Kalpoe Brothers to Be Released in Aruba - Now Van der Sloot released also

And none of them, according to their defense attorney's can ever be re-arrested ever again. Case is closed:

(CNN) -- An Aruban judge Friday ordered the release of Joran van der Sloot, a suspect in the 2005 disappearance of Natalee Holloway.  

Prosecutors said they will not appeal the decision.

Two other suspects, Deepak and Satish Kalpoe, were released last week.

A statement from the public prosecutor's office said the judge, in his decision, found that the authorities' "recent investigation has not resulted in more direct evidence than before that Natalee Holloway has died as a result of a violent crime against her or that the suspect has been involved in such a crime."

Authorities arrested all three young men last month, citing new and incriminating evidence but not offering specifics. All three -- who were arrested and released during the investigation in 2005 -- were charged last month with involvement in the "voluntary manslaughter" of Holloway, as well as assault and battery leading to her death.

As I suspected from the very beginning, as this latest story broke. From Fox News:

Two suspects rearrested in the Aruba disappearance of Natalee Holloway will be released. [Ed.note] Again, and again, and again, and again.............................

Court officials said the detention of two brothers held since last Wednesday would not be extended.

A judge last Friday had ordered an extended detention of Surinamese brothers Satish and Deepak Kalpoe in the disappearance of Holloway after reviewing new evidence in the case of the missing teenager.

Investigators were focusing in part on cell phone calls and text messages between the suspects, prosecutor Dop Kruimel told The Associated Press.

"It's part of the investigation," she said, declining to give further details. "We do everything we can to see what happened."

Holloway, of Mountain Brook, Ala., was last seen leaving a bar with the Kalpoes and Joran van der Sloot the three on May 30, 2005, hours before she was scheduled to board a plane home with high school classmates celebrating their graduation on the Dutch Caribbean island. She was 18 at the time.

A search by hundreds of volunteers, soldiers, police and FBI agents, even Dutch air force planes, turned up no trace of her. Her father, Dave Holloway, told The Associated Press he plans to launch a new effort to find her remains off the island's coast, using private boats.

/**/

Prosecutors said they had ordered the three men re-arrested and disclosed that they had new evidence, although officials declined to provide any details.

The Kalpoe brothers and the van der Sloot individual, were the last three people on this planet to have been seen, and have acknowledged to have been with her, before she vanished from the planet--this must be gut wrenching for the family of Natalee.

As the old saw goes, law in this lifetime, justice in the next. 

 

 

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Tags: Aruba | Culture | disapperance | F.B.I. | Kalpoe Brothers | murder | Natalee Holloway | new evidence | police bungling | stupidity | van der sloot

At age 61, doctor joins the Navy

An amazing, heartwarming, and gut-wrenching story this morning, from the Los Angeles Times:

When one of his sons, a Marine, was killed in Iraq, Dr. Bill Krissoff decided to enlist. With help from the White House, he's in uniform and will be stationed near his other son, who's at Camp Pendleton.

SAN DIEGO -- In the months after his oldest son was killed in Iraq, Bill Krissoff decided to honor his son -- and help other Marines -- by enlisting in the military as a doctor.

His medical credentials are impeccable and he's in good physical shape, but at 61, he was pushing the age limit. The paperwork bogged down.

Then in late August, Krissoff and his wife, Christine, were among several relatives of service personnel killed in Iraq and Afghanistan invited to meet with President Bush after his speech to the American Legion convention in Reno.

At the end of the hourlong meeting, Bush asked each family if there was anything he could do for them. Dr. Krissoff mentioned his desire to enlist.

Karl Rove, then the president's top political advisor, took down the key information. Once back at the White House, he turned the matter over to Marine Gen. Peter Pace, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

A few days later, Krissoff was called by a medical recruiter from the Navy, which provides the medical personnel for Marine Corps. With a push from the top, Krissoff's enlistment application began to speed through the process of interviews and background checks.

"Suddenly I got all the support I needed from the bureaucracy to get this done," said Lt. Cmdr. Ken Hopkins, a Navy nurse now on medical recruiting duty.

On Nov. 17, Krissoff was commissioned a lieutenant commander in the Navy reserves, assigned to the medical corps. Rove sent flowers and a note of congratulations.

Several weeks of training in military-style medicine lie ahead, but Krissoff believes he is on his way to honoring his late son, 1st Lt. Nathan Krissoff, by deploying to a field hospital in Iraq.

He's closing up his orthopedic medicine practice in Truckee, Calif., and he and his wife are moving to San Diego to be close to the Marine Corps 4th Medical Battalion. They'll also be near their other son, Austin, 24, a Marine officer at Camp Pendleton.

"I'm just a doctor who wants to help Marines -- I'm not trying to change the world," Krissoff said in a telephone interview. "I'm inspired by both my sons' dedication to service."

Nathan Krissoff, 25, an intelligence officer with the 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion, was killed last Dec. 9 by a roadside bomb while riding in a Humvee outside Fallouja. Hundreds of Marines, soldiers and sailors attended a memorial service in the auditorium at Camp Fallouja.

Even by the mournful standards of such events, the memorial was emotional. Marines hugged one another, and many had tears in their eyes. Officers and enlisted eulogized Krissoff as a natural leader, charismatic but humble.

Lt. Col. William Seely, the battalion commander, called the young officer a "modern-day knight" who felt a moral need to rid Iraq of "oppression, tyranny and extremism."

Months later, Seely traveled the U.S. to visit the families of Marines in his battalion who had died in Iraq. Seely encouraged Krissoff in his enlistment idea and advised him on navigating the process.

With a medical degree from the University of Colorado and advanced training at San Francisco General Hospital and the University of California, Davis, Krissoff has a flourishing practice specializing in "fracture work," mainly knee and shoulder problems. For the Navy, he hopes to be assigned to trauma medicine, which will require some refresher training.

"Operating in a well-lighted surgical theater with air-conditioning is different than operating in a tent in a field,:" said Hopkins, who served in Iraq during the assault on Baghdad in 2003. Hopkins said Krissoff will be able to serve both as a doctor and, because of his decades of experience, as a mentor to younger doctors.

"He had exactly the skill set we look for," he said.

Krissoff concedes a kind of turnabout is at play. "Usually it's the father who tries to lead the sons by example," he said. "In this case, my sons led me."

And what would his son Nathan think of his desire to enlist and deploy to a war zone?

"He'd just say, 'Way to go, Pops,'" said Krissoff, his voice seeming to tremble slightly.

