“Expresso, Excetera!”

I know you’re all curious about the effects of drugs. Here’s a totally realistic simulation…

NOTE: Do NOT consume any drugs before viewing this website.

Apparently, Lombard Street was turned into CandyLand for a day.

Rate that banks pay the Federal Reserve to borrow money for up to 90 days, “No Questions Asked”: 0.5%.

Rate that banks pay depositors for regular savings accounts: 0.05%.

Rate that banks charge borrowers for borrowing money with many “questions asked”: 5.25%.

Nice work, if you can get it.

Apropos of this post, this:

I may well have flown on ship 493 on a trip from Boston to Tampa, Orlando, or Fort Lauderdale in my youth. The Boeing 727-200 was long a workhorse of Delta’s fleet. It’s sad to see what’s become of her.

(I created the graphic above from a photo on Airliners.net and another on a photographer’s Flickr site which, I’m sad to say, I’ve lost track of.)

“Joester5” shares his method of eliminating Google’s sidebar ads in your emails. Just include a few “catastrophic” words like “9/11” or “suicide” and the ad space will remain blank.

Of course I am already blocking all Gmail ads (at least in Firefox) using WebMail Ad Blocker, but this method allows you to explore your darker side.

via BoingBoing

Writing in Vanity Fair, Nina Munk explores Harvard’s staggering endowment losses in Fiscal 2009 (the amount they lost that year is about DOUBLE the total amount of the endowment in 1993):

last December [2008], the university sold $2.5 billion worth of bonds, increasing its total debt to just over $6 billion…

To be clear, even if you’d tried hard, you could not have picked a worse time to sell bonds than December 2008; that was the precise moment when credit markets seized up. But Harvard, it seems, had no choice. Unwilling to sell its assets at fire-sale prices, it needed immediate cash to cover, among other things, what my sources say was approximately a $1 billion unrealized loss from interest-rate swaps…

Those swaps, put in place under Harvard’s then president, Lawrence “Larry” Summers, in the early 2000s, were intended to protect, or hedge, the university against rising interest rates on all the money it had borrowed. The idea was simple: if interest rates went up, the swaps would bring in enough money to cover Harvard’s higher debt payments.

Instead, interest rates went down. And for reasons no one can explain to me, even as interest rates were plunging in 2007 and 2008, the university simply forgot, or neglected, or chose not to cancel its swaps—with the result that Harvard wound up facing that $1 billion loss! Whose responsibility was that? Where were Harvard’s chief financial officer and treasurer while all this was going on?

When you remember that the so-called “Masters of the Universe” and “financial wizards” who run Wall Street and the world’s major corporations are educated at places like The Big H… maybe it shouldn’t be so surprising that The Big H itself was the biggest financial loser in the latest round of global economic catastrophe.

It might have come down from Amazon’s headquarters reading something like this:

kindle 7.17.09 allowing orwell downloads doupleplusungood refs unbooks revert fullwise

OK, when it comes to writing in doublespeak, I’m obviously no Winston Smith. What I’m trying to say is this: on July 17th, Amazon reached into Kindle devices across the globe and deleted all traces of the book Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell.

Claiming they’d mistakenly allowed the book to be sold by a publisher who didn’t own the rights, Amazon remotely erased both Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm from hundreds of devices, and credited the accounts of the affected Kindle owners.

Amazon promised, though, that they’ll never do it again.

Looks like not everyone is hurting in this economic downturn. Check out Matt Taibi’s recent RS article in which he uncovers how Goldman Sachs has managed to manipulate markets and their own regulators to make the major economic bubbles of the past 100 years into massive profit booms for their firm. Even now, they have used the recent bailouts as an opportunity to “to pick the American carcass clean of its loose capital”.

Guess having your former executives as your overseeers has it’s advantages.

They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They’ve been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s — and now they’re preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.

If you want to understand how we got into this financial crisis, you have to first understand where all the money went — and in order to understand that, you need to understand what Goldman has already gotten away with. It is a history exactly five bubbles long — including last year’s strange and seemingly inexplicable spike in the price of oil. There were a lot of losers in each of those bubbles, and in the bailout that followed. But Goldman wasn’t one of them.

more..

Boys and their toys… how quickly they tire of them!