dont worry be happy

Capitalist crooks

capitalist crooks: books in amazon

W by Stone

W by Oliver Stone

super tax payer

chapatte

commenti

il capitalismo é un idea coniata da marx con connotati negativi. io credo piu nell'economia libera dei mercati. la parola capitalismo serve a descrivere il funzionamento del capitale con modelli che cambiano nel tempo . in questo caso il modello predominante é stato il bonus legato alla performance del dipartimento crediti senza tener conto dei rischi sistemici della banca stessa e l'illusione del della frammentazione del rischio spacciata per verità scientifica. certo , mi auguro che l'economia libera di mercato non finisca perché é nel codice genetico degli USA. mi chiedo se una punizione esemplare di certi dirigenti aiuterebbe a correggere certe pratiche. questo vale per il mondo dell'impresa ma anche per la politica e gli organi di regolamentazione che non hanno visto arrivare quest'enorme tsunami. solo i soliti emarginati come nouriel roubini facevano da spaventa passeri e oggi vengono rivalutati . per tipi come larry summers o greenspan tutto filava liscio come l'olio. i dirigenti delle banche non facvano che eseguire il grande credo della crescita senza barriere. insomma anche il libero mercato o il capitalismo é in grado di creare grandi illusioni che influenzano la maggioranza dei dirigenti.

who is the culpritt

from nytimes
"These experts, from both political parties, say Mr. Bush’s early personnel choices and overarching antipathy toward regulation created a climate, that, if it did not set off the turmoil, almost certainly aggravated it.............William H. Donaldson, a former Wall Street executive with respected Republican credentials who became chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission under Mr. Bush, quit after facing resistance from the White House and Republican members of the agency, who criticized his support for stiffer regulations on mutual funds and hedge funds......To some extent, Mr. Bush was simply following a deregulatory pattern set by his predecessor, President Clinton. Perhaps the most significant recent deregulation of the banking industry — the landmark act that allowed commercial banks to expand into other financial activities, like investment banking and insurance — was signed into law by Mr. Clinton in 1999.....Beyond the administration’s deregulatory bent, some economists argue that its fiscal and tax policies made the United States more dependent on foreign capital, which inflated the bubble in housing prices......The White House and Congress wanted to make housing affordable to more Americans, and freeing up the lending markets was a way to do that. As Mr. Rogoff said: “It was a market-based way to help poor people. There was an incredible belief in free markets.”"

lehman creditors

Richard Fuld : usd 17000 per hour , half a billion from 1993 till today. Where is the money ?

Richard Fuld charity work : robin Hood Foundation!!!!

Fuld serves on the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and is a member of the International Business Council of the World Economic Forum and the Business Council. He also serves on the Board of Trustees of Middlebury College and New York-Presbyterian Hospital, as well as on the board of directors of the Robin Hood Foundation.[3]


lehman authorised to sell to barclays


lehamn history ft
Lehman Brothers Faces Objections to Barclays Sale (Update3)

Lehman Creditors May Be Able to Recover Fuld's Pay, Lawyers Say

iht lehamn creditors

Broken brothers: How brinkmanship was not enough to save Lehman
By Henny Sender, Francesco Guerrera, Peter Thal Larsen and Gary Silverman
Published: September 15 2008 20:22 | Last updated: September 15 2008 21:44


On May 29 2007, with the clock ticking on one of the greatest global property booms in history, Richard Fuld rolled the dice on the US real estate market one more time.

The odds were not good for the chairman and chief executive of Lehman Brothers investment bank. It had been nearly a year since the US Federal Reserve brought an end to the era of cheap money with a series of interest rate increases that took its overnight lending rate from 1 per cent in June 2003 to 5.25 per cent in June 2006. It had been more than three months since HSBC became the first big global bank to reveal multi-billion-dollar losses on subprime mortgage loans. The credit cycle was turning, as it had so many times before during Mr Fuld’s four decades at Lehman, but he still felt lucky.

As a result, Lehman, a bank with a little more than $20bn (€14bn, £11bn) in equity at the time, joined Tishman Speyer, a developer, and Bank of America to spend $15bn for Archstone-Smith Trust, a property investment company that owned a giant portfolio of apartments in “the most desirable” neighbourhoods of large US cities.

Lehman had its reasons for believing that it could still make money in US property. Blackstone, a private equity firm run by former Lehman executives Steve Schwarzman and Pete Peterson, had just stunned Wall Street by sealing a string of profitable deals to sell several upscale office towers acquired as part of its highly leveraged $36bn buyout of Equity Office Properties a few months previously.

The Archstone deal was also consistent with the high-risk, high-reward culture that had taken root at Lehman. With less capital than rivals such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, Lehman was known for punching above its weight and being quicker than others to seize opportunities. Mr Fuld, a former bond trader known to associates as “the gorilla”, was the embodiment of this culture. A man of military mien known for his direct management style, he was determined, having re-established the bank’s independence from American Express, to return it the pinnacle of Wall Street.

He almost got there. In the months preceding Archstone, Lehman was worth $60bn and was seen as one of Wall Street’s best-run banks. Mr Fuld had also showed himself very much aware of the storms gathering over the financial system. At Lehman’s 2006 Christmas party visitors noted his cautious outlook for the year ahead. A month later at last year’s World Economic Forum in Davos he talked openly about being “really worried” about the risks posed by property valuations, excess leverage and the rise in oil and commodity prices. “We’re taking some money off the table,” he said.

But while Mr Fuld may have been aware of danger and prepared to take precautions, within Lehman, as one insider remembers, “the acquisition machine rolled on”.

Below: From Alabama to a doomed second act
With the benefit of hindsight, the Archstone deal was a sign that Lehman was losing its touch. Just as the deal was being done, an era of wheeling-and-dealing fuelled by mountains of cheap debt was coming to an end. Over at Blackstone, Jon Gray, the group’s property chief, was already confessing to associates that the office tower sales the firm had made in April 2007 would have been impossible a month later. Mr Fuld, in other words, had committed the ultimate Wall Street sin – buying at the top of the market.

Archstone was a millstone for Lehman, part of a crippling $30bn-plus in property assets that the bank could not sell and investors could no longer tolerate. The bank’s stock market capitalisation crumbled to the point where it stood at $2bn last Friday. By Monday morning it was seeking protection from its creditors.

Lehman on Monday declined to comment but insiders said the bank was hit by a crisis of such virulence that Mr Fuld and other senior executives could have done little to avoid its consequences. While the Archstone deal came near the peak of the property cycle, they added, it did not in itself play a big part in Lehman’s demise. Mr Fuld’s allies said the chief executive did not disregard risk-management practices, pointing out that top executives met every Monday, often for several hours, to review the bank’s risk practices.

Yet the bet that left Lehman with a massive illiquid property portfolio was hardly out of character for a bank built in the image of its pugnacious 62-year-old chief executive. Mr Fuld was known as a canny operator, leveraging his bank’s prowess in the fixed-income markets and its small pile of capital to take big risks and earn bigger returns than larger rivals. Lehman thought of itself as the smart, scrappy underdog – not just good at spotting chances but also nimble enough to get out in time.

It was a formula that was prone to trouble. In 1998, when Wall Street executives and regulators met at the New York Federal Reserve to rescue the Long-Term Capital Management hedge fund, Lehman was allowed to chip in less money than most of its competitors – an unspoken acknowledgement that it had problems of its own.

However, Mr Fuld brought Lehman back from the abyss in take-no-prisoners fashion, pushing regulators to clamp down on rumour-mongering and firing up his staff. His inspirational abilities were on display after the September 11 attacks forced Lehman to evacuate its headquarters and relocate to a midtown hotel. There, Mr Fuld addressed his staff like a general going into battle.

With the Fed keeping interest rates low to stave off a recession after the terrorist attacks, Lehman grew rapidly, playing an outsized role in the securitisation market and the leveraged lending businesses – and produced quarter after quarter of record earnings from 2005 to 2007. Mr Fuld was feted as a visionary and paid as such, with Lehman awarding him a $186m 10-year stock award bonus in 2006 – prompting criticism that the investment bank’s board of directors had grown too cosy with their chief executive.

But as Lehman grew bigger, signs of internal tensions emerged. In 2004, Mr Fuld picked Joe Gregory, a former commercial paper trader, as president and chief operating officer – effectively his successor. Mr Gregory personified Lehman’s loyal, co-operative culture. But former colleagues say he became obsessed with the administrative processes and recruiting practices, while neglecting risk management.

They also accuse him of ratcheting up the appetite for risk and forcing out executives who disagreed. One of the Lehman bankers who urged caution, former colleagues say, was Mike Gelband, former head of fixed-income, who left in early 2007.

At the time of the Archstone deal and for some months afterwards, Lehman insiders recall few, if any, internal objections. Instead, executives remained so bullish that they congratulated themselves on having picked up Archstone on the cheap. Internal criticism became more common after Mr Gregory helped install Erin Callan as Lehman’s chief financial officer in the summer of 2007. A well-regarded investment banker, Ms Callan was widely touted as a rare example of a woman breaking into Wall Street’s upper ranks. But some Lehman bankers questioned whether putting a dealmaker in charge of the books was the right move to make as the subprime mortgage crisis worsened.



