California could put its revenues in its own state-owned bank and fan these “reserves” into many times their face value in loans, using the same “fractional reserve” system that private banks use.
Posts Tagged ‘crisis’
Ellen Brown: Towards a Solution to the Debt Crisis in California: The State Could Walk Away and Create Its Own Credit Machine
July 14th, 2009 |
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Goldman Sachs sees bumper profit
July 14th, 2009 |
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US bank Goldman Sachs has unveiled net earnings of $3.44bn (£2.1bn) for the April to June period – well above what analysts had forecast.
It comes after the bank startled Wall Street by reporting it made $1.8bn in the first three months of the year, despite the economic crisis.
The firm has recently paid back $10bn in federal aid intended to help it steer through the global turmoil.
It is expected to pay about $18bn in pay and bonuses to its 28,000 staff.
Six months ago, Goldman saw its first quarterly loss since going public in 1999, after being battered by the economic crisis.
Its share price, while still well off its high, has gained about 75% in 2009.</p
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Nathan Gardels: California’s Crisis of Consumer Democracy
July 14th, 2009 |
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California’s fiscal crisis says as much about the state of the American Dream as it does about the state of California’s economy. And it is…
Marshall Auerback: California Currency? A Taste of Things to Come Unless Percora II Helps Us Leave Discredited Economic Dogma Behind
July 13th, 2009 |
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As California’s IOUs signal desperation, Roosevelt Braintruster Marshall Auerback suggests that a Pecora-style Commission could help the public recognize the folly of past economic dogmas.
Christopher Hayes: New Pecora Commission Will Give Rise To Public Anger…Which Is Why Elites Fear It
July 13th, 2009 |
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Are suppositions about the complexity of the financial crisis just another way of keeping the real story from public scrutiny? Roosevelt Institute Braintruster Christopher Hayes…
Jeff Madrick: Full Investigation of Crisis is Vital to Democracy
July 13th, 2009 |
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How do we get the facts on how the financial system imploded? Roosevelt Institute Braintruster Jeff Madrick would prefer a special prosecutor — or at…
Shannyn Moore: Sarah Palin’s Constitutional Train Wreck
July 13th, 2009 |
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When Senator Bill Wielechowski came on my radio program this week, he dropped a bomb I wasn’t ready for; in order for Alaska to avoid…
New GM, no room for complacency
July 13th, 2009 |
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It was almost an anti-climax, but in case you missed it, a new and leaner GM came out of bankruptcy at the end of last week. The consensus among the analysts appears to be that this is GM’s last chance. It needs to have learned lessons from its demise and it needs to heed them.
Although New GM comes with a new and improved balance sheet – a big plus – it needs to continue to reinvent itself and convince sceptical consumers that it has brands and product that are relevant to their needs and that they can have faith in. And it needs to achieve those things with a sustainable business model.
In effect, the US government has created for GM an opportunity and a chance to survive. It is one that needs to be grabbed with both hands, but there is no guarantee of long-term survival. A lot of hard work is ahead.
There are some people at the helm of the new company or close to it – not least Messrs Henderson and the now ‘unretired’ Lutz – who were in influential roles in the run-up to GM’s failure as a business in the US. They, in particular, need to continue to demonstrate that lessons have been learned and that the new company is not simply a slimmed down version of what went before. New GM should also have a new urgency and nimbleness about it, an energised spirit, if it is to survive and thrive.
A criticism of the old GM – and not just GM, but Detroit generally – was that there was a culture of complacency for too many years. Detroit, many say, sleepwalked into this crisis when it failed to invest in much better car product or rationalise brands and models, preferring to rake in lazy profits from truck sales in North America.
When sales got more difficult on the back of heightened competition from the Japanese transplants in particular, things deteriorated still further as the metal was pushed out unprofitably to keep factories running. Long-run loss of market share tells its own story. And there were agreements struck with the UAW that sewed the seeds for unsustainable worker legacy costs.
