Slam. Slam. Slam. Slam. Like a scene from a gathering of Mafia dons, the doors of 30 black Lincolns slammed shut as their besuited occupants stepped out into a Manhattan downpour – and into a global financial storm. That storm broke yesterday, with stock markets tumbling around the world. In London, the FTSE 100 plunged almost 4 per cent to 5204.2. Scotland’s banking giants were among the biggest victims. HBOS slumped 17.5 per cent; Royal Bank of Scotland lost 12.2 per cent. In the US, the Dow Jones industrial average suffered its biggest fall since 9/11. The collapse effectively began at 6pm last Friday. The place: the offices of the New York Federal Reserve. The occasion: an emergency meeting of the most powerful figures in American banking and finance aimed at staving off a massive bank collapse. Those who stepped from their limousines to be present included Richard Fuld, the chairman and chief executive of Lehman Brothers; John Mack, the head of Morgan Stanley; Jamie Dimon, of JP Morgan Chase; Vikram Pandit, of Citigroup; Lloyd Blankfein, of Goldman Sachs; Bob Diamond, the head of Barclays Capital; and senior representatives from Mellon Bank and Royal Bank of Scotland. […]
One fifth of sovereign wealth funds are not accountable to their domestic legislatures, according to a new survey supported by the International Monetary Fund. The survey of 20 such funds found that 21 per cent were not accountable, while 58 per cent reported to their legislatures through a board chair or minister of finance. The survey was conducted under the auspices of the IMF by the international working group of sovereign wealth funds (IWG) as part of a process towards drafting a set of principles for them. Following a summit in Santiago, Chile, this month, the IWG reached agreement on a draft set of 24 principles expected to be unveiled next month. The push for a voluntary code of conduct comes amid increased scrutiny of the role of such funds in the global financial markets. US politicians have grown more vocal about their nature, as several have increased their stakes in US companies. The survey found that 65 per cent of the entities are funded by mineral royalties, mainly oil. They generally do not engage in macro-economic policies, except in cases where monies are transferred to their budget in special cases, or to the central bank […]
WASHINGTON — No one cog in the federal government’s machine of financial regulation let down the country by failing to prevent the latest shakeout on Wall Street. The entire system did. ‘They just haven’t done a particularly good job,’ said James Barth, a senior finance fellow at the Milken Institute, a nonpartisan research group based in Los Angeles. Kathleen Day, a spokeswoman for the Center for Responsible Lending, a consumer-oriented research group, explained the regulatory lapses more starkly: ‘The job of regulators is that when the party’s in full swing, make sure the partygoers drink responsibly,’ she said. ‘Instead, they let everyone drink as much as they wanted and then handed them the car keys.’ Analysts and politicians are raising serious questions about the nation’s financial regulatory system, which dates to the New Deal era. On Monday, one Wall Street bank, Lehman Brothers, filed for bankruptcy protection and another, Merrill Lynch, sought comfort by selling itself to Bank of America for $50 billion. Earlier this year, the government helped enable the sale of faltering investment bank Bear Stearns to J.P. Morgan Chase, and more recently took over mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Such […]
What makes people vote Republican? Why in particular do working class and rural Americans usually vote for pro-business Republicans when their economic interests would seem better served by Democratic policies? We psychologists have been examining the origins of ideology ever since Hitler sent us Germany’s best psychologists, and we long ago reported that strict parenting and a variety of personal insecurities work together to turn people against liberalism, diversity, and progress. But now that we can map the brains, genes, and unconscious attitudes of conservatives, we have refined our diagnosis: conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death. People vote Republican because Republicans offer ‘moral clarity’-a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate. Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world. Diagnosis is a pleasure. It is a thrill to solve a mystery from scattered clues, and it is empowering to know what makes others tick. In the psychological community, where almost all of us are politically liberal, our diagnosis of conservatism gives […]
As he leaves Iraq this week, the outgoing US commander, General David Petraeus, is sounding far less optimistic than the Republican presidential candidate, John McCain, about the American situation in Iraq. General Petraeus says that it remains ‘fragile’, recent security gains are ‘not irreversible’ and ‘this is not the sort of struggle where you take a hill, plant the flag and go home to a victory parade… it’s not a war with a simple slogan.’ Compare this with Sarah Palin’s belief that ‘victory in Iraq is wholly in sight’ and her criticism of Barack Obama for not using the word ‘victory’. The Republican contenders have made these claims of success for the ‘surge’ – the American reinforcements sent last year – although they are demonstrably contradicted by the fact that the US has to keep more troops, some 138,000, in Iraq today than beforehand. Another barometer of the true state of security in Iraq is the inability of the 4.7 million refugees, one in six of the population, who fled for their lives inside and outside Iraq, to return to their homes. Ongoing violence is down, but Iraq is still the most dangerous country in the world. On […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
