The Vermont Senate gave its final approval to a same-sex marriage bill Tuesday.
By a voice vote with a few barely audible no votes, the bill now moves to the House.
The House Judiciary Committee takes testimony on the bill this afternoon. Testimony is expected to last a week or more before the full House will vote on the bill.
…[DONALD MARRON] I hope the government has set it up that, once it gets going, they can change the terms, as the market gets more comfortable, as more confidence this thing is actually going to work, isn’t as concerned about what the Congress is going to do as they are in the case of TALF.
So this is getting things going. There needs to be flexibility in the future. I’m assuming Tim Geithner and Larry Summers have thought that through. So once we get it started, we can make sure it becomes a positive continuing force and not some kind of a windfall.
JEFFREY BROWN: Well, Mr. Krugman, go ahead. Argue back. That’s the argument is, you need to attract investors, so…
PAUL KRUGMAN: I don’t think that’s the issue, really. I mean, there’s a lot of people who’ve got money parked in the banks. The problem is that people — it’s the banks as institutions that are the issue, not whether people are willing to buy these particular assets.
In a way, we’d like to make the whole story of these assets go away. The only reason that they’re there, the only reason it’s an issue is because the banks have lost so much money that they are not effective at their job of passing funds from one end of the economy to the other.
This is not going to change that. I mean, it’s going to make some of the stuff sell for a slightly better price, but the banks are still going to be deep underwater, at least the troubled ones are going to be. It’s going to convey some windfall benefits to people who are holding some of this paper who are not actually crucial financial intermediaries.
Watch it all.
In all the uproar over AIG, the most important lesson has been ignored. AIG failed because it sold large amounts of credit default swaps (CDS) without properly offsetting or covering their positions. What we must take away from this is that CDS are toxic instruments whose use ought to be strictly regulated: Only those who own the underlying bonds ought to be allowed to buy them. Instituting this rule would tame a destructive force and cut the price of the swaps. It would also save the U.S. Treasury a lot of money by reducing the loss on AIG’s outstanding positions without abrogating any contracts.
CDS came into existence as a way of providing insurance on bonds against default. Since they are tradable instruments, they became bear-market warrants for speculating on deteriorating conditions in a company or country. What makes them toxic is that such speculation can be self-validating.
Up until the crash of 2008, the prevailing view — called the efficient market hypothesis — was that the prices of financial instruments accurately reflect all the available information (i.e. the underlying reality). But this is not true. Financial markets don’t deal with the current reality, but with the future — a matter of anticipation, not knowledge. Thus, we must understand financial markets through a new paradigm which recognizes that they always provide a biased view of the future, and that the distortion of prices in financial markets may affect the underlying reality that those prices are supposed to reflect.
One day last July, Naji Hamdan was summoned to the U.S. Embassy in the United Arab Emirates. He drove two hours through the desert heat from Dubai to answer questions from FBI agents who had arrived from Los Angeles, where Hamdan had gone to school, started a family, built a successful auto-parts business and become a U.S. citizen.
At his apartment six weeks later, he was awakened from a nap by men who bundled him into a black Chevrolet Suburban with tinted windows. Hamdan was told he was a prisoner of the UAE and was held in a cell painted glossy white to reflect the lights that burned round the clock, according to a note he wrote from prison. Between interrogations, he wrote, he was confined in a frigid room overnight, strapped into “an electric chair” and punched in the head until he lost consciousness.
In one session, the blindfolded prisoner recalled hearing a voice that sounded American. The voice said, “Do what they want or these people will [expletive] you up,” Hamdan wrote.
The prisoner obliged, signing a confession that he later said meant only that he would do anything to make the pain stop. The case might have ended there but for Hamdan’s U.S. citizenship and his American attorney’s assertion that he was tortured “at the behest” of his own government.
The Obama administration is considering asking Congress to give the Treasury secretary unprecedented powers to initiate the seizure of non-bank financial companies, such as large insurers, investment firms and hedge funds, whose collapse would damage the broader economy, according to an administration document.
The government at present has the authority to seize only banks.
These opportunities for what Kate Lehman, information technology coordinator for the Diocese of Bethlehem, called “ubiquitous communication” can also create difficulties, she and Lytle agreed. “Ubiquitous communication is great, but you are always in the network and you can’t always be in the network or you will end up crashing and burning,” Lehman said. “Jesus went into the wilderness to get away from the network to re-focus.”
Lytle said “this is where we have to be honest and we have to have integrity. We cannot do everything we are being asked to do, and be faithful people. We can’t.”
“We have to get to the point where we are counter-cultural and right now we’re not. We’re trying to keep up with everything that everyone in the world is doing,” she continued. “That’s not going to keep us alive and if we can’t stay alive — if we can’t feel joyous when we’re a part of our communities — how are we going to model and witness what it is that we’re supposed to be excited about?”
Plenty of people dream of leaving their jobs to become teachers. Today, more people are actually doing it.
