Read it all (15 page pdf) and follow this link to some very important commentary thereon.

[BARRY] RITHOLTZ: Most of Wall Street is furious at what happened. Most of Wall Street aren’t involved in mortgage securitization or derivatives or any of the other bad assets that have been blowing up. The average guy — you know Wall Street is a meritocracy, eat what you kill, as much as you can earn in profits you get to take as a bonus — and I know a lot of guys, everywhere from Merrill Lynch to Bear Stearns to Lehman, that actually were really profitable. But because this one division was run by rogue pirate traders and reckless derivatives salesmen, they wiped up the entire bonus pool for the entire firm, and then some, all the while engaging in really reckless behavior.

[Kai] Ryssdal: Do you figure we’re stuck now as a bailout nation? We’re going to be subsidizing banks and car companies and insurance companies for some time to come.

RITHOLTZ: You know we’ve already seen the trucking industry make hints they want stuff. And we’ve seen the homebuilders who are key players in this, who just overbuilt everything. They’ve been asking for a bailout. That’s the slippery slope. Once you reward people for their worst behavior, for speculative, irresponsible investing and punish the prudent and the people who are careful with that money. Everybody seems to think it’s a free for all. Hey, you’ve got yours. How do I get mine?

Ryssdal: What’s the alternative to these bailouts? I mean should we have just done nothing?

RITHOLTZ: What you do is what the FDIC does when a bank is found to be insolvent. Look what happened with Washington Mutual….

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The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Secretary General have now announced the names of the Working Group. They are:

* The Most Revd Dr John Neill, Archbishop of Dublin (Chair);
* The Most Revd Dr John Chew, Primate of South East Asia;
* Dr Eileen Scully, Anglican Church of Canada;
* The Rt Revd Dr Gregory Cameron, Bishop of St Asaph in the Church in Wales and former Deputy Secretary General of the Anglican Communion.

Read it all.

Bishop Colin Johnson is encouraging Anglicans to take part in the national church�s Vision 2019 initiative, saying that one person�s voice can make a difference.

�As a unique voice, you might say something that sparks an idea in somebody else and it just takes off,� he says. �In Christian theology, Mary�s voice that said �Let it be� allowed for the Incarnation of Christ. One person makes a difference.�

Vision 2019 is a nation-wide exercise to discern, dream and decide where Anglicans think God wants the Anglican Church of Canada to be in 2019. The national church has designated June 7 as Vision 2019 Sunday and is sending out a resource kit to all parishes.

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Girls embracing girls, girls embracing boys, boys embracing each other ”” the hug has become the favorite social greeting when teenagers meet or part these days. Teachers joke about “one hour” and “six hour” hugs, saying that students hug one another all day as if they were separated for the entire summer.

A measure of how rapidly the ritual is spreading is that some students complain of peer pressure to hug to fit in. And schools from Hillsdale, N.J., to Bend, Ore., wary in a litigious era about sexual harassment or improper touching ”” or citing hallway clogging and late arrivals to class ”” have banned hugging or imposed a three-second rule.

Parents, who grew up in a generation more likely to use the handshake, the low-five or the high-five, are often baffled by the close physical contact. “It’s a wordless custom, from what I’ve observed,” wrote Beth J. Harpaz, the mother of two boys, 11 and 16, and a parenting columnist for The Associated Press, in a new book, “13 Is the New 18.”

“And there doesn’t seem to be any other overt way in which they acknowledge knowing each other,” she continued, describing the scene at her older son’s school in Manhattan. “No hi, no smile, no wave, no high-five ”” just the hug. Witnessing this interaction always makes me feel like I am a tourist in a country where I do not know the customs and cannot speak the language.”

Read it all.

Family integrity will be restored only when families are de-politicized and protected from government invasion. This will demand morally vigorous congregations that are willing to take marriage out of the hands of the state by intervening in the marriages they are called upon to witness and consecrate and by resisting the power of the state to move in. This is the logic behind the group Marriage Savers, and it can restore the churches’ authority even among those who previously viewed a church’s role in their marriage as largely ceremonial.

No greater challenge confronts the churches””nor any greater opportunity to reverse the mass exodus””than to defend their own marriage ordinance against this attack from the government. Churches readily and rightly mobilize politically against moral evils like abortion and same-sex “marriage,” in which they are not required to participate. Even more are they primary stakeholders in involuntary divorce, which allows the state to desecrate and nullify their own ministry.

