HAPPY NEW YEAR 2009!!

I am back, been absent from the blog for too long, what with Xmas and New Year's and all. But it doesn't mean I haven't been writing! I will post new material soon.

In the meantime, I opened in my inbox a wonderful little message of hope, about the Next Great President, Obama.

Here it is...

Garrison Keillor's comments on Obama's election

Be happy, dear hearts, and allow yourselves a few more weeks of quiet exultation. It isn't gloating; it's satisfaction at a job well done. He was a superb candidate, serious, professorial but with a flashing grin and a buoyancy that comes from working out in the gym every morning. He spoke in a genuine voice, not senatorial at all. He relished campaigning. He accepted adulation gracefully. He brandished his sword against his opponents without mocking or belittling them. He was elegant, unaffected, utterly American, and now (Wow) suddenly America is cool. Chicago is cool. Chicago !!!

We threw the dice and we won the jackpot and ele cted a black guy with a Harvard degree, the middle name Hussein and a sense of humor he said, "I've got relatives who look like Bernie Mac, and I've got relatives who look like Margaret Thatcher." The French junior minister for human rights said, "On this morning, we all want to be American so we can take a bite of this dream unfolding before our eyes." When was the last time you heard someone from France say they wanted to be American and take a bite of something of ours? Ponder that for a moment.

The world expects us to elect pompous yahoos, and instead we have us a 47-year-old prince from the prairie who cheerfully ran the race, and when his opponents threw sand at him, he just smiled back. He'll be the first president in history to look really good making a jump shot. He loves his classy wife and his sweet little daughters. At the same time, he knows pop music, American lit and constitutional law. I just can't imagine anybody cooler.

It feels good to be cool, and all of us can share in that, even sour old right-wingers and embittered blottoheads. Next time you fly to Heathrow and hand your passport to the man with the badge, he's going to see "United States of America "and look up and grin. Even if you worship in the church of Fox , everyone you meet overseas is going to ask you about Obama, and you may as well say you voted for him because, my friends, he is your line of credit over there. No need anymore to try to look Canadian.

RESOLUTIONS FOR 2009

1) I will make $80,000 in 2009. I will have fun doing it.
2) I will find a great girlfriend, or many.
3) I will be ripped like Daniel Craig in Quantum of Solace. I will do it with a 99% vegetarian diet.
4) I will buy a sailboat to take my girlfriend(s) on.
5) I will not share a bedroom with my brother again. I will have as many rooms as girlfriends.
6) I will indulge in no less than trips to Brazil, Argentina, Greece and India. In case of civil wars, the country next to it will suffice.
7) I will take my One-A-Day vitamins, once a day.
8) I will score ten (10) “Tries” at rugby.
9) I will end the year being able to prove wrong the Obama nay-sayers.
10) I will enjoy this year in peace and happiness, whether or not these resolutions come true.

Byron Shirley on December 17th, 2008

Bush Gets The Boot!! The Shoe-throwing Incident

Here's the video of an Iraqi journalist throwing both of his shoes at President Bush in protest.

Bush's response shows how clueless he is: "So what if the guy threw a show at me?[...] I don't know what this was protesting against."

How Wall Street Started Betting on Both Sides--and Lost, Finally!!

Great article by One-time Bond trader-turned Genius Journalist Micheal Lewis (Liar's Poker, The New New Thing, Moneyball,...), about how the game Wall Street insiders where playing for years fiiiiinnnnaaalllllyyyyy came to an end--maybe 10 years too late?

The End: The era that defined Wall Street is finally, officially over. Michael Lewis, who chronicled its excess in Liar’s Poker, returns to his old haunt to figure out what went wrong.

(from the article posted above, page 4)

"[this is around 2005] The juiciest shorts—the bonds ultimately backed by the mortgages most likely to default—had several characteristics. They’d be in what Wall Street people were now calling the sand states: Arizona, California, Florida, Nevada. The loans would have been made by one of the more dubious mortgage lenders; Long Beach Financial, wholly owned by Washington Mutual, was a great example. Long Beach Financial was moving money out the door as fast as it could, few questions asked, in loans built to self-destruct. It specialized in asking home­owners with bad credit and no proof of income to put no money down and defer interest payments for as long as possible. In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $720,000.

More generally, the subprime market tapped a tranche of the American public that did not typically have anything to do with Wall Street. Lenders were making loans to people who, based on their credit ratings, were less creditworthy than 71 percent of the population. Eisman knew some of these people. One day, his housekeeper, a South American woman, told him that she was planning to buy a townhouse in Queens. “The price was absurd, and they were giving her a low-down-payment option-ARM,” says Eisman, who talked her into taking out a conventional fixed-rate mortgage. Next, the baby nurse he’d hired back in 1997 to take care of his newborn twin daughters phoned him. “She was this lovely woman from Jamaica,” he says. “One day she calls me and says she and her sister own five townhouses in Queens. I said, ‘How did that happen?’ ” It happened because after they bought the first one and its value rose, the lenders came and suggested they refinance and take out $250,000, which they used to buy another one. Then the price of that one rose too, and they repeated the experiment. “By the time they were done,” Eisman says, “they owned five of them, the market was falling, and they couldn’t make any of the payments.”

How can we be surprised that the market failed??

And some more, in 2004:

"There’s a simple measure of sanity in housing prices: the ratio of median home price to income. Historically, it runs around 3 to 1; by late 2004, it had risen nationally to 4 to 1. “All these people were saying it was nearly as high in some other countries,” Zelman says. “But the problem wasn’t just that it was 4 to 1. In Los Angeles, it was 10 to 1, and in Miami, 8.5 to 1. And then you coupled that with the buyers. They weren’t real buyers. They were speculators.”

Not convinced we where delusional? How is this for strange:

"By the spring of 2005, FrontPoint was fairly convinced that something was very screwed up not merely in a handful of companies but in the financial underpinnings of the entire U.S. mortgage market. In 2000, there had been $130 billion in subprime mortgage lending, with $55 billion of that repackaged as mortgage bonds. But in 2005, there was $625 billion in subprime mortgage loans, $507 billion of which found its way into mortgage bonds. Eisman couldn’t understand who was making all these loans or why."

(Thank you Steven for the article!!)

Us Vs. Them---I mean, How Our Different Brains Function

I'm thinking up of a piece on relationships and dating, and my friend Alexandra pointed out this video, a 5 minute sample of a DVD. Hilarious and totally true.


Tale Of Two Brains - The best free videos are right here