SAVAGE: “Santorum is a Lunatic”

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgfXgOcqlPo&feature=g-all&context=G267b44eFAAAAAHgAJAA 603 500]

NICOSIA (Reuters) – The euro zone sovereign debt crisis has eased in recent weeks, ECB Governing Council member Athanasios Orphanides said on Saturday, adding more needed to be done to convince markets the euro zone had an effective crisis handling mechanism in place.

“We have seen a very substantial improvement if you look at where we were in November and where we are now in terms of risk for example of France, Belgium, Italy and Spain,” Orphanides told a conference in Cyprus.

“But you realize we have not solved the problem yet, because the risk is a lot greater than the risk we started off with two years ago.”

He said a defining moment for the euro zone was when Europe’s leaders abandoned the concept of private sector involvement (PSI) as a means of handling debt crises, leaving it in place only in the case of indebted Greece.

Orphanides, governor of the Central Bank of Cyprus, has frequently argued that the PSI, which imposed a writedown in the value of Greek sovereign debt held by creditors, triggered contagion throughout the euro zone.

“By abandoning the PSI (concept) in December, essentially we improved the framework up to a point,” he said. “Unfortunately it didn’t reverse the haircut on Greece, so we had them (European leaders) on the one hand saying “we won’t do it again” but on Greece, imposing a loss.

“We had a situation where declarations were not consistent with deeds and that is one reason why, in my view, European leaders did not manage to fully restore the confidence of the markets,” he said.

A “fiscal compact” enforcing more financial discipline on euro zone states which was agreed to by Europe’s leaders in December was an important step forward in building a mechanism to fight future crises, Orphanides said.

ATHENS (Reuters) – The chief negotiator for the body representing private sector holders of Greek bonds expressed confidence on Saturday that a bond swap deal which is a key part of Greece’s bailout program would be completed successfully next week.

“We can sense in our discussions with investors that momentum is building,” Charles Dallara, managing director of the International Institute of Finance (IIF), told Greece’s Antenna television in an interview.

“I’m quite optimistic that the participation levels will be quite high,” he said, but he declined to predict a figure.

Bondholders have until March 8 to sign up to the agreement under which they will exchange their existing Greek government bonds for new paper in a swap deal that will see the nominal value of their holdings cut by 53.5 percent.

Failure to secure a deal with private sector creditors would threaten the 130-billion-euro bailout package agreed last month with the European Central Bank, the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.

Greece has said it would not be obliged to go through with the arrangement unless it gets 90 percent participation. If participation is below 90 percent but above 75 percent, it would consult with its public sector creditors.

Assuming a sufficient number of investors accept the deal, European leaders should give final approval to the bailout in a teleconference on March 9.

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In the early going, Stephen A. Wynn, the Las Vegas magnate with a thousand-watt smile, was on the rebound after his casino and resorts empire, Mirage Resorts, fell prey to a hostile takeover in 2000.

To bankroll his comeback, he turned to a Japanese billionaire, Kazuo Okada, who had made much of his fortune manufacturing gaming machines for Japan’s notorious pachinko parlors — and who was adept at the wild ways of the mushrooming Asian gambling industry.

Together they formed Wynn Resorts, with Mr. Okada eventually becoming the company’s biggest shareholder.

“I love Kazuo Okada as much as any man that I’ve ever met in my life,” Mr. Wynn effused during an earnings conference call in May 2008.

The love affair is over. Mr. Wynn and Mr. Okada are now embroiled in a nasty corporate divorce, in one of the most rancorous public feuds the international gambling industry has ever seen.

With each side accusing the other of questionable payments to public officials in Asia, many gambling executives fear collateral damage. They worry that the accusations could prompt government investigations into any number of ethically questionable business practices in gambling, where Asian regulators have often looked the other way.

“It’s like two gunslingers shooting it out,” said a longtime industry official, who insisted on anonymity because he knew both men and wanted to protect the relationships. “And what I’m wondering is whether they’ll both kill each other.”

The fight is playing out in Las Vegas, where Wynn Resorts is based, and here in Macao, the former Portuguese seaport colony now controlled by China, where annual gambling revenue is four times that of the Las Vegas Strip. Macao (often spelled Macau) was the source of all of Wynn Resorts’ $613.4 million in profit last year — more than offsetting its money-losing properties in the moribund Nevada economy.

Despite the partners’ joint success in playing the gambling game by Macao’s lax house rules, Mr. Wynn’s allies on the company’s board are now accusing Mr. Okada of violating American foreign-corruption laws.

