Archive for
November, 2007
November 30th, 2007
Marketwatch.com story re Wall Street Journal update report on rumored agreement among banks to not raise mortgage rates when adjustable loans are ready to re-set as way to choke off the seething flood of foreclosures. This won’t solve the more general confidence problem re valuation of complex structured finance securities. But WOULD address the heart of the Main Street problem. Not a “bail out” of Wall Street as sophomoric dogmatists whine, since the lenders would be taking the hit. Treasury’s role seems to be “guidance” — and by getting all the cats in the pool assuring something like level playing field.
U.S. Government, Banks Finalizing Rate-Freeze PlanBy Chris Oliver
Nov. 30, 2007
HONG KONG (MarketWatch) — The U.S. Federal government and leading financial institutions are finalizing details of a plan that would extend low introductory rates offered to some borrowers who took out adjustable rate mortgages, according to reports.
The plan, being hammered out between the Treasury Department and a number of large mortgage lenders, would include subprime mortgage borrowers, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday, citing unnamed sources familiar with the negotiations.
The report said the gist of the plan was to extend the low introductory rates on home loans made to borrowers who will have trouble meeting higher reset rates. Under one scenario, the extension of lower rates could run as long as seven years, the report said.
About two million adjustable rate mortgages are scheduled to reset to higher levels over the next two years.
November 28th, 2007
Trent Lott announced yesterday or thereabouts that he’s resigning his Senate seat in January. Rather abrupt. Spoke of wanting to “do things” with his wife.
Meanwhile I spy Republican clubhouse unwilling to nominate McCain, Romney or Giuliani. None are GOPhers at heart. All rather … individualistic.
Long Shot One: Trent Lott gets nominated. Familiar. Abides by the rules. Draws the Nixon/Reagan Democrat vote.
Seems Likely: Donkeys will nominate Hillary.
But Then Also Likely: Two weeks after the Donkey Convention … Vince Foster rises from the dead. Stories they were lovers. His wife is already on PBS video, from early 90s, implying and all but explicitly saying this. Skeleton falls from closet.
Long Shot Two: The smear works. And the vote is close enough in the key states to get monkeyed with (third time now) and Trent gets assigned the White House seat in January 2009.
November 25th, 2007
From Naked Capitalism:
“Private demand for US financial assets has disappeared”
Larry Summers warns of “Deepening Crisis”
The wages of Bush-Cheneyism are approaching like a 300-foot tsunami. Nowhere to hide, stateside.
November 22nd, 2007
The Dylan film is spectacular. The most exciting american film in years.
Something to see and be thinking about for years.
Must be seen in a theater — the flow of music and people is joyous.
More balanced — as it looks, in its oblique way, into Dylan’s broken relationships with early fans and his first wife — than I’d expected from one or two reviews.
Indeed, one or two reviews had saddled me with worries, going in.
All worries dashed. The energy and courage laid down to make the film have paid off in spades.
Directed by Todd Haynes. Written by same and Oren Moverman. Shot by Edward Lachman. Edited by Jay Rabinowitz.
Interesting reviews online: J Hoberman at the Village Voice. John Anderson at Newsday. By Pete Travers in Rolling Stone. At Not Coming to a Theater Near You. Film Comment. And by writer Robert Sullivan in the NY Times. AO Scott is also in the Times, and applauds, but the Sullivan piece is much richer; he spent six months on it, visiting sets, the editing room, etc.
The reviewers who frowned are in a distinct minority, but include Anthony Lane in The New Yorker — who offers two basic complaints: the film is disjointed and at times confusing, and is insufficiently about the man in his world, and thus allows the “elusive Dylan, once again, to slip away.”
Although I seem to share many of Mr Lane’s thoughts about Dylan, his displeasure with the film seems a bit wooden-headed. To begin, I was never importantly confused. Jonathan Demme (I think it was) seemed right to observe that 30 seconds of confusion in a film are fine but five seconds of boredom intolerable.
