Computer Glitches Halt the Tokyo Exchange for 1.5 Hours

“The Tokyo Stock Exchange Group Inc.’s second major system error in seven months halted derivatives trading for about 95 minutes, cutting equity volumes, driving government bonds lower and sending futures traders to its smaller Osaka rival.

The failure lasted from about 9:20 a.m. to 10:55 a.m. local time, the bourse operator said. Trading in Topix Index shares was 20 percent below the average for the time of day after index and government bond futures were halted. Japanese 10-year government bonds fell during the breakdown. The exchange suffered its biggest disruption in six years on Feb. 2 as a fault halted trading for 3.5 hours in some of the country’s biggest companies.”

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World Markets

Currencies

Commodities

USD Libor

Euribor

Yields for Italy, Spain, France,  and Germany …

here we go again “US Army Veteran.”

His music, Wade M. Page once said, was about “how the value of human life has been degraded by tyranny.”

ut on Sunday, Mr. Page, an Army veteran and a rock singer whose bands specialized in the lyrics of hate, coldly took the lives of six people and wounded three others when he opened fire with a 9-millimeter semiautomatic handgun in a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wis., the police said. Officers then shot him to death.

To some who track the movements of white supremacist groups, the violence was not a total surprise. Mr. Page, 40, had long been among the hundreds of names on the radar of organizations monitored by the Southern Poverty Law Center because of his ties to the white supremacist movement and his role as the leader of a white-power band called End Apathy. The authorities have said they are treating the shooting as an act of domestic terrorism.

In Oak Creek and in nearby Cudahy, Wis., south of Milwaukee, where Mr. Page lived in the days before the attack, the magnitude and the nature of what had happened were only beginning to sink in, grief competing with outrage. A company flew its flag at half-staff. A Christian minister offered his parishioners’ help to a Sikh gathering at the Salvation Army.

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Wait…what?

U.S. equity-index futures rose, while Spain’s two-year note yield increased. Standard CharteredPlc tumbled the most in four years after a U.S. regulator said the lender may face suspension of business activities.

Standard & Poor’s 500 Index futures added 0.3 percent at 9:45 a.m. in London. The Stoxx Europe 600 Index rose less than 0.1 percent, after advancing as much as 0.6 percent. Standard Chartered slumped 16 percent, the most since October 2008. The Spanish two-year yield jumped 24 basis points and the German 10- year yield increased three basis points. The euro strengthened 0.1 percent to $1.2417. Soybeans climbed 1.3 percent.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel backed a bond-buying plan announced last week by the European Central Bank, a spokesman said yesterday. Reports today will probably show factory orders in Germany dropped, while Italy’s economy contracted in the second quarter, according to Bloomberg surveys of economists.

“The risk of the euro being abandoned has been reduced quite substantially,” said Khiem Do, Hong Kong-based head of Asian multi-asset strategy at Baring Asset Management (Asia) Ltd., which oversees about $8 billion. “That’s allowed risk assets to be re-priced.”

Standard Chartered slid for a second day after a New Yorkregulator said it may stop the bank from doing business in the state because it handled transactions for Iranian institutions that are sanctioned by the U.S.

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Oh shit….but.

U.K. stocks erased their advance, after yesterday rallying to a three-month high, as Standard Chartered Plc (STAN) plunged the most since October 2008.

Standard Chartered tumbled 17 percent as a New York regulator warned that it may suspend the bank’s U.S. unit from doing business in the state. BP Plc (BP/) added 1.5 percent.InterContinental Hotels Group Plc (IHG) jumped 4 percent after announcing a special dividend and a share buyback.

The FTSE 100 Index lost 6.15 points, or 0.1 percent, to 5,802.62 at 9:30 a.m. in London. The gauge has still climbed 10 percent from its 2012 low on June 1 as European Central Bank President Mario Draghi pledged to preserve the euro. The broader FTSE All-Share Index also slipped 0.1 percent today, while Ireland’s ISEQ Index retreated 1.2 percent.

To contact the reporter on this story: Namitha Jagadeesh in London at[email protected]

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Andrew Rummer at [email protected]

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*2 DISTINCT PLUMES OF SMOKES OBSERVED EMITTING FROM CVX REFINERY
*CHEVRON SPOKESWOMAN SAYS NOT SURE WHAT CAUSE OF FIRE IS :CVX US
*CHEVRON RICHMOND REFINERY HAS EVACUATION ON EMISSIONS: FILING

LIVE FEED OF THE SON OF A BITCH BURNING DOWN

Knight Capital Group officials raced over the weekend to negotiate a deal to save the crippled brokerage firm as new details emerged showing regulators rebuffed the company’s pleas to be released from errant trades it had booked.