Mr Fuld’s role in these decisions was hard to pin down because colleagues say he was growing more remote. Mr Fuld spent an increasing amount of time in his mansion in Sun Valley, a ski resort in Idaho that he has used for years to entertain clients, or travelling around the world. “When Dick came over it was like a state visit,” says one London-based banker. Some bankers believed, too, that Mr Gregory shielded Mr Fuld from what was going on and discouraged executives from raising criticism or reporting bad news. “Joe was like Dick’s bodyguard,” says one senior banker.

It could be argued that clearer-eyed commentary on Lehman came from hedge fund managers such as David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital, who repeatedly questioned whether the bank’s problems were deeper than many thought. Lehman tried to wave off such criticism but investors drove the bank’s shares lower.

Lehman tried to shore up its defences this year, securing a $2bn credit line from its banks on March 14 – the Friday before the Fed-engineered sale of Bear Stearns to JPMorgan Chase. As part of the rescue, the Fed said it was making its borrowing window available to securities firms in a move widely seen on Wall Street as influenced by Mr Fuld, who sat on the board of the New York Fed. Indeed, some bankers referred to the measure as the Save Lehman Act of 2008. If so, it was to provide only a temporary respite.

Lehman’s access to the discount window seemed to preclude a Bear-style run on the bank. But Mr Einhorn continued to question the value Lehman assigned to its holdings. Analysts were particularly sceptical about Archstone, arguing that it should be marked down by 30 per cent – in line with comparable property investment companies and the relevant indices. In that case $4bn in bridge equity provided by a Lehman-led bank group – intended to be eventually replaced by funds from other sources – would be at risk.

In June, Lehman stunned the market with a $2.8bn loss. The bank demonstrated its connections in the financial world, however, by also raising $6bn in new capital. Hank Greenberg, the former AIG chief executive, invested through his CV Starr vehicle, along with the state of New Jersey pension fund; Wes Edens, a former Lehman executive and the founder of Fortress Investment Group; and GLG, a hedge fund 20 per cent owned by Lehman.

But for its critics, Lehman’s earnings report contained further reasons to worry. Despite the loss, it was marking its Archstone holdings at 85 cents on the dollar – far higher than bearish critics thought appropriate.

What the hedge funds did not know was that Lehman’s search for new capital was going international. Before raising $6bn from domestic sources, Lehman had sought an investment from Korea Development Bank, a South Korean state-controlled lender.

Two days after the earnings announcement, Mr Gregory and Ms Callan were ousted, and Bart McDade, previously head of Lehman’s equities business, was installed as president. The reshuffle sparked more turmoil inside the bank. Executives who had left, such as Mr Gelband and Alex Kirk, a former fixed-income banker, returned to senior positions. In London, Jeremy Isaacs, a long-serving executive who had overseen Lehman’s expansion in Europe and Asia, signalled that he wanted to leave.

In public, Mr Fuld embarked on a crusade to stop what he regarded as a concerted campaign to sink Lehman by a small group of short-sellers. He called on the Securities and Exchange Commission to take action, drawing up a voluminous dossier of “evidence”. The SEC eventually tightened rules outlawing abusive short-selling for Lehman and several other financial groups. But Mr Fuld went further, phoning some Wall Street counterparts to say that he had heard their traders were spreading false rumours about his bank.

But such behind-the-scenes actions only served to confirm the anxieties of Mr Fuld’s critics. In late June and early July, he began discussing the possibility of a management buyout and initiated talks with half a dozen private equity firms, with the idea that each would put up about $2bn. Those talks also went nowhere. By August, analysts were anticipating red ink, with JPMorgan predicting a possible $4bn loss. The share price drop accelerated.

Within the bank, the atmosphere became siege-like. “It was like Fort Apache, The Bronx,” said one senior insider, with reference to a hard-nosed film centred on a beleaguered New York police station.

During the first week of August, Lehman hosted top executives of Korea Development Bank and China’s Citic Securities at its New York headquarters for talks on the purchase of a major stake in the bank. Mr Fuld greeted his guests with a show of strength, people familiar with the talks said. Even when he was not in the room, he directed the negotiations, according to one adviser to KDB, and gave out virtually no information about Lehman’s holdings. “The Koreans were very receptive,” says this person. “But then he [Mr Fuld] tried to change the terms. The deal went away.” Lehman has declined to comment on Mr Fuld’s role in the talks.

Lehman’s insiders argue that KDB never tabled a formal offer and that the prolonged discussions prevented them from seeking other suitors. In their view, Lehman’s downfall was so fast that Mr Fuld had little time to look for alternatives.

Lehman did begin talks with potential buyers for all or part of its property book, including Blackstone and Colony Capital, another savvy player in the market. Last week the bank said that it planned to sell its $4bn UK portfolio to private equity group BlackRock – while providing 75 per cent of the financing – but found no takers for other holdings.

It also initiated talks with several parties about its asset management business – its crown jewel, including Neuberger Berman . Carlyle, a private equity firm, was willing to buy the whole thing for about $7bn and give Lehman the right to buy it back, But Lehman held out for a better deal and spurned Carlyle’s offer, according to people familiar with the matter.

Last week, Mr Fuld tried a different tack, saying Lehman would try to sell a 55 per cent stake in the asset management arm and spin off $30bn of commercial property assets into a separate “bad bank” structure that would enable the rest of Lehman to survive. However, his efforts quickly came to be viewed as a last-ditch attempt to sell the entire bank.

When Lehman’s end did come, it was swift. As Hank Paulson, US Treasury secretary, and Tim Geithner, the president of the New York Fed, summoned the heads of some of the world’s largest banks to crisis talks on Friday, it did not take long for them to realise that Lehman was doomed.

Wall Street titans including Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley’s John Mack and Merrill Lynch’s John Thain, huddled for hours in an attempt to devise a plan to buy $33bn of commercial assets from Lehman. The deal, reminiscent of the LTCM bail-out in 1998, was aimed at facilitating a sale of Lehman to Bank of America or Barclays of the UK.

But there was a snag: neither suitor was prepared to even table a bid for Lehman without a government guarantee that would have allowed the bank to continue trading until a takeover was completed. When Mr Paulson indicated that there would be no repeat of the intervention that helped JPMorgan Chase’s acquisition of Bear Stearns and enabled the government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the giant mortgage financiers, Lehman’s game was up. Bank of America quickly announced it had entered merger discussions with Merrill Lynch, while Barclays withdrew from the race.

All that Lehman’s executives could do was embark on the grim ritual of a bankruptcy filing. It is impossible to say whether the bank could have escaped with its independence intact. Critics point to a string of poor decisions as a sign that Mr Fuld and his team were late to recognise the risks of the credit bubble and slow to respond when the crisis hit. Others argue that the bank’s relatively small capital base and wholesale funding model meant it was almost impossible to avoid a loss of confidence when the turmoil struck.

Strangely enough, it was presaged seven years ago by Mr Fuld himself. When asked, in an interview with the Financial Times, if Lehman’s then $7.2bn in equity was sufficient for an investment bank, he responded with a story about playing blackjack in Las Vegas three decades before.

A young Lehman bond trader at the time, Mr Fuld said he was playing for a few dollars a hand when he was joined by a high-roller. The man’s luck was terrible but every time he lost, he doubled his bet, impressing the younger Mr Fuld. “That’s the answer,” he thought. “Get enough capital and double up.” But as dawn neared and the high-roller’s losses mounted to several million dollars, Mr Fuld said he felt sick to his stomach as he realised the cost of taking a high-risk approach.

It does not matter how rich you are, Mr Fuld said. “You don’t have enough capital.” It is a lesson he has since had to relearn.

FROM ALABAMA TO A DOOMED SECOND ACT

For a generation of Wall Street executives, it was hard to follow accounts of Lehman Brothers’ eleventh-hour negotiations to sell itself without recalling the events that unfolded at the bank more than two decades ago. “I’m watching this with sad fascination,” a former Lehman partner said last week. “It’s like déjà vu, but for different reasons.”

Lehman lost its independence in 1984 following a bitter power struggle between its top two executives, Pete Peterson and Lewis Glucksman. While the feud, chronicled in Ken Auletta’s bestseller, Greed and Glory on Wall Street: The Fall of the House of Lehman, helped destroy the old Lehman, the careers of many of its stars, from Stephen Schwarzman and Edward Altman to Peter Solomon and Steven Rattner, continued to flourish.

Mr Glucksman, who died in 2006, appeared to win with the departure of his rival in 1983, only to be forced to sell his prize a year later to American Express, which merged the business with its own brokerage, Shearson. Mr Peterson went on to found Blackstone Group, the private-equity firm, together with Mr Schwarzman. Though Mr Glucksman left Lehman following its sale, one of his proteges, Richard Fuld, would become the man most responsible for reinvigorating the bank after its eventual spin-off from American Express in 1994.



Founded in Montgomery, Alabama in 1850 by German-Jewish immigrants, Lehman Brothers started life as a general store (pictured left), branching out to trade in cotton. The US civil war disrupted the southern economy, prompting Emanuel and Mayer Lehman to move north to New York and venture beyond cotton to other commodities and, eventually, securities.

By the early 1900s Lehman was helping corporate American stalwarts Sears, Roebuck and F.W. Woolworth raise capital. Herbert Lehman, scion of the founding family, succeeded Franklin Delano Roosevelt as governor of New York in 1933.

When the US government forced financial institutions to choose between commercial banking and securities in the 1930s, Lehman opted for the latter.

