Ice is calming, its absence is inevitable
Bear Sterns broke in Switzerland yesterday, we talked about how UBS got into the sub-prime market and how risk is detected -- the mortgages were being paid, at least prior to reset, and that was the primary mechanism for risk detection. From the risk audit point of view, what we're observing is successful hacking the financial risk audit system, and therefore what is being bailed out by public capital institutions is not "homeowners" or "lenders" but a risk audit system, that is, the lack of staying current in the arms race, by major private capital institutions. If that is too abstract, imagine Haliburton got the contract to defend the Pentagon, and built an Israeli Apartheid wall, providing perfect defense, on all four sides.
Only there are five sides and the creative post-KGB or the creative-PLA managed to execute their plan of attack on the fifth side of Haiburton's perfect four-sided defensive perimeter. Into Haliburton's highly profitable shoes steps ... men and women making $218/mo (Uniformed Services Pay Act of 1967), adjusted for inflation.
There was extensive sea ice off the coast of Labrador, a reassuring sight. I've returned to a place where not swooning over a charlatan is a confession of racism, and the alternative is an empty embrace.
I've no idea what it will cost to simply provide reasonable care for the 4.6m Iraqi refugees, let alone reconstruct some of Iraq, but it won't be appropriated while war continues to consume a trillion dollars every biannual defense appropriation cycle, and no objectively anticipated future defense appropriation cycle offers a domestically acceptable exit point, at which a change from war to peace is possible.