Three hours after a software glitch unleashed a wave of erratic trades on Wednesday, leaving Knight holding at least $4.5 billion worth of securities it hadn’t planned to buy, firm Chief Executive Thomas Joyce was on the phone with Mary Schapiro, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Read the article here.

It is a glorious development…Still, I wish Breitbart was around to see everything he has been able to accomplish.

Occupy Unmasked, a negative take on the Occupy Wall Street movement, will be distributed next month by Magnet Releasing.

In February, billionaire sports and media mogul Mark Cuban was seen hugging Barack Obama at a $30,000-a-plate fundraiser for the president’s re-election bid. On Monday, Cuban announced that one of his companies, Magnet Releasing, will distribute a film that heavily questions Obama, Democrats and the Occupy Wall Street movement the president has praised.

The film, dubbed Occupy Unmasked, is one of a few documentaries that Andrew Breitbart was involved with prior to his death five months ago. The film, from Citizens United Productions, producer David Bossie and director Stephen Bannon, seeks to document potential criminal activity at Occupy encampments and outline the movement’s allegedly radical-left underpinnings. Breitbart is featured prominently onscreen.

Despite the film’s political implications, Cuban told The Hollywood Reporter he remains largely nonpartisan.

Magnet is releasing the movie, Cuban said, “for the same reason we release all of our films: We believe there is a market for it. There has never been a film that I have been involved with that was influenced by any political beliefs I have because I don’t have any political beliefs.”

Nevertheless, conservative writers — primarily at Breitbart.com — quickly noted Cuban’s track record of financial support for Obama and the distribution of left-leaning films such as Jesus Camp and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room through his Magnolia Pictures, and they praised Cuban for rallying around the idea of “more voices, not less” with his embrace of Occupy Unmasked.

Magnet is planning a late-September limited theatrical release day-and-date with VOD.

“This film is controversial, and that’s exactly the reason we want to ensure it can find its audience prior to the November elections,” Cuban said in a statement announcing the deal. “I look forward to our partnership with Citizens United Productions and to getting this film out to the masses.”

Bossie told THR he expects a theatrical and VOD release on Sept. 21 and a DVD rollout — titled Andrew Breitbart Presents: Occupy Unmasked — within two weeks of that.

“We want to educate the American people about the insidious nature of the Occupy movement — what bad guys they are and what their true intentions are and what they want to do to America and to capitalism,” Bossie said.

“This is the first truly conservative film being distributed by a mainstream, independent, liberal-leaning company. Look at what Mark Cuban and Magnolia has released in the past,” said Bannon, whose previous movie was the pro-Sarah Palin documentary The Undefeated.  “We’re really excited that Magnet sees the commercial value of the film, because they’re not into proselytizing, they want to make money.”

Source

“It’s a tax that punishes people that have been diligent over the years and did the right thing,” says Certified Public Accountant Bob Keebler on the Medicare surtax that kicks in on Jan.1.

As I wrote last week, the additional 3.8% tax is part of the president’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, ak.a. “Obamacare,” and affects individuals Congress has decided are “wealthy:” single taxpayers with modified adjusted gross income (MAGI) of $200,000 or more and married couples with a MAGI of at least $250,000.

If you fall into one of these categories, you’ll pay 3.8% more in federal income tax on the lesser of your investment income or your “excess” MAGI- the amount that exceeds the $200,000 or $250,000 threshold.

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WASHINGTON (AP) – People retiring today are part of the first generation of workers who have paid more in Social Security taxes during their careers than they will receive in benefits after they retire. It’s a historic shift that will only get worse for future retirees, according to an analysis by The Associated Press.

Previous generations got a much better bargain, mainly because payroll taxes were very low when Social Security was enacted in the 1930s and remained so for decades.

“For the early generations, it was an incredibly good deal,” said Andrew Biggs, a former deputy Social Security commissioner who is now a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “The government gave you free money and getting free money is popular.”

If you retired in 1960, you could expect to get back seven times more in benefits than you paid in Social Security taxes, and more if you were a low-income worker, as long you made it to age 78 for men and 81 for women.

