大象传媒

Credit Default Swaps [CDS] is a word we are going to have to learn? Why? Because there is 60 trillion dollars worth and the trouble is they could be worth nothing.

CDS market has NO regulation and according to James Tappan of Bondtrac there is probably less than 20 people in the world who understand them. He gives a rare insight on Yorba TV here on the first 2 segments




CDS underpin every deal to build ships, engines, bridges, hospitals, schools indeed any project that needs insurance. AIG had probably 10 trillion worth of CDS but there are no reporting regulations so no one really knows.

What we are staring at is that these cannot now be funded because no one is lending. They cannot be sold because no one is buying because they are impossible to value. An implosion of insurance. Which would be 'challenging'. Nothing can work legally without insurance cover. Effectively that might be the case right now. You might have a piece of paper saying you are insured but is it?

So the mortgage market was just the warm up act.

Tappan also talks about the negative yield in Bonds which last happened in 29.

British seaside piers have unluckily, of late, seemed to have caught fire and become complete wrecks. To use an old expression, Gordon Brown can take a long walk off a short pier!!

Its a curious though but could the man everybody assumed was for the chop in a reshuffle be the Labour hero?

People want shot of Gordon. Whatever his views he can probably see he is damaged goods. There is no obvious candidate to succeed. There is an economic crisis.

Everybody thinks the blame for the crisis such as it is belongs to Gordon not Darling. Darling is well placed in knowledge to handle the crisis... No supporters but probably no enemies. A compromise candidate.

On the realistic side Labour have hit the sea floor in Titanic terms so Darling won't help them but would be able to manage until the next election when the electorate get to reward their poor performance.

If Miliband goes for it he is going to look like a bright schoolboy out of his depth. Nobody seems to like Straw. Milburn is deluded enough to think he is the man for the job - and thats why he isn't. Johnson does not have the gravitas. Harman would not cut it - could perhaps win a swathe of womens votes but then its usually the mum's experiencing the inflation....

Or they leave Gordon to irritate the voters until the next election.

I know i shouldn't but i have been laughing all week. The rug pulled from under some of the biggest financial institutions was always going to happen.
Banks once lent to responsible borrowers only but for years the criteria for lending eventually dropped to the floor; giving loans to anyone with a pulse, as long as you could sign your name on the dotted-line, you could get a mortgage, easy credit for the foolish young consumer or the home owner who re mortgaged to buy a caravan they never really needed. All that debt-money floating around the system may have created more jobs thanks to a credit card laden consumer busily buying the latest non essential gadget or keeping up with the home lifestyle vision of Laurence lewellen Bowen but the debt riddled lifestyle was always going to get us (and the banks) in the end. The banks are going to consolidate their positions and recalibrate how they do business, but one thing is for sure and its been like this for a least a year now, the days of easy money are long gone and the consequences for this financial folly that had no buffer-except with the aid of the tax payer- will be felt for quite some time in the guise of higher unemployment, negative growth, less tax receipts for the Govt, more crime.......ect ect. Maybe i should stop laughing now.

I don't do praise easily but Paul Mason's reports and blogg this week have been excellent. Did i understand most of it is another matter.

WISDOM 鈥� THE ONLY CONTROL THAT WORKS.

I can remember when debt was dishonourable and hand-outs demeaning. Hire purchase (aptly titled the 'never-never') was looked at askance. The only debt that many had was a mortgage, where the value of the house, more than covered the loan.
Slowly, hire purchase gave way to credit which in turn gave us buy now pay later.
Mutual building societies became banks by bribing their clients and all sorts of other deregulation was set in train.

You don't need Shakespeare of Socrates or Gibbon to tell you that THIS IS DECLINE. Nor can you find any of the complex societies (misnamed 'civilisations') of the past, still manifesting on this planet. We too are on our way out.

We would seem to have far more cleverness available to us than they had. We are scientifically, technologically, cosmologically, biologically (what have I missed?) way ahead of them, but we are still going down the pan.

Clearly, we are misapplying our cleverness; free to do so with ever-decreasing restraint. I content that this is because wisdom is absent.

" What shall we do at the end of this extraordinary week?

Apart from that - whatever it is - we have the second Luntz focus group film - today looking at who might take over from Gordon Brown, should he make an exit.

Shaminder "

Well now that 'spivs and speculators' have taken away our money Scotland will return
to Newsnight at 10.30 after the 大象传媒2 opt out up here for the launch of a new Gaelic-language TV channel "大象传媒 Alba "- at 9 pm.

Onward and upward as they say ... or 'Cha do dhuin doras nach do dh'thosgail doras!'
[Chaddaw ghoon dorriss nach daw ghoeskill dorriss) [When one door closes another opens].

I can see two snags: 1) this language is difficult .... 2) Dundee doesn't yet have
digital freeview and apparently Alba is
not even on the 大象传媒 Freeview box yet.

But we live in hope .....and apparently they are starting off with football to build up an
audience .... this sounds clever. In the '80s
the Catalan Government tried to promote
that language using football terminology to get people started in Barcelona!

And I have got MOrag MacNeills excellent 'Everyday Gaelic' which
has an audio CD and also jokes!

e.g.

"De thuirt an t-ochd-chasach ri a leannan?"

..... "Teann a-nall's thoir dhomh do lamh, do lamh, do lamh ........."

[pronounced: 'Jay hoert untochk chassoch ree lennan?' ..... 'tcha-oon una-ools hawr
ghaw daw lahv, daw lahv, daw lahv ......']

(What did the octopus say to his sweetheart? .... ...Come give me
your hand, your hand, your hand,
your hand ..... etc)

Derivative deep sea relationship banking
in Gaelic? Now there's an idea for Alex Salmond .......!

