Sen. Ted Kaufmann [D-DE] lays out his position on financial sector reform, in a floor statement that I think is clearly argued. Which sounds like faint praise, but these days... it's a rarer commodity than I'd like.
Agree or disagree, you won't walk away wondering where he stands, or why.
Over at The Futurist, "GK" laid out the 4 Horsemen in January 2009. All elements remain in place.
Meanwhile, the Wall St. Journal notes that VCs are having a difficult time. They may have avoided a 5th Horesman, however, depending on how the SEC and Senate define the Venture Capital funds that were finally excluded from the House and Senate versions of the new financial rules bill.
How often do you find a cross-over story about three notable Left Coast industries: venture capital, media, and -- err -- sex?
It seems that noted San Francisco sex writer Violet Blue did some checking on what the SF Chron and sfgate.com were doing with her content (NSFW WARNING) and didn't like what she found. Her past columns had been copied to another domain, all outbound links (and some punctuation) stripped, the articles split into multiple pages, the pages stuffed with keywords - some inappropriate, and festooned with pay-per-click ads. And it emerged that multiple domains had also been aliased to these dead-end copies. Now where have we seen that kind of behavior before?
Here I should mention that sfgate.com is apparently - by admission of the author - within the letter of her contract by making this use of her work. That relationship, now terminated, was based on a level of trust that she feels has been abused, and made no explicit stipulations on how the content can be reused. The interest here is what this occurrence may say about the ongoing behavior of the MSM online, and its implications for the industry's business model.
This incident is not a one-off.
I'm talking about ads for mass spectrometers, genetic sequencers, and other stuff that leaves your "4G smartphone hacked to run Linux" huddled in some corner, crying over its basic inadequacy.
My favorite might be the boy band takeoff, for its oh-so obvious send up.
I would never in a million years have guessed that these kinds of creative approaches existed in that sphere. I'll take that as a signal to stretch my imagination a bit in future.
The UK's Serious Fraud Office (SFO) has spent the last 6 years chasing BAE systems over allegations that bribes were paid to secure foreign deals in a number of countries. Bribes are the least of the allegations involved in some international defense deals, and contract wins without inducements would be far more surprising in countries like Saudi Arabia, Tanzania, and South Africa. Nevertheless, the UK does have laws to prevent British firms from paying them, and the US Department of Justice chose to pursue the matter as well.
BAE Systems has settled with both governments, pleading guilty to technical violations but not criminal offenses, and paying about $400 million to the US DoJ, and GBP 30 million in the UK. I have the full history and details over at DID.
It will be interesting to see how future Saudi arms deals get done, given that bribes are a requirement.
"In Somalia's main pirate lair of Haradheere [about 400 km/ 250 miles NE of Mogadishu], the sea gangs have set up a cooperative to fund their hijackings offshore, a sort of stock exchange meets criminal syndicate.... "Four months ago, during the monsoon rains, we decided to set up this stock exchange. We started with 15 'maritime companies' and now we are hosting 72. Ten of them have so far been successful at hijacking," Mohammed said.
"The shares are open to all and everybody can take part, whether personally at sea or on land by providing cash, weapons or useful materials ... we've made piracy a community activity.".... "Piracy-related business has become the main profitable economic activity in our area and as locals we depend on their output," said Mohamed Adam, the town's deputy security officer.
This is just the beginning of the true cost of the dithering and ineffective measures demanded by the UN and its enablers. Large sections of the Indian Ocean, far beyond Somalia, are already becoming dangerous for shipping and trade. And the forces on land will continue to morph toward more sophisticated - and hostile - models, the longer they're left alone. This is far too good a racket not to attract interest from al-Qaeda, which already has reliable proxies in the area - and a long Islamic history of piracy and slavery to use as justification and rallying call.
Barron's Magazine recently ran a feature entitled "Watch Their Language," (subscription required) which focused on some "dirty words" used in 10-K and 10-Q filings. James A. Kaplan, the Chairman and CEO of a firm called Audit Integrity, adds some publicly-accessible "Devil's Dictionary" type translations of terms found in corporate financial reports. Worthwhile reading for any investor.
According to the documents, George Soros' Open Society Policy Center pays the annual salary of the NIAC staffer who heads the Campaign for a New Policy on Iran, according to an email among NIAC officials. And the minutes of a series of meetings including NIAC and other coalition members offer a glimpse of the strategy and tactics involved in the push for a rapprochement with the Islamic Republic, from an attempt to undermine the appointment of Dennis Ross as Iran envoy to a planned "Send Hillary to Iran" campaign.At some point it would be nice if there was a decent amount of transparency around what Soros is doing; if he genuinely believes in open societies, he ought to lead it, but since he doesn't - perhaps a decent journalistic project would be to connect the dots and create a map of his involvement in US and foreign affairs.
John Gapper, of Britain's financial Times, nails it. He discusses its subsidized level of leverage a bit too briefly, but his overall conclusion is sound:
"Not only is it reasonable to suspect that Goldman, which has entwined itself with governments around the world by sending partners out into "public service" when they leave, would not be allowed to fail by its alumnae network, but the bail-out was prima facie evidence.
Thus, at the heart of the financial system, now sits a professionals-only, high-risk Wall Street firm with its own private equity and hedge funds arrayed on top of a nonpareil corporate and government client list, which taxpayers reasonably assume is gambling with their money.
You do not have to be a vampire squid-style conspiracy theorist to see the difficulty...."
Business Insider has a post that includes a quick intro, followed by a set of charts and presentations:
"Massive "Shadow Inventory" Overhang Will Keep Pressure On House Prices."
Good context for the (premature) calls that say the crisis is over... and as this overhang continues to roll, it will have an impact on the banking sector, which is also getting shot with commercial real estate difficulties. For instance, CIT is - as a number of people predicted before the bailouts - headed toward bankruptcy anyway. They have been peceeded by many regional banks. Clusterstock has an article that points up a key issue here: bank balance sheets are still pretty opaque:
"There was a stunning omission from the government's latest list of "problem" banks, which ran to 416 lenders, a 15-year high, as of June 30. One outfit not on the list was Georgian Bank, the second-largest Atlanta-based bank, which supposedly had plenty of capital. It failed last week."
The question is whether the "Our Cronies Are Too Big To Fail" set in the larger banks is in much better shape. It's not clear that they are.