The bank rose to become one of Wall Street’s most powerful institutions. Though it always possessed a stable of talented bankers and traders, the bank’s emphasis on individual initiative seemed to invite dissent among senior executives, Mr Auletta wrote. Indeed, Mr Peterson rose to power following a boardroom battle that led to the removal in 1973 of his predecessor, Fred Ehrman.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

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the lessons from great depresion in the subprime

http://iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=16288248
International Herald Tribune
News Analysis: A lesson rooted in the Great Depression
By Carter Dougherty
Thursday, September 18, 2008

FRANKFURT: Will future historians write about the Great Depression of the 2000s as they did about the one in the 1930s? The world's central bankers sought to answer "no" Thursday - resoundingly, though not definitively.

With a huge infusion of cash, the U.S. Federal Reserve, joined by its fellow central banks around the globe, unleashed their most forceful volley of financial firepower yet. The goal was to persuade a convulsing banking system that there will be no shortage of money to meet essential obligations, now or in the future.

The $180 billion in additional funds they committed Wednesday was only the start.

That is in sharp contrast to what happened in the 1930s when the Fed stood idly by as waves of defaults drained money from the banking system, starved the American economy of credit and eventually dragged Europe down as well.

This time around, central bankers are purposefully searching for strategies to avoid that chain of events. And unlike the approach in the 1930s, it is a global effort, driven by a close-knit community of central bankers who are aware that the mistakes of the Depression era erased their credibility for years afterward.

"The need to avoid that next depression plays a big role in U.S. policy making," said Paul de Grauwe, a professor of international economics at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. "But it is also present in Europe because we have experiences with bank crises in a number of countries. It may not be as intense, but it is not absent."

The chairman of the Fed in the 1920s, Benjamin Strong, foresaw the potential for a banking crisis that would interrupt lending and he was one of the few Americans to understand that financial ties between the United States and Europe made the problem a global one.

The solution, in his words, was for central banks to "flood the street with money."

Strong died in 1928, too early to experience the monetary dystopia that followed when the Fed reined in lending in response to the stock market crash of 1929. The other half of Strong's scenario came true in 1931, when a run on the Austrian bank Creditanstalt grew into a European banking crisis that U.S. banks then amplified by calling in loans to Germany and other countries.

The banking system today is deleveraging, the inelegant term for what happened with catastrophic effects in the 1930s. Banks have to shed losses linked to the lifeless U.S. housing market and recapitalize, either by attracting new investors or by selling themselves to stronger institutions, so they can resume lending.

This process sometimes turns out badly: Lehman Brothers is a recent addition to the list, and Washington Mutual, the largest savings and loan in the United States and once among the most successful financial institutions in the country, is talking about selling itself to a stronger bank. That is why even healthy banks hoard cash in a crisis.

Events took an ominous turn Wednesday when it became clear that even money market funds, repositories for savings of as much as $3.5 trillion, were scaling back their lending to be sure they could meet any demands from customers for their money.

That approached the 21st century equivalent of stuffing cash under mattresses for safekeeping - exactly what President Franklin D. Roosevelt urged Americans not to do during the Depression. The credit ecosystem functions today by channeling savings from individuals and into securities issued by, among others, precisely the same banks whose future seems so dark.

Every barometer that measures the willingness to lend went haywire by midweek, notably Libor, a benchmark borrowing cost that influences lending around the world. Returns on ultrasafe U.S. Treasury notes plunged as money sought a haven, an experience that left even seasoned professionals grasping to comprehend the magnitude of distrust.

"There is a complete lack of confidence," said Jim O'Neill, chief economist at Goldman Sachs in London. "It's the most extreme since the credit crisis began."

The cash infusion announced Thursday will function via an exchange of various currencies for as much as $180 billion from the Fed, with most of the share taken by the European Central Bank. That money will then course through the banking system, allowing commercial banks to borrow more easily from each other and their central banks.

Most crucially, and unlike what happened in previous coordinated cash injections, the Fed, the ECB and other central banks explicitly promised to continue the infusions as long as money markets were in turmoil.

After the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the Fed lowered its benchmark rate to 1 percent and promised in advance to keep it there indefinitely to create a security blanket of continuous credit. The strategist behind that step - Alan Greenspan, then the Fed chairman - is now widely blamed for keeping money too cheap for too long, inflating the real estate bubbles whose bursting is now wreaking so much havoc in the United States and elsewhere.

The current corps of central bankers wants to avoid a similar permanent expansion of the money supply, while keeping cash flowing through banks and into the rest of the economy.

The move Thursday creates a globally administered line of rolling credit whose terms can be slowly tightened, via higher interest rates and lower lending volumes, as banks recapitalize themselves and confidence returns among lenders and borrowers. That prospect preserves a stick for central bankers to use on banks that do not heal themselves.

"They are playing a very delicate game of chicken," O'Neill said. "And they are doing a pretty good job, under very difficult circumstances."

Will it work?

One lesson of the past year has been that the crisis of tomorrow stems from risks that were unseen today. That is one reason why O'Neill and other analysts expect further unorthodox moves from central banks and other officials who know what they want to do - keep credit flowing - but have proved flexible about how to do it.

But their success rests with the banks themselves.

Raising money to rebuild a capital cushion requires issuing new stock, merging or selling big stakes, moves that are rarely popular with existing shareholders even in the best of times. And chief executives often lose their jobs taking such painful steps.

Yet they are necessary before financiers can return to their normal job of lending money to grease the wheels of commerce.

"They are not acting like banks these days," said Charles Wyplosz, director of the International Center of Money and Banking Studies at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva. "They are acting like besieged fortresses."
Correction:
Notes:
International Herald Tribune Copyright © 2008 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com

funny video/ car racing / woman convulsion

video

Fuld Lehamn Kamikaze Harakiri Samurai kills himself and everybody around . A sincere thanks .

check this description
Dick Fuld’s “I’ll Fucking Kill You, Like Actually Put A Shotgun In Your Mouth And Pull The Trigger ‘Til It Goes Click” Style Of Management Has Kept Lehman Brothers Safe From Things Like $8.4 Billion Writedowns, So Far. But Is He Going Soft?

dickfuld.jpgJust how has referring to competitors as enemies whose “throats” must be “ripped out,” telling employees to act as though they are “at war,” and, on at least one occasion, making a visit to the trading floor to put his second-best earner’s tie through a shredder, in front of everyone, to make the point that “second best isn’t good enough” helped Dick Fuld to avoid the gigantic writedowns that have plagued Merrill, Citigroup and UBS, the hedge fund failures that have made a joke of Bear Stearns, and the accounting scandal that was Goldman third quarter earnings? How about because all of that is enough to scare the shit out of anyone, especially the people within arm’s length of the guy, into not fucking things up? Nobody wants to be the guy to tell “Gorilla” that things didn’t go so well this quarter, and while everyone else was having a pissing contest to see who could do the worst, Lehman’s minions were being intimidated into not having as horrible a Q3 as their “enemies,” if not necessarily an amazing one (earnings fell 3 percent, to $887 million, and there was a $700 million write-off). Even Mike Mayo, who’s intimidated by no one, gave the credit to Fuld, saying that the outcome was “helped by having one of the most consistent cultures on the Street—one C.E.O. for over a decade, a one-firm mentality and comprehensive risk management,” probably out of fear. Former colleague Stephen Schwarzman, who seems like the kind of guy who would be too petty to give someone else credit for anything, went out of his comfort zone to call Fuld “a survivor” and opine that “he’s got a sixth sense of when things are turning on you,” though, admittedly, Schwarzman’s praise-inducing intimidation could stem more from the height differential than anything else.

But a New York Times profile suggests that Fuld is losing his taste for human flesh, which could mean disaster for LEH. Examine the facts:

- When asked how he felt about “the war comment” from last year, Fuld shifted in his chair and said, “I don’t like the war comment…‘war’ connotes that we are trying to kill our enemies. That’s not the view that I want them to have.”

- After feigning offense at the accusation that he’s “mellowed,” Fuld “paused to collect his thoughts.”

- Then he said: “I think I have many of the same reactions; I just handle them differently…I’VE LEARNED, IN ALL FAIRNESS THERE IS ANOTHER VIEW.”

And the most egregious ?
- Lehman’s president, Joseph M. Gregory, says that Fuld “has improved” his attitude and “made it more comfortable for people to speak.”

This is a phenomenon the must be cut off at the knees (which the old Fuld would’ve already done, without compunction). It’s only a hop, skip and a jump from people not soiling themselves in your presence to Merrill Lynch.