What shall we do?

Surely, we shall debate which is the larger crisis - the financial meltdown or Gordon Brown's future.

Anyone taking bets on it? - I wouldn't bank on it!

Dear newsnight editors
I wonder if you have covered in Newsnight why a lorry could be allowed to cause so much danger and damage in the channel tunnel?

When I go through on the train my luggage is searched. So, why are lorries laden with chemicals like phenol etc, allowed through - indeed why are lorries allowed at all in the tunnel given that it may have been an overheated braking system which caused the fire and this could happen again at any time? I

I am also worried that suicide bombers could easily hide in a tanker or similar lorry/truck- so I should think all lorries should go by sea wouldn't you?

Can you report on the enquiry for us? Below is an extract from The Telegraph that you could comment on, which is worrying as the public travel in the same tunnels by train as these lorry trains. The report does not tell us what punishment was given to those who were convicted of manslaughter in the Mont Blanc tunnel... Can you find out for us?
"
If you have covered these issues please send me the link.. follows copy from Telegraph:
"It was only the tunnel's structure which allowed them (lorry drivers trapped) to be evacuated swiftly."
She (French Interior Minister Michelle Alliot-Marie) pledged to take a hardline stance.
She said that death and serious injury were only averted because the explosion was in a "lorry cut off" from the others, and not a nearby one carrying highly flammable carbolic acid, or phenol.

Interior ministry sources cited the Mont Blanc prosecution, which ended in 13 individuals and companies being found guilty of manslaughter for a huge fire in an Alpine tunnel that killed 39 people in 1999".

barrie (#5) "We would seem to have far more cleverness available to us than they had. We are scientifically, technologically, cosmologically, biologically (what have I missed?) way ahead of them, but we are still going down the pan."

Well, I'd say you missed dysgenic (differential) fertility as the driver of dumbing down rather than elevating intelligence. Morebright females in education and the workplace mean less babies from them and ore from the underclass, a swelling of the under 70 IQs by 60% and shrinkage of the over 130 IQs by the same percentage over 5 generations - all due to liberation, freedom and equality etc.

But as I've said before, I fear there are those who deal amongst us who've done remarkably well out of predatory 'Liberal-Democracy'. The (#5) NYC demographics highlight how a classic zero-sum game of predator and prey has been engineered and sprung through encouraged low-skilled migration with high fertility, and recent events on both sides of the Atlantic should, I suggest, make it painfully obvious to anyone who's prepared to look at the evidence objectively in terms of base rates and salience that equalities and political corrctness is not what it seems at all...But then, how many people are up to looking at any of this objectively these days?

DEAR JADED JEAN

We can't keep meeting like this. The neighbours are talking; mostly about soaps and Big Brother, admittedly . . .

Barrie (#10) "We can't keep meeting like this. The neighbours are talking"

Well, that was always the hope . . . .Do you reckon many will have bothered to put the fragments together, or will politically correct self-censorship have blunted most's will and made it all feel like thoughtcrime or just too 'cerebral' (it's how it works you know...).

- We were basically told "Europe, you鈥檙e on your own鈥� said one senior Lehman executive. Another said: 鈥淭here is a big feeling in London that the New Yorkers have looked after themselves. What鈥檚 worse, the problems in New York were what brought us down.鈥� -

Sunday Times, 21st Sept 2008

The Lord Major's Office tell us that well over 99% of London's population growth in the next three decades is projected to be in BME groups.

KEEPING THE 'BEST' FOR LAST (JJ #11)

Hi JJ. If Paul Mason's most recent offering is anything to go by, even he has given up gravitas on this blog (unless they spiked his Coke - or coked his spike).

So far as I can tell, there is no public service ethos now, in UK broadcasting. News is show biz, science is fun, politics is 'living within the lie' and the 'documentary' is cult of the individual, with most of the footage taken up by a prancing celebrity. Elevated music is presented by a gardener and the other stuff, by a defrocked politician, unless someone with incoherent speech is available, of course. The World Service seems to be Radio 5 on acid, so where now
for the few left with more than two brain cells?

I have posted the proposition on another thread: "That this house is falling down because the true nature of money is not understood." Just saw Gordon with Andrew Marr - too painful to comment . . .

Ah well - back to rocking and weeping. I do it well, it makes me feel better, and harms no one. Who needs money?

PS Would that Hyperbolic Discounting thing help me? Do you give classes and will I need a leotard?

TOPSY-TURVEY

Barrie (#12) Give leotard wide berth ... try instead.

HUNKY-DORY (attractive boat)

JJ - I have looked upon the Ron Fisher and seen that he was good. Thanks.

I note that he refuted the smoking lung-cancer link while propounding mental capacity difference linked to racial types.
The two would seem, to me, equally probable, even without data and analysis.

Very sad that he invoked the 'apple imports and divorce' rate defence.

Clearly, if the ruling classes have fewer kids, the centre cannot hold; a neat predictor of eternal collapse of 'civilisations'.
That we have the understanding of this, a product of cleverness, supports my view that added wisdom (to apply knowledge) could alter the trend.
I suspect wisdom, as a Dawkins meme, is virtually absent as a currency in our 'culture', thus always loses out to nihilism.

Wisdom, it seems, is the trick we 'we don't know that we aren't applying' as Rumsfeld might say, if he weren't so unwise.

Barrie (#14) The alternative (which has long been my theme) is to (bravely) ask whether DYSgenics is being implemented throughout Liberal-Democracies (the evidence suggests it is), and if so, whether this is a) selective and b) whether it's by accident or design - and finally, what, if anything, might be done about it (see Paul Mason blog) under the circumstances.