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Tags: Iraq | Iraq | marines | bravery | Culture | dedication | Dr. Krissof | Duty | Honor | Joint Chief of Staff | SACRIFICE

‘Snooty’ bankers blamed for crisis

From the Financial Times:

The “snooty” attitude of bankers and financiers who thought they were cleverer than everyone else is largely to blame for the global credit squeeze “disaster”, Germany’s finance minister has said.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Peer Steinbrück played down the impact on Europe’s largest economy of the turmoil but said steps had to be taken to raise risk awareness.

German proposals before the squeeze for increasing transparency had been “mocked” and sometimes deliberately misunderstood as an attempt to impose regulation rather than voluntary codes, Mr Steinbrück said, but were now winning support.

In a swipe at finance industry leaders, he said the “quality of managers” had proved a weakness. “The snooty attitude that we have sometimes seen – under the motto of ‘we are cleverer than the others’ – ended in disaster,” he said.

Mr Steinbrück’s comments came as IKB and WestLB, the German banks hit hard by the turmoil, pledged more capital to cover potential losses, and Rolf Gerlach, the chairman of WestLB, resigned unexpectedly.

After talks with the Bundesbank and the financial regulator, the banks that rescued IKB said they would cover a further $520m of possible losses in addition to their €3.5bn ($5.1bn) rescue.

Mr Steinbrück was critical of the management of Sachsen LB and IKB. “It is clear that the management . . . didn’t have the right management expertise.” They had been unable to cope with the complexity of the products in which they were investing, he said. Crisis talks on IKB’s future took place on Thursday but Mr Steinbrück said taxpayers would not foot a rescue bill.

The Bundesbank warned that financial market turmoil had “noticeably” increased macro-economic risks to the German financial system but the economy remained in good shape.

Would you buy a used car from your Investment Banker? Actually, in all honesty, you might just get something useful instead.

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Tags: Bundesbank | CHEAT | Finance Industry Leaders | financial market | lie | Management Expertise | Money & Stuff | Peregrine Financial Group | pfg | pfgbest | pfgbestwatch | STEAL | Turmoil

Our Financial Institutions may Implode

And according to the Wall Street Journal, the "Rich" well they just "Don't Trust Their Advisers."

The wealthy should be relying more than ever on their financial advisers.

Investing, especially for the rich, has become ever more complicated. The well-heeled used to be able to make due with a basic portfolio of blue-chips, munis and a couple of homes. Now, experts recommend more than a dozen asset classes, from hedge funds and private equity to commodities and currencies. And today’s market swings show that the financial landscape is more precarious than ever.

So it’s surprising that recent surveys show that the rich are opting to make some of their most important investing decisions themselves, snubbing their brokers, financial planners or private bankers. According to a survey released this morning by Spectrem Group, which polled investors worth $25 million or more, close to half of all respondents believe they could do a better job of financial planning than their advisers. And only about half were satisfied with the “knowledge and expertise” of their adviser and his or her ability to “deal with complex financial issues and problems.”

What’s even more interesting is that today’s rich don’t use advisers for some of their most complex investing. More than half invest in venture capital and private equity without any adviser, and more than two-thirds invest in futures, commodities and options without an adviser.

Why the loner mentality? Today’s rich are self-made — the survey points out that most of the $25 million plus group are business owners or corporate execs who didn’t inherit their fortunes. They’re used to building and managing their wealth themselves. And people who succeed in one area of business (say owning a trucking firm) often believe they’re instant experts in other areas (say, convertible bonds).

Second, the rich are leery of adviser agendas and expertise. They believe (fairly or not) that private banks and Wall Street firms today are more interested in products than providing custom financial advice. Other clients feel their advisers don’t really understand what they’re selling or why, since the talent pool in wealth management has yet to catch up with market complexities.

There is no “right” or “wrong” answer to whether the rich should be using their financial advisers more. Too many of the wealthy ran their investments themselves during the dot-com boom and lost millions. At the same time, they’re right to distrust some of their wealth advisers, since many care more about short-term profits than long-term advice.

So if the wealthy lose their shirt in the current market turmoil, they may have no one to blame but themselves.

I guess, I won't be calling my Merrill Lynch or Peregrine Financial "anytime" soon. After all, when they sell me something I take all of the risk, and they take all of the profits--er, that was, until now everything that these New York and Chicago firms do is quite specious and suspect as to it being nothing short of defalcation.

Deadbeat Commercial developers Signaled by Property Derivatives.

"Commercial real estate is a full-blown bubble that feels very much at a bursting point," said Christian Stracke, an analyst in London at CreditSights Inc., a fixed-income research firm. "There's a fairly toxic mix of factors at work."

The seven-year rally in offices and retail properties ended in September when prices fell an average of 1.2 percent, according to Moody's Investors Service. Banks worldwide are holding $54 billion of unsold commercial mortgages, according to data compiled by New York-based Citigroup Inc. that includes fixed and floating-rate debt.

Lenders are struggling to sell loans to investors after losses on debt backed by subprime mortgages to people with poor credit caused financial markets to seize up in July and August. Bonds with AAA ratings secured by properties ranging from the Sears Tower in Chicago to trailer parks in Delaware yield about 203 basis points more than similar maturity Treasuries, up from 92 basis points on Oct. 12, according to Morgan Stanley indexes.

The benchmark CMBX-NA-AAA index of derivatives tied to the safest commercial mortgage securities rose to 102 basis points from 44 a month ago. It costs $102,000 a year to protect $10 million of bonds backed by property loans against default, up from $44,000 a month ago.

Sales of debt secured by commercial mortgages tumbled 80 percent to $3.9 billion in October from a year earlier, data compiled by Bloomberg show. New securities backed by loans on buildings will fall 50 percent in 2008 from $220 billion this year, Moody's said Nov. 2.

My Comment: This is a full blown commercial real estate credit crunch. What else would one call an 80% decline? Furthermore, a 50% projected drop for all of next year is quite a contraction.

Real estate deals are coming apart at the fastest pace since September 2001, when the U.S. economy was shrinking, because banks are tightening standards for loans, said Robert White, president of Real Capital Analytics, a New York-based research firm.

About $15 billion of commercial property transactions of $10 million or more are under contract in the U.S., compared with about $70 billion at mid-year, White said. That's unusual because the number usually rises at year-end, he said.

Market is Imploding

More than 75 [deals] have been withdrawn because banks aren't lending, and that estimate is "probably conservative, because not all deals that blew up were well-publicized," White said.

"The commercial real estate market is imploding," said James Ortega, who manages $150 million at Saenz Hofmann Fund Advisory in Sao Paulo. Ortega has set trades to profit from a decline in property companies' shares. "We're about to experience a very significant correction."

