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Monthly Archives: January 2012

DSK: I Have No Idea If I Slept With Prostitutes At Those Orgies As Everyone Was Naked

Sanya Khetani

In a new twist to the Dominique Strauss-Kahn saga, which has become a hunt for a prostitution ring operating out of Paris, his mobile phone records showed he had relationships with 10 women, allegedly all call girls, the Telegraph reports.

But DSK’s lawyer has countered with perhaps the single most brilliant defense argument in modern history.

He said his client had no way of knowing the women at the swinger parties were prostitutes because they were “all naked at the time”.

“I defy you to tell the difference between a naked prostitute and any other naked woman,” lawyer Henri Leclerc said.

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CES 2012 FAIL: Che Guevara Now a Pitch Man for Mercedes

The top act at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week featured Mercedes Benz’ Chairman  Dieter Zetsche peddling his company’s new gadgetry under a huge picture of Che Guevara, who sported the Mercedes logo on his beret. “Viva la Revolucion!” beamed the cheeky Herr Zetsche while unveiling his brilliant ad campaign.

In other words: to sell cars in the U.S., Mercedes Benz is relying on the mass appeal in the U.S. of the mass-murdering Stalinist who craved to destroy the U.S.

Read the rest here.

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Conservatives Remain the Largest Ideological Group in the US

Overall, the nation has grown more polarized over the past decade

by Lydia Saad

PRINCETON, NJ — Political ideology in the U.S. held steady in 2011, with 40% of Americans continuing to describe their views as conservative, 35% as moderate, and 21% as liberal. This marks the third straight year that conservatives have outnumbered moderates, after more than a decade in which moderates mainly tied or outnumbered conservatives.

Read the rest of Gallup’s report here.

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FINDERS KEEPERS: MF Global May Not Be Able to Pay Clients Back

Is this going to set the stage for this type of occurrence to be normal or acceptable when/if the global crisis consumes us?

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Former customers of MF Global Holdings’ collapsed brokerage were disappointed to hear on Thursday that the trustee hunting for funds missing from their accounts has no immediate plans to transfer more money to them.

More than 250 customers met in New York on Thursday with James Giddens, the trustee in charge of liquidating the brokerage and returning money to customers, for an update on the status of his investigation into what may be $1.2 billion missing from their accounts.

Giddens and his team of lawyers said they may not be able to make another mass transfer of funds above the roughly $3.8 billion they have already paid out. That figure represents about 72 percent of the total money held in customer accounts when the firm went under, leaving many customers still thousands or millions of dollars out of pocket.

Read the rest here.

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The Worst Economic Recovery Since The Great Depression

Peter Ferrara, Contributor

The record of President Obama’s first three years in office is in, and nothing that happens now can go back and change that.  What that record shows is that President Obama, with his throwback, old-fashioned, 1970s Keynesian economics, has put America through the worst recovery from a recession since the Great Depression.

The recession started in December, 2007.  Go to the website of the National Bureau of Economic Research (www.nber.org) to see the complete history of America’s recessions.  What that history reveals is that before this last recession, since the Great Depression recessions in America have lasted an average of 10 months, with the longest previously lasting 16 months.

When President Obama entered office in January, 2009, the recession was already in its 13th month.  His responsibility was to manage a timely, robust recovery to get America back on track again.  Based on the historical record, that recovery was imminent, within a couple of months or so.  Despite widespread fear, nothing fundamental had changed to deprive America of the long term, world-leading prosperity it had enjoyed going back 300 years.

Supposedly a forward looking progressive, Obama proved to be America’s first backward looking regressive.  His first act was to increase federal borrowing, the national debt and the deficit by nearly a trillion dollars to finance a supposed “stimulus” package, based on the discredited Keynesian theory left for dead 30 years ago holding that increased government spending, deficits and debt are what promote economic growth and recovery. That theory arose in the 1930s as the answer to the Great Depression, which, of course, never worked.

 

That was the beginning of President Obama’s Rip Van Winkle act, pretending not to know anything that happened over the previous 30 years proving the dramatic, historic success of the new, more modern, supply side economics, which holds that incentives for increased production are what promote economic growth and recovery.  Indeed, that Rip Van Winklism pretended not to remember the 1970s either, when double digit inflation and double digit unemployment proved Keynesian economics grievously wrong.

As should have been long expected, Obama’s trillion dollar Keynesian stimulus did nothing to promote recovery and growth, and almost surely delayed it.  That is because borrowing a trillion dollars out of the economy to spend a trillion back into it does nothing to promote the economy on net. Indeed, it is probably a net drag on the economy, because the private sector spends the money more productively and efficiently than the public sector.