What does seem true — to give Lane his due — is that the film is tightly focused on a familiar leitmotif — Dylan’s inability to live in the skin his fame wrapped about him — and thus does not fully treat much else that Dylan fans may be desperately seeking to explore and perhaps grasp.
Beneath this seeking sentiment lies, I suspect, long and commonly held disappointments in the way Dylan piloted himself through stretches of his career. Those of us who suffer with these petty resentments yearn, always, for a triumphant Apologia — a conclusive public Defense — that somehow removes from the hero’s shoe the doo and spent bubblegum he stepped in along the way.
The same desire takes shape with every reading of Hamlet. Yet the promising, brilliant prince’s trajectory always falls and fails to find redemption, or even satisfactory explanation.
Nevertheless, for good reasons, he remains one’s hero.
Mr Haynes clearly set out NOT to make a grand Apology, but rather to present the appearances at play. And this seems the essence of Mr Lane’s complaint — that the filmmaker’s vision fell short for failing to grapple with the heart of the matter.
Two reactions to this complaint:
(i) It’s a question if the grand Apology can, in any form, be mustered. We had a good shot at it a few years ago in No Direction Home, Martin Scorcese’s great documentary. Dylan spoke there at length — interesting, and moving, but confusing as ever — and around the same time had published a collection of scattered remembrances entitled Chronicles. Both doc and book, while gratefully received here, were shot through with contradiction on the familiar ticklish points re desire (to be a poet and a pop star) and responsibility (to other people).
One doubts, then, that Dylan himself has a coherent grasp of the elusive heart of the matter — which leaves Mr Haynes seeming wise, seeming to have taken the best available road, by sticking with the appearances and giving them room to exuberantly play. What Mr Lane desires (on behalf of many, no doubt) may be impossible, in any form, and almost certainly, if embraced as motive of a feature film, would lead to a treacly false artifact. Whereas I’m Not There bleeds truth, such as we have it about Bob, from every frame.
(ii) My sense, reading Mr Lane’s complaint that the history in the film is “paper thin”, is that — in his pique at finding Hamlet again tumbling toward the swordplay — he failed to notice that I’m Not There does indeed deliver the music and its world in their rich mindblowingness, even as the director/writer pursues his relatively narrow interests, and even as he allows his Dylanesque voices free range in declaring they were never a “folksinger” and that “politics” do not exist. The film brings the early music in its time to life, reigniting one’s imagination re same, and this is perhaps its prime raison d’etre, and the reason it will rocket about the world, as Pulp Fiction did a few years back, but with incomparably more staying power. It will stay as long as the Scorcese and Pennebaker documentaries do, and for much the same reasons. As long as people remain curious about Dylan and the interesting times he shared and shaped.
November 22nd, 2007
Forty-four years now since the murder of the first distinctively postwar president.
The NY Times marked the occasion with an article about the Zapruder film that in passing reasserted the notion that Oswald did it.
Earlier this year the Times published a disinformative and dismissive review of David Talbot’s book Brothers, which while editorially messy contains several important new bits of information, and manages to bring the essentials to life in 400 easy to read pages.
The Times, then, still seems on the payroll.
Meanwhile Howard Hunt’s explicit confession (I was just a “benchwarmer” on CIA team) continues to be blacked out in the mainstrea media.
November 19th, 2007
I haven’t yet seen this in the American press: Nigeria prosecuting Pfizer for operating a la mode The Constant Gardener.
From the German magazine Der Spiegel:
USING AFRICANS AS GUINEA PIGS
Nigeria Takes On Pfizer over ‘Killer Drug’
By Hauke Goos
The Nigerian government is taking on Pfizer, the world’s biggest pharmaceutical company. It accuses the company of using a meningitis epidemic to test an unapproved drug on Nigerian children. Eleven children who participated in the tests died and others were left with disabilities. … END QUOTE
The case is rooted in 1996. Perhaps in part inspired Le Carre’s novel? Which was published in 2001.