My Comment: "Banks Aren't Lending" Fancy that. Large banks like Citigroup (C) are capital impaired. Citigroup could not do major commercial real estate deals now even if it wanted to. For more on this idea as well as the desperation at Citigroup please see Abu Dhabi Deal Raises Questions About Citigroup's Health and Petrodollars Return Home.

In Manhattan, the world's largest office market, the vacancy rate rose to 7.6 percent in October, the highest in a year, property brokerage Colliers ABR said. Rents increased 1.4 percent on average to $64.08 a square foot from September, the second-smallest month-to-month increase since June 2006.

My Comment: Blackstone (BX) has already admitted it may have "net losses for a number of years". Declining rents and rising vacancies are not going to help matters. See Commercial Real Estate Black Hole for more on Blackstone.

Subprime Similarities

Record-low interest rates in the past five years encouraged banks to loosen underwriting standards and caused prices to rise as much as 35 percent a year.

My Comment: This was obvious to the whole world and should have been obvious to Moody's, Fitch, and the S&P. Amazingly enough it either wasn't or they simply looked the other way. See Fitch Discloses Its Fatally Flawed Rating Model for more on fatally flawed models.

Banks provided loans that allowed borrowers to pay only interest, not principal, and lenders offered financing that exceeded property values, according to Moody's. The average loan-to-value ratio reached a record high of 117.5 in the third quarter for mortgages that were turned into bonds, from 90 in 2003, said Moody's, which bases its calculations on its own estimates of rental value.

Those are some of the same practices hurting the $10.7 trillion residential mortgage market, according to an annual survey in October by accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Urban Land Institute in Washington.

My Comment: It was only a matter of time before this started to hit commercial real estate. And the key point here is that it is just starting. In baseball terms this is the top half of the first inning.

Bondholders helped feed demand for loans by purchasing a record $273 billion of securities backed by commercial mortgages this year, up from $95 billion in 2004, based on data compiled by Trepp LLC, a New York-based research firm.

Demand has dried up since July, when securities linked to subprime home mortgages contaminated credit markets and caused financial institutions to report losses or writedowns of more than $66 billion.

My Comment: Willingness to borrow and willingness to lend are both impacted. There is much pain to come. The declines in residential started out slow as well. Anyone remember the mantra "It's only subprime that affected?" The new mantra is "It's all subprime".

Banks also have about $283 billion of debt they provided to help finance leveraged buyouts in the U.S. and Europe that hasn't been sold, according to research by Charlotte, North Carolina-based Bank of America Corp.

My Comment: This is crucial. Banks will be lending impaired as long as they sit on this debt. If they dump it to get rid of it, they will take huge losses. If they sit on it, they will bleed capital and/or be lending impaired. Yes this is yet another Zugzwang for banks not strong enough to pull such "assets" on to the balance sheet.

The next time you get a call from a investment broker, banker, or firm, offering you an investment,, just remember this--they know just about nothing. Nothing at all.

Exactly why should we trust Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, HSBC, Peregrine Financial Group, or their rating, and regulatory agencies?

Le Caveat Emptor.

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Tags: lies | ADVISORS | Bank of America | credit markets | deceipt | fraud | IMPLODE | Lending Crunch | merrill lynch | Money & Stuff | mortgages | Peregrine Financial Group | pfgbest | pfgbestwatch | Rating Agencies | Rich

It's about a Healthy Lifestyle

More good health advice from the people at Iowa Avenue: 

According to recent study, eating plans rich in whole grains, fruits, and vegetables may help your heart.

Whole Grains Do a Heart Good

In the study that took place in Sweden, 24,000 postmenopausal women supplied information on how often they ate 96 common foods. The food was then grouped into four major dietary patterns: healthy (vegetables, fruits and legumes); Western/Swedish (red meat, processed meat, poultry, rice, pasta, eggs, fried potatoes, fish; alcohol (wine, liquor, beer and some snacks); and sweets (sweet baked goods, candy, chocolate, jam and ice cream).

In a 6 year follow-up period, 308 of the women had heart attacks. However, two dietary patterns, healthy and alcohol, were associated with lower risk of heart attack.

Researchers concluded a low-risk eating plan consisted of high intake of whole grains, fish, vegetables, fruit, and legumes, moderate alcohol consumption, along with not smoking and being physically active and relatively thin. “This combination of healthy behaviors – present in 5% [of those studied] – may prevent 77% of heart attacks in the study population,” the study team wrote.

“This study clearly demonstrates that it is within an individual’s control to change destiny and the ability to control his of her health,” said Dr. Suzanne Steinbaum, director of women and heart disease at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. “It demonstrated that people have control over their health and can take control, eat properly and exercise and prevent onset of disease.”

The issue is confusing with the myriad of books urging different diets, she acknowledged. But the real road to long-term health “is not so much going on a diet as adopting a healthy lifestyle,” Steinbaum said.

It is amazing that a reduction of 77% of heart attacks is in the total control of each individual. Each of us can take active steps to improve our own lifestyles.

It should be encouraging for our community to know and to understand that eating right is beneficial in a myriad of ways. These are not clichés but real life.

Are you ready to “Get Real?”

After all, it’s about a healthy lifestyle!!

(c) Iowa Avenue

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Tags: diet | Eating Plan | healthy lifestyle | heart attack | iowa avenue | Life | weight loss | weight1minute | whole grains

New Buchanan Book Declares 'End Of America'

From the Drudge Report:

 "America is coming apart, decomposing, and...the likelihood of her survival as one nation...is improbable -- and impossible if America continues on her current course," declares Pat Buchanan. "For we are on a path to national suicide."

The best-selling author and former presidential candidate is on the eve of launching his new epic book: DAY OF RECKONING: HOW HUBRIS, IDEOLOGY AND GREED ARE TEARING AMERICA APART.

[The book's release date has been moved up to this week. It ranked #237 on AMAZON's hitparade Monday morning.]

This time, Buchanan goes all the way:

"America is in an existential crisis from which the nation may not survive."

The U.S. Army is breaking and is too small to meet America’s global commitments.

The dollar has sunk to historic lows and is being abandoned by foreign governments.

U.S. manufacturing is being hollowed out.

The greatest invasion in history, from the Third World, is swamping the ethno-cultural core of the country, leading to Balkanization and the loss of the Southwest to Mexico.

The culture is collapsing and the nation is being deconstructed along the lines of race and class.

A fiscal crisis looms as the unfunded mandates of Social Security and Medicare remain unaddressed.

All these crises are hitting America at once -- a perfect storm of crises.

