Temperaturdata , Temperature data , temperature measurement , Temperature trend , the National Climatic Data Center , thermometers , trend per decade , Trends per decade , tweaking , U.
I want to wish every one of you a warm, in the name of Global Warming Hysteria, and nice summer. It will also mean that I will write less and more sporadic posts. One theme of this blog has been to expose governments and the political elites attack on freedom and their aspiration and strive for total control of their citizen. And it is getting worse under one pretext after another. And I recommend that you read the rest of this post, ponder about it, and then come back and answer this question:. Are YOU going to behave like a sheep and voluntarily accept and give away your freedom and privacy for nothing?
Or are you going to do something about it? In the last month, I had visitors from countries. Last month it passed As I said before I am just blown away by what a true and awesome international phenomena blogging is. They have so far no gained the control they want. In fact, in some cases they are leading it. First, the reaction was to totally ignore the blogosphere.
When that was no longer possible. The reaction was one of attack. Their arrogance is so ludicrous and stupefying that it is numbing. It is a total waste of time. Instead, it has been replaced by journalist and media that are driven by a political agenda. It is about controlling and setting the agenda. Not about reporting the facts. And hopefully make better choices. A very sad fact for the democracy and an utter betrayal of what journalism is supposed to be. You will find many examples of this betrayal in this blog. The result, the US government is legally bound to spend more money on mandatory entitlements and interest than it can raise in tax revenue.
It will not make any difference how high the federal, state or local government raise taxes, or even if they cut everything. Another effect of Obama economics is that the poor are getting poorer, especially the black. Under Obama the poorest Americans has suffered the single largest drop in income ever.
And the Black Americans in the same lowest income quintile have suffered almost double as the average American in the same quintile under Obama: The drop is — And the number of people classified as poor are getting larger and larger. Then on top of that, we have the equally disastrous foreign policy. Where the Obama administration systematically have thrown their former allies Eastern Europe, Britain, Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia etc under the bus, and helped parties like the Muslim Brotherhood that hate everything that USA and the western world stands for, to power.
How the Assad regime with the help of Russia, Iran, China and Hezbollah transformed peaceful protester to fighters. The danger to America is not Barack Obama but a citizenry capable of entrusting a man like him with the Presidency. It will be far easier to limit and undo the follies of an Obama presidency than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to a depraved electorate willing to have such a man for their president. The problem is much deeper and far more serious than Mr.
Obama , who is a mere symptom of what ails America. Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince. The Republic can survive a Barack Obama, who is, after all, merely a fool. A lot of that is going on in EU countries too. And the Swedish FRA takes part in this cooperation. I wrote about this in see my post https: But of course it is excellent for controlling your own people and intimidating them. The whole report here: These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight.
After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth , the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U. Capitol buildings — about 17 million square feet of space. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U. These are not academic issues; lack of focus, not lack of resources, was at the heart of the Fort Hood shooting that left 13 dead , as well as the Christmas Day bomb attempt thwarted not by the thousands of analysts employed to find lone terrorists but by an alert airline passenger who saw smoke coming from his seatmate.
Gates said in an interview with The Post last week. Underscoring the seriousness of these issues are the conclusions of retired Army Lt. Vines , who once commanded , troops in Iraq and is familiar with complex problems, was stunned by what he discovered. Contract analysts are often straight out of college and trained at corporate headquarters. When hired, a typical analyst knows very little about the priority countries — Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan — and is not fluent in their languages.
Still, the number of intelligence reports they produce on these key countries is overwhelming , say current and former intelligence officials who try to cull them every day. The problem with many intelligence reports, say officers who read them, is that they simply re-slice the same facts already in circulation. Even the analysts at the National Counterterrorism Center NCTC , which is supposed to be where the most sensitive, most difficult-to-obtain nuggets of information are fused together, get low marks from intelligence officials for not producing reports that are original, or at least better than the reports already written by the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency or Defense Intelligence Agency.
Custer was the director of intelligence at U. In , he visited its director at the time, retired Vice Adm. John Scott Redd, to tell him so. In a secure office in Washington, a senior intelligence officer was dealing with his own frustration. Seated at his computer, he began scrolling through some of the classified information he is expected to read every day: The inbox on his desk was full, too. He threw up his arms, picked up a thick, glossy intelligence report and waved it around, yelling. The overload of hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and annual reports is actually counterproductive, say people who receive them.