These allegations of missteps include giving a visiting Philippine gambling regulator and his entourage free use of the Wynn Macau casino-resort’s Villa 81 — a 7,000-square-foot pleasure palace that normally rents for $6,000 a night and has amenities including his-and-hers bathrooms with showers built to accommodate six people at a time.

Mr. Okada’s camp, in turn, is questioning the propriety of a $135 million donation that Wynn Resorts made last year to the University of Macau — its chancellor is also the head of Macao’s government, with ultimate oversight of gambling. Mr. Okada’s litigation has prompted an inquiry by the United States.

Both sides deny wrongdoing. Mr. Wynn and Mr. Okada declined to be interviewed.

iOwnTheWorld is making for sale some beautiful tribute to art to Breitbart. All profits go to his family.

by Hollywoodland

Right-leaning documentaries rarely get the chance to go head to head with their liberal-minded competition.

When was the last time a conservative documentary ended up battling it out for the Best Documentary Oscar?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52XGMQbX8PE&feature=player_embedded

So it’s fascinating to watch the crowdsourcing battle royale between “FrackNation,” a film by Big Hollywood contributors Phelim McAleer and Ann McElninney which argues against the Obama administration’s stance on hydraulic fracking, and “Troy Davis Lives,” a documentary about the execution of a Georgia man convicted of killing a police officer.

To say the former is beating the latter is an understatement. If this were a boxing match they would have stopped the fight days ago.

Read the rest here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=abIWrtP_U_U

Skip to 2:10 to get straight to the gold part, although the entire video is worth watching.

This week, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 13000 for the first time in almost four years. If you told yourself, “It’s just an arbitrary number,” you were right.

Round numbers on stock indexes are meaningless in themselves. But they aren’t a bad pretext for putting stock indexes in perspective—and that exercise might give you a less-jaundiced view on the market.

The Dow closed at 13009.12 on Tuesday, its highest level since May 19, 2008, and flickered around 13000 the rest of the week. It is easy to see why many investors shrugged and stayed on the sidelines: That was the ninth time since 2007 that the closing value of the Dow had climbed across the 13000 milestone, according to the WSJ Market Data Group. Along the way, the index had sunk below (and bounced back over) the 12000, 11000, 10000, 9000, 8000 and 7000 thresholds more than 300 times.

Earlier last month, the blogger Tadas Viskanta of AbnormalReturns.com angered some investors with a post titled “There Has Never Been a Better Time to Be an Individual Investor.” He says much of the online chatter about his post harked back to the 1990s, complaining that those—not these—should be considered the glory days. After all, the Dow is more than 1,000 points below its record high of 14164.53 in October 2007.

But there is a good case to be made that the Dow has never been higher—and that Mr. Viskanta is right. The Dow industrials, since their launch on May 26, 1896, have been reported as a “price-only” index that doesn’t capture the dividend income of the underlying companies. The same is true for most major stock indexes.

So I asked Meir Statman, a finance professor at Santa Clara University, and Jonathan Scheid, president of Bellatore Financial, an investment firm in San Jose, Calif., to calculate where the Dow would be today with all dividends reinvested back into the index. Counting dividends, the Dow would have closed this Tuesday at 1339410.97—more than 100 times above its official close.

Read the rest here.

by Maria Popova

What Peeping Toms have to do with failure and the expectations of genius.

One hundred and eight years ago today, the world welcomed Theodor Seuss Geisel, better-known as Dr. Seuss — legendary children’s book author, radical ideologist, lover of reading. Among his many creative feats is a fairly unknown, fairly scandalous one: In 1939, when Geisel left Vanguard for Random House, he had one condition for his new publisher, Bennett Cerf — that he would let Geisel do an “adult” book first. The result was The Seven Lady Godivas: The True Facts Concerning History’s Barest Family, which tells the story of nudist sisters who, after their father’s death, pledge not to wed until each of them has “brought to the light of the world some new and worthy Horse Truth, of benefit to man.”

Geisel wrote in the foreword:

A beautiful story of love, honor and scientific achievement has too long been gathering dust in the archives.”

Read the rest and see many more pages of the book here.

NEW YORK (Stockpickr) — At Stockpickr, we track the top holdings of a variety of high-profile investors, such as George Soros and Carl Icahn.

It should come as no surprise that the most popular of these portfolios is that of renowned investor Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway(BRK.A_), (BRK.B_) and one of the richest people in the world.