Peter Vos ran an Internet start-up. Now he teaches computer science to middle school kids in Maryland.
Jaime McLaughlin used to do people’s taxes. Now he teaches math to sixth graders in Chicago.
Alisa Salvans was a makeup artist at Saks department store. Now she teaches high school chemistry in suburban Dallas.
The number of people who have Alzheimer’s disease is creeping insidiously higher year after year, adding increasing pressure on the health care system, experts say.
A report out today, the 2009 Alzheimer’s Disease Facts and Figures, indicates that an estimated 5.1 million Americans over 65 now have Alzheimer’s.
The Board of Governors of the Church Commissioners and the Archbishops’ Council each agreed, last August, to make available to the Lambeth Conference Company up to £600,000 as required to enable the Company to honour its commitments while fundraising efforts continued. Both bodies regarded these amounts as interest free loan facilities. Of the £388,000 actually borrowed by the Company, £124,000 has now been repaid, leaving £132,000 owing to each organisation as fundraising continues.
By the end of 2008, the review reports, the projected deficit had reduced from an estimate of over £1 million in August 2008 to £288,000, in part as a result of further fundraising efforts and in part due to actual costs proving lower than had been cautiously projected earlier in the year. The total cost of the event was £5.2million, as against the budget of £6.1million.
Read it all and make sure to follow the links to the report and the appendices.
The long awaited details of Geithner’s “plan” for dealing with bad bank assets is finally out. Githener’s plan is disingenuous at best. If people want to be outraged at something, it should be over Geithner’s plan.
After repeated pledges by world leaders to avoid erecting trade barriers, protectionism is on the march, provoking nasty trade disputes and undermining efforts to plot a coordinated response to the deepest global economic downturn since World War II.
From a looming battle with China over tariffs on carbon-intensive goods to a spat over Mexican trucks using American roads, barriers are going up around the world. As the recession’s grip tightens, these pressures are likely to intensify, several experts said.
The surge in protectionism is casting a shadow over an economic summit meeting of world leaders scheduled for London on April 2. At the last such gathering, in Washington in November, former President George W. Bush persuaded the Group of 20 members to commit to protecting free trade — whatever the pressures caused by faltering economies and lost jobs. The members include industrialized and developing nations, and the European Union.
The last thing we need is an outbreak of real protectionism. Read it all.
[We need]…A Green New Deal. If Roosevelt’s big idea for the Great Depression was public works, then it makes sense to use this crisis to start the long, hard process of making economies more sustainable and less dependent on fossil fuels. A combination of low interest rates and fiscal expansion is ideal – provided the investment is used productively rather than for speculation. That will involve two concepts that have been anathema during the heyday of laissez-faire: industrial policy and credit controls.
A Green New Deal is vital for the world. The US has only 4 per cent of the world’s population, but is responsible for 25 per cent of global CO2 emissions. The problems of the big three car makers provide Obama with an unprecedented opportunity to send the gas guzzler to the scrapheap. Rebalancing the global economy means countries such as China must increase domestic demand; one way to do that would be through investment in greener energy.
New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced Monday evening that nine of the top 10 executives at AIG will return their bonuses.
Meanwhile, there is little prospect that Congress will do what is necessary to bring spending and borrowing down to levels that do not trigger inflation. Politicians just don’t worry as much about inflation as about catering to their multiple constituencies. So the Treasury will have more trillions in IOUs to peddle.
But its best customers just might be unenthusiastic about adding significantly to their holdings. Wen already owns trillions in Treasury bills that are depreciating in value. Besides, China’s mounting needs for infrastructure and an improved safety net will sop up funds once used to buy American securities. Japan, another large customer, is now running a current-account deficit, and so it won’t have as many dollars to recycle. Nor will Middle East buyers, no longer receiving a flood of dollars from $140-a-barrel oil. Little wonder that Larry Lindsey, former economic adviser to President George W Bush, says he “cannot figure out what combination of foreign buyers is going to acquire . . . [the] debt” that Obama’s plans will generate.
Which leaves Americans and the Fed as customers. Even if they save more, domestic consumers can’t absorb all the Treasury bonds that will be on offer. And if the Fed keeps buying, it will pour fuel on the inflationary fires.
India’s Tata Motors on Monday launched the world’s cheapest car, the Nano, hoping to revolutionise travel for millions and buck a slump in auto sales caused by the global economic crisis.
Company boss Ratan Tata said the no-frills vehicle, slated to cost just 100,000 rupees (2,000 dollars) for the basic model, will get India’s middle-class urban population off motorcycles and into safer, affordable cars.
“I think we are at the gates of offering a new form of transport to the people of India and later, I hope, other markets elsewhere in the world,” he said, describing the launch as a “milestone.”
Kevin Forrester’s election needs to be confirmed by a majority of standing committees and bishops in the TEC before he can be consecrated. It will be an interesting test for the TEC. Will they stand for the uniqueness of Christ? Will they recognise that Buddhism and biblical Christianity are mutually exclusive?