It seems art, in any case, imitated life.
Meanwhile, as Democratic candidates debate how many tens of millions of Americans should live without health care, the scientific so-called community heralds progress in the immortalization project: the cloning of primate embryos, and the production of stem cells from skin (rather than embryos).
Most news reports and commentators seem to be presuming that the latter innovation removes all/most ethical roadblocks to stem cell work.
If so, according to the technoprophets who briefly came out of the closet at the turn of the millennium — including some of the scientist businessmen running the primary biotech companies involved — the grandchildren of the very rich may perhaps needn’t die unless they want to. Brave new world that hath such creatures in’t.
November 19th, 2007
From Der Spiegel, David Lynch at large:
QUOTE
DIRECTOR BUYS BERLIN MOUNTAIN
David Gets Lynched over ‘Invincible Germany’ Meditation Center Plan
David Lynch has purchased a large property on Berlin’s Teufelberg mountain where he hopes to build a university devoted to Transcendental Meditation. But he is in hot water after his guru chanted “invincible Germany” at a lecture about the project….
END QUOTE
November 17th, 2007
Here’s an al-Jazeera story about the OPEC summit — only the third in the organization’s history (ie, where the heads of state are in attendance).
Hugo Chavez calling upon the organ to take a stand against US threats to attack Iran and (Chavez says) Venezuela.
The Saudi king trying, in response, to maintain an even, “apolitical” keel — rather impressive given the growing rift between the Saudis and Bush-Cheney.
Oil meanwhile still within shooting distance of $100 a barrel.
November 12th, 2007
Both Airbus and Boeing have been having production problems as of late.
Yet at the big air show in Dubai this weekend, all the big orders went to Airbus, with a decided tilt there from the Persian Gulf kingdoms in particular. A story is copied below.
I wonder if it’s more than just business. Boeing of course is a big Pentagon contractor, old club member of the military-industrial complex.
And Saudi Arabia and the other south coast emirates are all rather pissed at Bush-Cheney for (i) preaching “oil independence” (since the ethanol initiative in 2004 or 5) and (ii) blaming the high price of oil on production shortfalls (whereas in fact it seems increasingly clear that current $90 oil has a lot to do with largely unpublicized US strategic reserve stockpiling).
So maybe throwing all the business to Airbus was a way to express displeasure with the Bush-Cheney-Pentagon leadership as of late. If the Likud grand strategy is (as I think) to degrade US ties to both Europe and Saudi Arabia, while strengthening its own, then, again, this embrace of Airbus — ie Europe — by our arab allies might be taken as a businesslike complaint.
Perhaps even a message that attacking Iran is a bad idea. (Perhaps in reaction to the story out of France last week that the US and Israel have set up joint “working committees” to deal with Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program. )
Similar perhaps to the message the Chinese are sending about selling dollars.
STORY:
Airbus snares $50 bln in orders at Dubai Air Show
Boeing left licking its wounds as Middle Eastern carriers spurn Dreamliner
by Aude Lagorce, MarketWatchNov 12, 2007
LONDON (MarketWatch) — European airplane maker Airbus has scored a major victory over U.S. rival Boeing Co. with a series of major orders, worth close to $50 billion at list prices, from Middle Eastern carriers at the Dubai Aerospace Air Show.
Over the last two years Dubai has joined Paris and the U.K.’s Farnborough air shows as a major battleground for the two aircraft makers thanks to rapidly expanding Gulf-based airlines such as Emirates, Etihad and Qatar Airways. The show has grown in sync with the industry, which is in its third year of record demand, spurred by new aircraft and the expansion of budget airlines.
REST OF STORY HERE
November 11th, 2007
South Bank fundits (London) explain the subprime meltdown & related.
It’s Credit and Crunchy
Subprime Sentiment
Jolly old town …
