TheMommyBlog

Friday, March 05, 2010 Business, Bad Mood Dude, Family, Internet, News, Politics, Technology

This is just a portion of an article by Paul Craig Roberts, former university professor, Wall Street Journal editor, and assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest book, How the Economy Was Lost: The War of the Worlds, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press.

My heart sank with every paragraph, as each point was identified, explained, and sank in. It’s like having a game of charades replaced by a set of progressively more informative bullet points with snapshots from your families’ lives appended.

I would love to poke holes in it and identify it as political propaganda, but I have seen, first-hand, too much of what’s described unfold. This is so much worse than accepting the previous, prevalent belief that we would never be able attain our parents’ generation’s standard of living.

Doomed by the Myths of Free Trade
How the Economy was Lost

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

The American economy has gone away. It is not coming back until free trade myths are buried six feet under.

...The demise of America’s productive economy left the US economy dependent on finance, in which the US remained dominant because the dollar is the reserve currency. With the departure of factories, finance went in new directions. Mortgages, which were once held in the portfolios of the issuer, were securitized. Individual mortgage debts were combined into a “security.” The next step was to strip out the interest payments to the mortgages and sell them as derivatives, thus creating a third debt instrument based on the original mortgages.

In pursuit of ever more profits, financial institutions began betting on the success and failure of various debt instruments and by implication on firms. They bought and sold collateral debt swaps. A buyer pays a premium to a seller for a swap to guarantee an asset’s value. If an asset “insured” by a swap falls in value, the seller of the swap is supposed to make the owner of the swap whole. The purchaser of a swap is not required to own the asset in order to contract for a guarantee of its value. Therefore, as many people could purchase as many swaps as they wished on the same asset. Thus, the total value of the swaps greatly exceeds the value of the assets.*

The next step is for holders of the swaps to short the asset in order to drive down its value and collect the guarantee. As the issuers of swaps were not required to reserve against them, and as there is no limit to the number of swaps, the payouts could easily exceed the net worth of the issuer.

This was the most shameful and most mindless form of speculation. Gamblers were betting hands that they could not cover. The US regulators fled their posts. The American financial institutions abandoned all integrity. As a consequence, American financial institutions and rating agencies are trusted nowhere on earth.

The US government should never have used billions of taxpayers’ dollars to pay off swap bets as it did when it bailed out the insurance company AIG. This was a stunning waste of a vast sum of money. The federal government should declare all swap agreements to be fraudulent contracts, except for a single swap held by the owner of the asset. Simply wiping out these fraudulent contracts would remove the bulk of the vast overhang of “troubled” assets that threaten financial markets.

The billions of taxpayers’ dollars spent buying up subprime derivatives were also wasted. The government did not need to spend one dime. All government needed to do was to suspend the mark-to-market rule. This simple act would have removed the solvency threat to financial institutions by allowing them to keep the derivatives at book value until financial institutions could ascertain their true values and write them down over time.

Taxpayers, equity owners, and the credit standing of the US government are being ruined by financial shysters who are manipulating to their own advantage the government’s commitment to mark-to-market and to the “sanctity of contracts.” Multi-trillion dollar “bailouts” and bank nationalization are the result of the government’s inability to respond intelligently.

Two more simple acts would have completed the rescue without costing the taxpayers one dollar: an announcement from the Federal Reserve that it will be lender of last resort to all depository institutions including money market funds, and an announcement reinstating the uptick rule.

The uptick rule was suspended or repealed a couple of years ago in order to permit hedge funds and shyster speculators to rip-off American equity owners. The rule prevented short-selling any stock that did not move up in price during the previous day. In other words, speculators could not make money at others’ expense by ganging up on a stock and short-selling it day after day.

As a former Treasury official, I am amazed that the US government, in the midst of the worst financial crises ever, is content for short-selling to drive down the asset prices that the government is trying to support. No bailout or stimulus plan has any hope until the uptick rule is reinstated…

Friday, August 21, 2009 Me, Me, Me, Other people who write, Social Communities and Groups, Technology

If the name fits… ahahahaha! At first I typed “bane.” Lord help me.