In 2003, imams in northern Nigeria fomented a boycott of polio vaccinations, claiming they were a Western plot to make Muslims infertile or infect them with AIDS. The result: The number of newly crippled children more than doubled the following year, and there were fears that the disease would spread into a dozen countries nearby.
Now, after another tripling of cases in 2008, a big new anti-polio push is under way in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country. And this time, some Muslim clerics have made themselves part of the solution, joining community leaders, health workers and the victims themselves in waging the war.
In the dusty streets of Kano, northern Nigeria’s main city, town criers with bullhorns cut through the traffic and crowds, urging parents to take their children to one of hundreds of vaccination centers. Radio and newspapers are full of get-vaccinated ads.
It is a truth so familiar as to have become cliché: Women are the driving force behind organized religion. They fill the pews, they bring their children into the fold. The Pew data help make sense of these facts. But the same data highlight the cruel irony that in far too many religious contexts in this country, women remain second-class citizens.
Another of the findings of Pew’s 2008 Religious Landscape Survey was that, among people who pray “more than seldom,” a significant proportion across most religious groups say their prayers are regularly answered, at least once a week or once a month. This religious demographic was not broken down by gender.
But it is fair to assume that, given women’s greater likelihood to pray at all, a sizable number of these supplicants are women. It is equally fair to assume that, if religious equality is what they are praying for, many of them are going to have to wait a while longer.
The executives said the political attacks are having a broad effect on their business — even though the restrictions are intended to apply only to recipients of federal bailout money — and cancellations have been increasing as the rhetoric heats up.
“We’ve seen companies cancel meetings last minute, leaving 100 percent on the table just to avoid criticism and ridicule,” said Frits van Paasschen, president and chief executive of White Plains, New York-based Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc., the third-largest U.S. lodging company, who attended the White House meeting.
[The Rev. Lawrence] Provenzano, 54, a Brooklyn native, will assume the post of bishop coadjutor in September, making him the designated successor to the current bishop, Orris G. Walker Jr. Walker called for the election in 2007 and now must retire within three years of Provenzano’s assumption of the coadjutor post.
“I was overwhelmed with the overwhelming support I received,” Provenzano said last night.
Noting the diocese is among the more diverse in the world, Provenzano said parishioners should be able to “celebrate their diversity in ways that are meaningful. . . . We don’t all need to act the same and look the same.”
President Obama’s proposed 2010 federal budget contains a 7% cut in charitable tax deductions for the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers. Some religious groups are asking how that will affect their bottom line.
The answer: it depends who you ask.
Here’s what it means in real terms for the 5% of Americans whose household income exceeds $250,000 a year. Those families can currently save $350 in taxes for every $1,000 donated to charity; under Obama’s plan, that amount would drop to $280 per $1,000 donation.
“By doing this, you raise the cost of giving” said Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at The Tax Policy Center, a liberal Washington think tank.
Q: What is the Geithner Plan?
A: The Geithner Plan is a trillion-dollar operation by which the U.S. acts as the world’s largest hedge fund investor, committing its money to funds to buy up risky and distressed but probably fundamentally undervalued assets and, as patient capital, holding them either until maturity or until markets recover so that risk discounts are normal and it can sell them off–in either case at an immense profit.
Q: What if markets never recover, the assets are not fundamentally undervalued, and even when held to maturity the government doesn’t make back its money?
A: Then we have worse things to worry about than government losses on TARP-program money–for we are then in a world in which the only things that have value are bottled water, sewing needles, and ammunition.
Q: Where does the trillion dollars come from?
A: $150 billion comes from the TARP in the form of equity, $820 billion from the FDIC in the form of debt, and $30 billion from the hedge fund and pension fund managers who will be hired to make the investments and run the program’s operations.
Q: Why is the government making hedge and pension fund managers kick in $30 billion?
A: So that they have skin in the game, and so do not take excessive risks with the taxpayers’ money because their own money is on the line as well.
Read it all–and the discussion.
Update:: Paul Krugman doesn’t like the plan.
While the canons are clear that the Episcopal Church keeps the properties (who could imagine canons that would not support the institution that created them?), I think we should listen to the clear message of Scripture and pass over the older brother’s outrage and prepare for the reconciliation that trumps all worldly concern.
Could the Episcopal Church allow a renegade diocese to gather all that it has and travel to a distant country? It would be risky and scary, like the gospel itself. In the parable, the younger son squanders all of the property.
We rightly are concerned about the saints entrusted to our burial grounds and the memorial silver in the safes. We have a responsibility to the legacies entrusted and the promises made.
Still, I remain surprised that the Episcopal Church’s dedication to the reconciliation model so abundant in the Gospel of Luke grows scarce when the fight is over property. In the blink of an eye, brothers and sisters morph into litigants, and the battle lands in the secular courts.
