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04 Nov 09

Asia Times Online :: Asian news and current affairs

www.atimes.com/...KK05Dj02.html - Preview

2009 economy usa money value spending inflation price resources speculation

Bernankeism is a form of voodoo economics. It assumes that the economy is
constantly suffering demand deficiencies, in relation to supplies of basic
products such as oil and food commodities, and that the remedy is sheer "money
helicoptering". This is different from the thinking of John Maynard Keynes, who
called for infrastructure spending to stimulate the economy and discarded money
injection into banks that can create a liquidity trap, or monetizing record
fiscal deficits on current expenditure that cannot be rolled back later for
political reasons.
Bernanke has constantly denied any link between monetary policy and commodity
prices, even though all money injection was going straight to speculation in
stocks and commodities.
1 more annotations...
- banks were taking free money from the Fed, buying
  government bonds, and making a 3.8% net gain.

16 Oct 09

Wall Street's Naked Swindle : Rolling Stone

www.rollingstone.com/...print - Preview

2009 economy market intervention speculation investment power consumption law regulation

The very next day, March 12th, Bear went into free fall. By the
end of the week, the firm had lost virtually all of its cash and
was clinging to promises of state aid; by the weekend, it was being
knocked to its knees by the Fed and the Treasury, and forced at the
barrel of a shotgun to sell itself to JPMorgan Chase (which had
been given $29 billion in public money to marry its
hunchbacked new bride) at the humiliating price of … $2 a
share. Whoever bought those options on March 11th woke up on the
morning of March 17th having made 159 times his money, or roughly
$270 million.
the boom
that had ballooned both companies to fantastic heights was
basically a counterfeit economy, a mountain of paste that Wall
Street had built to replace the legitimate business it no longer
had.
15 more annotations...
- What really happened to Bear and Lehman is that an economic
  drought temporarily left the hyenas without any more middle-class
  victims — and so they started eating each other, using the
  exact same schemes they had been using for years to fleece the rest
  of the country.
- The basic
  concept in almost every case was the same: replacing hard assets
  with complex formulas that, once unwound, would prove to be backed
  by promises and IOUs instead of real stuff.
- Then, on March 11th — around the same time that mystery
  Nostradamus was betting $1.7 million that Bear was about to
  collapse — a curious thing happened that attracted virtually
  no notice on Wall Street. On that day, a meeting was held at the
  Federal Reserve Bank of New York that was brokered by Fed chief Ben
  Bernanke and then-New York Fed president Timothy Geithner. The
  luncheon included virtually everyone who was anyone on Wall Street
  — except for Bear Stearns.
- There was nothing to prevent that broker — let's say he
  has only a million shares of IBM total — from making the same
  promise to five different hedge funds. And not only could brokers
  lend stocks they never had, another loophole in the system allowed
  hedge funds to sell those stocks and deliver a kind of IOU instead
  of the actual share to the buyer.
- "What the transfer agents saw, when corporate
  votes came up, was that they were getting more votes than there
  were shares," says Trimbath. In other words, transfer agents
  representing a corporation that had, say, 1 million shares
  outstanding would report a vote on new board members in which
  1.3 million votes were cast — a seeming
  impossibility.
- This is the basic outline for how to seize the assets of a
  publicly traded company using counterfeit stock. What naked
  short-sellers do is sell large quantities of stock they don't
  actually have, flooding the market with "phantom" shares that, just
  like those Island Rubles, depress a company's share price by making
  the shares less scarce and therefore less valuable.
- At one
  point, investors claimed ownership of nearly 42 million shares
  in Overstock — even though fewer than 24 million shares in
  the company had actually been issued.
- "I like Faber, he's a good guy," a Bear executive later said.
  "But I wonder if he ever asked himself, 'Why is someone telling me
  this?' There was a reason this was leaked, and the reason is
  simple: Someone wanted us to go down, and go down hard."
- Just like that, with a slight nod of Paulson's big shiny head,
  Bear was vaporized. This, remember, all took place while Bear's
  stock was still selling at $30. By knocking the share price down 28
  bucks, Paulson ensured that the manipulators who were illegally
  counterfeiting Bear's shares would make an awesome fortune.
- Prime Brokerage
  — in essence, the service end of the short- selling business
  — is now one of the most profitable sectors that big Wall
  Street firms have left.
- The major players on Wall Street, who for years had confined
  this unseemly sort of insider rape to smaller companies, had begun
  to eat each other alive.
- This was one of the most amazing regulatory actions ever: It
  essentially told Wall Street that it was enjoined from
  counterfeiting stock — but only temporarily, and only the
  stock of the 19 of the richest companies on Wall Street.
- But the SEC didn't stop there — it also went out of its
  way to protect the survivors from the normal functioning of the
  marketplace.
- "The world consumes
  85 million barrels of oil per day, but it's not uncommon to
  trade 1 billion barrels per day on the various commodities
  exchanges," says White. "So you've got 12 paper barrels trading for
  every physical barrel."
- A paper presented at the
  American Bankruptcy Institute earlier this year reports that up to
  a third of all notes for mortgage-backed securities may have been
  "misplaced or lost" — meaning they're backed by IOUs instead
  of actual mortgages.

