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Fortis gaat zijn reclameslogan ‘Here today. Where tomorrow?’ afvoeren. Op het internet werd er al snel ‘Here today. Gone tomorrow.’ van gemaakt.
Toch zegt Fortis dat het niet de grappen zijn, die hen overstag deed gaan. “De huidige marktsituatie van Fortis is de reden om nog eens goed te kijken naar wat je wilt zeggen in reclameboodschappen.”
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The Democrats have a pretty convincing case. The Democratic leadership and the Republican leadership each promised to deliver over half of their parties. The Democrats delivered. The Republicans failed. The Republicans are at fault for the failure of the bill because the majority of them voted against it—even though both Bush and McCain were backing the bill.
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To me, this sounds like the Republican Party’s lack of leadership is in large part responsible for the failure of this bill. Obama delivered his party. McCain and Bush combined could not deliver theirs. I don’t know whether you want to write it down to charisma, oratorical ability, moral credibility, or even relevant leadership experience—but the lesson is simple. Obama has something McCain lacks. Obama can get things done.
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While everyone knows the U.S. government is looking to bail Wall Street banks, few people realize that it’s also bailing out speculative oil and commodities traders in the process, fueling a sharp rise in energy prices.
Lehman Brothers and AIG held enormous trading positions in commodities markets. If those positions had been liquidated suddenly, the price of everything from wheat to oil would have collapsed. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the main regulator of U.S. commodity markets, allowed Wall Street’s investment banks and trading companies to take control of massive positions in commodities markets called swaps held by Lehman Brothers and AIG.
The result: Oil prices spiked by a whopping $16 per barrel on Monday, the largest single-day rise in oil prices ever.
“If speculators were forced to liquidate their positions, oil would easily be $65 to $75 per barrel by the time the liquidation was complete,” said Michael Masters, the founder of Atlanta-based hedge fund Masters Capital Management. Tuesday, oil was trading at $108.74 in midday trading in New York.
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Various readers wrote us, and it was confirmed by a detailed report on the call at DealBreaker, that the Treasury Department held a conference call this evening for analysts on the bailout bill.
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I’ve included the long form notes below, but some items jump out:
1. The tranching is a mere formality, and the Treasury boys as much as said so. They could take the $700 billion max as soon as the bill has passed,
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2) Waiting a couple of weeks because no one has any idea when or where the next bomb will blow up. In other words, all their doomsday scenarios about Black Monday were B.S. They screamed the check had to be written by Monday, but now they’re saying they actually have a few weeks before they need to cash it. Plus, this will allow them to “seek guidance” from GS, JPM, and other selfless public servants about where the money should be funneled.
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5. Of course the exec comp provisions are a joke. Who do you think is going to be hiring all those banking cmte staffers and newly retired congresspeople next year during the inevitable post-election turnover? Do you really think they’re going to vote to limit their salaries? Remember that for lots of people on the Hill (including elected reps), govt work is merely time you spend accumulating credentials in preparation for your real life’s work in the vastly richer private world.
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John McCain’s campaign claims the $700 billion bailout legislation failed in the House because Democrats, from Barack Obama to Nancy Pelosi, created a toxic, partisan environment.
An environment where 60% of Democrats voted in favor, and only 33% of Republicans. So clearly Democrats are to blame for the failure.
Right.
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The Federal Reserve will pump an additional $630 billion into the global financial system, flooding banks with cash to alleviate the worst banking crisis since the Great Depression.
The Fed increased its existing currency swaps with foreign central banks by $330 billion to $620 billion to make more dollars available worldwide. The Term Auction Facility, the Fed’s emergency loan program, will expand by $300 billion to $450 billion. The European Central Bank, the Bank of England and the Bank of Japan are among the participating authorities.
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ING is niet van plan om een bod uit te brengen om ABN Amro Nederland over te nemen van Fortis. Dat maakte de bankverzekeraar maandagavond bekend.
ING zegt de situatie die is ontstaan door de gedeeltelijke nationalisatie van Fortis “zorgvuldig” te hebben bestudeerd.
Ondertiteling: “Als fortis al het geld niet bij elkaar kon krijgen, waarom denk je dat wij dat wel kunnen?”
The dow tumbled 7%, and I saw a guess that would be about 1500b of market cap lost. Other indexes went way down as well (aex 8.75%, nasdaq 9%, S&P 9%, etc).