In his annual letter to shareholders, Buffett revealed that he has selected selected his successor at Berkshire Hathaway, though he did not reveal the person’s identity.

Today we’re taking a closer look at 10 of Buffett’s top dividend stocks, based on Berkshire Hathaway’s most recent quarterly 13F filing with the SEC, which reflects holdings as of Dec. 31, 2011. These stocks each comprise at least 1% of Berkshire’s portfolio and yield at least 1.5%.

Read the rest here.

Warren Buffett, the former hedge fund manager who built Berkshire Hathaway Inc. into a $195 billion company by gaining leverage through insurance premiums, said this traditional source of new funds is drying up.

Berkshire’s (BRK/A) insurance units, which cover risks from fender benders to asbestos-related hospital bills, can no longer be relied on to provide new investment funds in the form of float, or accumulated premium, Buffett said in a Feb. 25 letter. Float, which rose to $70.6 billion as of Dec. 31 from $65.8 billion a year earlier and $39 million in 1970, is unlikely to “grow much — if at all — from its current level,” Buffett said.

Read the rest here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=7_s7yirG63w#!

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — BP agreed late Friday to settle lawsuits brought by more than 100,000 fishermen who lost work, cleanup workers who got sick and others who claimed harm from the oil giant’s 2010 Gulf of Mexico disaster, the worst offshore oil spill in the nation’s history.

The momentous settlement will have no cap to compensate the plaintiffs, though BP PLC estimated it would have to pay out about $7.8 billion, making it one of the largest class-action settlements ever. After the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989, the company ultimately settled with the U.S. government for $1 billion, which would be about $1.8 billion today.

Read the rest here.

Great piece.

Full Article

General Motors has temporarily suspended production of its Volt electric car, the company announced Friday.

GM, which is based in Detroit, announced to employees at one of its facilities that it was halting production of the beleaguered electric car for five weeks and temporarily laying off 1,300 employees.

A GM spokesman told The Hill on Friday that production of the Volt would resume April 23.

“We needed to maintain proper inventory and make sure that we continued to meet market demand,” GM spokesman Chris Lee said in a telephone interview.

Lee noted that sales of the Volt were higher in February than they were in January, and added that California recently decided to allow the electric car to qualify for High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes in the state.

“We see positive trends, but we needed to make this market adjustment,” he said.

The Chevy Volt has come under criticism from Republicans in Congress because of reports of its batteries catching on fire during testing. President Obama gave the electric vehicle a vote of confidence in a speech to the United Auto Workers union this week, promising he would buy a Volt “five years from now, when I’m not president anymore.”

But Republicans have argued that the Volt was being pushed by the Obama administration for political reasons instead of consumer demand.

“Is the commitment to the American public or is the commitment to clean energy, that we are going to get there any way we can?” Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.) asked in a hearing in the House in January about the Volt’s reported battery fires.

“When the market is ready … it won’t have to be subsidized,” Kelly said.

Chevy has argued the debate about the Volt has become too political.

“We did not develop the Chevy Volt to be a political punching bag,” General Motors CEO Daniel Akerson testified before Congress in the same January hearing. “We engineered the Volt to be a technological wonder.”

Read the rest here.

“Wait til they see what happens March 1st.”

Full Article

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Wall Street’s biggest banks are locked in an increasingly frantic struggle with the Federal Reserve over the right to retain the jewels of their commodity trading empires: warehouses, storage tanks and other hard assets worth billions of dollars.

While the battle over proprietary trading and new derivatives regulations has taken place largely in public view since the 2008 financial crisis, the fight by JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs to retain or expand their prized physical commodity operations – most acquired in only the past six years – has remained hidden.

The debate is nearing an inflection point: Within 18 months, the Fed will likely either allow banks more freedom to invest in the physical commodity world than ever; or force them to sell off the assets that many banks are counting on to buttress their trading books at a time when they are already vulnerable because of intensifying competition and new trading curbs.

The banks are now locked in deep debate with the Fed, multiple sources involved in the discussions told Reuters. Goldman and Morgan Stanley argue the right to own such assets is ‘grandfathered’ in from their lightly-regulated investment banking days, or that at least they should be allowed to retain them as “merchant banking” investments, kept segregated from the trading desks.

But regulators and lawmakers may not be in the mood to give way. Banks are under pressure to reduce risk on their balance sheet; as commodity prices rise again, they may face more allegations that they could use these assets to drive prices higher or lower, squeezing them for trading profits.