As recently as 1985, workers at every income level could retire and expect to get more in benefits than they paid in Social Security taxes, though they didn’t do quite as well as their parents and grandparents.

Not anymore.

Read here:

They were homes once, but they are homes no longer. They are hollow dangers. Hiding places. Drug houses.

They are lurching shadows that stare down our city’s children as they walk to school. There’s a real home; there’s a shell of a house. There’s a neighbor; there’s two shells of houses. A child wonders who just ducked behind a smashed window, or why that doorway is wide open.

The child is scared — with good reason.

And we need to stop it.

On Aug. 25, I am helping organize an event called 100 Houses to make those streets a bit less frightening for kids. The goal is ambitious, but simple:

Board up 100 houses in a single day.

That’s right, 100 houses.

We can do this. In a way, we must. Because the Abandoned Home has become a terrible symbol of Detroit. Left behind by someone who couldn’t pay the mortgage. Bid farewell by someone who couldn’t deal with the city. These places, like animal carcasses, are quickly stripped of anything valuable — right down to the pipes — and then begin their steady slide into the muck. The windows and doors are soon gone, smashed or destroyed by people wanting to use the place for shelter, hiding, prostitution, drugs.

When one house like that goes down, it affects the block. When many go down, it affects the neighborhood. Families leave. They walk away.

And what’s the result?

Another abandoned house.

Read here:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — If lawmakers cannot agree on how to address the pending “fiscal cliff,” $7 trillion worth of tax increases and spending cuts will begin to go into effect in January.

The smart money says Congress won’t come close to an agreement before the November election, and that lawmakers may not even be able to reach one until early next year. At that point, of course, they’d need to undo at least some of the tax increases and spending cuts that went into effec.

In the meantime, uncertainty about just what Congress will do will weigh on the economy.

Here’s a rundown of what happens if lawmakers fail to act before Jan. 1, 2013.

Read here:

Economic Measurement

I appreciate the opportunity to speak at a conference with the important theme of economic measurement. In many spheres of human endeavor, from science to business to education to economic policy, good decisions depend on good measurement. More subtly, what we decide to measure, or are able to measure, has important effects on the choices we make, since it is natural to focus on those objectives for which we can best estimate and document the effects of our decisions. One great pioneer in this subject area, of course, is Simon Kuznets, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1971 for his work on economic measurement, including the national income accounts. Over the years many economists have built on his work to further improve our ability to quantify aspects of economic activity and thus to improve economic policymaking and our understanding of how the economy works. The remarkably broad and ambitious research program of this conference and the impressive expertise that has been assembled illustrate the continued vitality of this field. Evolving technologies that allow economists to gather new types of data and to manipulate millions of data points are just one factor among several that are likely to transform the field in coming years.

As we think about new directions for economic measurement, we might start by reminding ourselves of the purpose of economics. Textbooks describe economics as the study of the allocation of scarce resources. That definition may indeed be the “what,” but it certainly is not the “why.” The ultimate purpose of economics, of course, is to understand and promote the enhancement of well-being. Economic measurement accordingly must encompass measures of well-being and its determinants.

Read here:

What kind of stupidity is this? That’s only about 5.7%, but staggered in such a way that the taxpayers will get absolutely hammered.

Cut the Keynesian horseshit and just raise taxes a bit.

This is a truly astounding story: San Diego’s Poway school district is paying $1 billion to borrow $105 million.

And it may not be alone in San Diego or the state paying loan shark rates.

According to a story in the Voice of San Diego, a mostly investigative online news site, the city really had no choice. It was either raise taxes or float what appeared to be just another bond to fix its schools.

Read here:

Appearing on CNBC this morning, Joyce said the it was “absolutely” the best deal and the board was confident “we made the right choice.” He said there was a “big number” of parties interested in a deal, including private equity, clients and distressed investors.

“The flattering thing is how the industry responded to us,” Joyce said. “The wildly flattering thing was how our clients responded to us.”

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Just kidding. It’s just some bullshit rocks.

The reason for the removal is unclear, although speculation naturally turns to the strained relationship between Apple and Google. Aside from YouTube, Apple’s iOS 6 contains another high-profile departure from Google’s services with Apple rolling out its own mapping and navigation service to displace Google.

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It closed the fuck higher.

This could be good or bad depending on how you look at it. I’d like to think natural born citizens will see their wages rise.

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