Mish has charts and a detailed explanation.

What’s striking to me is the amazing calm before the storm. That decreased volatility was like being in the eye of a hurricane, and somehow not knowing it.

The short version of this story is that banks do not trust each other, so they are unwilling to lend to each other except at an unusually wide premium. But why should they trust each other?

The title to this post is from the source document - which is from the Federal Bank of San Francisco…

We are living in unsettled and unsettling times indeed.

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AKA “torture”

In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News.

At the time, [participants in the meetings] included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

The “highly placed sources” doing the leaking could be principled opponents of torture or this could just be more surfacing of shadowy turf wars between the various intelligence agencies. Or both. Or something else. They live down the rabbit hole, most of us don’t, so it’s difficult to tell what’s really going on, and more importantly, why.

However, it’s good this has been leaked and it certainly sounds like war crimes were ok’ed by them, doesn’t it?

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“He didn’t have a lot of experience in running a presidential campaign, did he?”

– Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, interviewed on Good Morning America, when asked if Sen. Barack Obama had enough experience to be president.

Obama has run a brilliant campaign while Clinton, by virtually any measure, has badly mismanaged her campaign, with the latest polls showing Obama now down just six points in Pennsylvania, a state where Clinton used to enjoy a massive double-digit lead.

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“Russia has gone back to being a colony for former KGB agents, who’ve changed in name only — a fuel-rich colony for a small group of oil and gas merchants who give nothing of their riches to anyone living outside the capital.”

– Journalist Yelena Tregubova, who was forced to seek asylum in Britain after receiving death threats for her reporting in Russia.

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For some, this will be the deciding reason to get active now and do something about climate change. Before it’s too late…

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