The reason given out for keeping the meeting venue a secret is security concerns. Even with the participation of US Federal Reserve and European Central Bank, the Asian central banks are expected to steal the thunder at the meeting. The Asian bankers are uniting under the leadership of the governor of the Central Bank of Malaysia, Zeti Akhtar Aziz. – Blog of India¹

How about that Tracy Porter Guy!  Oh well, while everyone was being distracted over the weekend, the big story in the world was happening at a secret location near Sydney, Australia with almost no media coverage.  Thanks to the Herald Sun and the above blogger in India a few hints are emerging, though.

Meanwhile, the folks at MW² inadvertently added a further piece to the puzzle through yet another one  of those 'Oh, must be OK then,' says son as cardiologist cuts short golfing vacation to rush to mother's side stories the financial press likes to perpetrate:

LONDON (MarketWatch) — Jean-Claude Trichet may not be flying to the rescue of Greece and other debt-troubled southern European nations, but news Tuesday that the European Central Bank president will leave Sydney earlier than initially planned to attend a meeting of European Union leaders in Brussels was enough to provide the euro and financial markets with a lift.

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[1]: "World’s Top Central Banks Meeting in Australia", by Meena Rani K, Blog of India, February 8, 2010.

[2]: "Financial markets calm as Greek rescue speculation rises: Portugal plans 10-year euro-denominated bond issue", by William L. Watts, MarketWatch, February 9, 2010.

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Plot Thickens @ RBA Jubilee — Asian Creditor Cenbanks Dominating?

The document was an annual report on [minister Christian Paradis'] Public Works' massive real-estate portfolio, which contained factual information on high vacancy rates and weak returns on investment. Such reports had never been made public before. // The department's real-estate branch had consented to the full release, and the Access to Information office at Public Works had determined after extensive consultation that there was no legal basis to withhold any of the report. [however ...] – Canadian Press¹

This rather creepy straw-in-the-wind showed up as front page news this morning on Doom North's snowy front doorstep.

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[1]: "Tory cabinet minister's office blocked full release of report", February 7, 2010.

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“Well unrelease it,” Togneri said: Strange Gyres in Paradis as Canada Nearly Transparent

Representatives from 24 central banks and monetary authorities, including the US Federal Reserve and European Central Bank, landed in Sydney [Australia] to meet tomorrow [Feb 7th] at an undisclosed location. – Herald Sun¹

The heavy stuff always happens under cover of something like Super-Weekend, eh?  But the blogosphere never sleeps   Thanks for pointing me at this one, twist, I'd completely missed it with my own focus on Iqualoit.

It isn't every day the BIS sends up a flare like this.  So the spectacle of G7 finance ministers contemplating the prospect of raw whale blubber on the frozen shores of Frobisher Bay was, after all, only theatre.

Turns out the real story was unfolding quietly on the other side of the world.  Perhaps the MSM finally starting to cover the Agency Debt problem a few days ago was the last straw, but it's safe to go along with the Herald Sun's narrative, which is basically that the "World" crisis (which we'd all half forgotten by now) was in truth a lot more serious than we thought at the time.

"This does feel like '08 and '07 all over again whereby we had these sorts of little fires pop up and they are supposedly contained but in reality they are not quite contained," said H3 Global Advisers chief executive Andrew Kaleel.

"Dubai should have been an isolated incident and now we are seeing issues with Greece, Portugal and Spain."

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[1]: "World bankers meet in Sydney as recovery fears intensify", by George Lekakis and Fleur Leyden, Herald Sun, February 6, 2010.

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The Anti-Summit: Baffin Island was the Diversion

Instead of paying an estimated $2.5 million to $2.7 million per Super Bowl commercial, big brands are using social networking to connect with consumers — hoping to click in a more personal way. // "Social networking is the newest thing for marketers," says Vranica. "You've got 60 ads fighting for attention, so if you use social networking as a marketer and drum up some excitement, you'll have people specifically watching out for your commercial that night." – ABC¹

I wanted to be Sam Huff when I grew up.  Although we Ms lived in 02420 (still part of 02173 then) it was long enough ago that we counted as natural Giants fans.  Dad transferred his loyalties to the Pats even before amalgamation, but I never really did.

Did the kicker have some success as an announcer?  From hanging around grocery store checkouts there's some evidence that the utility guy's wife partnered for a while with a somebody Reagus on daytime TV.