The current recession in the US has brutally exposed long-run failures of strategy in the home market. The GM board and its management were surely responsible for some of GM’s troubles (the reason why Rick Wagoner had to go; someone had to) even if they were putting things right and, in a sense, ran out of runway.
Any sign that the ‘complacency culture’ is not gone but merely dormant would jeopardise that chance that New GM has been given. Everyone on the New GM board needs to understand the seriousness of the situation and fact that New GM needs to stay on red alert, the old days and ways gone for good.
An immediate and severe crisis that would have seen GM assets liquidated and all sorts of supplier sector grief has been cleverly averted, but there is still something of a crisis on.
The feelbad factor
July 12th, 2009 |
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Light, uplifting comedy has had its day. Give me the bleak, miserable stuff – it suits my crisis better
‘They give birth astride of a grave,” says Pozzo in Waiting For Godot. “The light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.” Close your eyes and picture yourself giving birth astride of a grave. You shiver and moan. Your baby, once you’ve squeezed it out, drops six feet onto the ground. Oh yes, your mother was right. You should have gone private.
Beckett’s magnificent line is an example of feelbad. Feelbad confronts you with the darkness, futility and awfulness of existence, but does it with such imagination, bravado, soul and wit that you find yourself exhilarated. Feelbad is The Smiths, feelgood The Smurfs. I rest my case.
Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York is a feelbad classic. I’ve seen it twice and urge you to do the same. Both times it gave me a mid-life crisis. But that’s a recommendation. I’m 56. A mid-life crisis means I’ll live to 112. It’s a masterpiece of anti-formulaic, genre-busting, unmarketable feelbad art, one that deserves the most off-putting advertising strapline to convey its uncompromising, uningratiating vision. I offer up, in all humility: “Delay your suicide two hours to see this film.”
If you haven’t seen it, look away now, as I’m about to divulge the plot. Here goes: a guy dies. That’s it. And, as the film makes clear, that’s not just the story of the guy in the film, it’s the story of everyone. Everyone dies. That’s the only story there is. Thank you, Charlie Kaufman. Thank you, Sammy Beckett.
En route to the Big D, our hero, a depressed, self-obsessed director and hypochondriac, conceives an epic theatre piece on the subject of (wait for it, wait for it) the brutal awfulness of human life. But he never finishes his theatre piece. Of course he doesn’t. This is feelbad. He just can’t get to the end, what with constant interferences from life itself – which have to be included in the piece – and his own dissatisfaction and decline. Decades pass without his completing his work. The film’s a sort of writer’s blockbuster.
You may have heard that it’s relentlessly bleak. This is not true. Feelbad doesn’t preclude warmth or a sly and delicate humour. (That’s why the ladies love Leonard Cohen.) I’m a professional comedy writer, so feelbad humour is a subject very close to my heart, which, of course, is just a few inches away from my wallet. I make my living supplying amusing stuff for popular consumption. I started my career writing jokes for the Two Ronnies, at a time when likeable, unchallenging, diminutive chaps like Ronnie Corbett and Ernie Wise were the giants of BBC Light Entertainment. You were instructed, when writing comedy, to provide three laughs a page. You were instructed, when performing it, to go out there and make them laugh. In other words, your motivation was to make the audience feel good, with comedy of a kind your maiden aunt would enjoy.
But Light Entertainment has transmuted, over the last three decades, into Heavy Entertainment. Darker it’s got and darker. Basil Fawlty had rage but was still unmistakably farcical and funny. David Brent? There were times when his awfulness was so real you had to cover your eyes. And Brent was nothing compared with the gallery of grotesques in The League of Gentlemen, or the savagery in the collected works of Chris Morris, or the cruelty in Nighty Night. It is as if the smile has been wiped off comedy’s face, to be replaced with an expression that’s darker but somehow more truthful.
