Ben Bernanke forecasts the future

Don't Worry, We're Vigilantly Monitoring The Plummeting Dollar:

"My own view is that the recent pickup reflects more than purely temporary factors and that continued growth next year is likely. However, some important headwinds--in particular, constrained bank lending and a weak job market--likely will prevent the expansion from being as robust as we would hope. I'll discuss each of these problem areas in a bit more detail and then end with some further comments on the outlook for the economy and for policy."

-- Ben Bernanke

This is the man that said the subprime market problems were contained.

We are well and truly fucked.

This GDP number is a joke. It's a measure (it's hard to see how it could be accurate) of how much money changes hands each year. That's all it is. It's not a measure of economic health. I give you ten dollars and you give it back to me and we do that all year and we can produce $1,000s of dollars of GDP. Banks send money back and forth amongst themselves and they can produce another trillion dollars in GDP. It's just a stupid meaningless number and the fact that it (may) have increased a few percent on the back of nearly two trillion dollars in new money printed by the Federal Reserve is just nothing to get excited about.

The chairman goes on to say:

"We are attentive to the implications of changes in the value of the dollar and will continue to formulate policy to guard against risks to our dual mandate to foster both maximum employment and price stability."

Really? You're in charge of maximum employment? Then you're a completely incompetent nincompoop. (The fact is that nobody is in charge of maximum employment - that's central economic planning, Soviet Union style. How did that work out?)

Really? You're in charge of price stability? The price of what? Houses? How's that working out?

Wake up America! These guys are full of shit. It's time to give them the boot.

End the Fed!

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© 2005-2009 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.

Warren Buffett: Traitor to Capitalism

CNBC TRANSCRIPT: Warren Buffett & Bill Gates - Keeping America Great - Warren Buffett Watch - CNBC.com:

BECKY: Warren, was it a mistake for the government to allow Lehman to go under?

BUFFETT: It may have been. But I would say overall, the officials in Washington did a terrific job of dealing with really what was an economic Pearl Harbor, as we talked about. So I would say that if Merrill hadn't been bought by the B of A, Merrill would have gone very quickly. And the dominoes were really lined up. And I don't think it was fully appreciated, perhaps, what a big domino Lehman was or how close it was to the next big dominoes. But overall, I give (former Treasury Secretary Henry) Paulson, I give (Federal Reserve Chairman Ben)Bernanke, I give (FDIC Chairman) Sheila Bair, I give (Treasury Secretary) Tim Geithner, I give them very high marks for the fact they took unprecedented action. [APPLAUSE]

If Warren Buffett, the most widely known "capitalist" in America, is telling people that government intervention in markets is "good" and part of "capitalism" and the "American system" then who is going to defend true capitalism?

The fact is that Warren's investment in Goldman Sachs benefited hugely from the bailout (as well as Goldman's ridiculous conversion to commercial bank status) as otherwise Goldman would be out of business and Warren would have been $5 billion poorer.

When the markets were going up he was a genius. Then there was a hiccup and he was bailed out.

This kind of hypocrisy is just horrendous.

Let me remind you: capitalism is where individuals make their own decisions as to where and when and what to buy or sell. Fascism (or corporatism) is where corporations team with the government to leverage the government's monopoly power to maintain and increase power. When it comes to big companies have fascism. It didn't work for Mussolini and it's not going to end well here either. To hear Warren Buffett promote fascism is very problematic because he is viewed as the ultimate capitalist and his words lend great credence to the proposition that capitalism has somehow failed when in fact it is central economic planning by the Federal Reserve that has created the current crisis.

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Butt-Head is Reading on I-405

This butt-head is reading a book while driving on I-405 (Washington) after merging from WA-520.

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Driving in the Rain

I love night time photography. Someday I'm gonna buy myself a real camera. But these cheap things do a pretty good job in the meantime.

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Glass

Photo by my daughter (age 14).

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Sysinternals proposal

I posted the following feedback at the SysInternals.com site:

Hi,

As the number of cores increases, we need Process Explorer and similar tools to display the CPU usage in a more readable format.  I would propose that the first core go half way up the graph and all remaining cores be scaled such that if all cores are 100% busy then the graph looks to be full.  Ideally this would exponential so if two cores are busy, the graph is 3/4 full, and three cores is 7/8ths full, then 15/16ths, and on until the final core fills the last little bit left (depending on the number of cores this might be just 1/32nd or such).

This will solve the problem where you have 16 cores and a process is pegged at 100% of one core but the graph is so small you won't be able to even see it.

Thanks,

-- Stephen Clarke-Willson

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A Model Day at the Park

Read about tilt/shift photography at Wikipedia.
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Sound Banking: A Capitalist Imperative - The Market Ticker

Sound Banking: A Capitalist Imperative - The Market Ticker:

"It is time to 'clear the decks' and talk about exactly what a sound banking system is - and is not.

It is time to identify that which is an exercise in capitalism, and that which is an exercise in fraud."

This is a really good article that describes how fractional reserve banking goes bad. Basically, it says that banks can loan out money they "create" as long as they have a hard asset to back it up. In modern times, of course, banks are making loans against things that don't exist: a building that isn't built yet, your ability to pay (or not pay) your credit card, and incorrect assessment of home values.

So there's lots of fraud and most banks, by this definition, are insolvent.

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Excellent

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Coffee Art

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