Specifically, Buchanan contends:

• Pax Americana, the era of U.S. global dominance, is over. A struggle for global hegemony has begun among the United States, China, a resurgent Russia and radical Islam

• Bush’s invasion of Iraq was a product of hubris and of ideology, a secular religion of “democratism,” to which Bush was converted in the days following 9/11

• Torn asunder by a culture war, America has now begun to break down along class, ethnic and racial lines.

• The greatest threat to U.S. sovereignty and independence is the scheme of a global elite to erase America’s borders and merge the USA, Mexico and Canada into a North American Union.

• Free trade is shipping jobs, factories and technology to China and plunging America into permanent dependency and unpayable debt. One of every six U.S. manufacturing jobs vanished under Bush

• “Sovereign Wealth Funds,” controlled by foreign regimes and stuffed with trillions of dollars from U.S. trade deficits, are buying up strategic corporate assets vital to America’s security

• As U.S. wages are stagnant, corporate CEOs are raking in rising pay and benefits 400 to 500 times that of their workers

• The Third World invasion through Mexico is a graver threat to our survival as one nation than anything happening in Afghanistan or Iraq

* European-Americans, 89% of the nation when JFK took the oath, are now 66% and sinking. Before 2050, America is a Third World nation

• By 2060, America will add 167 million people and 105 million immigrants will be here, triple the 37 million today.

• Hispanics will be over 100 million in 2050 and concentrated in a Southwest most Mexicans believe belongs to them

Buchanan’s Recommendations:

• A new foreign-defense policy that closes most of the 1000 bases overseas, reviews all alliances, and brings home U.S. troops

• A purge of neoconservative ideology and the “Cakewalk” crowd” from national power.

• To avert a second Cold War, the United States should “get out of Russia’s space and get out of Russia’s face,” and shut down all U.S. bases on the soil of the former Soviet Union

• To reach a cold peace in the culture war, Buchanan urges a return to federalism and the overthrow of our judicial dictatorship by Congressionally mandated restrictions on the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court.

• To end the trade deficits and save the dollar, Buchanan urges a Hamiltonian solution: a 20% Border Equity Tax on imports, with the $500 billion raised to be used to end taxation on American producers

• To prevent America becoming “a tangle of squabbling nationalities” Buchanan urges: No amnesty for the 12-20 million illegal aliens; a border fence from San Diego to Brownsville; Congressional declarations that children born to illegal aliens are not citizens and English is the language of the United States; and a “timeout” on all immigration.

 

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Tags: America | Buchanan | lies | war | corruption | Culture | Culture Greed | deceipt | democracy | End of | Free Trade | Hubris | Idealogy | immigration | pfgbest | pfgbestwatch | Trade Defecits | U.S. Dollar

Chavez to freeze relations with Colombia

I don't think that I like this guy. An AP Newswire story, from Yahoo News:

CARACAS, Venezuela - President Hugo Chavez said Sunday he is putting relations with Colombia "in the freezer" after its president ended the Venezuelan leader's role mediating with leftist rebels in the neighboring country.

Chavez said economic relations will be hurt, blaming actions by Colombia's U.S.-allied President Alvaro Uribe that he said were "a spit in the face."

"I declare before the world that I'm putting relations with Colombia in the freezer because I've completely lost confidence with everyone in the Colombian government," Chavez said during a televised speech.

Addressing Cabinet ministers and military officials, Chavez said: "Everyone should be alert in relation to Colombia — economic relations — the businesses Colombians have here and the businesses we have there. Commercial relations, all of that is going to be harmed. It's lamentable."

Chavez was responding to Uribe's decision to cancel his mediation with Colombian rebels, preliminary talks aimed at a prisoner swap that would free rebel-held hostages, including three Americans. Uribe's spokesman said Chavez had defied the Colombian president by directly contacting his army chief to discuss the issue.

The Venezuelan leader said a statement issued by Uribe's government giving its reasons for ending his mediation was "filled with lies."

"I really, truly believe that the Colombian government doesn't want peace," Chavez said.

Chavez said he was particularly irked that Uribe had his officials issue statements instead of contacting the Venezuelan leader directly.

"Why don't do you show your face?" Chavez said. "President Uribe is lying ... in a shameless, horrible, ugly way. I think Colombia deserves another president, it deserves a better president."

Chavez in August joined Colombian lawmakers in a new push to free hostages held by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, better known as FARC. Prisoners include three U.S. military contractors and Ingrid Betancourt, a French-Colombian seized in 2002 while campaigning for Colombia's presidency.

The two South American countries are major trading partners, and the spat with Colombia comes amid another dispute with Spain that could affect Spanish businesses with major investments in Venezuela. Chavez has demanded Spanish King Juan Carlos apologize for telling him to shut up publicly during a recent summit in Chile.

Chavez said the situation with Colombia is similar.

"It's like the case of Spain: Until the king of Spain apologizes, I'm freezing relations with Spain," he said.

Chavez and Uribe are polar opposites politically.

Since taking office in 2002, the conservative Uribe has fought to crush Colombia's peasant-based rebel army with $4 billion in U.S. military aid.

The socialist Chavez has meanwhile railed against U.S. involvement in the region and called for Uribe to negotiate peace with Colombian guerrillas.

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Tags: Columbia | Venezuela | Venezuela | chavez | Dictator | peregrine financial. pfgbest | perficy | pfgbestwatch | Politics | socialism | world

The Importance of Staying Active

An important topic from the people at Iowa Avenue:

There are so many beneficial reasons to staying active, which are important to your health, welfare, and well-being. Even if you consider yourself a healthy person, there are unhealthy aspects to not staying active. An active lifestyle can help everybody. You don't have to be as fit as a professional athlete to benefit from physical activity. If you think you're too busy with work, family, and all the other demands in your life, it is important to be aware of that if you don’t spend time staying active, you won’t reap the many benefits of staying active. In fact, 30 minutes of moderate physical activity (activity that increases your heart rate) is all you need to:

1. Lower your risk of getting heart disease, stroke, colon cancer, and type 2 diabetes
   
   
2. Lower or prevent high blood pressure
   
   
3. Possibly help protect against breast cancer
   
   
4. Help control joint swelling and pain from arthritis
   
   
5. Reduce mild to moderate anxiety and depression
   
   
6. Promote psychological well-being
   
   
7. Help you handle stress
   
   
8. Help control your weight
   
   
9. Make you feel more energetic
   
   
10. Help you sleep better

As automobiles, automation, computers, television, and other influences play greater roles in peoples lives around the world, people tend to become more sedentary.