“The Fed’s not going to be terribly accommodating,” said Oliver Ireland, a former associate counsel to the U.S. Federal Reserve and a partner with law firm Morrison Foerster in Washington, D.C. “There doesn’t seem to be a lot of sentiment in this town for people doing new things and taking new risk.”

BRUSSELS (AP) — The leaders of 25 European countries on Friday signed a new treaty designed to limit government overspending, but their good intentions were immediately put to the test when Spain said it would miss deficit targets this year to spare itself from austerity overload.

By signing of the new treaty, known as the fiscal compact, the leaders hope to achieve closer political and economic integration and longer-term confidence in Europe’s finances. But the economic reality in the region — record unemployment and a slide back into recession — suggests the leaders need to reconsider their focus on austerity and seek ways to boost growth.

Hours after signing the new pact, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy admitted his government’s deficit will be 5.8 percent of economic output this year instead of the 4.4 percent earlier promised to the EU.

The EU’s executive, the European Commission, will be forced to either back off its demands for deficit cuts or sanction Madrid.

The clash illustrates the bind Europe’s leaders are in — having to reduce the debts that created the crisis in the first place while at the same time needing to foster economic growth, without which debt reduction measures will be futile.

“I did not consult other European leaders and I will inform the Commission in April,” Rajoy said. “This is a sovereign decision by Spain.”

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The dark economic days of early 2009 — hundreds of thousands of jobs lost per month, the Dow sinking to 6,600, a sense of chaos — may now seem a distant memory. But the legacy of the deep downturn, and the economic policies forged in that crucible are still very much with us. And, so, too, are the debates over the response by the Federal Reserve and the Obama Administration. Was the stimulus too much or too little? Did the central bank exert itself excessively to aid Wall Street? And did the elite cadre of brilliant economic minds that flocked to Washington in 2009 accurately diagnose the situation and prescribe the appropriate cure?

In his timely, highly readable new book, The Escape Artist: How Obama’s Team Fumbled the Recovery, Noam Scheiber, a veteran Washington reporter with a solid background in economics, delves into these questions.

From the outset, Scheiber argues, the willingness of the Fed and Treasury to go all out to save the financial system was not matched by a similar desire by the administration to pitch big ideas to help the real economy. One of Scheiber’s big scoops was the unearthing of a memo written by Christina Romer, the head of the Council of Economic Advisers, in which she argued that a stimulus of $1.8 trillion would be needed to return employment to healthy levels by 2011. But the memo never reached the president’s desk, in part because the dominant political advisers believed a measure of that size was a non-starter. “I think they missed an opportunity out of the gate,” Scheiber says. While the stimulus worked and helped get the economy back on a track of growth, it ultimately was a half-measure that disappointed. “They were right about the shape but didn’t give it enough oomph to get escape velocity,” for the economy, Scheiber says. (In the accomanying video, Scheiber joins me and my colleague Aaron Task to discuss his book).

Scheiber also delves into the personalities, conflicts, and egos that made up Obama’s economic team: Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag, Romner, National Economic Council Chairman Laurence Summers, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, economic advisers Austen Goolsbee, Gene Sperling, and Jason Furman, and the political powerhouse of Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and advisers David Axelrod and David Plouffe. At times, this Dream Team of advisers turned out to be a Team of Rivals. Scheiber conducted hundreds of interviews with all the key players, unearthing details about their arguments, policy preferences, and tennis games. As a result, with its reconstruction of meetings The Escape Artists reads like a Bob Woodward book — albeit better written and informed by a more sophisticated understanding of economics and policymaking.

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U.S. oil reserves should be put into the market in order to stem recent price rises, Dan Weiss, director of climate strategy at the Center for American Progress, told CNBC. He blamed speculators for the recent rise in oil prices.

Nymex light sweet crude April futures locked in an almost 9 percent price gain for the month of February, while Brent crude saw its futures contract price jump by more than 14 percent last month.

“Speculators are driving up the price, taking advantage of fears about a supply disruption in the Persian Gulf which have not materialized yet.

Speculators are buying two thirds of futures contracts and end-users only one third, when it’s usually the reverse,” he said. “In the U.S., demand is down, and price increases are not demand driven.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. is producing “more oil than it has in years. The amount of reserve oil on hand is much higher than forecast,” he said.

Weiss said speculation can be curbed by bringing some of those reserves to the market in order to bring prices down.

“We’ve spoken about bursting the speculative bubble by having the President putting some reserve oil on the market. Every time that’s been done, it’s led to a decrease in oil and gas prices,” he said.