The Survivor [NYT]

turning to japanese accounting

japanese accounting or how to preserve value

traffic à paris

traffic

le probleme c'est le non respect des regles soit par les motards/automobilistes que par les pietons. il y a une telle ignorance à Paris . Ca arrive souvent de voir des pietons croiser au feu rouge et devoir freiner d'emergence ou vice versa , essayer de traverser des passages protégés san feu en tant que pietons et risquer de se faire renverser par des voitures mais surtout des motards qui aiment montrer leur agilité acrobatique. le jardin du voisin est tjrs plus beau mais s'agit il seulement d'un mirage que dans des pays comme l'allemagne , la suisse ou le royaume uni il y a un respect plus repandu des règles du traffic ? que dire alors des camions é Paris , parqués à n'importe quelle heure du jour n'importe où. on a l'impression que dans cette anarchie il y a un fort dégré de tollerance par tous , usagers et autorités, un individualisme tout latin ou tiers mondiste comme j'ai vu jadis dans les rues de Saigon ou d'autres grandes métropoles. Que disent les statistiques des accidents à Paris ?

novaya gazeta in english

novaya gazeta in russian by number
http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2008/64

novaya gazeta in english
http://en.novayagazeta.ru/data/2008/64

http://en.novayagazeta.ru/data/2008/63

amico di tettamanti, attivo in CH

adriano agosti

agosti 2

more personalities amid the battered russian medias and journalists

lukyanov magazine
lukyanov newspaper

pavloski gleb olegovich

compromat pavloski

khodorkovsky

khodorkovsky

Володи Милова, ANOTHER journalist

OIL THREAT RUSSIA

SVOBODA NEWS

journalist Natalia Morar

wiki


robert amsterdam

pasko interview

seanrussiablog

reporters ohne grenzen

eurasian security

why germany and France are responsible for the destruction of Georgia

Второй шаг сделал Запад в апреле, когда на саммите в Бухаресте Германия и Франция под давлением России отложили вступление Грузии в НАТО. Кремль понял, что у него развязаны руки.


the second step was this april when France and Germany influenced by Russia refused the Nato membership of Georgia

russian editorialists with cojones

pavel felgenauer novaya gazeta

julia latina echo of moscow

julia latina novaya gazeta

Obama Speech Denver

georgia think tank

royal united service

Post Russian Annexatation _interesting content and style

repubblica

Negli ultimi anni a Washington ci si è infatti pochissimo occupati di Russia, molto più di Cina, India o radicalismo islamico. Nell'illusione di aver messo l'orso in gabbia, dopo avergli tagliato le unghie. Ma un impero di quelle dimensioni e con quella storia o viene totalmente distrutto o è destinato a rinascere, entro limiti e condizioni nuove.

a bitter end in betancourt liberation, the other side of the coin

german
spanish

buffet, virtue ,liabilities and subprime

More bank failures are possible this year, Buffett said, and he suggested penalties should be meted out to people who spread rumors about the solvency of investment banks. Speculation about cash shortages contributed to a run on Bear Stearns Cos. and its forced sale to JPMorgan Chase & Co. earlier this year.

``If your virtue is questioned, you've got a problem,'' he said. In the normal course of business, ``there is no investment bank that can pay all its liabilities tomorrow.''

two different views on georgia war

Putin does not hide he likes women, heer a demostration of his youth movement supporting the war in georgia

georgia news

end of post soviet era, moscowtimes

http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2008/60/02.html
http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2008/60/00.html
http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2008/60/02.html
http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2008/60/06.html
http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2008/60/03.html
http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2008/60/05.html

Georgia and the media

Paper Reprimanded Over Georgia
19 August 2008

jULIA lATINA IN ECHO Moscow. the best news to be found in the russian media, journalists writing smartly and wittily defying death penalty from their own rulers . wished we had the same journalists in Europe

tolstoj today.

nouriel rubin

finally he hits the fame by forecasting doom scenarios . it s a question of method, time and patience untill you are right. afterwards cash in the fame.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/magazine/17pessimist-t.html?ref=magazine

August 17, 2008
Dr. Doom
By STEPHEN MIHM

On Sept. 7, 2006, Nouriel Roubini, an economics professor at New York University, stood before an audience of economists at the International Monetary Fund and announced that a crisis was brewing. In the coming months and years, he warned, the United States was likely to face a once-in-a-lifetime housing bust, an oil shock, sharply declining consumer confidence and, ultimately, a deep recession. He laid out a bleak sequence of events: homeowners defaulting on mortgages, trillions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities unraveling worldwide and the global financial system shuddering to a halt. These developments, he went on, could cripple or destroy hedge funds, investment banks and other major financial institutions like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The audience seemed skeptical, even dismissive. As Roubini stepped down from the lectern after his talk, the moderator of the event quipped, “I think perhaps we will need a stiff drink after that.” People laughed — and not without reason. At the time, unemployment and inflation remained low, and the economy, while weak, was still growing, despite rising oil prices and a softening housing market. And then there was the espouser of doom himself: Roubini was known to be a perpetual pessimist, what economists call a “permabear.” When the economist Anirvan Banerji delivered his response to Roubini’s talk, he noted that Roubini’s predictions did not make use of mathematical models and dismissed his hunches as those of a career naysayer.

But Roubini was soon vindicated. In the year that followed, subprime lenders began entering bankruptcy, hedge funds began going under and the stock market plunged. There was declining employment, a deteriorating dollar, ever-increasing evidence of a huge housing bust and a growing air of panic in financial markets as the credit crisis deepened. By late summer, the Federal Reserve was rushing to the rescue, making the first of many unorthodox interventions in the economy, including cutting the lending rate by 50 basis points and buying up tens of billions of dollars in mortgage-backed securities. When Roubini returned to the I.M.F. last September, he delivered a second talk, predicting a growing crisis of solvency that would infect every sector of the financial system. This time, no one laughed. “He sounded like a madman in 2006,” recalls the I.M.F. economist Prakash Loungani, who invited Roubini on both occasions. “He was a prophet when he returned in 2007.”

Over the past year, whenever optimists have declared the worst of the economic crisis behind us, Roubini has countered with steadfast pessimism. In February, when the conventional wisdom held that the venerable investment firms of Wall Street would weather the crisis, Roubini warned that one or more of them would go “belly up” — and six weeks later, Bear Stearns collapsed. Following the Fed’s further extraordinary actions in the spring — including making lines of credit available to selected investment banks and brokerage houses — many economists made note of the ensuing economic rally and proclaimed the credit crisis over and a recession averted. Roubini, who dismissed the rally as nothing more than a “delusional complacency” encouraged by a “bunch of self-serving spinmasters,” stuck to his script of “nightmare” events: waves of corporate bankrupticies, collapses in markets like commercial real estate and municipal bonds and, most alarming, the possible bankruptcy of a large regional or national bank that would trigger a panic by depositors. Not all of these developments have come to pass (and perhaps never will), but the demise last month of the California bank IndyMac — one of the largest such failures in U.S. history — drew only more attention to Roubini’s seeming prescience.

As a result, Roubini, a respected but formerly obscure academic, has become a major figure in the public debate about the economy: the seer who saw it coming. He has been summoned to speak before Congress, the Council on Foreign Relations and the World Economic Forum at Davos. He is now a sought-after adviser, spending much of his time shuttling between meetings with central bank governors and finance ministers in Europe and Asia. Though he continues to issue colorful doomsday prophecies of a decidedly nonmainstream sort — especially on his popular and polemical blog, where he offers visions of “equity market slaughter” and the “Coming Systemic Bust of the U.S. Banking System” — the mainstream economic establishment appears to be moving closer, however fitfully, to his way of seeing things. “I have in the last few months become more pessimistic than the consensus,” the former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers told me earlier this year. “Certainly, Nouriel’s writings have been a contributor to that.”

On a cold and dreary day last winter, I met Roubini over lunch in the TriBeCa neighborhood of New York City. “I’m not a pessimist by nature,” he insisted. “I’m not someone who sees things in a bleak way.” Just looking at him, I found the assertion hard to credit. With a dour manner and an aura of gloom about him, Roubini gives the impression of being permanently pained, as if the burden of what he knows is almost too much for him to bear. He rarely smiles, and when he does, his face, topped by an unruly mop of brown hair, contorts into something more closely resembling a grimace.

When I pressed him on his claim that he wasn’t pessimistic, he paused for a moment and then relented a little. “I have more concerns about potential risks and vulnerabilities than most people,” he said, with glum understatement. But these concerns, he argued, make him more of a realist than a pessimist and put him in the role of the cleareyed outsider — unsettling complacency and puncturing pieties.

Roubini, who is 50, has been an outsider his entire life. He was born in Istanbul, the child of Iranian Jews, and his family moved to Tehran when he was 2, then to Tel Aviv and finally to Italy, where he grew up and attended college. He moved to the United States to pursue his doctorate in international economics at Harvard. Along the way he became fluent in Farsi, Hebrew, Italian and English. His accent, an inimitable polyglot growl, radiates a weariness that comes with being what he calls a “global nomad.”

As a graduate student at Harvard, Roubini was an unusual talent, according to his adviser, the Columbia economist Jeffrey Sachs. He was as comfortable in the world of arcane mathematics as he was studying political and economic institutions. “It’s a mix of skills that rarely comes packaged in one person,” Sachs told me. After completing his Ph.D. in 1988, Roubini joined the economics department at Yale, where he first met and began sharing ideas with Robert Shiller, the economist now known for his prescient warnings about the 1990s tech bubble.

The ’90s were an eventful time for an international economist like Roubini. Throughout the decade, one emerging economy after another was beset by crisis, beginning with Mexico’s in 1994. Panics swept Asia, including Thailand, Indonesia and Korea, in 1997 and 1998. The economies of Brazil and Russia imploded in 1998. Argentina’s followed in 2000. Roubini began studying these countries and soon identified what he saw as their common weaknesses. On the eve of the crises that befell them, he noticed, most had huge current-account deficits (meaning, basically, that they spent far more than they made), and they typically financed these deficits by borrowing from abroad in ways that exposed them to the national equivalent of bank runs. Most of these countries also had poorly regulated banking systems plagued by excessive borrowing and reckless lending. Corporate governance was often weak, with cronyism in abundance.