Being sedentary is essentially--not being active. It affects, or can affect all ages, sexes, and plays a major role in how people function in all aspects of their lives, lifestyles, and their ability to function, prevent disease, and lead healthy lifestyles.

It eventually causes sickness, disease, and leads to increases in drug, alcohol, and tobacco usage. As it also manifests itself--in medical and other problems--it causes significant monetary costs to society

Some examples from scientific and educational studies, confirm this:

The External Costs of a Sedentary Life-style.

The data supporting the effects of being sedentary and the benefits from staying active are enormous.

Therefore, Iowa Avenue—a Weight Management Community-- recommends the following to get you “moving,” as a preventative measure/s that will mitigate your chances of becoming sick, disabled, or worse:

• Choose an activity that's fun.
  
  
• Vary your activities, so you don't get bored.
  
  
• Use different jogging, walking, or biking paths to vary your routine.
  
  
• If you can't set aside one block of time, do short activities throughout the day, such as three 10-minute walks.
  
  
• Create opportunities for activity, such as taking the stairs instead of the elevator.
  
  
• Don't let cold weather keep you on the couch! You can find activities to do in the winter, such as exercising to a workout video which are available free of charge at most public libraries.
  
  
• Exercise with a friend or family member.
  
  
• Turn activities into social occasions—for example, go to a movie after you and a friend work out.
  
  
• Share you successes with a friend.
  
  
• Build a community group to go on hikes, build walking trails, start exercise classes, and organize special events to promote physical activity.
  
  
• Set specific, short-term goals, and reward yourself (with something other than food!) when you achieve them.
  
  
• Don't expect to notice body changes right away.
  
  
• Make your activity a regular part of your day, so it becomes a habit.

Remember that feeling good on the inside and outside are just not about being thin, killing yourself exercising, or for that matter, not enjoying food or starving yourself.

Remember, it’s about a Healthy Lifestyle.

© Iowa Avenue

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Tags: Health | healthy lifestyle | iowa avenue | Life | Preventative Measure | sedentary | Staying Active | walking | weight management | Weight Management Community

Now is the biggest transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the already enormously wealthy in History

Goldman says the Cost Of The Crunch Is $2 Trillion.

The firm's economic team put a $2 trillion price tag on the ultimate economic cost of the credit crunch, including $400 billion in losses directly tied to mortgages--well north of recent estimates by economists, including those at the Federal Reserve.

In July, for example, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke put subprime-related losses at $50 billion to $100 billion. "Even at the time, these numbers seemed quite optimistic," wrote Goldman (GS) economist Jan Hatzius, in a note Friday. "Now it is clear to most observers that they are far too low."

Some have called on the Fed to do more to ease the credit crunch and restore the fixed-income markets to normal. But in a speech in New York on Friday, Fed Gov. Randall Kroszner said the central bank probably won't need to reduce interest rates further to help the economy.

The first problem here is blaming the credit crunch for losses. That is a very poor way of looking at things. If $2 trillion is the answer, then what is the question?

The real question is: "How much damage did the Fed and central bankers worldwide do by spawning off the biggest credit boom in history?"

Now that we have the proper question we can see that calling on the Fed to do more to ease the credit crunch cannot be the solution. The Fed caused the credit crunch by slashing interest rates to 1% to bail out its banking buddies in the wake of a dotcom bubble collapse. All the Fed did was create a bigger bubble.

This bubble is so big in fact that it cannot even be bailed out. It's the end of the line for a serially bubble blowing Fed.

Are we done with question and answer? No, not quite even though we now have the right question and possibly the right answer. The next logical question is "Who is paying the price?"

The answer is the poor to middle class. Wall Street made out like bandits and the of executives of Citigroup (C), Merrill Lynch(MER), Bear Stearns(BSC), Countrywide (CFC) made countless $billions.

So not only was this the biggest credit bubble in history, this was also the biggest transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the already enormously wealthy. That is the real travesty of justice regardless of whether or not the price tag is $1 trillion, $2 trillion, or $10 trillion.

And if you factor in rising property taxes, insurance, gasoline prices, etc, while real wages were sinking, even $10 trillion could be conservative by the time all is said and done. Whatever the figure is, Fed and Congress will be hellbent on reckless solutions that will do nothing but make matters worse.

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Tags: anticompetitive | CHEAT | Credit Crunch | deceipt | destruction of middle class in america | fed | fraud | losses | Money & Stuff | Peregrine Financial Group | pfgbest | pfgbestwatch | pfgbestwath | poor | Rich | unfair | wealth transfer

Welcome to America, Home of “The Speculation Economy”

From the Wall Street Journal:

With the financial world still in relative chaos, it’s time to take stock of some basic questions. Here are a couple: Is Wall Street doing more harm than good right now? How did it get to be such an integral part of the economy in the first place?

To answer that, we spent some time with Lawrence E. Mitchell, a George Washington University law professor who authored a new book called “The Speculation Economy: How Finance Triumphed Over Industry” (Berrett-Koehler Publishers Inc.)

Deal Journal: It’s so easy not to even ask how things got to be a certain way. You tracked the roots of the modern corporation. What did you find?

Lawrence Mitchell: Before 1889, for the most part, a company couldn’t buy stock in another company. In 1893, New Jersey came up with a law that allowed companies to buy stock in other companies. The most important part is that New Jersey said boards of directors had the final say on the value of the property. Now they had a way to combine and take over a corporation by printing stock. You could print as much stock as you needed to buy these companies.

In 1896, we came out of a huge depression. There was all this surplus capital around. Financiers and promoters, and later J.P. Morgan, said ‘wow, look at this. We can buy these companies for little or no cash. We can make bundles of money.’ For example, when Morgan put together U.S. Steel in 1901, it was capitalized at $1.4 billion, and Morgan took $62.5 million in stock. In 2007 dollars, that was a $1.4 billion fee, which was then dumped on the market. They were printing huge amounts of stock, compensating sellers with it, and all the stock got dumped on the market.

DJ: Then came the huge explosion in the stock market.

LM: Trading volume in 1897 was 77 million shares on the NYSE, almost all railroads. By 1901, that was 265 million shares. During this time, and depending whose numbers you use, anywhere from $8 billion to $20 billion of capitalization got shoved into the U.S. economy, almost all of it stock.

DJ: So what’s the matter with that? This capital was helping build new businesses and the economy at large.

LM: In most of these offerings they raised some working capital. But most of it was secondary sales. Industrial jobs grew no faster than they did previously. It was speculative.

DJ: And that’s the legacy you describe in your book.