We’re supposed, in these difficult times, to be crying out for comfort, for blandness, for kindness, for the smiley love of our mummies. But it doesn’t quite look like that from where I’m sitting. For a start, nobody has a maiden aunt any more. She’s doing unspeakable unmaidenly things with your bi-curious bachelor uncle, in the very living room where the telly’s broadcasting Psychoville. “I’ve done a bad murder,” runs a typical line from this series, now running on BBC2 as part of Thursday’s comedy night. Logically, that means there are good ones.
Feelbad is here to stay. People want bleakness, darkness and depression. They crave unpalatable extremes. Where’s it going to end, you ask. We all know the answer. It’s going to end in death. Enjoy.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
The feelbad factor
July 12th, 2009 |
No Comments
Light, uplifting comedy has had its day. Give me the bleak, miserable stuff – it suits my crisis better
‘They give birth astride of a grave,” says Pozzo in Waiting For Godot. “The light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.” Close your eyes and picture yourself giving birth astride of a grave. You shiver and moan. Your baby, once you’ve squeezed it out, drops six feet onto the ground. Oh yes, your mother was right. You should have gone private.
Beckett’s magnificent line is an example of feelbad. Feelbad confronts you with the darkness, futility and awfulness of existence, but does it with such imagination, bravado, soul and wit that you find yourself exhilarated. Feelbad is The Smiths, feelgood The Smurfs. I rest my case.
Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York is a feelbad classic. I’ve seen it twice and urge you to do the same. Both times it gave me a mid-life crisis. But that’s a recommendation. I’m 56. A mid-life crisis means I’ll live to 112. It’s a masterpiece of anti-formulaic, genre-busting, unmarketable feelbad art, one that deserves the most off-putting advertising strapline to convey its uncompromising, uningratiating vision. I offer up, in all humility: “Delay your suicide two hours to see this film.”
If you haven’t seen it, look away now, as I’m about to divulge the plot. Here goes: a guy dies. That’s it. And, as the film makes clear, that’s not just the story of the guy in the film, it’s the story of everyone. Everyone dies. That’s the only story there is. Thank you, Charlie Kaufman. Thank you, Sammy Beckett.
En route to the Big D, our hero, a depressed, self-obsessed director and hypochondriac, conceives an epic theatre piece on the subject of (wait for it, wait for it) the brutal awfulness of human life. But he never finishes his theatre piece. Of course he doesn’t. This is feelbad. He just can’t get to the end, what with constant interferences from life itself – which have to be included in the piece – and his own dissatisfaction and decline. Decades pass without his completing his work. The film’s a sort of writer’s blockbuster.
You may have heard that it’s relentlessly bleak. This is not true. Feelbad doesn’t preclude warmth or a sly and delicate humour. (That’s why the ladies love Leonard Cohen.) I’m a professional comedy writer, so feelbad humour is a subject very close to my heart, which, of course, is just a few inches away from my wallet. I make my living supplying amusing stuff for popular consumption. I started my career writing jokes for the Two Ronnies, at a time when likeable, unchallenging, diminutive chaps like Ronnie Corbett and Ernie Wise were the giants of BBC Light Entertainment. You were instructed, when writing comedy, to provide three laughs a page. You were instructed, when performing it, to go out there and make them laugh. In other words, your motivation was to make the audience feel good, with comedy of a kind your maiden aunt would enjoy.
But Light Entertainment has transmuted, over the last three decades, into Heavy Entertainment. Darker it’s got and darker. Basil Fawlty had rage but was still unmistakably farcical and funny. David Brent? There were times when his awfulness was so real you had to cover your eyes. And Brent was nothing compared with the gallery of grotesques in The League of Gentlemen, or the savagery in the collected works of Chris Morris, or the cruelty in Nighty Night. It is as if the smile has been wiped off comedy’s face, to be replaced with an expression that’s darker but somehow more truthful.
