New verb
Bob Morris @ 23:13 Category: Credit crisis;
November 20, 2008
VW Jetta TDI diesel wins Green Car of Year
Bob Morris @ 20:26 Category: Unfiled;
Yes, a diesel. This at the Los Angeles Auto Show. It gets 41 mpg and shows that “clean diesel has arrived.”
Jetta sales are up 1% in the US this year, while car sales overall have plummeted. MSRP is $21,990.
Give the people what they want, and they will buy it.
Citigroup. Ashes to ashes. Born in subprime
Bob Morris @ 15:37 Category: Credit crisis Tags: Citigroup, subprime;
It’s too bad that tens of thousands more will be losing their jobs at Citigroup. The stock is cratering and Citi will cease to exist soon and then be scavenged by vultures.
Citi wasn’t just stung by subprime, they had their birth in subprime. Sandy Weil built the empire starting with some real stomach-turning scumbag subprime outfits in the South.
A Tale of Two Citis.
Columbia Journalism Review
Dean Starkman Wed 3 Oct 2007
It took an obscure magazine to reveal how Sandy Weill built his empire on subprime lending. Why?
Let’s face it, only the likes of Commercial Credit Corp., of Baltimore, would sell 40 percent loans to barely literate residents of Mississippi’s Noxubee and Lowndes* counties, tacking on credit insurance to bring the rate up to 70 percent. (Never mind what credit insurance is. Just don’t buy it.) Or maybe Primerica, of Atlanta, which Tennessee regulators accused of “seeking to deceive and confuse” customers through “a system of deliberate evasion.” Or maybe the truly rancid Associates First Capital Corp., of Irving, Texas, so corrupt that it employed a “designated forger,” an ex-employee told ABC’s Prime Time Live. I mean, who would go near a bunch like that?
Whoops! My bad. Sanford I. Weill, the former chairman and CEO of Citigroup Inc., Fortune’s third-most admired megabank last year, got his start buying Commercial Credit in 1986, then bought Primerica in 1988 before merging with Citicorp a decade later.
Banking On Misery: Citigroup, Wall Street, and the Fleecing of the South
Institute for Southern Studies and Southern Exposure magazine
Michael Hudson. June 5, 2003
Citigroup the biggest financial corporation in the world. And under the leadership of CEO Sandy Weill, a surprising share of its fortunes come from suspect deals that target vulnerable consumers with exorbitant interest rates, hidden fees, and practices that fair-lending advocates say “skirt the edge of the law.”
“It’s a pretty lowdown company that would take advantage of the working poor like this,” says Tom Methvin, an attorney with Beasley, Allen, an Alabama firm that represents hundreds of borrowers who claim Citi did them wrong. “Behind the curtains, they prey on the most vulnerable people in our society.”
Ship of Fools. The Economist on the Republican Party.
Bob Morris @ 14:58 Category: Unfiled Tags: conservatism;
No doubt the lunatic fringe that controls the Republican Party will foam at the mouth at this Economist op-ed about how they are destroying themselves. Not only can they not refute the obvious facts and conclusions in the article, they wouldn’t know how to. Why? Because they are proudly and defiantly anti-intellectual. Which is precisely one of their primary problems and what The Economist points out.
Political parties die from the head down
There are any number of reasons for the Republican Party’s defeat on November 4th. But high on the list is the fact that the party lost the battle for brains… John McCain did best among uneducated voters in Appalachia and the South.
The Republicans lost the battle of ideas even more comprehensively than they lost the battle for educated votes, marching into the election armed with nothing more than slogans.
Republicanism’s anti-intellectual turn is devastating for its future.
Another reason is the degeneracy of the conservative intelligentsia itself, a modern-day version of the 1970s liberals it arose to do battle with: trapped in an ideological cocoon, defined by its outer fringes, ruled by dynasties and incapable of adjusting to a changed world.
Andrew Sullivan echoes many of these themes. A genuine conservative, he wants to take the party back from the deliberately and willfully ignorant who control it now.
One wonders what William Buckley, a genuine intellectual, one of the founders of modern conservatism and someone who relished the debate of ideas, would think of the Republican Party now.
A vast, chicken wing conspiracy
Bob Morris @ 14:25 Category: Unfiled Tags: biofuel;
It’s not left wing or right wing, but rather a chicken wing conspiracy. That’s what the biofuel industry thinks.
Thoughts on a new economy
DJ @ 08:30 Category: Unfiled;
DJ continues his series of posts
(Wiki image.)
One fundamental principle of economics is that there are too many variables, so you measure what’s most important and ignore the rest. In recent times, what’s considered important has been growth– increase in economic activity. As a result, we measure the economic health of a nation or economy by its GDP (Gross Domestic Product). We’re interested not in how many resources an economy has, but how much money it generates– theoretically, the amount of wealth created.
Like any other simplification, this model has flaws. But as resource preservation and efficiency become more important, this growth model of economics becomes more than flawed: it points us in the wrong direction. The graphic above amply demonstrates that the focus of this system is government and the market. Lots of people, from Marxists to Liberation Theologians and Engaged Buddhists, have called for a new approach to economics. The problem is, in order to change the economic system, we have to change the math by which we measure that system– and few people have gone to that extent,
The most common approach to measuring and understanding GDP is the expenditure method:
GDP = consumption + gross investment + government spending + (exports ? imports), or, GDP = C + I + G + (X-M).
So increasing consumption, investment, government spending and exports is good.
This model does not take into account either the increasing scarcity of resources or the environmental cost of consumption. In that sense, it fails the needs of our post-modern world, in which environmental degradation (in the form of global warming) threatens our very survival, and in which all economic activity, no matter how wasteful, is considered good.
Rathert than maximizing unfettered growth, an economic model for post-modern society should:
- Maximize quality of life (as opposed to merely standard of living)
- Maximize energy efficiency
- Minimize the overall consumption of scarce resources (in other words, it should promote recycling)
- Minimize impact on the environment
This suggests a measurement system that would factor in a non-economic quality of life such as the UN HDI or the Happiness Index, or some combination thereof. It would deduct waste and environmental cost from economic activity.
At the risk of repeating the existing error of simplfication, suppose our New Economic Index (NEI) looked more like this:
NEI = [(consumption - raw materials) + (government spending - government overhead) + exports - imports] * HDI
This formula deducts the raw materials used for both raw materials and energy. It also suggests that, as with a business, not all spending by government is good. Lastly, it recognizes the economic value of quality of life: as literacy and infrastructure increase, so does our economic measurement.
Such a model would promote local production, which minimizes the energy cost of moving goods and services from producer to consumer. Yet in cases where an item could be produced efficiently enough to offset the energy cost of transportation– in other words where the local market cannot efficiently provide an item such as a computer– the formula would favor more distant production.
I’m an accountant not an economist, and I’m not suggesting this primitive equation will replace a century of macroeconomic thought by minds greater than mine. But it does suggest two premises: (1) what we measure we maximize, and (2) the way we measure our economy is not the only way to do so.
Day Without a Gay
Bob Morris @ 05:11 Category: LGBT rights;
On December 10, 2008 the gay community will take a historic stance against hatred by donating love to a variety of different causes.
On December 10, you are encouraged not to call in sick to work. You are encouraged to call in “gay”–and donate your time to service!