LM: It transformed the entire financing of American business. Prior to this time, businesses were financed with retained earnings, founder savings, maybe some local debt and equity kicked in by friends. Common stock has an unlimited upside. And so the market began to demand that corporations focus not so much on the steady production of goods and services, but on shoving dividends out the door.

Today, 20% of GDP comes from manufacturing and 32% comes from finance. It kind of makes you wonder what finance was financing.

DJ: But part of the success of America has been its ability to innovate with finance.

LM: A tiny, tiny fraction, less than 3%, is for new offerings. The rest is secondary trading. If we’re not financing productivity, what are we financing? You start to see this sort of second-order level of remove from production and industry, of finance taking on its own independent logic, where money is moving from one pocket to another but not landing any place where it’s making any difference.

DJ: So we’re in danger of falling down the rabbit hole of finance?

LM: I’m deeply worried that unless we pay attention to restoring a basic balance to our economy, and redirecting finance to its original goal – which was to finance productivity – then we’re going to find ourselves in the long term in very bad shape.

DJ: How can we fix the problem as you see it?

LM: My favorite is that we revisit long-term capital gains taxation. You could take it industry by industry, one year versus 10 years, creating a sliding scale capital gains tax. For day traders, if they trade within a month, tax 90% of the gains, and over 10 years, extend tax forgiveness.

DJ: Seems like a pretty tough mission to get it changed.

LM: Thorsten Veblen said in 1903 that ‘industry and finance are two different things. The well being of the nation depends on it.’

Industry and Finance are indeed, two very different things, but our esteemed Congress doesn't get it:

Fannie & Freddie Clobbered Over Need to Raise Capital

The proposal by Bernanke and Congress to up the lending limit on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will not solve a thing if both are capital impaired and cannot make new loans. That seems to be the situation as Freddie Mac Loses $2 Billion and Seeks New Capital.

Freddie Mac, the nation's No. 2 buyer and guarantor of home loans, lost $2 billion in the third quarter and said Tuesday it must raise fresh capital to meet regulatory requirements. Its shares fell more than 26 percent.

The mortgage financier said it is "seriously considering" cutting in half its dividend in the fourth quarter and has hired Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. as financial advisers to help it examine possible new ways of raising capital in the near future.

My Comment: After listening to its latest conference call I questioned Fannie Mae's cure rates and capitalization in Fannie Mae's Credit Loss: What's The Real Story?

In the call Fannie repeatedly dodged questions over capital concerns. In response, I wrote "Fannie Mae is way undercapitalized and a systemic threat. Oddly enough this was the opinion of the Fed before they abruptly changed their minds in reaction to the credit crunch."

It did not take long to prove that assertion, and so much for the alleged transparency from this Fed.

Expect a disaster in Fannie Mae's next quarterly statement as well.

Freddie Mac said it set aside $1.2 billion in the turbulent July-September period to account for bad home loans, reflecting "the significant deterioration of mortgage credit."

My Comment: It is now clear that Fannie Mae is way too optimistic about what cure rates will be. This will restrict the ability of both Fannie and Freddie to take back more loans as well as issue new loans.

The $2 billion third-quarter loss for McLean, Va.-based Freddie Mac worked out to $3.29 a share, compared with $1.17 a share in the third quarter of 2006.

Freddie Mac's regulatory core capital was estimated to be just $600 million in excess of the 30 percent mandatory target capital surplus directed by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight.

My Comment: In the next bubble blowing gimmick, expect the amount of regulatory capital required to be lowered. The Fed , Congress, and oversight committees will do damn near anything to keep the bubble alive. However, nothing will work. The system is broke. It's time for a new one.

"We have begun raising prices, tightened our credit standards and enhanced our risk management practices," Piszel said. "We also continue to improve our internal controls."

My Comment: Raising prices huh? We finally have explicit confirmation of what I have been saying for a long time: Mortgage rates are going to disconnect from 10-year treasuries over default concerns. We can now add capital impairment as a reason for further disconnect.

"We were getting thin" in terms of excess capital, and Freddie Mac decided it needed to bolster its capital "to manage through this credit cycle," Piszel said in a telephone interview. That cycle isn't expected to improve until 2009, he said, with home prices projected to register a 5 percent to 6 percent decline nationwide.

My Comment: Notice how 2007 became 2008 became 2009. I expect it will be more like 2012 at the earliest. My reasons were outlined in When Will Housing Bottom? Now we have more reasons to add to the list.

And, Peregrine Financial Group, the serial undercapitalized Investment "Experts", provides more reasons, to realize that finance and industry are not our greatest export, either: 

Notice to public: Settlement hearing in the matter of Peregrine Financial Group (Canada) Inc. TORONTO, Nov. 16 /CNW/ - The Investment Dealers Association of Canada

(IDA) announced today that a hearing will be held before a Hearing Panel

appointed pursuant to By-law 20 for the presentation, review and consideration

of a Settlement Agreement.

The Settlement Agreement is between IDA staff and Peregrine Financial

Group (Canada) Inc., which was at all material times a Member of the IDA, and

relates to matters for which it may be disciplined. The conduct which is the

subject of the hearing occurred during the time period from December 2005 to

March 2006. The charges against Peregrine Financial Group (Canada) Inc.

include that it failed to maintain a risk adjusted capital at a level greater

than zero calculated in accordance with Form 1, contrary to By-law 17.1.

The hearing is scheduled to commence at 10:00 a.m. on Wednesday, November

28, 2007, at Legal Transcript Services, 111 Richmond Street West, Suite 1500,

Toronto, Ontario. The hearing is not open to the public unless and until the

Settlement Agreement has been accepted by the Hearing Panel. Copies of the

decision of the Hearing Panel and the Settlement Agreement will be made

available if and when the Settlement Agreement is accepted by the Hearing

Panel.Oh yeah, they seem to have "been there done that" in Canada previously.Welcome to America, Home of “The Speculation Economy”

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Tags: economy | bubble | CHEAT | FANNIE MAE | fraud | Freddie Mac | housing | lie | Money & Stuff | Peregrine Financial Group | pfgbestwatch | rabbit hole of finance | speculation

Saudi FM Saud al-Faisal warns US dollar could collapse if OPEC considers Alternative Currency

The warning was overheard at an oil producing countries’ session Riyadh over an open microphone in a private meeting in reply to a proposal from Venezuela and Iran to discuss a currency basket for pricing crude. Prince Saud said: “My feeling is that the mere mention that the OPEC countries are studying the issue of the dollar is itself going to have an impact that endangers the interests of the countries.” The microphone was then cut off.

Don't you all love people who don't care about us, give us "warnings?"

