#1
WORLD MIL FORUM [GOOGLE Chinglish translation] > IIUC Article = in this new PRC Report before the US Congress, USA SUPPORT FOR TAIWAN IS REITERATED?SUPPOR VEE TAIWAN RELATIONS ACT, + calls for the US to MILPOL prepare for SEVEN POSSIBLE TAIWAN CONTINGENCIES [adjustment(s) of Asia-Pacific US force presence-capabilities]:
* FORMAL INDEPENDENCE [despite PRC]
* Other-than-Independence AUTONOMY [read, QUASI/NEAR-INDEPENDENCE]
* INTERNAL TURMOIL [destabiliz, civil war, etc.]
* STATUS QUO
* FOREIGN INTERVENTION IN TAIWAN AFFAIRS
* FOREIGN TROOPS/MILFORS BASED ON TAIWAN SOIL
* NUCLEAR WEAPONS FOR TAIWAN
Via Instapundit
Back in the spring of 1998, when Boris Yeltsin was still at Russia's helm, I led a group of global investors to Moscow to find out firsthand where the Russian economy was headed. My long career with the International Monetary Fund and on Wall Street had taken me to "emerging markets" throughout Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America, and I thought I'd seen it all. Yet I still recall the shock I felt at a meeting in Russia's dingy Ministry of Finance, where I finally realized how a handful of young oligarchs were bringing Russia's economy to ruin in the pursuit of their own selfish interests, despite the supposed brilliance of Anatoly Chubais, Russia's economic czar at the time.
At the time, I could not imagine that anything remotely similar could happen in the United States. Indeed, I shared the American conceit that most emerging-market nations had poorly developed institutions and would do well to emulate Washington and Wall Street. These days, though, I'm hardly so confident. Many economists and analysts are worrying that the United States might go the way of Japan, which suffered a "lost decade" after its own real estate market fell apart in the early 1990s. But I'm more concerned that the United States is coming to resemble Argentina, Russia and other so-called emerging markets, both in what led us to the crisis, and in how we're trying to fix it.
Over the past year, I've been getting Russia flashbacks as I witness the AIG debacle as well as the collapse of Bear Sterns and a host of other financial institutions. Much like the oligarchs did in Russia, a small group of traders and executives at onetime venerable institutions have brought the U.S. and global financial systems to their knees with their reckless risk-taking -- with other people's money -- for their personal gain.
Negotiating with Argentina's top officials during their multiple financial crises in the 1990s was always an ordeal, and sparring with Domingo Cavallo, the country's Harvard-trained finance minister at the time, was particularly trying. One always had the sense that, despite their supreme arrogance, the country's leaders never had a coherent economic strategy and that major decisions were always made on the run. I never thought that was how policy was made in the United States -- until, that is, I saw how totally at sea Treasury Secretaries Henry Paulson and Timothy F. Geithner and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke have appeared so many times during our country's ongoing economic and financial storm.
Posted by: ed ||
03/27/2009 12:08 ||
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#1
I expect people to be greedy, selfish, shortsighted bastards. So I'm not exactly shocked that Wall Street and bank executives were trying to make money. What the hell else would they be doing?
The problem is and will always be a political one. Congress told banks whom to lend to. Everything else flowed as a natural consequence.
#3
I do not believe that the current crisis is fundamentally a political one. The politicians did not force any businesses to generate tens of trillions of dollars in worthless/fraudulent credit default swaps. It is a classical credit collapse, similar to those that have been happening for centuries, and which will continue to happen as long as people do business using credit.
#4
Long before the current mortgage racket, the bank/financial institutions got into the credit card racket. Back when the Carter administrative launched us into double digit inflation, most states had usury laws limiting the amount of interests that can be charged by 'legal' institutions. When the banks rightly pointed out they could not lend near or lower than what they borrowed from the Fed, their little agents at the state level got the governments to remove the laws rather than modify them to float with the Prime rate. So when the Prime came back down to the lower single digits, the interest rates remained in the upper teens and lower twenties for years. That's because the banks and financial institution began granting credit/credit cards to nearly everyone. Pre-Carter, you had to be very very qualified to get a card. Post-inflation, your dog would get invited to get a card. The banks never had to carry the losses, they simply passed it on to other card holders. The entire modus operandi was there and running by these institutions when the government gave them fuel, in the form of the mortgages, to throw on their running game. They are not 'victims'.
#6
Perhaps AH9418, but if lenders hadn't been mandated to provide mortgages to risky borrowers via the Community Reinvestment Act and if FMae and FMac hadn't been around to buy up all of the risky mortgages created by said act, which they then bundled up for sale as "collateralized debt securities" to Wall St-- who in turn used them to engage in the various ridiculous credit default swaps which have since cratered-- could this whole mess have been avoided in the first place?
I grant that my grasp of the intracacies involved may be less than ideal but if my understanding is correct, the government got involved in the business of mortgage lending and borrowing "for the common good" and removed many of the free market guidelines. Simply put, had the free market not been tampered with, lenders would not have made the loans they did and we wouldn't be in the mess we are in today.