But every so often, examples emerge. Last fall, after eight years of growth and hirings, the enterprise was at full throttle when word emerged that something was seriously amiss inside Yemen. In response, President Obama signed an order sending dozens of secret commandos to that country to target and kill the leaders of an al-Qaeda affiliate. In Yemen, the commandos set up a joint operations center packed with hard drives, forensic kits and communications gear. They exchanged thousands of intercepts, agent reports, photographic evidence and real-time video surveillance with dozens of top-secret organizations in the United States.
That was the system as it was intended. But when the information reached the National Counterterrorism Center in Washington for analysis, it arrived buried within the 5, pieces of general terrorist-related data that are reviewed each day. Analysts had to switch from database to database, from hard drive to hard drive, from screen to screen, just to locate what might be interesting to study further. As military operations in Yemen intensified and the chatter about a possible terrorist strike increased, the intelligence agencies ramped up their effort.
The flood of information into the NCTC became a torrent. Somewhere in that deluge was even more vital data. Partial names of someone in Yemen. A reference to a Nigerian radical who had gone to Yemen. A report of a father in Nigeria worried about a son who had become interested in radical teachings and had disappeared inside Yemen. These were all clues to what would happen when a Nigerian named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab left Yemen and eventually boarded a plane in Amsterdam bound for Detroit.
But nobody put them together because, as officials would testify later, the system had gotten so big that the lines of responsibility had become hopelessly blurred. And so Abdulmutallab was able to step aboard Northwest Airlines Flight As it descended toward Detroit, he allegedly tried to ignite explosives hidden in his underwear. It was a passenger who saw what he was doing and tackled him. Blair acknowledged the problem. Create yet another team to run down every important lead.
But he also told Congress he needed more money and more analysts to prevent another mistake. After the Christmas Day bombing attempt, Leiter also pleaded for more — more analysts to join the or so he already had. So you have nearly And they have access to ALL this data from the mass surveillance. And at least half of the analyst analyzing this data is fresh out of school, no experience with the countries and the cultures they are analyzing.
A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. In addition, there will be more than , square feet for technical support and administration. The entire site will be self-sustaining, with fuel tanks large enough to power the backup generators for three days in an emergency, water storage with the capability of pumping 1.
By , market research firm IDC estimates, there will be 2. Should the agency ever fill the Utah center with a yottabyte of information, it would be equal to about quintillion ,,,,,, pages of text. Binney left the NSA in late , shortly after the agency launched its warrantless-wiretapping program.
They were going to do it anyway, and they were going to crucify anyone who stood in the way. The haul only grew from there. The other side of this surveillance state , the ability to use all this equipment, data and personal for cyber-attacks and cyber war efforts. The Secret War http: Two years later, Rumsfeld appointed Alexander—now a three-star general—director of the NSA , where he oversaw the illegal, warrantless wiretapping program while deceiving members of the House Intelligence Committee. In a publicly released letter to Alexander shortly after The New York Times exposed the program, US representative Rush Holt, a member of the committee, angrily took him to task for not being forthcoming about the wiretapping: Alexander also proved to be militant about secrecy.
In a senior agency employee named Thomas Drake allegedly gave information to The Baltimore Sun showing that a publicly discussed program known as Trailblazer was millions of dollars over budget, behind schedule, possibly illegal, and a serious threat to privacy. In response, federal prosecutors charged Drake with 10 felony counts, including retaining classified documents and making false statements. He faced up to 35 years in prison—despite the fact that all of the information Drake was alleged to have leaked was not only unclassified and already in the public domain but in fact had been placed there by NSA and Pentagon officials themselves.
The investigation went on for four years, after which Drake received no jail time or fine. The judge, Richard D. Bennett, excoriated the prosecutor and NSA officials for dragging their feet. It was not proper. Known as Site M, the acre complex includes its own megawatt power substation , 14 administrative buildings, 10 parking garages, and chiller and boiler plants.
The server building will have 90, square feet of raised floor—handy for supercomputers—yet hold only 50 people. Meanwhile, the ,square-foot operations center will house more than 1, people. In all, the buildings will have a footprint of 1. Stretching over the next 16 years, they would quadruple the footprint to 5. With those conflicts now mostly in the rearview mirror, they are looking to Alexander as a kind of savior.