Or, since almost 50 million United States citizens have no health insurance, that has become a major issue in this upcoming Presidential election.

Oh, did you hear the one about Russell R. Wasendorf, Sr., CEO and Chairman, of Peregrine Financial Group, telling us that the merger of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade, won't "substantially" lessen competition between U.S. exchanges?

Gee, in business school, the concept of few companies in an industry are either a monopoly or an oligopoly.

Meaning one player, or just a few, gets to price gouge us, and have a lock on the market.

Well,  anti-trust and anti-competitive laws need to be strengthened not weakened. Or haven't the "poo poo" boys in Chicago been reading the latest financial news?

The price of oil is skyrocketing--more money for exchanges, speculators, future commission merchants, and OPEC, and less money for people who have to have to drive to work to survive. 

And he bemoans the big bullies in New York:

To wit:

"Now, in its probe of the CME Group merger, Justice seems to be reacting to the FIA's lobbying, as the FIA decries that by concentrating significant power in Chicago the combination of the world's two largest and most successful futures exchanges might reduce competition or raise the barrier to entry for new competitors.

The FIA does not represent the best interests of the futures industry with this stand nor in general. The association purports to be an advocate for all futures firms, but its board is dominated by the big New York investment banks and the global wire houses. The organization had its roots in New York, where it was founded in 1955, and it has always given short shrift to Chicago, the home of the U.S. futures industry. It has been unwilling to include retail brokerage firms and CTAs in its strategic planning and in setting its agenda.

A powerful merged exchange in Chicago will be an enormous threat to the FIA's supremacy as a lobbying power in Washington and as a player in the industry. The New York investment banks have held sway over government for many years, and the Chicago exchanges have had to fight tooth and nail to keep these banks from stepping on their toes.

The CME-CBOT merger presents enormous benefits for futures customers and in turn the firms with whom they trade. Customers will have access to a wide range of products on one trading platform. This is increasingly necessary as more and more individual traders branch out in adding more products to their portfolios. Even FIA acknowledges the merger could bring cost savings and operational efficiencies to firms and their customers."

Well, most of us, by now. know that the words, "operational efficiencies," "global competition," and "best intestests" by those that are seeking something from us--MONEY--really don't have much of our compassion nor trust.

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Tags: anti-competitive | CHEATING | Collapse of Dollar | Health Insurance | liars | Money & Stuff | OPEC | Peregrine Financial Group | pfgbest | pfgbestwatch | SAUDIS | warnings

No More Surfer Jokes! A Laid-Back Surfer Dude May Be Next Einstein

No more Spicoli "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" fur sure, archetypes about surfers:

From Fox News:

A surfer dude with no fixed address may be this century's Einstein.

A. Garrett Lisi, a physicist who divides his time between surfing in Maui and teaching snowboarding in Lake Tahoe, has come up with what may be the Grand Unified Theory.

That's the "holy grail" of physics that scientists have been searching for ever since Albert Einstein presented his General Theory of Relativity nearly 100 years ago.

Even more remarkable is that Lisi, who has a Ph.D. but no permanent university affiliation, solves the problem without resorting to exotic dimensions, string theory or exceptionally complex mathematics.

A successful Grand Unified Theory would use a series of equations to show how the four fundamental forces of nature — gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces — relate to each other.

Electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force, which controls radioactivity, were linked more than 30 years ago, and some progress has been made with linking them to the strong nuclear force, which binds protons together in the atomic nucleus.

But gravity has always been an outlier. Not only have all attempts to link gravity to the other three forces failed, but physicists still can't agree on what gravity actually is or how it works.

Lisi solves this by using the E8 lattice, an eight-dimensional structure visualized earlier this year in a widely circulated paper.

• Click here to read more about the E8 lattice.

He noticed that several of the equations used to describe the lattice matched those he'd come up with trying to resolve the four fundamental forces.

"The moment this happened my brain exploded with the implications and the beauty of the thing," Lisi tells New Scientist magazine. "I thought: 'Holy crap, that's it!'"

• Click here to read a formal presentation of the theory, if you dare.

By mapping known subatomic particles, plus 20 imaginary ones, onto the 248 points of the E8 lattice, and then rotating the lattice in a computer model, Lisi shows how the particles elegantly combine to form three of the four forces.

The imaginary ones combine to form gravity, for which subatomic particles have only been theorized.

• Click here to watch a video of the lattice being rotated.

"Some incredibly beautiful stuff falls out of Lisi's theory," David Ritz Finkelstein of Georgia Tech tells New Scientist. "I think that this must be more than coincidence and he really is touching on something profound."

But Professor Marcus du Sautoy of Oxford tells Britain's Daily Telegraph that "there seem to be a lot of things still to fill in."

For his part, Lisi self-mockingly calls his finding "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything," and downplays the suggestion that it may be the Grand Unified Theory.

"The theory is very young, and still in development," he tells the Daily Telegraph. "Right now, I'd assign a low (but not tiny) likelihood to this prediction."

He hopes the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, currently being built on the Swiss-French border will find some of his 20 imaginary gravity-related particles.

"This is an all-or-nothing kind of theory — it's either going to be exactly right, or spectacularly wrong," Lisi tells New Scientist. "I'm the first to admit this is a long shot. But it ain't over till the LHC sings."

• Click here for the New Scientist story, and here for the Daily Telegraph version.  

 

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Tags: einstein | Lattice Theory | peregrine financial | pfgbestwatch | PHYSICISTS | surfer | Technology

Log On to E*Trade. Sell E*Trade.

The Wall Street bloodbath gains more momentum; just when you thought it was "safe" to breathe--a metaphor, to be sure--no offense, Mr. Al Gore:

E*Trade Financial shares hit rock bottom at the open, and have since started digging. The stock, which opened down 36% on the Nasdaq Stock Market, is now down 49% and losses are accelerating in the wake of a report from Citigroup analyst Prashant Bhatia which suggested the company could be facing a “run on the bank” as investors, worried about the company’s financial condition, may pull their accounts en masse.

The idea of a free-for-all situation may seem far-fetched given the increased education investors have about investing, but Mr. Bhatia says “in our view, customers may withdraw assets first, and ask questions later.” No kidding — shares were already down 61% on the year coming into today, so this additional selloff doesn’t help the portfolio much.

 

 

They may do so just based on the tidbits contained in the company’s 10-Q report, which Mr. Bhatia (who was unavailable for an interview) quotes at great length. Basically, E*Trade, which has garnered a solid reputation as a discount brokerage, may have become the poster child for getting into a marginal business much later than it should have, and as a result it’s now embroiled in the subprime and collateralized debt mess in a big way.