But hey, that’s not tax payer money, right? That’s just pension funds so nobody… oh wait.
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The United States needs to do more to develop an offensive cyberwar capability rather than just focus on defending its networks from attack, says the chairman of the House cybersecurity subcommittee.
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“Warfare is forever changed. … Never again will we see major warfare without a strong cyber component executed as part of it,” the Rhode Island Democrat added, citing the assault on Georgian government Web sites that accompanied Russia’s invasion last month.
Mr. Langevin, chairman of the House Homeland Security subcommittee on emerging threats, cybersecurity and science and technology and a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, also called on the White House to declassify much more of its Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI) and said the Department of Homeland Security should be stripped of its lead role in defending the nation’s computer networks.
Let me translate from “politician” to something you can understand: “look at me, I’ve got a committee and I want it to be bigger!”
People have started sending me their own work on the failed bail-out… thanks, Mat!
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The House on Monday defeated a $700 billion emergency rescue package, ignoring urgent pleas from President Bush and bipartisan congressional leaders to quickly bail out the staggering financial industry.
Stocks plummeted on Wall Street even before the 228-205 vote to reject the bill was announced on the House floor.
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If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself.
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This diskette has officially blown my mind.
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A very quick and incredibly surprising ending to our work here: On Sunday morning we revisited the spot to see the results of the night, and when we reached the square we couldnt believe our eyes: All the coins were gone. Not one eurocent was left on the square. We were expecting everything, but not this fast and this complete. After the initial shock we found out the following: In the morning somebody showed up with a couple of plastic bags and started putting the coins into his bags. Apparently one of the neighbours saw this and thought this person is “stealing the artwork”, and called the police.
They showed up, talked to the guy with the bags, who had no problem with leaving everything right there. Somehow the police must have thought that is not enough to protect the artwork, and after trying to reach the owner of it, they decided to get into action themselves. They called a city cleaning company and cleaned up the whole square with brooms, and brought all the coins to a “safe” room at the police department.
So not more than 20 hours of completion of the work it was gone again already. And it was not removed by homeless people, not completely messed up by the youth coming back from clubbing. No, it was cleaned up by the authority, due to a big misunderstanding, to help and protect us and our work. Thank you!
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Italian bloggers are up in arms at a court ruling early this year that suggests almost all Italian blogs are illegal. This month, a senior Italian politician went one step further, warning that most web activity is likely to be against the law.
The story begins back in May, when a judge in Modica (in Sicily) found local historian and author Carlo Ruta guilty of the crime of “stampa clandestina” – or publishing a “clandestine” newspaper – in respect of his blog. The judge ruled that since the blog had a headline, that made it an online newspaper, and brought it within the law’s remit.
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So is this just a storm in a teacup? After all, if this law potentially affects some 5 million Italian websites, there are at least 4,999,999 that have not yet been taken down. Why was Carlo Ruta singled out?
One clue lies in the location of the court that found him guilty (Sicily). Another, in the fact that his blog contained much detailed research of links between politics and the mafia – always a sensitive subject in Italy.
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Top bankers couldn’t simply ignore the computer models, because after the last round of big financial losses, regulators now require them to monitor their risk positions. Indeed, if the models say a firm’s risk has increased, the firm must either reduce its bets or set aside more capital as a cushion in case things go wrong.
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“There was a willful designing of the systems to measure the risks in a certain way that would not necessarily pick up all the right risks,” said Gregg Berman, the co-head of the risk-management group at RiskMetrics, a software company spun out of JPMorgan. “They wanted to keep their capital base as stable as possible so that the limits they imposed on their trading desks and portfolio managers would be stable.”
One way they did this, Mr. Berman said, was to make sure the computer models looked at several years of trading history instead of just the last few months. The most important models calculate a measure known as Value at Risk — the amount of money you might lose in the worst plausible situation. They try to figure out what that worst case is by looking at how volatile markets have been in the past.
But since the markets were placid for several years (as mortgage bankers busily lent money to anyone with a pulse), the computers were slow to say that risk had increased as defaults started to rise.
It was like a weather forecaster in Houston last weekend talking about the onset of Hurricane Ike by giving the average wind speed for the previous month.
But many on Wall Street did even worse, as Mr. Berman describes it. They continued to trade very complex securities concocted by their most creative bankers even though their risk management systems weren’t able to understand the details of what they owned.