I’m speaking on a panel with the ever lovely Beth Blecherman of TechMamas and Silicon Valley Moms Group at the Chicks Who Click conference in Palo Alto tomorrow!

Overview
We are Chicks who Click—Minds that are creative, connected and looking to collaborate – with dynamic women- to be the best in our fields through social media. Chicks Who Click not only know tools such as blogging, social networks, conversations and communities, but understand the smartest ways to use them to achieve personal and career goals.  We are also educating our communities on the importance of encouraging girls and young women to pursue careers in technology.

At every Chicks Who Click event, we will share how to make your relationships count, we will empower you to use your social toolbox and we will help you refine your personal brand.

What
A one-day Social Media Conference for Women incorporating networking, education and empowerment with like-minded women, achieving great heights in the area of Social Media.

Who
Chicks who Click is a community of women that are growing and flourishing through Social Media. Our vision was to create a conference, a think tank, if you will, for women to come together to listen, teach, experiment and connect with like-minded women face to face, stay connected through Twitter, Blogging, Facebook or Flickr, and to empower each other in achieving great heights in our careers and journeys; and lastly, to collaborate our efforts as women in the male-dominated field of technology.

Visit Us Online!
Follow Denise Smith on Twitter @Deetells
Become a fan on Facebook!
Follow the Conference on Twitter at #CWC09
Read our Blog at chickswhoclickblog.net

Thursday, January 15, 2009 Other people who write, Technology

I don’t subscribe to many email lists; in fact, I think I can count on one and a half hands the number to which I’ve intentionally and usefully subscribed, but I read an incredibly insightful post one day and thought, oh hell, might as well have SOME zen in my life. I subscribed to Zen Habits last week and it’s been paying off nearly every day.

Today’s post is brilliant: a list of features he’d like to see in GMail. He is already a huge fan, and given the improvements they’ve made over the years, thinks they do listen.

Google Features I’d Like To See
by Leo Babauta

• Ability to tell other Gmail users that I’m busy and can’t be bothered with more email, similar to how your status shows in Gmail chat, but appears when they’re about to email me. If they decide to email me anyway, despite my “Do Not Disturb” status, they will be warned that the email probably won’t be read, will be archived and become dusty, and that they’ll have to send a follow up message to me in a few days because I’ll have completely flaked on replying.
• The ability to remind you to follow up on an email if someone hasn’t replied and you’ve marked it as needing a follow up. Also, if you enable auto-follow-up, it’ll automatically follow up with a short, polite email. Or maybe it’ll just play a small coughing sound in the other person’s Gmail: “Ahem…”
• Phone answering service. Should be able to converse with the caller, and sound like me, and route any relevant info to Gmail. If the caller is a telemarketer, the Google service should try to sell them something, such as my book, and be very pushy about it. Don’t take “no” for an answer, Gphone!
• A button similar to “Report Spam” for when you receive a spam email, except that it says “Spam Back” and when you press it, the spammer receives all the spam you’ve received in the last 90 days.
• Yet another similar button that says “Report Joke/Chain” so that anytime someone keeps sending you joke emails, chain emails, or sappy forwarded emails, these are automatically filtered out (like spam is). Real emails from the same sender would be let through the filter. In addition, you can enable an automatic reply to the sender of chain/joke/forwarded emails that informs them that they really should pause longer before forwarding messages to people, as it fills up people’s inboxes needlessly, the blonde jokes weren’t very funny in the first place, and no, Bill Gates isn’t really tracking this chain email and won’t give you a million dollars for forwarding it.

It reminds me of the old days, managing the software for a foundation and listening to requests for new features, and thinking, “You want to do this… without people? What, you stay home and collect the paycheck?” He gets carried away, but I swear to peanuts if any of this becomes available I will be adding features like Count Dracula.

Heh. At the end of the post, is says, “Post written automatically by Google autoblogger.”

I love it.