The funny thing, looking back on it, is how long it took for even someone who predicted the disaster to grasp its root causes. They were learning about this on the fly, shorting the bonds and then trying to figure out what they had done. [Steve] Eisman knew subprime lenders could be scumbags. What he underestimated was the total unabashed complicity of the upper class of American capitalism. For instance, he knew that the big Wall Street investment banks took huge piles of loans that in and of themselves might be rated BBB, threw them into a trust, carved the trust into tranches, and wound up with 60 percent of the new total being rated AAA.

But he couldn’t figure out exactly how the rating agencies justified turning BBB loans into AAA-rated bonds. “I didn’t understand how they were turning all this garbage into gold,” he says. He brought some of the bond people from Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, and UBS over for a visit. “We always asked the same question,” says Eisman. “Where are the rating agencies in all of this? And I’d always get the same reaction. It was a smirk.” He called Standard & Poor’s and asked what would happen to default rates if real estate prices fell. The man at S&P couldn’t say; its model for home prices had no ability to accept a negative number. “They were just assuming home prices would keep going up,” Eisman says….

There was only one thing that bothered Eisman, and it continued to trouble him as late as May 2007. “The thing we couldn’t figure out is: It’s so obvious. Why hasn’t everyone else figured out that the machine is done?” Eisman had long subscribed to Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, a newsletter famous in Wall Street circles and obscure outside them. Jim Grant, its editor, had been prophesying doom ever since the great debt cycle began, in the mid-1980s. In late 2006, he decided to investigate these things called C.D.O.’s. Or rather, he had asked his young assistant, Dan Gertner, a chemical engineer with an M.B.A., to see if he could understand them. Gertner went off with the documents that purported to explain C.D.O.’s to potential investors and for several days sweated and groaned and heaved and suffered. “Then he came back,” says Grant, “and said, ”˜I can’t figure this thing out.’ And I said, ”˜I think we have our story.’”‰”

Eisman read Grant’s piece as independent confirmation of what he knew in his bones about the C.D.O.’s he had shorted. “When I read it, I thought, Oh my God. This is like owning a gold mine….

Quite a piece from the author of Liar’s Poker. Read it carefully and read it all.

With a handful of higher-ups already out the door, Time Inc. is moving to the rank-and-file as it, like other publishers, seeks to reduce its workforce in the face of dropping ad revenue.

Some of Time Inc.’s biggest magazines have put out the call for at least 83 volunteers to take buyouts, according to memos and staffers at the company. The news comes as part of the company’s previously announced restructuring and plan to cut its headcount by about 600, or roughly 6 percent of the Time Inc.’s worldwide workforce of 10,200.

Read it all.

The truth is that domestic partnerships are a Trojan horse used to obtain same-sex “marriage.” When first conceived, domestic partnerships were meant to be an imitation of marriage and were specifically designed with same-sex couples in mind. The message they sent to society was this: The relationships are of equal value; we just call them by different names.

But as the states of California, Florida and Arizona demonstrated again, people do not view same-sex relationships the same as opposite-sex relationships. Marriage has long been viewed as the best context for dealing with procreation. Altering this fundamental relationship raises many questions for society. For example, who is not needed in raising a child: the father or the mother?

That’s the type of question in need of an answer, not questions about non-issues such as benefits. Voters are not convinced that we should tinker with the basic unit of society. And political special interests certainly should not trump what is clearly in the best interests of families and children.

Read it all as well as a USA Today editorial which has a different view.

Watch it all. I especially was interested to learn the story of the featured chaplain in terms of his own combat experience.

On Saturday 15th November Dr Williams will officially open The Springfield Centre at St Christopher’s Church, Springfield, and meet with parents, children, staff and volunteers from the Centre.

The Archbishop said: “The Springfield Centre is a further example of the Church of England’s Presence & Engagement programme, which emphasises the positive contribution of parish churches in multi religious neighbourhoods.”