As an Anglican, I am acutely aware of how far modernity was ushered in not only through divorce, but through divorce processes that served the all-encompassing claims of the emerging state leviathan. Politically, this might be seen as the “original sin” of modern man. We all need to atone.

Read it carefully and read it all.

The Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin on Wednesday deposed 61 clergy from Lodi to Bakersfield because they have left the national Episcopal Church and aligned themselves with the worldwide Anglican Communion.

Episcopal Bishop Jerry Lamb, who called the action “heartbreaking,” said from his Stockton headquarters that such clergy will have their retirement assets frozen and no longer can participate as Episcopal priests. But, he added, “this action is not taken for any ethical or moral concerns.”

The news didn’t seem to matter to the priests, who are now under Anglican oversight.

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As long as we’re talking about getting people to pay for what they value online, Edward Gottesman suggests in the British magazine Prospect, what about taxing everyone a few cents per e-mail to cut down on the estimated 90 percent of it that is unwanted spam choking the Web?

Yuck. Read it all.

Received via email–KSH.

It is with a mixture of sadness and joy that we received today a letter from Bishop Lamb wherein he purports to depose 36 priests and 16 deacons as of May 22, 2009. It is heartbreaking that The Episcopal Church chooses to take such a punitive action and condemn 52 active clergy with “Abandonment of the Communion” when all of these men and women are recognized around the world as priests and deacons in good standing within the Anglican Communion.Clearly, the traditional understanding of what it means to be a member of this historic Communion has been tragically altered by this action; and thereby The Episcopal Church needlessly isolates itself from their brothers and sisters around the world.

The Diocese of San Joaquin continues to reach out to the central third of California in active ministry.It will become one of 23 founding Dioceses, along with 5 more in formation, within the new Province of the Anglican Church in North America at its first Provincial Assembly in Bedford, Texas, June 22-25. Despite The Episcopal Church’s disregard for valid Anglican Orders and ongoing legal actions against us, the bold vision to bring all to an ever expanding knowledge and joy of the Lord Jesus Christ remains unchanged within the diocese. We rejoice over the growing number of ministries seeking to join themselves with us in the mission field God
has put before us.
~
We are, however,~grieved that the leadership of The Episcopal Church feels compelled to create this unprecedented division between the ministries of The Episcopal Church and their brothers and sisters throughout the rest of the Anglican Communion. For our part, we continue to recognize the orders of those who are properly ordained according to the Book of Common Prayer and who have chosen to continue to serve Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior within TEC.~~May God bless~all of us who share a common vision of ministry.~

–The Rt. Rev. John-David Schofield, is Bishop of the Diocese of San Joaquin

A quick follow up to yesterday’s post With Each Interest Rate Tick Higher Another “Green Shoot” Dies….

We are drowning under the weight of near term supply for sure but I guess I think something else is afoot here.

Look at the breakeven spread on the 10 year TIPS bond. That spread is currently 185 basis points. I do not believe that we have been that wide since the advent of the financial crisis in 2007. I think that investors are uttering a gigantic and collective nyet regarding the implementation of monetary policy and fiscal policy in the US.That is why the curve is steepening so dramatically.

Yuck. Read it all and follow the links.

In the U.K., a Web site called…allows married people who are planning to play a few matches away from home to meet up with each other. It has at least 300,000 members, indicating that the British have more on their minds than just the work expenses of politicians and the threat of unemployment.

The Web site crunched its traffic and membership numbers and found that there was a big increase in both when there was a turning point in the FTSE-100 index, which measures the leading companies listed in London. When the market collapses, people plot affairs. And when the bulls rage, the same thing happens. When it is trading sideways, they stick with their partners.

“It has to do with people’s confidence levels,” says Rosie Freeman-Jones, a spokeswoman for the site. “When the markets are up, they think they can have an affair because they feel they can get away with anything. When the market hits the bottom, they are looking for a way to relieve the pressure.”

I happened to catch this because of a Bloomberg Television report this morning, it goes in the category of things of which I would not have thought.

I will take comments on this submitted by email only to at KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

A “dirty tricks” campaign has blown up in the faces of liberal activists in the Episcopal Church, as the publication of purloined e-mails has led to allegations of “conduct unbecoming a member of the clergy” being lodged against the leader of the gay-pressure group Integrity and a member of the Episcopal Church’s Executive Council.

