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IMF Europe Chief Antonio Borges Quits One Year Into Job Amid Debt Crisis
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The head of the International Monetary Fund’s European department quit less than a year into the job and was replaced by an in-house economist.
Antonio Borges, a Portuguese native whose unit oversees bailouts in the euro region, left for “personal reasons,” the Washington-based IMF said today in an e-mailed statement. His successor is Reza Moghadam, the fund’s director of strategy.
For “personal reasons”… yeah, right. “Sounds fishy” doesn’t even begin to describe it.
Ballmer: We Will ALWAYS Be In The Windows Era
[Quote]:
The questioner asked what Microsoft thought about the contention that we’re in the "post PC era."
Ballmer started off in his usual enthusiastic fashion: "We are in the Windows era — we were, we are, and we always will be."
We are at war with Eurasia. We have always been at war with Eurasia.
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Political investing in the news
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I had given a talk at Larry [Lessig]’s weekly seminar in the spring about our (Jens and mine) work on this issue, in which the general message was that members of Congress overall are not very good investors, and that existing investigations of “insider trading” in Congress (and ethics issues more generally) suffer from a general bias toward finding wrongdoing even when the evidence is more ambiguous.
(…)
The current discussion talks a lot about how Congress has exempted itself from insider trading laws, but I think (not being a securities law expert) that is kind of bogus. They are just as exempt from insider trading laws as I am. It’s simply that the SEC regulations on insider trading apply to information held by corporate insiders, but don’t address other types of information that might be gathered by politicians, academics, journalists, bankers, bloggers, hedge fund managers, and others who are in a position to learn about market developments. It seems like an exaggeration to say (as Schweizer does here) that members of Congress “have legislated themselves as untouchable as a political class.” Also, there are ethical restrictions in both houses of Congress against profiting from your political position. Perhaps these should be enforced more strictly, but this places members of Congress roughly in the same category as journalists, who learn a lot of stuff about the market but are prohibited by self-regulation from profiting from it — except that members of Congress are required to disclose their investments while journalists are not.
(…)
I wish we could count on the public to accurately identify instances of corruption, but I think the rewards to “finding” wrongdoing (and reporting on it) are large enough, and the rewards to arguing otherwise small enough, that the public will generally conclude the worst whether or not there is legitimate cause for concern.
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Because if there’s one institution you can trust when it comes to handling Child abuse…
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The Roman Catholic Church is willing to partner with American educational institutions to educate the public about child sex abuse after the Penn State scandal, according to the head of the U.S. church.
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I guess that’s why they called it Envy
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Congress Pushes Back On Healthier School Lunches
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Who needs leafy greens and carrots when pizza and french fries will do?
In an effort many 9-year-olds will cheer, Congress wants pizza and french fries to stay on school lunch lines and is fighting the Obama administration’s efforts to take unhealthy foods out of schools.
[..]
This time around, food companies that produce frozen pizzas for schools, the salt industry and potato growers requested the changes and lobbied Congress.
Well, it could be worse – the US has a history of calling people who give out free breakfast to kids communist outlaws bent on overthrowing the U.S. government.
iPhone 3GS Outsold Every Android Smartphone in Q3
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As we have repeatedly noted, there are many metrics with which to pass some kind of arbitrary judgement on who is beating whom in the smartphone market, but the reality is that Apple is playing a different game than OEMs like Samsung, HTC, and Motorola Mobility. The company’s goals are also far, far different from Google’s when it comes to that company’s Android platform.
Bullet Hits White House Window
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The Secret Service is investigating how a bullet hit an exterior window of the White House. A round was stopped by ballistic glass behind the building’s historic exterior glass.
The Secret Service also tells News4 that one additional round was also found on the exterior of the White House. Both rounds were discovered Tuesday morning.
[..]
Investigators found an assault rifle in a car abandoned near the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge. It was not an AK-47, as suggested in previous reports, and the owner of the gun is unknown at this time.
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Best self-portrait ever
Europe Bans X-Ray Body Scanners Used at U.S. Airports
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The European Union on Monday prohibited the use of X-ray body scanners in European airports, parting ways with the U.S. Transportation Security Administration, which has deployed hundreds of the scanners as a way to screen millions of airline passengers for explosives hidden under clothing.
The European Commission, which enforces common policies of the EU’s 27 member countries, adopted the rule “in order not to risk jeopardizing citizens’ health and safety.”
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Scalia and Thomas dine with healthcare law challengers as court takes case
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The day the Supreme Court gathered behind closed doors to consider the politically divisive question of whether it would hear a challenge to President Obama’s healthcare law, two of its justices, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, were feted at a dinner sponsored by the law firm that will argue the case before the high court.
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Personal profit from crisis is probably the reason.
Or running from a crime scene..
He may not be the criminal though. Sounds like he was wobbly on the corporatist message.