The Springfield Centre has grown out of the work of The Springfield Project, a community project established in 2000 by St Christopher’s Church, a local parish church in a multi cultural neighbourhood. The new £2m Centre was primarily financed and built by Birmingham City Council as the home of the Springfield Children’s Centre, a ‘one stop shop’ provision for families with children under the age of 5.

Read it all.

An interesting graph.

“We make decent money, but it takes a tremendous amount to pay the mortgage,” [Jerry] Martinez, 33, said.

First American CoreLogic, a real estate data company, has calculated that 7.6 million properties in the country were underwater as of Sept. 30, while another 2.1 million were in striking distance. That is nearly a quarter of all homes with mortgages. The 20 hardest-hit ZIP codes are all in four states: California, Florida, Nevada and Arizona.

“Most people pay very little attention to what their equity stake is if they can make the mortgage,” said First American’s chief economist, Mark Fleming. “They think it’s a bummer if the value has gone down, but they are rooted in their house.”

And yet the magnitude of the current declines has little precedent. “When my house is valued at 50 percent less than it was, does this begin to challenge the way I’m going to behave?” he said.

Read it all.

Is God indeed our shelter in the stormy blast? The churches on Wall Street are full. More and more young people are putting themselves forward for ordination to the Church of England. Politicians are calling for a return to spiritual values and bankers are demonised for their pursuit of Mammon. Has the economic downturn driven the West back to religion? Or are we merely seeing a plaintive echo of Matthew Arnold’s “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar”?

Counting the numbers who go to church is a poor measure of faith: in Britain, at least, religion has become a contentious political issue, with argument raging more on television, in the press and on the internet than from the country pulpits of the Church of England.

And it is from the internet that a striking statistic has just emerged: some 71 per cent of those surveyed by Faithbook, a new multifaith page on Facebook, believe that a spiritual recession is more worrying than a material recession. And 80 per cent do not see the financial situation as a crisis but an economic watershed with moral and social opportunities.

Read it all.

A few years ago, my Late Lord Mayor, I ventured to refer at this dinner to the legendary Texan tourist who, faced with a medical crisis and the cry for artificial respiration, generously said that there was no need to bother about artificial respiration as he could afford the real thing. I suppose that this is in fact the underlying issue we currently face: how can we afford the real thing? the real thing that is actual sustainable prosperity for a whole population ”“ a flourishing ‘real economy’; the real thing that is security for actual people in the most vulnerable situations. And we have been reminded that the relation between these things and the intellectually exhilarating, rapidly-moving, self-multiplying world of financial adventure is by no means as simple ”“ or as benign ”“ as we’d like to think. Just to talk about greed is simplistic: it’s more that we are looking at a large-scale system, sophisticated and normally successful, that can persuade us to imagine that it is more unquestionably solid and dependable than it in fact is. And when some of the salve wears off, we’re bound to ask how best we reconnect with what we’ve lost.

The City has worked hard over the years ”“ and you, my Late Lord Mayor, have been a notable example in this ”“ to connect with the struggles and needs of the urban life that exists around you and the needs of the wider world. In another part of London, I was struck, on a recent visit to Canary Wharf, by the willingness of so many to put premises, skills and resources at the service of a much challenged neighbourhood: one of the first people I met there was the head teacher of a local school with whom the firm I was visiting had developed a very creative partnership. There are countless people – very many, I know, in this company tonight – who have shown how to connect, how to think about affording the real thing. And it is this which gives me and others some confidence in these uncertain days: there is still in our institutions a will not only to make money but to create employment, security and a just sharing of goods.

Read it all.

Take a look.

The chorus of calls for help could pressure the Bush administration to widen the scope of its $700 billion bailout plan, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which was authorized in October.Treasury officials have refused so far to open TARP to U.S. car makers, despite lobbying from Congress to do so.

The Treasury has committed all but $60 billion of the first $350 billion in funds granted by Congress under the TARP plan. That sum remains after accounting for Treasury’s planned investments in the banking sector and Monday’s additional $40 billion investment in troubled insurer American International Group Inc. AIG was originally bailed out by the Federal Reserve in September, and Fannie Mae, along with its sister company Freddie Mac, was seized by the government the same month.

