Moving to Wordpress

Wasatch Economics

Germans realize their banking system is in trouble

Credit Writedowns tells us that

"On Friday, the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) leaked a bombshell - a confidential report by Bafin, the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority, found that German banks were sitting on over 800 billion euros in toxic assets...This new account has been all over the news in Germany because Germans are becoming quite frightened about the health of their banking system and are angry because the German economy was largely absent from the bubbles of the past decade. Germans are beginning to ask quite openly why banks like Commerzbank and the state-owned land banks as well as institutions like Hypo Real Estate are being rescued with taxpayer money."

If the populace is just beginning to demand answers they are a long way from resolution of the problem. Perhaps the alleged absence of bubbles in the German economy was actually reckless lending preventing precipitous decline in the health of Germany's economy. German banks have been highly leveraged...as I have mentioned here several times.

Virtual think tanks?

Found at Haft of the Spear:

THE THINK TANK IS DEAD
Long Live the Think Tank

By Michael Tanji

Whither the brick-and-mortar think tank in an age of free information and globally accessible intellectual discourse? Very well, thank you. While virtual intellectual efforts are taking place on-line, the "virtual think tank" that is able to compete with its physical-world brethren is still in beta release. This is not, however, a situation that will remain static. Early efforts that assembled people virtually for intellectual pursuits have produced promising results, and as people become more comfortable working in virtual environments such successes are likely to grow. Virtual think tanks have distinct advantages and disadvantages over traditional think tanks that extend beyond the technical and into the political and social, and it will take more than a generational shift to bring about meaningful change. The immediate future is likely to produce a synergy between traditional houses of public policy production and the emerging "Think Tank 2.0" approach.

See Calculated Risk and offshoots for an example of what Tanji is talking about.

Factoid of the day

" In 2002, the total number of undergraduate degrees granted in Arabic in all U.S. colleges and universities—yes, all of them—was six."

Bizarre...that would make doing business in the Middle East for US companies rather difficult.

On the other hand, there's this(from the same link):

"In 2003, two alleged Iranian agents caught photographing the No. 7 subway line beneath the East River were surprised to find themselves confronted by a cop who spoke fluent Persian. They quickly left the country. In 2003, a young undercover officer born in Bangladesh penetrated a small group of angry young immigrants, two of whom had started plotting to blow up targets in Staten Island and the subway station at Herald Square.

When it comes to disrupting potential terrorist plots, cops can use simple techniques out of bounds to the CIA or even the FBI. Cohen's detectives, for instance, might follow a suspect onto a subway and have a uniformed cop collar him for an infraction as minor as sitting on two seats at a time. Once he's taken down to the station, he may be faced with the threat that his friends will find out he was there and think he's talked. "Mostly, we don't hear from those guys again," says one of Cohen's senior operatives."

Crisis in the making?

CDC says too late to contain U.S. flu outbreak

"WASHINGTON, April 24 (Reuters) - The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Friday it was too late to contain the swine flu outbreak in the United States. CDC acting director Dr. Richard Besser told reporters in a telephone briefing it was likely too late to try to contain the outbreak, by vaccinating, treating or isolating people. "There are things that we see that suggest that containment is not very likely," he said. He said the U.S. cases and Mexican cases are likely the same virus. "So far the genetic elements that we have looked at are the same." But Besser said it was unclear why the virus was causing so many deaths in deaths in Mexico and such mild disease in the United States."

Essentially, US cases could turn deadly any time...people with weakened immune systems will be at great risk.