We’re supposed, in these difficult times, to be crying out for comfort, for blandness, for kindness, for the smiley love of our mummies. But it doesn’t quite look like that from where I’m sitting. For a start, nobody has a maiden aunt any more. She’s doing unspeakable unmaidenly things with your bi-curious bachelor uncle, in the very living room where the telly’s broadcasting Psychoville. “I’ve done a bad murder,” runs a typical line from this series, now running on BBC2 as part of Thursday’s comedy night. Logically, that means there are good ones.
Feelbad is here to stay. People want bleakness, darkness and depression. They crave unpalatable extremes. Where’s it going to end, you ask. We all know the answer. It’s going to end in death. Enjoy.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Honduras talks end without accord
July 11th, 2009 |
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Two days of talks in Costa Rica aimed at ending the political crisis in Honduras have ended without agreement.
Mediators from the host country said the two sides had agreed to resume talks shortly but some regional leaders said they saw little sign of progress.
Ousted President Manuel Zelaya and interim leader Roberto Micheletti had refused to meet but held separate talks with Costa Rican President Oscar Arias.
Correspondents say the former allies’ positions remain far apart.
Mr Zelaya, who was removed from Honduras at gun point in a coup last month, continues to describe Mr Micheletti as a criminal, while Mr Micheletti’s interim government has said Mr Zelaya will be arrested if he tries to return to the country.
Both men left the talks on Thursday, leaving delegations behind to continue the discussions.
Mr Zelaya flew to the Dominican Republic, where he is hoping to gather more support, and Mr Micheletti has returned to Honduras.
On arriving back in the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, Mr Micheletti said: "We are in agreement with his [Mr Zelaya's] return here – but to be sent directly to the courts."
Shortly after his return, Mr Micheletti announced he had accepted the resignation of his de facto Foreign Minister, Enrique Ortez, for using racially offensive language about US President Barack Obama.
Mr Ortez was reported to have described Mr Obama as "negrito" – meaning "little black man" – which Mr Micheletti said was "a scandalous epithet".
‘Timid measures’
On Friday, Hugo Chavez, the President of Venezuela and one of Mr Zelaya’s key supporters, said the talks in Costa Rica were dead and that it was "horrible" to see the "usurper" Mr Micheletti being treated with deference by Mr Arias.
CRISIS TIMELINE- 28 June: Troops expel Zelaya; Micheletti becomes interim leader
- 29 June: US President Obama condemns the overthrow as illegal
- 4 July: Organization of American States suspends Honduras
- 5 July: Zelaya’s jet is turned back from Honduras, amid clashes
- 9 July: Micheletti leaves mediated talks in Costa Rica
Mr Chavez also criticised what he said were "timid measures" by the US in response to the crisis and demanded to know why they had not recalled their ambassador imposed sanctions.
The BBC’s Charles Scanlon in the region says much will now depend on what Washington decides to do next.
The US has already cut some aid to Honduras but has not exerted its full economic and diplomatic muscle, says our correspondent.
The political crisis erupted after Mr Zelaya attempted to hold a non-binding public consultation to ask people whether they supported moves to change the constitution.
Opponents said that could have led to the removal of the current one-term limit on serving as president and so paved the way for Mr Zelaya’s possible re-election.
He was forced out of Honduras at gunpoint on 28 June. </p
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Honduras crisis may spur Latin America coups: Castro
July 11th, 2009 |
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Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro predicted that Latin America would be swept by a wave of military coups if Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was not returned to power after his ouster in a June 28 coup. Castro, in a column published late on Friday on an Internet site run by Cuba’s communist
Who wants to be a CEO………?
June 15th, 2009 |
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I know the research below is based on US business leaders only, but alot of their insights are relevant to business leaders – and the odd political leader – in Europe so I thought this might be useful to share. Being released as we speak by my colleaugues in our corporate reputation team in New [...]
Explaining the Financial Crisis: Continuously Updated News Aggregation in Action
September 18th, 2008 |
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Scott framed his previous challenge to news sites in general terms: like Drudge, any site could use continuously updated aggregation to become a “destination for links to news of what’s going in the world.” But this kind of aggregation can be just as powerful when applied to specific stories or topics.