Roubini’s work was distinguished not only by his conclusions but also by his approach. By making extensive use of transnational comparisons and historical analogies, he was employing a subjective, nontechnical framework, the sort embraced by popular economists like the Times Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz in order to reach a nonacademic audience. Roubini takes pains to note that he remains a rigorous scholarly economist — “When I weigh evidence,” he told me, “I’m drawing on 20 years of accumulated experience using models” — but his approach is not the contemporary scholarly ideal in which an economist builds a model in order to constrain his subjective impressions and abide by a discrete set of data. As Shiller told me, “Nouriel has a different way of seeing things than most economists: he gets into everything.”

Roubini likens his style to that of a policy maker like Alan Greenspan, the former Fed chairman who was said (perhaps apocryphally) to pore over vast quantities of technical economic data while sitting in the bathtub, looking to sniff out where the economy was headed. Roubini also cites, as a more ideologically congenial example, the sweeping, cosmopolitan approach of the legendary economist John Maynard Keynes, whom Roubini, with only slight exaggeration, calls “the most brilliant economist who never wrote down an equation.” The book that Roubini ultimately wrote (with the economist Brad Setser) on the emerging market crises, “Bailouts or Bail-Ins?” contains not a single equation in its 400-plus pages.

After analyzing the markets that collapsed in the ’90s, Roubini set out to determine which country’s economy would be the next to succumb to the same pressures. His surprising answer: the United States’. “The United States,” Roubini remembers thinking, “looked like the biggest emerging market of all.” Of course, the United States wasn’t an emerging market; it was (and still is) the largest economy in the world. But Roubini was unnerved by what he saw in the U.S. economy, in particular its 2004 current-account deficit of $600 billion. He began writing extensively about the dangers of that deficit and then branched out, researching the various effects of the credit boom — including the biggest housing bubble in the nation’s history — that began after the Federal Reserve cut rates to close to zero in 2003. Roubini became convinced that the housing bubble was going to pop.

By late 2004 he had started to write about a “nightmare hard landing scenario for the United States.” He predicted that foreign investors would stop financing the fiscal and current-account deficit and abandon the dollar, wreaking havoc on the economy. He said that these problems, which he called the “twin financial train wrecks,” might manifest themselves in 2005 or, at the latest, 2006. “You have been warned here first,” he wrote ominously on his blog. But by the end of 2006, the train wrecks hadn’t occurred.

Recessions are signal events in any modern economy. And yet remarkably, the profession of economics is quite bad at predicting them. A recent study looked at “consensus forecasts” (the predictions of large groups of economists) that were made in advance of 60 different national recessions that hit around the world in the ’90s: in 97 percent of the cases, the study found, the economists failed to predict the coming contraction a year in advance. On those rare occasions when economists did successfully predict recessions, they significantly underestimated the severity of the downturns. Worse, many of the economists failed to anticipate recessions that occurred as soon as two months later.

The dismal science, it seems, is an optimistic profession. Many economists, Roubini among them, argue that some of the optimism is built into the very machinery, the mathematics, of modern economic theory. Econometric models typically rely on the assumption that the near future is likely to be similar to the recent past, and thus it is rare that the models anticipate breaks in the economy. And if the models can’t foresee a relatively minor break like a recession, they have even more trouble modeling and predicting a major rupture like a full-blown financial crisis. Only a handful of 20th-century economists have even bothered to study financial panics. (The most notable example is probably the late economist Hyman Minksy, of whom Roubini is an avid reader.) “These are things most economists barely understand,” Roubini told me. “We’re in uncharted territory where standard economic theory isn’t helpful.”

True though this may be, Roubini’s critics do not agree that his approach is any more accurate. Anirvan Banerji, the economist who challenged Roubini’s first I.M.F. talk, points out that Roubini has been peddling pessimism for years; Banerji contends that Roubini’s apparent foresight is nothing more than an unhappy coincidence of events. “Even a stopped clock is right twice a day,” he told me. “The justification for his bearish call has evolved over the years,” Banerji went on, ticking off the different reasons that Roubini has used to justify his predictions of recessions and crises: rising trade deficits, exploding current-account deficits, Hurricane Katrina, soaring oil prices. All of Roubini’s predictions, Banerji observed, have been based on analogies with past experience. “This forecasting by analogy is a tempting thing to do,” he said. “But you have to pick the right analogy. The danger of this more subjective approach is that instead of letting the objective facts shape your views, you will choose the facts that confirm your existing views.”

Kenneth Rogoff, an economist at Harvard who has known Roubini for decades, told me that he sees great value in Roubini’s willingness to entertain possible situations that are far outside the consensus view of most economists. “If you’re sitting around at the European Central Bank,” he said, “and you’re asking what’s the worst thing that could happen, the first thing people will say is, ‘Let’s see what Nouriel says.’ ” But Rogoff cautioned against equating that skill with forecasting. Roubini, in other words, might be the kind of economist you want to consult about the possibility of the collapse of the municipal-bond market, but he is not necessarily the kind you ask to predict, say, the rise in global demand for paper clips.

His defenders contend that Roubini is not unduly pessimistic. Jeffrey Sachs, his former adviser, told me that “if the underlying conditions call for optimism, Nouriel would be optimistic.” And to be sure, Roubini is capable of being optimistic — or at least of steering clear of absolute worst-case prognostications. He agrees, for example, with the conventional economic wisdom that oil will drop below $100 a barrel in the coming months as global demand weakens. “I’m not comfortable saying that we’re going to end up in the Great Depression,” he told me. “I’m a reasonable person.”

What economic developments does Roubini see on the horizon? And what does he think we should do about them? The first step, he told me in a recent conversation, is to acknowledge the extent of the problem. “We are in a recession, and denying it is nonsense,” he said. When Jim Nussle, the White House budget director, announced last month that the nation had “avoided a recession,” Roubini was incredulous. For months, he has been predicting that the United States will suffer through an 18-month recession that will eventually rank as the “worst since the Great Depression.” Though he is confident that the economy will enter a technical recovery toward the end of next year, he says that job losses, corporate bankruptcies and other drags on growth will continue to take a toll for years.

Roubini has counseled various policy makers, including Federal Reserve governors and senior Treasury Department officials, to mount an aggressive response to the crisis. He applauded when the Federal Reserve cut interest rates to 2 percent from 5.25 percent beginning last summer. He also supported the Fed’s willingness to engineer a takeover of Bear Stearns. Roubini argues that the Fed’s actions averted catastrophe, though he says he believes that future bailouts should focus on mortgage owners, not investors. Accordingly, he sees the choice facing the United States as stark but simple: either the government backs up a trillion-plus dollars’ worth of high-risk mortgages (in exchange for the lenders’ agreement to reduce monthly mortgage payments), or the banks and other institutions holding those mortgages — or the complex securities derived from them — go under. “You either nationalize the banks or you nationalize the mortgages,” he said. “Otherwise, they’re all toast.”

For months Roubini has been arguing that the true cost of the housing crisis will not be a mere $300 billion — the amount allowed for by the housing legislation sponsored by Representative Barney Frank and Senator Christopher Dodd — but something between a trillion and a trillion and a half dollars. But most important, in Roubini’s opinion, is to realize that the problem is deeper than the housing crisis. “Reckless people have deluded themselves that this was a subprime crisis,” he told me. “But we have problems with credit-card debt, student-loan debt, auto loans, commercial real estate loans, home-equity loans, corporate debt and loans that financed leveraged buyouts.” All of these forms of debt, he argues, suffer from some or all of the same traits that first surfaced in the housing market: shoddy underwriting, securitization, negligence on the part of the credit-rating agencies and lax government oversight. “We have a subprime financial system,” he said, “not a subprime mortgage market.”

Roubini argues that most of the losses from this bad debt have yet to be written off, and the toll from bad commercial real estate loans alone may help send hundreds of local banks into the arms of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. “A good third of the regional banks won’t make it,” he predicted. In turn, these bailouts will add hundreds of billions of dollars to an already gargantuan federal debt, and someone, somewhere, is going to have to finance that debt, along with all the other debt accumulated by consumers and corporations. “Our biggest financiers are China, Russia and the gulf states,” Roubini noted. “These are rivals, not allies.”

The United States, Roubini went on, will likely muddle through the crisis but will emerge from it a different nation, with a different place in the world. “Once you run current-account deficits, you depend on the kindness of strangers,” he said, pausing to let out a resigned sigh. “This might be the beginning of the end of the American empire.”

Stephen Mihm, an assistant professor of economic history at the University of Georgia, is the author of “A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men and the Making of the United States.” His last feature article for the magazine was about North Korean counterfeiting.

georgia blogs

http://www.virtualcollector.blogspot.com/

paul felgangauer , powerful defiant analysis

http://georgiandaily.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5952&Itemid=130


http://windowoneurasia.blogspot.com/2008/08/window-on-eurasia-moscow-made-plans.html

Il medico ebreo che diventò il "Generale Luo

che grandi storie, ancora più grandiose perché i suoi autori caduti nel totale oblio. grazieal tempo ritornano alla luce.

Scappato dall'Europa, fu un eroe della rivoluzione. Emarginato da Mao morì in Israele
Il medico ebreo che diventò il "Generale Luo"

Ein Österreicher im Reich der Mitte
Buchpräsentation zu Leben und Werk Jakob Rosenfelds im Hohen Haus

la manaudou, le journaliste , la crise et la psychanalyse

lacan remplace dieu et le confesseur

PARODIE

ENCORE

CENSORSHIP

basf and technological innovation

the collaboration of basf with monsanto

" Monsanto ist in der grünen Biotechnologie der europäischen Konkurrenz weit voraus. Was macht die BASF für das US-Unternehmen so interessant?