I realize I may be grossly oversimplifying the matter.
#7
risky borrowers via the Community Reinvestment Act
Yeah, the Community Reinvestment borrower were risky and defaulted in large numbers - but they were largely defaulting on $50,000 homes, which does not add up to enough to account for trillion dollar problems. To get to the trillion dollar level you have to have risky loans on half million and million dollar homes being defaulted - in other words people with income and assets to own a reasonable home but ambitions for mansions or for 'flipping' homes for big short-term gains.
COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED ELEVENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Time: 2:30 P.M.
Place: 419 Dirksen Senate Building
Presiding: Senator Kerry
Senator Kerry's Opening Statement
Senator Lugar's Opening Statement
Witnesses:
+Mr. Martin Wolf
Associate Editor and Chief Economics Commentator
Financial Times
London, UK
+Mr. George Soros
Chairman
Soros Fund Management and Open Society
New York, NY
+Mr. Lawrence Lindsey
President and CEO of The Lindsey Group and
Former Director of the National Economic Council
Washington, DC
#3
Well, at least the Chinese are adaptable to the concept of rewarding success rather than punishing it and not rewarding failure at this time. Something fundamental that seems to have disappeared from the American environment. The Chinese also don't seemed tied down with the 'victim' culture to retard or inhibit things that need to be done.
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
03/27/2009 21:44 Comments ||
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#7
shouldn't the question be: are we turning into China?
Corrupt government - check
No accountablity of representatives to people - check
controlled media - check
government interference in all capitalist ventures - soon to be check
SO HERE we go again, folks. It is now 10 years since the anti-capitalists attacked London, and next week they intend to outdo themselves. The alienated children of the middle classes are planning to subvert the G20 summit. Across the desolate wastes of the leftie internet, their wrathful campfires are already burning, and when April dawns they will surge like the Orcs of Mordor in the general direction of the Bank of England.
They will taunt the police. They will paralyse traffic. They will do their utmost to spoil your day; and when Billy Bragg has finished his Commie dirges, it is a safe bet that they will begin the chant of hate. Somewhere in the crowd, a keffiyeh-wearing twerp will drain a mouthful of cider and call to his comrades: "What do we want?"
And at that moment, a great silence will fall in the carnival of cretinous crusties. The papier mache horsemen of the Apocalypse will turn their heads inquiringly in his direction. "What do we want?" he will demand again, a shade more hysterically, and by this time the rioters will be looking at their feet and coughing. Er. What do they want?
The embarrassing truth is that they haven't a clue. They seem to be cross about the recession, and also about climate change -- even though there is nothing like an economic downturn for reducing emissions. They are apparently enraged that state money is being used to prop up the banks, though they don't mind forcing the taxpayer to cough up millions to police their antics. They say they want to "burn a banker" and "stop the city", and no matter how superficially appealing those ambitions may be, it is hard to see how they can be turned into practical economic policies.
#3
At least 450,000 people have been forced to flee their homes, often ending up in camps.
These would be the now empty refugee camps that used to how Afghanis who'd fled Taliban rule there, and have been returning over the past two years. This time the ISI-trained Taliban have turned on their near cousins at home instead of the more distant cousins across the pass. The de facto rulers of Pakistan caused the problem, let them fix it... or lose their own heads to their little run-amok pets.
Reputed author and journalist M J Akbar says that one has to look at the Muslim world through a 'kaleidoscope and not through a telescope' in order to better understand it.
"If we do that then, we will realize that there are many fragments (in that world) and we may have a better understanding of its strengths and weaknesses," Akbar, who is an Asia Society Associate Fellow, said at the Asia Society in New York during a discussion on Islam vs. the West: Myth and Misunderstanding.
Akbar, who is also a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said there is no single 'monolithic Muslim world' as is usually believed in the West.
Noting that it's 'very dangerous and inaccurate' to see people with one label, he said while Muslims have spread around the world, and that there is a sense of Umah (brotherhood) among them, it does not go beyond a certain point.
He said as a human being he would feel bad and would have the same sense of anguish if a bomb goes off and kills people in a country say like Indonesia, beyond that one has to realize that Muslims live in different countries and cannot have the same kind of affinity that they feel with fellow citizens within their country.
"The one thing we don't talk about here is what type of country we are creating," says Shalem Center senior vice president and senior fellow Daniel Gordis, with conviction. Indeed, asserts Gordis - the author of Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win a War that May Never End, his latest of seven books on Jewish thought and life in Israel - "So focused have we been with resolving the conflict with the Palestinians that we have neglected to pay proper heed to issues no less critical for our survival."
They may even be more so, says Gordis, former director of the Mandel Foundation's Leadership Institute in Jerusalem, who joined Shalem in 2007 to help establish the country's first liberal arts college.