In its 10-Q the firm notes that almost 90% of the home-equity loans it holds were purchased, rather than originated, and the declining value of those homes means “our ability to recover our investment by foreclosing on underlying properties has diminished.” The firm also said continued deterioration in loans underlying its asset-backed investments “could result in a significant deterioration” of those investments.

Citi estimates that trying to liquidate E*Trade’s “loan and ABS portfolio would result in over $5b of losses.” Several other analysts lowered estimates today, dropping fiscal 2007 earnings-per-share estimates to 72 cents from a consensus of 85 cents a month ago (Citi expects 31 cents in earnings). The stock is the most actively traded with more than 55 million shares changing hands in the first half-hour.

Of course, according to Russel Wasendorf, Sr., more money for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for additional regulation of our Derivatives markets is simply a bad idea. That is, of course, if the investing public has to "pay for it" leaving, of course, the participating firms, or the govenment left to pay for more resources--which, ironically, is why they had the hearing in the first place. The government and New York and Chicago Financial frims are NOT paying more money for more resources for the CFTC for more regulation of the Derivatives Markets.

Silly me! What was I thinking? As an honest investor why in the world would the Foxes contribute to somebody watching the proverbial Henhouse? DUH!

Not that, of course, that money has to come from somewhere.

One has to laugh at the irony:

From today's Wall Street Journal, more blowing of the "Trumpets of Doom:"

Who's Watching the Big Banks? - [Ed.Note] Gee, I thought that the government was! Wow, was I ever wrong.

An excerpt, read the whole thing:

On the global stage, major central banks in Europe have served up a huge new volume of reserves to mitigate stresses in their banking systems. Even the Bank of Japan, which had hinted it would raise money rates, seems to have pitched in by abstaining from rate hikes.

Yet in spite of these efforts on the part of monetary officials in the U.S. and world-wide, market confidence remains shaky. The volume of transactions in the subprime mortgage market is tepid at best. Stock prices of financial institutions have fallen sharply. In most markets, volatility is high. Key commodities prices have risen sharply. The U.S. dollar is under attack.

The problem is that the Federal Reserve and Treasury have failed to come forth with solutions that will limit future financial excesses. They've also failed to keep pace with a series of fundamental structural changes that have transformed markets in recent decades. As a result, in an age when "transparency" is the business watchword, financial markets have become increasingly opaque. This in turn has fostered doubts and fears about the underlying strength of markets and their institutions. Compared with a generation or even a decade ago, financial markets today are much more complex, an order of magnitude larger, and filigreed with new and often arcane credit instruments. Risk taking -- driven by the mystique of quantitative risk modeling -- has become more aggressive. And these structural changes, many of which were initiated in the U.S., are rapidly gaining acceptance in other major financial centers around the globe.

This new, highly securitized financial regime can work well only if securities are priced accurately. Stated differently, weaknesses and failures in securities pricing are wreaking havoc in financial markets. Traders and investors are learning the hard way that not all assets are the same when it comes to pricing. There is a sharp difference between marking-to-market U.S. government securities or large high-quality private-sector issues versus lower quality issues for which pricing is done off a model or matrix.

This brings to mind Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke's response when I asked him at last month's Economic Club dinner in New York what information he would like that is not currently available to him. Pointing immediately to the problem of pricing subprime instruments, Mr. Bernanke said frankly, "I would like to know what those damn things are worth." Then added, "This episode has revealed a weakness in structured credit products."

Giant financial conglomerates contribute to the opaqueness in our financial markets. Their activities span across many sectors -- from consumers to business, from trading to investing, from securities underwriting to lending and proprietary trading, from insurance underwriting to real-estate brokerage, from managing billions of dollars of other people's money to consulting and advising. Their global presence has been growing briskly, with some now garnering more than half their profits from foreign operations. Their size, scope, and embeddedness in financial markets are impossible to decipher from their published balance sheets. Because their reach is so vast and deep, these financial behemoths are deemed too big to fail.

In the wake of these profound structural changes in our financial system, who or what can provide oversight and supervision? Today's regulatory system -- though system is too strong a word -- is largely a historical artifact left over from the era when financial markets and institutions were much more fragmented and insulated from one another. In the U.S., state and federal regulators of various kinds continue to oversee specific activities in the financial markets and institutions. But the destruction of financial silos that once separated brokerage, commercial banking, investment banking, insurance, mutual funds, and other financial businesses has made fragmented state and federal regulation obsolete.

The Federal Reserve System comes closest to performing the role of financial system guardian. Its central mission is to implement policy that will encourage sustained economic growth. But its monetary tactics are asymmetrical. Leading Fed officials periodically acknowledge that the central bank knows what to do when a financial bubble bursts (ease monetary policy), yet it lacks the analytical capacity to identify a credit bubble in the making. How, then, can the Federal Reserve hold inflation in check in order to encourage economic growth while at the same time restraining financial markets within prudent limits?

What is urgently needed is a new kind of institution that I will provisionally call the Federal Financial Oversight Authority. This regulatory body would oversee only the largest U.S.-based financial institutions -- the giant conglomerates engaged in a broad range of on- and off-balance-sheet activities that I noted above. The new authority would monitor and supervise these huge financial conglomerates -- assessing the adequacy of their capital, the soundness of their trading practices, their vulnerability to conflicts of interest, and other measures of their stability and competitiveness.

I am not proposing comprehensive supervision of most or all financial institutions. Oversight of the 10 to 20 largest financial conglomerates would fill the much-needed regulatory void, given the vast reach of those dominant players. The 15 largest institutions in the U.S., for example, have combined assets of $13 trillion. They dominate many key areas of trading, underwriting, and investment management. Many command an overwhelming position in derivatives and in many of the esoteric financial instruments that have grown so rapidly in the past decade."

Guess what, NONE OF THESE THINGS ARE ACTUALLY TAKING PLACE to fix any of these structural, accounting, legal, political, and other problems.

They are all, in the end, continuting more of the attempted "dumbing down" of all of us here in America.

What they are really saying, is "Be happy-Don't Worry" everything is going to be studied, groups will be formed to come up with potential solutions, and those potential solutions will, indeed, be implemented.

WRONG.

Don't feed us this b.s. anymore. We will go broke before we can see another "change," unless of course, that change is for the worse.

 

 

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Tags: Big Banks | BLOODBATH | buy | CITIGROUP | Derivatives | E'Trade | idiots | INVESTMENTS | LOAN | Money & Stuff | Peregrine Financial Group | pfg | pfgbest | pfgbestwatch | regulation | sell | stupidity | subprime lending