Wir haben eine Methode gefunden, mit der sich eine Vielzahl von Stoffwechselprodukten in einer biologischen Probe parallel analysieren lässt. Wir nennen das Metabolic Profiling. Wir schauen die Chemie in der Pflanze an und untersuchen anhand des Stoffwechsels, wie ganz bestimmte Produkte in der Pflanze genutzt werden, um diese optimal wachsen zu lassen. Mit dieser Technik, die wir geschützt haben, können wir heute relativ schnell sagen, welche Genmodifikation für eine Pflanze besonders geeignet ist, um schnelles Wachstum zu fördern. Schnelligkeit ist auch für uns zentral; wir sind x-mal schneller als alle anderen Wettbewerber. Das haben wir in die Partnerschaft mit Monsanto eingebracht. Metabolic Profiling kann man übrigens auch auf dem Gebiet der Pharma einsetzen; auch daran arbeiten wir. Das ist eine superinteressante Geschichte, die noch von sich reden machen wird."

FUW.com

russian news

http://www.echo.msk.ru/

http://www.ruvr.ru/index.php?lng=rus

http://www.rususa.com/fun/radio/

voice of russia

Novaya Gazeta , opposition newspaper and Yulia Latynina

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novaya_Gazeta

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yulia_Latynina

Georgian Blog

http://georgien.blogspot.com/

How to summarise the subprime crisis

According to Michael Aronstein as reported by FUW , " Die Schaffung von Komplexitaet , mit dem Zweck, hoeher Gebuehren zu erzielen, wird verschwinden "

Tier 1 and subprime crisis

a new element in the financial analysis amid the banking crisis. what was unbelievebale till 2 years ago has become compelling recently , the solvency of large banks . the tier 1 ratio is more than ever present in the news.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_capital

putin and russia

Galia Ackerman and Theirry Walton
Jean Michel Carré, le systeme Putin

georgia blog

http://franceschini.blogautore.repubblica.it/2008/08/11/?ref=hpsbsx

Volete capire i rapporti tra Mosca e la Georgia, e più in generale tra Mosca e i popoli del Caucaso? Leggete i magnifici racconti di Lev Tolstoj (che fece per un po’ il soldato da quelle parti) ambientati nella regione. Oppure leggete “La passione del suo tempo”, profetico thriller di John Le Carrè.

how to become rich by spying on tax cheats

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/07/opinion/edkelton.php

from the nyt blog

August 11th, 2008 8:36 am

Link
Dear Georgia,

It's really great here at the Olympics. My wife and I are having the time of our lives. The spectacle is really something else. We even got a chance during the opening ceremony to chat with some of the other world leaders. Can you believe that? Being President is lots of fun.

I was sorry to hear that you've started a quarrel with my friend, Mr. Putin. And that you've actually used some of the military supplies we sold you, too. Those were only for show in your Independence Day parades, remember? You were taught how to maintain them so that you could keep them bright and shiny for such displays. But now you've gone and gotten some of them wrecked. But don't worry. We can make more for you as soon as you send us an order. With the usual deposit, of course.

Have you forgotten that democracies aren't supposed to start wars? Perhaps you were confused by my doctrine of pre-emptive war and our invasion of Iraq. But those events weren't intended as something that you should do yourself, you know. You're only a little country, not a superpower. There's a huge difference, you know.

Meanwhile, please do write and let me know how things are going. I'll ask our ambassador to the UN to say some nice things in your behalf as soon as I can catch a break in the action here. And how do you like that swimmer of ours? Isn't he great? And our basketball team is absolutely amazing, too.

Regards and best wishes from your friend,

George

— jhannah3, Staten Island
Recommend Recommended by 35 Readers

georgia

clearly by losing the war Georgia will become the winner from a moral point of view . but at what price , the loss of its sovereignty ? a likely outcome since Russia will never allow any Caucasian country to join the nato . the only recalcitrant country to the Russian hegemony in the region , Georgia , was emboldened by the promises of , guess who, GEORGE W Bush, and the sincere believes of his president S. on the ancient bond with the western civilization , dating back to the Argonauts and the spread of the Christian gospel, to lead to a better future. this sincerity without any solid backup may ended up in a monumental mistake : an ally in the terror war loses its sovereignty at the expense of an historical enemy of reedom. By occupying Georgia Russia will dictate its terms in the Caucasus. Chess Mate . In the meantime I hope the president Bush will still enjoy his holydays in Bejing !

PS: By the way , it looks like the majority of posts are pro Russian , are we assisting to a media runoff from the progovernment youth movements , nasi rossie ? if not the nostalgics of the Soviet Union are always very strong in our backyard .

Randy Pausch

"you cannot change the cards you are dealt with , just how you play the hand "
Randy Pausch
http://download.srv.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/

Hank Paulson and Frederich the great

From http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=amy5j45Oa9Ag&refer=home
Aug. 7 (Bloomberg) -- In 1769, short of funds to rebuild Prussia after attacks by Russia, Sweden and Austria, Frederick the Great let aristocrats, churches and monasteries raise money by pledging their estates as security to investors.

From those beginnings emerged what today is Europe's $3 trillion market for covered bonds -- securities backed by assets such as mortgages as well as the seller's promise to pay. Now U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, faced with carnage in the housing market that led to $480 billion of losses and writedowns at the world's top financial institutions, is using a similar strategy to help America's banks turn assets into cash.

While the European market has grown for 250 years, Paulson's plan confronts obstacles Frederick never faced: Besides competition from the biggest U.S. housing-finance companies, the debt would be tied to mortgages and banks that are sliding in value with America's homes and economy.

.....

European investors have snapped up pfandbriefe, as they are known in Germany, because they're considered almost risk free. No bank has missed a payment on the securities in at least 100 years, according to Germany's Pfandbrief Association. .....

``The covered bond has been a very useful and widely accepted vehicle in Europe, but in the U.S. it remains an expensive financing mechanism versus home-loan banks and it doesn't offer the same capital relief as a true sale,'' said Richard Dorfman, chief executive officer of FHLBank Atlanta, the Georgia Federal Home Loan Bank, which has $150 billion of loans.......

For investors, a pledge this month by 13 banks and securities firms including Bank of America, London-based Barclays Plc and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. of New York to appoint dedicated traders, provide pricing information and make a market in the bonds may be the most important development, said TIAA-Cref's Cerra. The ability to easily trade and value the debt falls short of what's available in Europe, he said.......

Another hurdle is that so-called risk-based capital rules require banks to hold more than twice as much in reserves to issue covered bonds than if they worked with Fannie to create mortgage securities, and kept the bonds on their balance sheets.

Frederick the Great's financing plan worked so well that Denmark followed suit in 1797 after a fire destroyed much of Copenhagen. By 1850, France had joined in. Whether the idea catches on in the U.S. is another question, said Richard Kemmish, head of covered bond origination at Credit Suisse Group in London and member of the European Covered Bond Council's steering committee.

investigation movies or documentaries : two different views

watching a documentary on how the French police works to investigate a criminal case, I was struck by how reality diverges from fiction. in fiction the police officer works for the sake of truth, in reality the agent looks like he is working for the sake of his career , to get promoted by nailing the suspect with all possible means and receive a better pay check and more comfortable position later on. a bit like in a bank or any other institution working with such incentives. there you go, welcome to the world! the line between truth and manipulation is thin , up to the lawyers to defend the accused.

IHT, Roger Cohen,http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/03/opinion/edcohen.php

Although living In paris i was not aware of this latest scandal , probably erupted while in holydays and glad to learn about it in iht. Totally agree on your conclusions that there is a lesson of civilisation for the vaunted French civilisation afflicted by a continous malaise that binds freedom of speech to political correct statements. Not suprising for the heirs of Versailles!!! But let's be clear , so much ink for such a mediocre personality as Jean Sarkozy was not necessary from neither side , it was a present to the Sarkozy clan that was capable of stirring a " faux debat " on a private issue that should not have gone public. It looks like both quarreling sides are affected by a quest of moral hegemony which eventually does not help the country to get out of its deadlock. Both BH Levy and Bob Siné should ashame themselves of delving into such an affair ,curtailing a true debate of ideas and extolling the peoplisation of the society even among very refined intellectuals quoting Foucault and Dreyfuss , all of this for a young failed student turned politician to reap the dividend of daddy position. helas,to see a cartoonist like siné being fought by a renowned philosopher like bh levi is just a sign of lack of class !

Financial regulation in the wake of subrpime mess

the city claims that

“Proposed changes could greatly increase the cost of capital across Europe with detrimental effects far beyond the financial services industry,” said Stuart Fraser, chairman of policy and resources at the City of London, which will on Friday publish its gloomy forecasts.