For example, you might have [...]
The feelbad factor
Light, uplifting comedy has had its day. Give me the bleak, miserable stuff – it suits my crisis better
‘They give birth astride of a grave,” says Pozzo in Waiting For Godot. “The light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.” Close your eyes and picture yourself giving birth astride of a grave. You shiver and moan. Your baby, once you’ve squeezed it out, drops six feet onto the ground. Oh yes, your mother was right. You should have gone private.
Beckett’s magnificent line is an example of feelbad. Feelbad confronts you with the darkness, futility and awfulness of existence, but does it with such imagination, bravado, soul and wit that you find yourself exhilarated. Feelbad is The Smiths, feelgood The Smurfs. I rest my case.
Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York is a feelbad classic. I’ve seen it twice and urge you to do the same. Both times it gave me a mid-life crisis. But that’s a recommendation. I’m 56. A mid-life crisis means I’ll live to 112. It’s a masterpiece of anti-formulaic, genre-busting, unmarketable feelbad art, one that deserves the most off-putting advertising strapline to convey its uncompromising, uningratiating vision. I offer up, in all humility: “Delay your suicide two hours to see this film.”
If you haven’t seen it, look away now, as I’m about to divulge the plot. Here goes: a guy dies. That’s it. And, as the film makes clear, that’s not just the story of the guy in the film, it’s the story of everyone. Everyone dies. That’s the only story there is. Thank you, Charlie Kaufman. Thank you, Sammy Beckett.
En route to the Big D, our hero, a depressed, self-obsessed director and hypochondriac, conceives an epic theatre piece on the subject of (wait for it, wait for it) the brutal awfulness of human life. But he never finishes his theatre piece. Of course he doesn’t. This is feelbad. He just can’t get to the end, what with constant interferences from life itself – which have to be included in the piece – and his own dissatisfaction and decline. Decades pass without his completing his work. The film’s a sort of writer’s blockbuster.
You may have heard that it’s relentlessly bleak. This is not true. Feelbad doesn’t preclude warmth or a sly and delicate humour. (That’s why the ladies love Leonard Cohen.) I’m a professional comedy writer, so feelbad humour is a subject very close to my heart, which, of course, is just a few inches away from my wallet. I make my living supplying amusing stuff for popular consumption. I started my career writing jokes for the Two Ronnies, at a time when likeable, unchallenging, diminutive chaps like Ronnie Corbett and Ernie Wise were the giants of BBC Light Entertainment. You were instructed, when writing comedy, to provide three laughs a page. You were instructed, when performing it, to go out there and make them laugh. In other words, your motivation was to make the audience feel good, with comedy of a kind your maiden aunt would enjoy.
But Light Entertainment has transmuted, over the last three decades, into Heavy Entertainment. Darker it’s got and darker. Basil Fawlty had rage but was still unmistakably farcical and funny. David Brent? There were times when his awfulness was so real you had to cover your eyes. And Brent was nothing compared with the gallery of grotesques in The League of Gentlemen, or the savagery in the collected works of Chris Morris, or the cruelty in Nighty Night. It is as if the smile has been wiped off comedy’s face, to be replaced with an expression that’s darker but somehow more truthful.
We’re supposed, in these difficult times, to be crying out for comfort, for blandness, for kindness, for the smiley love of our mummies. But it doesn’t quite look like that from where I’m sitting. For a start, nobody has a maiden aunt any more. She’s doing unspeakable unmaidenly things with your bi-curious bachelor uncle, in the very living room where the telly’s broadcasting Psychoville. “I’ve done a bad murder,” runs a typical line from this series, now running on BBC2 as part of Thursday’s comedy night. Logically, that means there are good ones.
Feelbad is here to stay. People want bleakness, darkness and depression. They crave unpalatable extremes. Where’s it going to end, you ask. We all know the answer. It’s going to end in death. Enjoy.