Bishops associated with the Anglican Communion Institute (ACI) have asked the bishops of Los Angeles and Delaware to look in to the conduct of the Rev Susan Russell and the Rev Canon Mark Harris for having surreptitiously obtained and then posting on their blogs the text of private correspondence exchanged among the ACI and its attorney.

A request has also been made to Bishop John Chane of Washington to review the actions of one of his staffers in the anti-ACI campaign. The dispute centres around e-mails published by Canon Harris and Ms Russell though written and exchanged by the ACI leadership on the crafting of a position paper entitled the “Bishops’ Statement on the Polity of the Episcopal Church”, released last month by the ACI and subsequently endorsed by 14 bishops.

Read it all.

A senior Pakistani Taliban leader has claimed responsibility for Wednesday’s deadly suicide attack in the eastern city of Lahore.

Taliban official Hakimullah Mehsud told news agencies Thursday that the attack on police and intelligence offices was revenge for the ongoing military offensive in northwestern Pakistan’s Swat Valley.

Read it all.

Sir Alex Ferguson conceded that Manchester United performed poorly last night after his dream of becoming the first manager to retain the Champions League perished at the hands of an outstanding Barcelona team who made history of their own.

Goals in each half, from Samuel Eto’o and Lionel Messi, were enough to give Pep Guardiola’s side a 2-0 victory that their performance merited, making them the first Spanish club to complete a treble of league, domestic cup and European Cup.

However, while Ferguson had the good grace to acknowledge that Barcelona deserved to win, he is likely to be infuriated to learn that his tactics were criticised by Cristiano Ronaldo. “We only had ten minutes [on top] and then we never found ourselves again,” the United forward said. “We were not well, the tactics were not good and everything went wrong.”

Congratulations to Barcelona. I was disappointed with Man U.’s performance. After a strong start by Ronaldo, they looked dazed when their opponents scored. Read it all—KSH.

The big influx of highly educated workers into finance in the last two decades has been the subject of some national hand-wringing lately. President Obama, college presidents and economists have all worried aloud that Wall Street has hoarded human resources that might otherwise have gone to science, education, medicine or other fields.

Now, new research is suggesting that the shift also brought another cost ”” a cost that fell mainly on the people, especially women, who took jobs in finance. Among elite white-collar fields, finance appears to be uniquely difficult for anyone trying to combine work and family.

Read it all.

Check it out.

North Korea escalated its vitriol against South Korea and the United States on Wednesday with warnings of a “powerful military strike” if any North Korean ships were stopped or searched as part of an American-led operation to intercept vessels suspected of carrying unconventional weapons.

South Korea agreed to join the operation after North Korea tested a nuclear device on Monday, its second nuclear test in three years. The North had earlier warned the South not to participate in the operation, known as the Proliferation Security Initiative.

“We consider this a declaration of war against us,” North Korea said in a statement carried by its official news agency, KCNA. “Any hostile act against our peaceful vessels, including search and seizure, will be considered an unpardonable infringement on our sovereignty, and we will immediately respond with a powerful military strike.”

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As job losses rise, growing numbers of American homeowners with once solid credit are falling behind on their mortgages, amplifying a wave of foreclosures.

In the latest phase of the nation’s real estate disaster, the locus of trouble has shifted from subprime loans ”” those extended to home buyers with troubled credit ”” to the far more numerous prime loans issued to those with decent financial histories.

With many economists anticipating that the unemployment rate will rise into the double digits from its current 8.9 percent, foreclosures are expected to accelerate. That could exacerbate bank losses, adding pressure to the financial system and the broader economy.

“We’re about to have a big problem,” said Morris A. Davis, a real estate expert at the University of Wisconsin. “Foreclosures were bad last year? It’s going to get worse.”

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President Obama and Dick Cheney conspired on Thursday to propagate a myth. The myth is that we lived through an eight-year period of Bush-Cheney anti-terror policy and now we have entered a very different period called the Obama-Biden anti-terror policy. As both Obama and Cheney understand, this is a completely bogus distortion of history.

The reality is that after Sept. 11, we entered a two- or three-year period of what you might call Bush-Cheney policy. The country was blindsided. Intelligence officials knew next to nothing about the threats arrayed against them. The Bush administration tried just about everything to discover and prevent threats. The Bush people believed they were operating within the law but they did things most of us now find morally offensive and counterproductive.

The Bush-Cheney period lasted maybe three years. For Dick Cheney those might be the golden years. For Democrats, it is surely the period they want to forever hang around the necks of the Republican Party. But that period ended long ago.

Read the whole piece.