The National Bureau of Economic Research scored the recession as ending in June, 2009.  Yet, today, in the 49th month since the recession started, there has still been no real recovery, like recoveries from previous recessions in America.

Unemployment actually rose after June, 2009, and did not fall back down below that level until 18 months later in December, 2010.  Instead of a recovery, America has suffered the longest period of unemployment near 9% or above since the Great Depression, under President Obama’s public policy malpractice.  Even today, 49 months after the recession started, the U6 unemployment rate counting the unemployed, underemployed and discouraged workers is still 15.2%.  And that doesn’t include all the workers who have fled the workforce under Obama’s economic oppression.  The unemployment rate with the full measure of discouraged workers is reported at www.shadowstats.com as about 23%, which is depression level unemployment.

Today, over 4 years since the recession started, there are still almost 25 million Americans unemployed or underemployed.  That includes 5.6 million who are long-term unemployed for 27 weeks, or more than 6 months.  Under President Obama, America has suffered the longest period with so many in such long-term unemployment since the Great Depression.

Read the rest here.

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WHEW: US Anheuser-Busch Acquires Budweiser Brand

PRAGUE (AP) — Anheuser-Busch Inc., part of the AB InBev NV international brewing giant, took a crucial step in its fight with state-owned Czech brewery Budejovicky Budvar over the Budweiser brand when it acquired its local Czech rival.

According to the Czech registry of companies, Anheuser-Busch took control of Budejovicky Mestansky Pivovar or BMP in December. The move gives Anheuser-Busch the company’s trademarks, including the contested Budweiser Beer brand.

Read the rest here.

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Hedge Funds Hunker Down for Greek Debt Standoff

LONDON (Reuters) – Hedge funds are positioning to profit from a plan to slash Greece’s towering debt pile as Athens enters final talks that could sway the country’s membership of the euro.

York Capital, the $14 billion fund part-owned by Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse , New York-listed Och Ziff , and $10 billion-strong Marathon Asset Management are among those who collectively may have built up sufficiently large positions to scupper the bailout deal, several sources close to the debt restructuring told Reuters.

The deal asks creditors to voluntarily write down 50 percent of the notional value of their bond holdings. But hedge funds may opt out, hoping that Athens will let them get away with it to save itself political embarassment.

“I think we’ll hold out. People are so slow in Europe and by the time they’ve got everything in place logistically this might be the one window where investors might be paid back in full,” said one hedge fund manager who owns Greek bonds.

The stakes for Greece are high. Without the deal, the international lenders will not bail Athens out a second time, which means it will likely default around March 20, when a 14.5 billion euro bond falls due.

But hoping that Greece will pay out after all looks increasingly like a dangerous strategy. According to three senior euro zone sources on Thursday, the country is likely to force all creditors into the deal.

Read the rest here.

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Goldman Lost 50 Partners Last Year

By SUSANNE CRAIG

Goldman Sachs lost 50 partners in 2011, one of the biggest annual losses of senior executives in its 13 years as a publicly traded company.

Goldman, which is on track next week to report weak fourth-quarter and year-end results, has seen a number of prominent retirements in recent weeks, including Edward K. Eisler and David B. Heller, who both led Goldman’s influential securities division, as well as Edward C. Forst, a head of asset management and member of Goldman’s management committee.

A new regulatory filing analyzed by The New York Times and Footnoted.com, a division of Morningstar that analyzes corporate filings, shows that Goldman started the year with 483 partners. Fifty left and another 10 others were added to the partnership pool. The size of the pool, as of the end of December, is 442 people.

There are just 33 partners at the firm who were partners when Goldman went public in 1999, down six from this time last year.

On Wall Street, becoming a partner has long been considered the pinnacle of success. Partners are typically the best-paid employees at the firm, and have a larger say in how the bank is run. Only a small fraction of Goldman employees will make it to this level, and it can take years to make partner.

But over the last year Goldman has seen profits dip and has been forced to cut staff and slash costs. As Goldman shrinks, so does the partnership pool. Goldman tries to keep the percentage of partners to employees at 1.8 percent, according to people with knowledge of the process. So as Goldman shrinks, it can be expected that the number of partners will also fall. It is not possible to track partner defections for every year since the firm went public, but the data available suggests that the annual partner loss is 2011 is one of the worst since it went public.

Read the rest here.

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Why You Should Consider Smaller Government

[youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNXyBIPAJqQ 450 300] [youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4PE1gZn7s4&feature=related 450 300]

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