In the past few years, the contractors have embarked on their own cyber building binge parallel to the construction boom at Fort Meade: Not to be outdone, Boeing built a new Cyber Engagement Center. She has since moved on. Established in Atlanta in , Endgame is transparently antitransparent.
Farrell wrote to a business associate in an email that appeared in a WikiLeaks dump. Perhaps for good reason: According to news reports, Endgame is developing ways to break into Internet-connected devices through chinks in their antivirus armor. And since no one else has ever discovered these unseen cracks, the manufacturers have never developed patches for them. Those seeking to break into networks and computers are willing to pay millions of dollars to obtain them.
The client locates a region on the password-protected web-based map, then picks a country and city— say, Beijing, China. The map will then display what software is running on the computers inside the facility, what types of malware some may contain, and a menu of custom-designed exploits that can be used to secretly gain entry. It can also pinpoint those devices infected with malware, such as the Conficker worm, as well as networks turned into botnets and zombies— the equivalent of a back door left open.
The buying and using of such a subscription by nation-states could be seen as an act of war. Because there is as of yet no oversight or regulation of the cyberweapons trade, companies in the cyber-industrial complex are free to sell to whomever they wish. Thus, in their willingness to pay top dollar for more and better zero-day exploits, the spy agencies are helping drive a lucrative, dangerous, and unregulated cyber arms race, one that has developed its own gray and black markets. The companies trading in this arena can sell their wares to the highest bidder—be they frontmen for criminal hacking groups or terrorist organizations or countries that bankroll terrorists, such as Iran.
You have the same picture with more or less the same problems in Europe and the rest of these western countries. Mastering the Internet and Global Telecoms Exploitation , aimed at scooping up as much online and telephone traffic as possible. This is all being carried out without any form of public acknowledgement or debate.
That operation, codenamed Tempora, has been running for some 18 months. And the scale of the programme is constantly increasing as more cables are tapped and GCHQ data storage facilities in the UK and abroad are expanded with the aim of processing terabits thousands of gigabits of data at a time.
For the 2 billion users of the world wide web, Tempora represents a window on to their everyday lives, sucking up every form of communication from the fibre-optic cables that ring the world. The NSA has meanwhile opened a second window, in the form of the Prism operation , revealed earlier this month by the Guardian, from which it secured access to the internal systems of global companies that service the internet.
The GCHQ mass tapping operation has been built up over five years by attaching intercept probes to transatlantic fibre-optic cables where they land on British shores carrying data to western Europe from telephone exchanges and internet servers in north America. And last, never forget that nearly ALL the equipment and software used by brutal dictators all over the world to bring death and misery to their people, was sold by US and European companies. These companies installed, trained their personal and maintained this equipment helping these brutal dictators accomplish their goals.
We have seen so many different examples of this betrayal of journalist in their role as journalist. In this blog, I have given many examples when it comes to the Global Warming Hysteria. This is the ultimate betrayal of ALL what journalism is supposed to be. On Saturday November 17, police officers from all over Spain marched through Madrid, protesting austerity measures and cuts. They even apologized to the public for arresting the wrong people. One of the slogans was:. It complements what I wrote in my post EU a stupid empire on purpose:.
Forgot Password?
The best thing to do is never to enter it. Once you are in, the best thing to do is to leave. I disagree with one thing this author says: The Euro is part of that political project. Not to mention the enormous cost to the common people of all these political motivated but economically disastrous decisions.
So that the political agenda could be slowly, but steadily implemented. Until it was too late. The political elites new ALL along that had the EU project been presented to the people for what it really is, people in ALL countries would have rejected it. BUT EU was on purpose designed this way. So that the people could not stop this political project. Never forget that ALL the political elites, irrespective of party or ideology, in the EU countries were behind this. With very few exceptions. Which is the cornerstone of the federal super state of Europe. Because from an economical point these policies are total madness.
Ruining and lowering the living standard of most people. And the political elites know this. But the political project is MORE important. This is the situation that politicians and the banks have put the common people of Europe in. They are literally ruining us all. And WE have to pay the price of their folly and speculations. That unspoken implicit contract between citizens and their rulers that is the backbone of a democratic society.
If you try very, very hard, it is still very difficult to underestimate the seriousness of what happened. This is a game changer. And the very foundation of the modern financial and banking system. Now anything and everything can and might be done. Whatever boundaries that existed have been breached. There is no Law, no fences and no limits. To put it in perspective, this quote from January 18 from Jean-Claude Trichet , the president of the European Central Bank to He was also the president of the Eurogroup council of euro-zone finance ministers from to Evening in Europe is midday in the United States.