The rescue efforts are “evolving in ways that I don’t think anyone anticipated,” said Camden Fine, president and CEO of the Independent Community Bankers of America, a trade group. “Things are just hitting them from every single direction, every day, and I don’t think they know whether to spit or go blind.”

Read it all from the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal.

With wars continuing in Iraq and Afghanistan, the number of military veterans grows every Veterans Day. Commentator Forrest Brandt served in an earlier conflict ”” he was with the 1st Infantry Division in Lai Khe, Vietnam, from 1968-69.

Brandt, now a retired lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserves and an adjunct professor at Northern Kentucky University, wrote about the day he came home, July 18, 1969.

You need to listen to it all, all the music as well as the narration.

Listen to it all.

Delegates of the Fort Worth Episcopal Diocese will decide this weekend whether to sever ties with the Episcopal Church ”” a move that both sides agree would be spiritually devastating and would create conflict over who controls church properties.

At last year’s annual meeting, about 80 percent of the delegates, under the leadership of Fort Worth Bishop Jack Iker, gave initial approval to leaving the Episcopal Church.

The Episcopal Church, with 2.1 million members in the United States and 16 other countries, is part of the worldwide, 77-million-member Anglican Communion. The Episcopal Church is more liberal than the Anglican Communion on issues ranging from same-sex unions to interpretation of Scripture regarding salvation.

Three other U.S. dioceses have voted to leave The Episcopal Church. The most recent was in Quincy, Ill., last weekend.

Read it all.

A good discussion with helpful charts of the current credit crisis.

The Lambeth Conference Design Group, meeting one last time to review last summer’s gathering of Anglican bishops, was unanimous in its assessment that the 2008 conference was an overwhelming success, says the Rev. Ian Douglas, the group’s only U.S.-based Episcopal Church member.

Underscoring the missiological focus of the July 16-August 3 Lambeth Conference, Douglas said that the design group’s work had been “led by the Holy Spirit” as its members “asked prayerfully what God wanted us to do ”¦ It gave the group a fortitude of spirit and confidence that sustained us throughout the planning.”

“The design group felt that the vision they had, along with that of the Archbishop of Canterbury, had played out well,” said Sue Parks, Lambeth Conference manager, who noted that the group was “very conscious of all the people around the communion who had held the Lambeth Conference in prayer and the prayerful way the bishops had approached the gathering.”

The design group, which has met regularly since February 2004, held its final meeting November 4-6 at the Anglican Communion Office in London to measure the effectiveness of the conference theme, “Equipping bishops for God’s mission,” assess whether the bishops’ identity as Anglicans had been strengthened, and to discuss the nature and worth of the Indaba process.

Read it all.

Fallout from the weekend decision by the Diocese of Quincy, Ill., to leave the Episcopal Church of the United States may include litigation over millions of dollars’ worth of property and assets.

“We pray there will be no litigation,” the Rev. Ed den Blaauwen said Monday. Den Blaauwen, the rector of Christ Church in Moline, is also the newly appointed vicar general of the diocese that is now aligned with the Anglican Province of the Southern Cone, based in Argentina.

Church resources would be better used for Christian activities than in the courts, he added.

Read it all.

The nation’s Catholic leaders, fresh from the defeat of many of their most urgent abortion opposition issues in addition to the election of a president who supports abortion rights, came back swinging on Monday at their annual fall meeting in Baltimore.

“The common good can never be adequately incarnated in any society when those waiting to be born can be legally killed at choice,” said Cardinal Francis George, drawing applause in his opening address to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

“If the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision that African Americans were other people’s property and somehow less than persons were still settled constitutional law, Mr. Obama would not be president of the United States. Today, as was the case 150 years ago, common ground cannot be found by destroying the common good.”

Read it all.