EU commission replies with the statement


“When the financial sector is in such a state that losses risk being socialised while profits from risk-taking are privatised, nobody should be surprised if, in the absence of meaningful and comprehensive industry response, there is a regulatory response to address the misaligned incentives that are at the heart of the problems that have arisen.”

obama , the script never written

not even Hollywood could come up with a similar scenario, an Africa descendant with above the average skills candidate to the presidency of the most powerful country in the world. it goes beyond the American dream. what does it take now to be elected ? obama is up to the task , is the American public up to the most unconceivable innovation in their history ?

lerner e la guzzanti

http://www.repubblica.it/2008/07/sezioni/politica/giustizia-6/lerner-populismo/lerner-populismo.html

sabina guzzanti

http://www.corriere.it/politica/08_luglio_11/critico_chi_voglio_la_gente_applaude_2c148936-4efa-11dd-932f-00144f02aabc.shtml

hedge funds/take ober /cfd

FSA to target covert stake-building

Hedge funds will no longer be able to build secret stakes in companies after the UK’s market regulator announced it would introduce unexpectedly strict rules on the disclosure of derivatives. The FSA said big holdings through contracts for difference - which give investors financial exposure to share price moves but no voting rights - should be disclosed as if they were shares. The move comes after a series of cases in which activist hedge funds and companies planning to bid for rivals have used CFDs to secretly build holdings, and follows the introduction of rules requiring short-sellers to declare bets against the shares of companies involved in rights issues. It goes further than previous proposals to require only minimal disclosure of CFDs.

Michael Lind/texas / Bush

does history matter . no think some bold politicians. yet ,events once again show that history may hint to future developments. 8 yeas ago the vitriolic biography on gw bush highlighted his deleterious policies in his home state, texas. the pension system was squandered by deregulation. on the aftermath of enron debacle , g w bush was elected after a much contested race as president of the united states casting his mediocre skills in the shade after sept 11 . but at the end of his mandate the economy cannot hide anymore the blunt disaster viciously nurtured by a bold and imprudent administration highkacked by lobbyists looting the long term prospects of America. The subprime crisis is the most manifest sign of this total fiasco. Were the certainties that erased the word prudence from their dictionary a recipee for disaster ?

let's go back to the time when g w bush was running texas and the warning signs of an impending disaster were very present then. but demagogy, the art of distorting the attention from the real problems , prevailed . the current disaster is the tangible result for American people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Lind

city bankersarrogance and greed

http://www.bloomberg.com/avp/avp.asxx?clip=mms://media2.bloomberg.com/cache/vnM1PtU63dAE.asf&vCat=/av&RND=693121003

End of the Mandate

GW Bush touring Europe in his mission to convince Europeans to add more troops for the liberty cause. The guy comes to and end of his rule with the American economy collapsing and the US World leadership in shambles, mocked publicly by autocratic Russia that forgets how much money was poured in and subsequently stolen when their system failed in the mid 90s.

Once again , the question , what makes a man of power a great leader ? his blindness to the risks to wage wars to liberate countries with subsequent deleterious consequences because incapable of managing his policies or, besides the courage, his prudence and wisdom that take into account the real needs of his people and not those of his doctrines ?

A great outcome was the fall of a tyrant, Saddam ,but what lies after him? a country thorn by war , an unnecessary burden . What for ?

subprime risks ahead of us

Banken stehen vor trüben Ertragsperspektiven

Die Ratingagentur Fitch hat sich auf einer Konferenz zu internationalen Banken am Montag in Frankfurt skeptisch zu den Branchenperspektiven geäussert. Fitch glaubt, dass zwar weltweit 80% der Wertberichtigungen auf Subprime-bezogene Anlagen berichtet worden sind. Es könne aber Korrekturen auf andere Risikopositionen geben, etwa im Bereich fremdfinanzierter Übernahmen (Leveraged Finance) oder im Konsum- und im Immobiliengeschäft.

Auch wenn es zuletzt Zeichen der Marktstabilisierung gab, ist für Fitch offen, wann es zu einer Normalisierung kommt. Dank der Intervention der Notenbanken ist die Refinanzierung der meisten Institute weiter gut möglich. Jedoch könnten sich die Finanzierungskonditionen verschärfen. Etliche Banken zeigten eine markante Schwäche im Kapitalmarktneugeschäft, das durch die Marktverwerfungen zurückgebunden bleibt. Bestimmend für die nächsten Monate werden gemäss Fitch weniger die Folgen der Subprime-Krise, sondern konjunkturelle Risiken sein. Fitch erwartet durch eine Verschlechterung der Kreditrisiken einen Anstieg der Risikovorsorge und eine Ertragsbelastung.

Ertragsrückgang wiederum erschwere den Instituten die Stärkung der Eigenkapitalbasis aus eigener Kraft. Durch ihre schwache Ausgangslage seien hier BNP Paribas, Barclays und Société Générale besonders risikobehaftet. Im europäischen Vergleich sieht Fitch ein überdurchschnittliches Stresspotenzial auf dem britischen, irischen und deutschen Markt, während Italien, Frankreich und Spanien durchschnittlich eingestuft werden. Zu den stabilen Systemen zählt Fitch trotz UBS-Krise die Schweiz.

Why should France , the UK and Ireland be more vulnerable than Italy and Spain , Why is Switzerland the best positionned? Interestingly , the backdrop of globalisation stands out from this huge financial debalce. Globalisation means lower costs, more competition, larger international trade and productivity gains with an overall increase of wealth. however globalisation could not stop the toxic garbage to bespread around the world through the powerof the American financial industry causing great damage to those natually bound to them.

Der deutsche Bankenmarkt ist gemäss Fitch von der Finanzmarktkrise hart getroffen. Die Kapitalausstattung der Grossbanken reiche aber aus, um weitere Wertberichtigungen zu verkraften, sagte Fitch-Bankenanalystin Andrea von Schnurbein. Man müsse nun die weitere Entwicklung abwarten. Die - zum Verkauf stehende - Postbank liege mit ihrer Kapitalstärke am unteren Ende der Bandbreite dessen, was angemessen ist, indes sei das Risikoprofil geringer. Ihre Kollegin Simone Brehmer unterstrich, dass die Kreditrisikovorsorge deutscher Häuser im ersten Vierteljahr auf historisch sehr niedrigem Niveau gelegen hat. Hier erwartet sie mittelfristig einen Anstieg. Kritisch merkte sie die teilweise noch hohen Positionen in risikobehafteten Papieren per Ende März an (vgl. Tabelle). Die riskantesten Positionen seien aber zum Grossteil bereits wertberichtigt worden. Aus der möglichen Marktkonsolidierung (vgl. FuW Nr. 37 vom 10. Mai) in Deutschland erwartet Fitch keine Ratingauswirkungen. «Fusionen zwischen öffentlich-rechtlichen und privatrechtlichen Instituten wird es in Deutschland auch in zehn Jahren noch nicht geben», sagte Fitch-Deutschland-Chef Jens Schmidt-Bürgel. Nur dies würde aber den Bankenplatz nachhaltig stärken.

DM, Frankfurt

An example of take over strategy by issuing shares/ VON Roll and Finck family

Von Stahl zu von Finck

Einst war Von Roll als Stahlunternehmen ein Begriff. 1996 wurde der Stahlbereich mit von Moos zu Swiss Steel fusioniert. Die restliche Von Roll agierte unglücklich und stand 2003 nahe am Konkurs. Nach einer umfassenden Restrukturierung besteht die Gesellschaft nun mehrheitlich aus Geschäften der ehemaligen Isola-Werke, die 1987 aus Gründen der Diversifikation gekauft wurden. Von Roll ist heute spezialisiert auf die Produktion von Isolationsbändern, Kupferdrähten, Harzen sowie Lacken für Generatoren und Motoren. Im Angebot sind auch Verbundstoffe für verschiedene industrielle Anwendungen.

An der Spitze der Gesellschaft kam es Mitte 2007 zu einem Machtwechsel. Die deutsche Milliardärsfamilie um August von Finck erhöhte die Beteiligung an Von Roll von 21 auf 31,6%. Ziel dieser Aktion war es, an einer ausserordentlichen Generalversammlung eine Kapitalerhöhung um 323 Mio. Fr. durchzubringen und die Mehrheit im Verwaltungsrat zu erreichen. Beides gelang (vgl. FuW Nr. 63 vom 15. August 2007). Als Verwaltungsratspräsident und CEO übernahm Thomas Limberger die Verantwortung - Limberger war zuvor CEO von OC Oerlikon.

Die aufgelegte Kapitalerhöhung wurde von den Aktionären nicht voll gezeichnet. Von Finck sprang in die Lücke, überschritt damit die Marke von einem Drittel des Kapitals und musste in der Folge den anderen Aktionären ein Übernahmeangebot unterbreiten. Obwohl die Offerte absichtlich niedrig tief angesetzt war, wurden dem Grossaktionär fast 30% des restlichen Kapitals angedient. Dadurch erhöhte sich die Beteiligung der Familie von Finck auf beachtliche 63,1%.

DH

hedge for dummies

http://www.amazon.com/Hedge-Dummies-Business-Personal-Finance/dp/0470049278

an epic vicoty / barack obama

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/06/05/us/politics/0605-nat-PRIMARIES.jpg


http://politics.nytimes.com/election-guide/2008/results/demmap/


http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?query=Presidential+Election+of+2008&d=&o=&v=&c=&n=10&dp=0&daterange=full&srchst=m&sort=newest

guru and silicon valley

guru and silicon valley
http://www.neemkarolibaba.com/

http://www.neemkarolibaba.com/
http://www.repubblica.it/2008/06/sezioni/scienza_e_tecnologia/santone-silicon-valley/santone-silicon-valley/santone-silicon-valley.html

quo vadis Helvetia ?

more racist than whom in club of civilised nations ? what a shame every year on a regular basis the referendum weapon is deployed to humiliate people more swiss than us.black hands grabbing a Swiss passport displayed in a banner hung all over Switzerland while Americans appoint the first black running candidate to the white house. a relief that the Swiss voters rejected this hateful proposal . but for how long will the far right party of herr blocher recurr to this fighting instrument to stirr controversy and division among Swiss themselves?