Gordis, 49, made aliya from Los Angeles in 1998 with his wife and three children. A rabbi, he says he prefers being referred to as "traditional," rather than "Orthodox" ("I shy away from those labels"). And he firmly believes that it is not only possible to make room for "passionate discourse" about the nature of Israeli society and statehood, but imperative. Otherwise, he warns, Israel will be little more than a "Hebrew-speaking version" of America or Europe, whose citizens cannot articulate what it is they are doing here, or where they are headed. If that happens, he adds, "our enemies will have won."
"The goal of the book," he explains, "is not to prescribe precisely what we ought to do, but rather to initiate a conversation - to raise the question of the issues we would debating if we were not constantly fretting over peace."
What he suggests, then, is to "put peace aside."
"When the Palestinians give us quiet," he says, "we'll have quiet. When they don't, we'll defend ourselves. And though we can't ever give up yearning for peace, we mustn't allow our yearning for it to paralyze us. Nor can we put our lives on hold."
In your article, "When Mistakes Are Worth Making" [July 2008, on his blog, called "Dispatches from an Anxious State" - www.danielgordis.org], you defended the prisoner exchange for abducted - and murdered - soldiers Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, as well as the disengagement from Gaza, on the grounds that, though perhaps not strategically wise, they were good for Israel's soul. On the other hand, in your book, you describe the difference between the positive atmosphere in this country following the Six Day War and the very different one of today. How do these two views not contradict one another?
I felt that the prisoner exchange highlighted something incredibly powerful and positive about the Israeli soul. And though many in the security establishment felt that it was not strategically wise, because it made us vulnerable to the sort of blackmail we're being subjected to now with Gilad Schalit, I thought it was an extraordinary testimony to the ability of the Israeli soul to somehow trump strategy, and to reembrace our ongoing commitment to each and every one of the young men who defend this country, bringing them home no matter what, and giving peace to their families.
I'm not saying that it was smart, or even that it was the choice that should have been made. That's why I called it a "mistake worth making."
As far as disengagement is concerned, in retrospect, there's no question that it was a mistake, in terms of Israel's security and defense. But I hesitate to call it an out-and-out mistake - without in any way minimizing the horrible human cost to the families who were uprooted - because I think we learned something we could only have learned by doing it. What no one can reasonably deny now is that the Right was right.
As someone who used to be left of center, I always believed that the Palestinians wanted the same things we did - that they sought two states for two peoples; that they wanted a country just like we did; that they wished for their children and grandchildren to flourish, just like we did. Disengagement proved to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was wrong - tragically wrong, but wrong nonetheless. Because what they had was an opportunity to begin to build some sort of autonomy. And it became clear that this is not what they had, or have, in mind. They are much more intent on destroying us than they are on building themselves. They're much more committed to our not having a future than to their having one.
Surely someone like you knows the Bible and the history of the Jewish people. Why did it take certain very current events in this country to teach you about something that seems to be a recurring theme since biblical times? What caused you to have faith in an idea that, given all that has occurred previously, would have been hard to trust?
First of all, I'm an American, who came to Israel at the age of 40. I was raised - in a suburban, Jewish, democratic, liberal, optimistic family - to believe that, at the end of the day, all conflicts are resolvable, and that all people basically want the same things for themselves and their children.
Secondly, the Jewish experience is not monolithic. So, though the biblical account certainly contains its share of resentment and hatred of the Jews, it also dares to dream of a different day.
Third, the American-Jewish experience has shown that you can leave a country where you were hated, and come to a new place where you will be embraced. Had my grandfather wanted to go to Columbia University, he might well not have been admitted because of his Jewishness. When my father wanted to go to Columbia, he got in, but there were unspoken limits on the number of Jews accepted. By the time I went to Columbia, it was 35 percent-40% Jewish. So, yes, there is the biblical experience - and warning. But there's also one's personal experience. And my personal experience gave me hope that, just as resistance to Jews had dissipated in America, the same might happen here. It hasn't.
Contemporary Israeli history seems to have the opposite shift. You write about the euphoria after the Six Day War, and about the gradual decline in that sense of victory and safety. So, from the country that conducted the Entebbe raid in 1976, Israel in 2009 is a state that exchanges terrorists for kidnapped IDF soldiers.
Posted by: Fred ||
03/27/2009 00:00 ||
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As someone who used to be left of center, I always believed that the Palestinians wanted the same things we did - that they sought two states for two peoples; that they wanted a country just like we did; that they wished for their children and grandchildren to flourish, just like we did. Disengagement proved to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was wrong - tragically wrong, but wrong nonetheless. Because what they had was an opportunity to begin to build some sort of autonomy. And it became clear that this is not what they had, or have, in mind. They are much more intent on destroying us than they are on building themselves. They're much more committed to our not having a future than to their having one.
Very eloquently put. But I would think a person should get it at the very first utterance of "Death to Israel!" or "Death to America!"
Posted by: ed ||
03/27/2009 0:40 Comments ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Reputed author and journalist M J Akbar says that one has to look at the Muslim world through a 'kaleidoscope and not through a telescope' in order to better understand it.