There was another brief flurry of interest when Butkus was playing for the Bears.  A few years ago I picked up his auto-bio at the Salvation Army.  Weirdly, he mentioned the same play-sequence that I'd noticed when Page had dominated for about 5 minutes from right defensive end, of all things.

But I've completely lost track now.  There was something about Favre (Brent? Burt?) doing something unwholesome in the semis, so that means (I think) that one of the two teams isn't Green Bay, but that doesn't narrow it down very much.  I really haven't a clue who's playing tomorrow (it is tomorrow, isn't it?)

Seen a lot of stuff under Google Biz about the ads, though …

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[1]: "Future of Advertising: Ads That Stare Back and Interact — Companies Use Social Networking, 3-D and More to Reach Consumers", by Eric Noll, ABC News, February 6, 2010.

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uh, who’s playing tomorrow?

I do believe your optimism accelerator is sticking …

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Google Groundhog Day

I've always maintained they could have done a lot better than Swinton …

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Fun With Edmund Pevensie’s Anima

I've always maintained they could have done a lot better than Swinton …

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Fun With Edmund Pevensie’s Anima

Hat tip to Death By A Thousand Paper Cuts for directing us to Morgan Richmond's comments on the most recent report by the Inspector General for TARP.  This assessment is IMPORTANT: [Page 6 on original report]

The substantial costs of TARP — in money, moral hazard effects on the market, and Government credibility — will have been for naught if we do nothing to correct the fundamental problems in our financial system and end up in a similar or even greater crisis in two, or five, or ten years’ time. It is hard to see how any of the fundamental problems in the system have been addressed to date.

• To the extent that huge, interconnected, “too big to fail” institutions contributed to the crisis, those institutions are now even larger, in part because of the substantial subsidies provided by TARP and other bailout programs.
• To the extent that institutions were previously incentivized to take reckless risks through a “heads, I win; tails, the Government will bail me out” mentality, the market is more convinced than ever that the Government will step in as necessary to save systemically significant institutions. This perception was reinforced when TARP was extended until October 3, 2010, thus permitting Treasury to maintain a war chest of potential rescue funding at the same time that banks that have shown questionable ability to return to profitability (and in some cases are posting multi-billion-dollar losses) are exiting TARP programs.
• To the extent that large institutions’ risky behavior resulted from the desire to justify ever-greater bonuses — and indeed, the race appears to be on for TARP recipients to exit the program in order to avoid its pay restrictions — the current bonus season demonstrates that although there have been some improvements in the form that bonus compensation takes for some executives, there has been little fundamental change in the excessive compensation culture on Wall Street.
• To the extent that the crisis was fueled by a “bubble” in the housing market, the Federal Government’s concerted efforts to support home prices — as discussed more fully in Section 3 of this report — risk re-inflating that bubble in light of the Government’s effective takeover of the housing market through purchases and guarantees, either direct or implicit, of nearly all of the residential mortgage market.

 

Stated another way, even if TARP saved our financial system from driving off a cliff back in 2008, absent meaningful reform, we are still driving on the same winding mountain road, but this time in a faster car.

John M addendum: sorry, twist, but couldn't help myself (don't tell the chickens )

And the administration keeps passing out booze to the drivers instead of focusing on seatbelts.  The crash won't be pretty.

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U.S. Financial System Is “Speeding Down A Winding Mountain Road In A Faster Car”

So, I'll put this forward succinctly: legal personhood for corporations is not optional. It's absolutely fundamental to modern commerce. To believe otherwise, you basically have to be an anarchic anti-capitalist; indeed, you have to be against the very notion of large-scale cooperation and division of labour. But you're not, are you? – Chris MacDonald, September 27, 2009¹

Well Chris, as it happens …

MORE: The good professor is in the process of expanding his thoughts into a three-parter. He was also kind enough to reply to my effort here (see below).

• Feb 1: "The US Supreme Court, Free Speech, and Corporate Citizenship"
• Feb 2: "Free Speech: Means, Ends, and Citizens United"
• Feb 3 (scheduled): … a look at the decision from the point of view of the vexed notion of corporate personhood

First of all, thank-you for your comment (replying to mine) that served to get us started on this.  The comments were under your recent update on the issue at hand.

But before this generates into sticky-buns-at-20-paces in The Atrium, perhaps we should explore just how profoundly we disagree with each other on this issue.  I've just read your September '09 post and some of the comments underneath.  That was an early analysis of "Citizens United", and for Doomers who (like me before yesterday) weren't aware, it's now the point at issue in what's becoming perhaps the most important fight between President and US Supreme Court since 1937.