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/06/01/europe/EU-GEN-Switzerland-Citizenship-Referendum.php

Hilry and maths

The Clinton campaign said all current polls had her beating McCain in November, and claimed to be ahead in the popular vote by half a million ballots after 51 valid Democratic contests stretching back to Iowa in early January.

Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs mocked the Clinton calculations, which rest on counting Florida and Michigan, and estimating vote totals from Obama's victories in four caucus states where official tallies have not been released.

"It involves square roots and logarithms and you know, I think there's a computer crunching the formula. And a lot of margaritas," the Obama aide said.

from
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080529193741.dozugrom&show_article=1

pakistan and its own central bank

interesting article on the pakistan central banker and her task to rein in inflation

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/05/23/business/wbspot24.php

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/05/23/business/AS-FIN-MKT-Pakistan-Markets.php

at last the truth in the socgen debacle. and now mr bouton what do you do ?

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/05/22/business/socgen.php

mr boutton, socgen ceo, will you pay your communication strategy and lawyers with money of the shareholders or your own ? who was wrong ?

g w bush

is g w bus more liable to god or to the american people and how can he solve this quintessential dilemma for a man like him with very personal views on religion and the nation

pete peterson

pete peterson, blackstone founder, a legend in private quity and philantropic endeavours, incarnation of the american spirit

oil crisis in 2008

oil crisis in the us , finally they understand that we are in a interdependent world, an idea so much cherished by the clinton administration inducing a great bonanza for the american economy but discarded by the next government for fear of being associated with the devil. not anymore. this is a gift of mr narrow minded,thirsty of justice aboroad but lost back home. looking into retrospective the idea to leave iraq intact after the first iraqi war was brilliant because they made the arab countries insecure next to their dangerous neighbour longing for the American help . Now what ? They are relieved from the menace and free to set the oil produciuton as they wish while funding the iraqi insurrection. G W Bush did not have any plan for the after war but an unique obsession to get rid of the evil constantly gyrating on his head . he could not understand the benefits of the non US intervention. oil was no real matter in this war. what a waste.

junk mortgage restructuring

http://bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=acNLJ7FGT15U&refer=home

ospel and ubs , summary

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=a3sm9FOrsWcg&refer=home

hf set compensation planing deferral

http://www.greencompany.com/HedgeFunds/OffDocOffshore.shtml

cyprus

http://www.lowtax.net/lowtax/html/jcypetx.html


http://www.cypruspropertiesforyou.co.uk/buying-cyprus.htm

http://www.pkalopetrides.com.cy/personal-income-07.html

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/banking_and_finance/article684945.ece

http://www.arnoldandporter.com/pubs/files/MFAReporter_2006.pdf

fed to pay interest on banks reserves

how the fed intends to tackle the bank liquidity crisis . must say this guy is quite bold .

Malta

residence

UBS Subrpime crisis : a summary by the FT

How UBS Failed

Bridgeman Titus Flavius

Titus Flavius

12 emperors
getty

philippe daverio

expo milano e ruolo della borghesia

Il solito melodramma di VITTORIO ZUCCONI QUO VADIS ITALIA

Il solito melodramma
di VITTORIO ZUCCONI

inglese e babele

l'inglese , la nuova matrice linguistica si tramuta in una piovra dialettale nel global village babelico ?

dante e l'italia

http://www.docushare.it/mediasoft/dante/pages/danteinf.htm

la divina commedia


veltroni er veltro nelle elezioni politiche italiane del 2008 sara er feltro ?

Questi non ciberà terra né peltro,
1.104 ma sapienza, amore e virtute,
1.105 e sua nazion sarà tra feltro e feltro.

105. tra feltro e feltro: come generico è il significato del Veltro,
così genericamente va intesa, forse, quest'espressione: il
personaggio nascerà di famiglia povera, in quanto il feltro è " una
spezie di panno oltre ad ogni altra vilissima " (Boccaccio).
Questa interpretazione si accorda, a nostro avviso, con la serie di
schietti e modesti eroi che, pur in campo avverso, si batterono per
l'"umile" Italia.

conflict zones and finance

conflict zones and finance

conflict zones and finance

conflict zones and finance

straus kahn à l'attaque

bravo, le fmi perd sa reputation , on met un francais à la tete d'une institution mondiale, clé de la finance internationale, grace au coup de genie de sarko, et on la tourne dans une arène politique ou l'épicureiste strauss kahn avec le sophisme le plus intransigeant plaide pour son éléctorat francais ,son parti socialiste et les prochaines presidentielles, en annoncant à la baisse les estimations de croissance mondiale, en se heurtant à la commision européenne et la à trichet le fondamentaliste . objetif ? relancer la dépense publique pour revenir en patrie comme le messie , le redenteur.

voilà , quelle intelligence de la part de cette personalité politique, un profesionel de l'opportunisme, marié à une journaliste , comme la plus part de ses confrères, il s'allie aux experts en communication.

sarkoz et la nato

et bien voila la seule carte que sarko et la france peuvent jouer , une reforme et une expansion militaire pour reaffirmer la puissance et la gloire francaise . cela évidemment en compagnie de l'anglaterre car aujourd'hui dans la petite europe on ne peut montrer les muscles tout seul .

le reste des reformes , un échec. la france n'a aucune vocation pour l'economie de marché , les politiciens qui la gouvernent dans tous les échellons de la societé sont les premiers à vouloir garder leurs privilèges et le statu quo. regarder leur revenus financiers par rapport à des simples employés du privé ou du public , ils sont bien enviables: grace à la taxation ils gagnent bcp plus et ils auront une retraite garantie .

paradoxalement aujourd'hui on est dans la meme situation qu'avant la revolution francaise , des classes priviligiées qui ne bougent pas , un rallentissement économique et , écoutez bien, oiez, oiez, une croissance de la pauvreté. les classes priviligiés d'aujourd'hui qui sont ? les politiciens, tout parti confondu , et les grands marchands qui benéficient de la protection corporatiste de l'etat , les interets categoriels et les syndicats qu'on peut comparer au clergé de l'ancien regime ,reactionnaire, allergique au changement.

la vraie revolution en france serait celle de la fin de l'etat represseur et l'affirmation de l'economie du marché , l'abolition des partis politiques et leur systeme de revenus financiers/fonciers jadis appartenant au systeme feodaliste . que penserait prudhomme auujourd'hui?

ubs/ marcel ospel steps down / finally?

although Marchionne, the deus ex machina, praises Ospel contribution for fixing UBS problems , he did not mention that he managed to destroy the whole group with his decisions ! here some news from the Swiss press


depart ospel
http://letemps.ch/template/tempsFort.asp?page=3&article=228974
kurrer
http://letemps.ch/template/tempsFort.asp?page=3&article=228976
bns
http://www.letemps.ch/dossiers/dossiersarticle.asp?ID=228864

ubs au scanner

bns

impuesto patrimonio espana

el pais
faro
elmundo
elmundoII
elblog
espanaliberal
expansion

nassim taleb and the hubris

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aHfkhe8.C._8&refer=home

nassim taleb and the day after

sarkozy too small for the beauty

the president found a beautiful lady, carla bruni, to go out with, but he figured out that he is too short with her in the media and his ego is under strain. in spite of her glamorous looks she comes across empty and far away from the real France, the France which is poor and worrysome of its future. a fashion icon in the corridors of power with no mandate and empathy for the compelling issues of the people because she comes from a fairy world, preoccupied with the universal rights of the genetic code and with no basic neeed to earn her daily bread.

in spite of the media effort to portray her as the new jacqueline, dont think it was a clever coup to marry her. it was more of a impulsive coup de tete, which this president is getting us used to. genius or scoundrel , that s his leitmotif.

today the trend of putting pop stars with no experience and competence into positions of responsibility, like charity foundations , international organisations or for that matter even presidential institutions, is quite worrysome. pop star icons in human flesh are replacing former values and symbols while private and public institutions use their glamour to raise money and build consensus. u give money at a charity ball if u have angelina jolie without aid workers and destitute people. there is no spirit in this community, no sharing of the burden , it is just for the sake of appearing in a good cause and gain popularity.

SICUT TRANSIT GLORIAS MUNDI

eventually we are net losers if we are compalcent with this system which backs monpoly of image for obsolete but powerful institutions. we need some change .

http://www.repubblica.it/2006/05/gallerie/esteri/bruni-ultimo-atto/2.html

obama speech on race

obama speech on race

roger cohen on obama speech

cohen on obama

maureen dowd on obama speech

cronica de una muerte anunciada

bear stearns death

cabialavetta is back to switzerland , in the board of swissre , among others . what we lost back then is really PEANUTS compared to ospel .Publish Post

evasione all'italiana

dolce gabbana , lussemburgo , evasione

budget report

non domiciled

budget 2008

blog + visitati

http://www.repubblica.it/2007/02/sezioni/scienza_e_tecnologia/blogmania/blog-observer/blog-observer.html

best blogs

http://netmonitor.blogautore.repubblica.it/