On Saturday 8th November 2008 the Episcopal Church of the Sudan (ECS) reburied the remains of its first Archbishop, the late Most Rev. Elinana J. Ngalamu, in a grave behind All Saints’ Cathedral, Juba, Southern Sudan. The first Archbishop’s coffin, originally buried in Khartoum in October 1992 following his death there on 29th September 1992, was exhumed on Thursday 6th November 2008 and flown to Juba with an accompanying delegation on Friday 7th.

On the morning of Saturday 8th a brief burial ceremony was conducted by the current Archbishop, the Most Rev. Dr. Daniel Deng Bul, accompanied by the bishops of Khartoum, Rokon, Lainya, Rumbek, Ibba, Rejaf, Mundri and Lui, the assistant bishops of Torit, Bor and Juba, and the retired bishop of Mundri. Archbishop Daniel, sighting Moses’ reburial of Joseph’s bones in Canaan after his return to the Promised Land from exile in Egypt, prayed that Archbishop Elinana’s “homecoming” be symbolic in the hearts of Sudanese Anglicans in all marginalised areas as a final homecoming. He pleaded that never again should the Church have to flee from these areas as Archbishop Elinana fled from Juba to Khartoum in the 1980s to die in exile in 1992. He thanked God for the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) that ended the 21-year civil war in 2005 and allowed the homecoming of the first Archbishop.

Read it all.

A Disestablished Church is not part of a truly liberal society, the British MP Sir Alan Beith has said.

Speaking at the Liberal Democrat Christian Forum’s inaugural Gladstone Lecture, Sir Alan told members of the Liberal Democrat party that “disestablishment is not a necessary feature of a diverse and multi-cultural society.”

He said: “I know of no evidence that significant numbers of Muslims, Jews, Hindus or Sikhs are at all interested in getting the Church of England disestablished, and it is no longer a popular view with nonconformists or Catholics as it was a century ago.”

Read it all.

Gov. Mark Sanford urged residents Monday to make their voices heard before Congress makes any more decisions about how to deal with the ailing economy.

Sanford said that ordinary taxpayers are being hoodwinked and that he believes using more government money to push the nation out of a financial mess is a big mistake.

“The federal government, and by extension taxpayers, are being gamed. I think it’s dangerous over the long run the way that taxpayers are being sapped, and this dynamic is playing out in South Carolina,” Sanford wrote in a letter Friday to U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to alert him to unintended consequences in South Carolina.

Read it all.

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

—Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae (1872-1918). It is just so moving and powerful you find yourself coming back to it again and again–KSH.

P.S. the circumstances which led to the poem are well worth remembering:

It is a lasting legacy of the terrible battle in the Ypres salient in the spring of 1915 and to the war in general. McCrea had spent seventeen days treating injured men — Canadians, British, French, and Germans in the Ypres salient. McCrae later wrote: “I wish I could embody on paper some of the varied sensations of that seventeen days… Seventeen days of Hades! At the end of the first day if anyone had told us we had to spend seventeen days there, we would have folded our hands and said it could not have been done.” The next day McCrae witnessed the burial of a good friend, Lieut. Alexis Helmer. Later that day, sitting on the back of an ambulance parked near the field dressing station, McCrea composed the poem. A young NCO, delivering mail, watched him write it. When McCrae finished writing, he took his mail from the soldier and, without saying a word, handed his pad to the Sergeant-major. Cyril Allinson was moved by what he read: “The poem was exactly an exact description of the scene in front of us both. He used the word blow in that line because the poppies actually were being blown that morning by a gentle east wind. It never occurred to me at that time that it would ever be published. It seemed to me just an exact description of the scene.” Colonel McCrae was dissatisfied with the poem, and tossed it away. A fellow officer retrieved it and sent it to newspapers in England. The Spectator, in London, rejected it, but Punch published it on 8 December 1915. For his contributions as a surgeon, the main street in Wimereaux is named “Rue McCrae”.

There is a fabulous resource for this courtesy of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. There are many themes from which to choose, and various letters to see the text of and listen to. Take a moment a drink at least one in, and, if you have a moment, tell us your thoughts in the comments.

God of peace,
we pray for those who have served our nation
and who laid down their lives
to protect and defend our freedom.