18 Feb 09

The Technium: Many Species, One Mind

www.kk.org/...many_species_on.php - Preview

2009 speculation mind convergence divergence assessment reality matter being interaction cooptation avodance evolution technology obsoletion

My reading of evolution – as outlined in this blog -- suggests that what organic evolution "wants" is fundamental diversity, as in a diversity of evolutions.
if, as Dyson argues in his book, evolution is a type of slow distributed intelligence, then we already have many species, one mind.
1 more annotations...
- But the "one mind" of evolution is not at all like the One Mind of a global superorganism. The One Mind is a composite of many minds. That is a kind of mind we don't have a word for yet.

31 Oct 08

Kevin Kelly -- The Technium

This later supercomputer is called grid computing because the computation is served up as a utility to be delivered anywhere on the grid, like electricity. It is also called cloud computing because the tally of the exact component machines is dynamic and amorphous – like a cloud. The actual contours of the grid or cloud can change by the minute as machines come on or off line.
An unexpected bonus of this strategy is that their high production volume means bugs are minimized and so the generic chips are more reliable than any custom chip they could have designed.
11 more annotations...
- None of this is controversial. Seen from an abstract level there surely must be a very large collective virtual machine. But that is not what most people think of when they hear the term a “global superorganism.” That phrase suggests the sustained integrity of a living organism, or a defensible and defended boundary, or maybe a sense of self, or even conscious intelligence.
- The thresholds for life, intelligence, and consciousness are gradients,
- Within a hive honeybees are incapable of thermoregulation. The hive superorganism must regulate the bee’s working temperature. It does this by collectively fanning thousands of tiny bee wings, which moves hot air out of the colony. Individual computers are incapable of governing the flow of bits between themselves in the One Machine.
- We would acknowledge a degree of autonomy if an entity displayed any of these traits: self-repair, self-defense, self-maintenance (securing energy, disposing waste), self-control of goals, self-improvement.
- Voice traffic during the Bell/AT&T era obeyed a pattern known as Poisson distribution, sort of like a Gaussian bell curve. But ever since data from diverse components and web pages became the majority of bits on the lines, the traffic on the internet has been following a scale-invariant, or fractal, or power-law pattern.
- Scale-free distributions can be understood as a result of some degree of internal feedback, usually brought about by loose of interdependent between the units. Feedback loops constrain the actions of the bits by other bits.
- Cloud computers such as Google and Amazon form the learning center
- It is a hybrid intelligence, half humanity, half computer chip. Therefore it is probably more useful to us. We don’t know what the limits are to its value. How much would you pay for a portable genius who knew all there was known?
- If you build a machine that makes connections between everything, accumulates all the data in the world, and you then harness all available minds to collectively teach it where the meaningful connections and meaningful data are (Who is searching Whom?) while implementing deceptively simple algorithms that reinforce meaningful connections while physically moving, optimizing and replicating the data structures accordingly – if you do all this you will, from highly economical (yes, profitable) position arrive at a result – an intelligence -- that is "not as far off as people think.
- “Unfortunately, radio and optical SETI astronomers pay remarkably little attention to intelligence. Their attention is focused on the search for anomalous radio waves and rapidly pulsed laser signals from outer space. They do not think much about the intelligence that would produce those signals.
- Turns out some 5% of all malformed packets examined by the study had unknown origins