John Robb's Weblog

New book: Terror and Consent

Got a surprise from FEDEX today, the new book by Philip Bobbitt today. Going to give it a quick read, will report back.

Yves Smith

One of the few rational voices on the Bear fiasco.

If the Fed and JP Morgan/Chase can get played...

The Bear Sterns fiasco runs amok.

Trust in the US financial system continues to drop.

Why would anybody put money into the US with this level of uncertainty?

"A MERIWETHER"

When a very smart person,

does something incredibly stupid (costly, dangerous, etc.),

and expects to be paid for it....

Bear Shareholders are trying to pull a John Meriwether

These folks are so greedy that they are willing to put the entire global financial system at risk. Personally, I think the Fed should just walk away from the deal. Let Bear collapse. They were lucky to get $2.

Crunch time in financial service employment

8,000 at Bear and more on the horizon:

Job losses at Bear Stearns are just the thin end of the wedge, as experts warn that redundancies across the global financial services industry are rocketing. The Experian research agency predicts that the total tally in 2008 could hit 180,000. In New York alone, 12,700 jobs have already been lost this year, primarily in mortgage-related work as the US housing market nosedives.

The Shadow Banking System

Total value of the shadow banking system (unregulated and unsupervised): $516 Trillion.

US GDP ~ $13.86 Trillion (PPP).
Positions held by Bear Sterns ~ $13.4 Trillion (underlying assets ~ $80 billion).
Positions held by JP Morgan Chase prior to Bear Sterns acquisition ~ $77 Trillion.

Global sims

Sentient world sims. Is there an open source variant for the underlying SEAS platform (given the public funding that was used to build it, SEAS should be open source)? I suspect that it will only get good through the contributions/attentions of tens of thousands of developers.

Broken research means future failure

A quick check on the health of US Army thinking yields a Director of Research for the Strategic Studies Institute that thinks 4GW is a myth (this has been circulated before, but I am exploring the implications).

Dr Antulio J. Echevarria II critiques the theory of fourth-generation warfare, examining its problematic assumptions and logical flaws. He argues that this theory is hopelessly flawed and that its proponents undermine their credibility by subscribing to it.

A critique is fine, but the last sentence in the above is particularly flawed. If this is from the SSI's Director of Research, it's a good bet that the entire research agenda is hopelessly off-course. Perhaps the only way to rectify this is to flush the entire institute and start afresh.

Psychological defeat...

Times:

Despite 20 years of iron-fisted security, huge investments and mass migration since the last Tibetan uprising, the roof of the world once again looks like a hostile place to most Chinese. The uneasy sense of psychological defeat emerged from interviews with Chinese citizens and soldiers in Sichuan province, a vast region that includes a swathe of the Tibetan plateau, over the past week. Almost without exception, people said they had lost faith in government propaganda and feared that Tibetans would turn to violence against China.