The euro was falling on the Spiegel report, which had overhyped the meeting. Juncker, at a conference on economic governance in April, expounding on the practice and reasons for lying in financial and economic communications. On the tape, Mr. Minister in charge of battling tax fraud… resigns for having a secret Swiss account. Let that sink in for a bit. French authorities have searched the Paris flat of IMF chief Christine Lagarde as part of an investigation into her handling of a compensation payment to a businessman supporter of ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy , her lawyer said.
There you have the setting.
Remember, these people decide your fate and can take your money if they want as has been shown in Cyprus. On the contrary — they even managed to worsen it. Not small feet for our dear politicians and bankers. The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude. As a complement to my previous post Recent 4 Months U. US temperature recent 5 months Jan- May That is — 5. US temperature recent 3 months Jan- Mar US temperature recent 4 months Jan- Apr The recent 5 months trend is exactly 0.
The recent 5 months trend is exactly — 0. The dark side of the medal, however, is the unfortunate causal relationship between increasing capital flows in the industry and decreasing returns, due to fewer investment opportunities chased by more and more funds. In the current crisis, it appeared disastrous that more and more hedge funds were following the same strategies, because liquidity quickly dried up in market segments dominated by hedge funds when the wind changed its direction; in the Russian Crisis LTCM alone was so dominating that liquidity evaporated in certain swap markets when only LTCM wanted to reverse its trading positions.
LTCM had been founded in in Greenwich, Connecticut, [4] by former Salomon Brothers star bond trader and arbitrageur, John Meriwether, and two Nobel prize winning finance academics with guru status, Robert Merton and Myron Scholes who were eager to apply their valuation models in practice.
Together they gathered an impressive list of professionals from diverse backgrounds around them including David Mullins, a former Vice Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.
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International market knowledge, profound trading skills and rigorous academic understanding were combined as foundation for a new, superior hedge fund business model. LTCM believed that partly as a result of the Asian Crisis in the yield differential between high- and low-yield bonds or less and more liquid securities was excessively wide and would narrow when the markets reassessed the risk.
These arbitrage play opportunities were identified with the help of a quantitative strategy based on complex mathematical models, massive databases and vast computing power. Because a reduction of these spreads [5] was usually small in magnitude, the positions had to be significantly leveraged in order to generate the expected returns on equity. Apart from above-average performance and management fees [9] , the external investors also had to agree to an unusually strict lock-in clause which foresaw that investors were required to commit their funds for at least three years.
Solid reputation of the individual team members, a convincing strategy and good contacts to regulators provided the basis for a head start. Scale effects, leverage and substantial investments in infrastructure and manpower settled the matter. The fund outperformed the US stock market which was rallying at the time and blue chip corporate bonds. Efficient markets showed linear behaviour and statistical analysis could identify trends relatively easily.
The high return on equity was thus the result of extremely low cost of debt. Credit spreads between same maturity corporate and treasury bonds were also compared to their historical means and evaluated as either too large or too small which then lead to an according dual investment position in the belief that convergence to the historical mean would eventually set in. Formally, VaR is defined as a threshold value such that the probability that the mark-to- market loss on a given portfolio over a given time horizon exceeds this value, is the specified probability.
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Request a new password via email. Abstract The story of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management LTCM is the story of Icarus, a high-flyer who became one of the most spectacular failures financial markets have ever seen. Merton, These wise words from were spoken by Robert Merton, one of the masterminds of the late hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management LTCM , likely still today the most notorious fund of its kind in the world. The Hedge Fund Environment in the Late ies Relative to the Situation Today Hedge funds have been enjoying increasing popularity for years now due to their alleged ability to combine attractive returns with reduced volatility and low correlation with traditional asset classes such as stocks and bonds.
The Founders and the Concept LTCM had been founded in in Greenwich, Connecticut, [4] by former Salomon Brothers star bond trader and arbitrageur, John Meriwether, and two Nobel prize winning finance academics with guru status, Robert Merton and Myron Scholes who were eager to apply their valuation models in practice. Performance Until the Russian Crisis Solid reputation of the individual team members, a convincing strategy and good contacts to regulators provided the basis for a head start. Der Kalte Krieg in der Musik.