My thoughts on large corporations are strongly influenced by a 1970 polemic by Robert Townsend called "Up The Organization," and in particular his thoughts on his almost exact contemporary Harold Geneen.  It's rather curious, in that my father was one of Geneen's key engineers when he lost the confidence of Charles Adams in '59 and even today I'm constantly reminded of him because I worship Sundays with the brother of the guy who was his representative in Santiago on the occasion of 9/11 (the month Neruda died).

But more than that, I'm alarmed at how this private corporate person is swallowing up history.  I grew up in an atmosphere dominated by the great military companies that flourished around Route 128 after World War II.  In fact, just to drop one name Doomers have probably never heard, our family was pretty close to that of Frank Lewis, the manager of Alfred Loomis' private research facility who Loomis sent to Cambridge in the wake of the Tizard mission to help found the Rad Lab.

Now I never learned anything secret that was going on (probably nobody cares any more that dad had figured out ffts sometime in the '50s, so that Hawk was actually front-running Cooley/Tukey) but the extreme closeness with which these institutions held, and are still holding what they are doing, and what they did, I regard as a direct threat to democracy.  Eisenhower didn't know the half of it.

It's like corporations have been war-fighting ever since '45.  I mean, Harold was running the phone company, for heaven's sake.  But nowadays Sun Tzu is by no means out of place in the boardroom, and as the Australian author Kate Jennings has noted, Wall Street is actually joined at the hip with America's intelligence community.  Knowledge is power, and without transparency just their size is transforming the largest corporate persons into a tribe of monsters.

So here I am, feeling slightly foolish in the shoes of Robert Fludd, cheering on that same New Dark Age that Jane Jacobs used to worry about and ranged against you and the entire Enlightenment project.  To begin with, I think our fellow Haligonian, the late George Parkin Grant, was dead right in "English Speaking Justice" and that he showed conclusively that Rawls' had run contractarian theory into a reductio ad absurdum.  Now your colleague Dave Heckerl has been trying to convince me that there's more to contemporary liberalism than Rawls, so I've been having a go at Rorty and Trilling, etc. but I'm not sold just yet.

Now the thought experiment you give at the end of the September post, like Hobbes' original formulation, evidently assumes atomic individuals as an initial condition, but wasn't that always the fatal flaw in the whole Enlightenment project?  I think that Tawney in "Religion and the Rise of Capitalism" shows pretty convincingly that the very concept of modern individualism evolved out of the Enlightenment itself (assisted by their understanding of classical Greek thought) and related movements like the Empiricists.  Also, it seems to come out of Ivan Illich's work that Hobbes' State of Nature can't possibly be right as humans just display too much essential non-economic interdependence.

So even human individuals (e.g. J.P. Morgan in 1907 or Ken Griffin in 2010) can become problematical when they grow too large, let alone corporate persons.

To grope at some categories, I think that morality is part of collective ontology and ethics arises out of individual reason.  A couple of years ago Tatjana Takseva helped show me how the latter began to dominate the English speaking world in the 17th Century.  But now that temporary dominance is fading, and we find ourselves in opposite parties as the inevitable conflict unfolds.

However, I don't think a corporate person can host either morality or ethics.

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[1]: "Why Corporations Must be Legal Persons", by Chris MacDonald, Business Ethics Blog, September 27, 2009.

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Why Corporations Must *Not* be Legal Persons

I thought Doomers might appreciate a little humor this morning.  Mike Dawson, a V.P. at Freddie Mac had me in stitches over this one:

WASHINGTON, Feb 1 (Reuters) – The $5 trillion market for U.S. agency mortgage-backed securities should be able to weather the scheduled end of Federal Reserve purchases as value-seeking investors fill the void, a Freddie Mac executive said on Monday.

Those investors could include Freddie Mac, which has room to increase its $755 billion portfolio, Mike Dawson, a vice president of deal and contract management at Freddie Mac, told reporters at an American Securitization Forum conference.

"I don't see huge changes out there other than a little spread widening," he said, referring to yields on MBS relative to benchmark securities.

Freddie Mac is a value-seeking investor?  That must be why the administration lifted the $400 billion cap on funds available to the GSEs on Christmas Eve- so they could go out seeking great values in MBS. Right.

It doesn't get much funnier than that.

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Freddie Mac Not A “Value-Seeking Investor”