We pray for those who have fought,
whose spirits and bodies are scarred by war,
whose nights are haunted by memories
too painful for the light of day.

We pray for those who serve us now,
especially for those in harm’s way.
Shield them from danger
and bring them home.

Turn the hearts and minds
of our leaders and our enemies
to the work of justice and a harvest of peace.

Spare the poor, Lord, spare the poor!

Let the peace you left us,
the peace you gave us,
be the peace that sustains,
the peace that saves us.

Christ Jesus, hear us!
Lord Jesus, hear our prayer!

Army veteran David Platt used to sleep in abandoned houses in North Charleston, after his alcohol-fueled descent into homelessness.

He was among the roughly 300,000 veterans the government estimates are homeless during the course of each year in the United States. But a growing network of services in the Charleston area has helped him change his life.

“Four years ago, I was a homeless drunk on the streets, picking cigarette butts out of ashtrays,” said Platt, 51, formerly of Mount Pleasant. “When I finally got honest with myself, this is where I came.”

Platt is living at the Good Neighbor Center in North Charleston, one of several transitional housing facilities for homeless veterans in the region. He’s nearly completed an associate’s degree in horticulture at Trident Technical College, and is looking forward to living independently.

Read it all.

Veterans Day isn’t just a special day for America’s military veterans. It’s a day for all who rightly recognize the indispensable contributions our veterans have made to freedom not just for our nation but for the world.

Col. John “Red” Millander, commander of the 437th Airlift Wing at Charleston Air Force Base, correctly points out on this page that the courageous folks of today’s armed forces are still making such contributions.

Americans in military uniforms have sustained a noble ”” and constant ”” tradition of duty, honor and country for more than two centuries. The venues, reasons, terms of engagement, and popularity of the bloody conflicts in which they have fought have continually changed.

Yet their brave devotion to our nation has remained steadfast.

Read it all.

Old habits die hard.

In a small room at the San Francisco Veterans Administration Medical Center on Monday, a dozen old soldiers sat in wheelchairs to one side of the podium. It took awhile to get everyone situated, and politicians to talk. But these guys learned the finer points of “hurry up and wait” a long time ago.

Soon, the Veterans Day ceremony began. A color guard of JROTC students from San Francisco’s Washington High School brought in the American flag.

Michael O’Neal pushed up from his chair and stood on his only remaining foot.

After a bit, everyone sang the national anthem. O’Neal raised his hand to his face and held the salute. A tear formed at the corner of his only remaining eye.

Read the whole article.

It is Veteran’s Day–please take the time to watch it all.

Traditionalist Anglicans, smarting over the General Synod’s vote on women bishops, were urged on Saturday [Nov 1] not to become insular and “keep themselves to themselves”.

The appeal was issued by “flying bishop” Martyn Jarrett at a traditionalists’ Northern Festival in York Minster attended by thousands of Anglo-Catholics from all parts of the York province and beyond.

Bishop Jarrett, Bishop of Beverley, was preaching almost four months after July’s synod vote on women in the episcopate which traditionalists see as giving them no protection when females don mitres, possibly by 2013.

Read it all.

By a margin of just 16 votes, delegates to the Diocese of Pennsylvania’s annual convention decided Nov. 8 to sell all the property of Camp Wapiti. The camp has been the subject of debate at previous conventions.

Camp opponents have argued that the Rt. Rev. Charles E. Bennison Jr., the diocese’s recently deposed bishop, misled diocesan leadership about the true cost of diocesan funds to support the camp. After the diocese’s standing committee filed a complaint regarding diocesan funds and Camp Wapiti, the Title IV Review Committee advised against prosecuting Bishop Bennison. By then Bishop Bennison already was in church court on other charges that ultimately led to his being deposed by the House of Bishops.

The convention received two resolutions regarding the camp. One was to sell the camp whole, and the other was to keep the property and develop it more fully. Under the special-order rules, the convention chose to debate and vote on the first resolution, and to debate the second only if first failed. The rules said that approval of either resolution rendered the other resolution moot.

Read it all.