A Shout Out for Scruffy...

GATA Bill Murphy's Lemetropole Cafe market letter...

http://agoracom.com/ir/ECU/forums/discussion/topics/412960-a-shout-out-for-scruffy/messages/1360171#message

Good morning Bill. As I read through the morning (non-mainstream) news I see a huge pervasive rot threatening all aspects of our financial lives.

Here is a short list of what we are up against:

1 A network of elitists bankers who have a get out of jail free card, who contribute to both sides of political campaigns, who migrate employees to key positions in the administration and in the regulatory agencies that are supposed to assure fair market practices.

2 A history of million dollar fines (if any) for billion dollar crimes and no jail time for the biggest crooks.

3 Total control of mainstream media to the point of effective propaganda. Has anyone read or heard anything re the recent CFTC bombshells on MSNBC?

4 Regulations that destroy any transparency in our markets. The big bankers are protected by the regulators that are commissioned to protect us against them.

5 Naked shorting by the elite insiders to the detriment of all of us investors. Every naked short sale recorded and is identifiable, yet I have never heard of a single person, or clearing house, or brokerage receiving as much as a fine let alone jail time.

6 Evidence repeatedly provided to regulators and compliance agencies of the US that is NEVER acted on. Not one of the exposures leads to cleaning up of the markets, to firing of the idiots in charge, to jail time for those obviously complicit graft enablers, nor intervening in the crimes in progress.

7 A strong $ policy based on propaganda and manipulation. Does anyone with one eye and two brain cells believe the inflation #s? ... the unemployment numbers? ..that we have "turned the corner" or have begun the recovery? ..that the ObamaCare will cut the deficit? .. that the treasury is not the biggest buyer of treasuries via buy-backs?

8 Gambling casinos (crimex/nymex/lbma) that set the prices on physical commodities.

9 "Physical Markets" that have no physical.

10 Bribes offered to keep options holders from demanding physical delivery.

11 ETF’s that can’t be audited. Anyone who has read the prospectus and thinks that he/she is investing in physical should not be allowed to wield a check book.

12 Rules that allow options to be settled with (fraudulent) ETF shares.

13 A Fed that can keep its books hidden from the public. I was going to say from congress, but congress is part of the problem and we cannot count on them to act responsibly.

14 A government backed stock market manager (PPT) to get people to continue to "invest" in a stock market balloon while savings returns are miniscule to nonexistent.

15 A steady move to shun new purchases of US treasuries by the rest of the world.

16 Most moves up recently in the US $ have not been because of anything that indicates the $ is healthy, but because the currencies of the rest of the world are down graded by US based rating agencies. This while ALL currencies are pushed around by markets dominated by US and UK bankers.

17 Assassination attempts on whistle blowers.

18 And not the last, not the least, but one of the most egregious, a congress and administration that panders to special interests and totally disrespects, ignores, and denigrates the citizens, as it shoves this nation down the socialistic toilet.

And once again, as has often been repeated throughout history, gold and silver are the last shelter and protection one can have against corrupt public and financial institutions.

Thanks Bill and all the GATA organization. Many people are now in a better position to see what is going on and to protect themselves.

Scruffy

Senior SEC Employee Warns of Potential Municipal Bond Market Collapse:

Sunday, April 4, 2010
By Rick Bookstaber

http://rick.bookstaber.com/2010/04/municipal-market.html

This represents my personal opinion, not the views of the SEC or its staff.

My first blog post was in June, 2007. It was titled “What sorts of crises am I worried about now”. My answer was housing and credit. With the benefit of hindsight, this might be considered a no-brainer, although at the time it was not so clear where things would go.

Now as the dust settles from the crisis that emerged in 2008, we can start to think about what might come next. And yes, the crisis really is settling down, despite the alarmists who, thinking we were in a 1930’s style depression, pushed the panic button and stuffed their mattresses (or portfolios) with cash. For whatever reason, be it astute government intervention or the natural healing process, we are looking back at something along the lines of a bad, credit-driven recession.

I don’t think we will see a big crisis emerging for some time in banks, hedge funds or derivatives, mostly because, like with a knockout punch, the risks that matter don’t come from where you are looking. Unless the current push for legislation is a failure, which, of course, still remains to be seen, we will have steely eyes hovering over these sources of crisis. It will be awhile before the guards start dozing off at their posts.

So, where to look next. To see other potential sources of crisis, let’s first recount the lessons learned from this crisis:

1. Problems occur when things get leveraged and complex (and thus opaque).

2. If the problems occur in a very big market, especially in a very big market like housing that is tied to the credit markets, things can go systemic.

3. The notion that you can diversify by holding a geographically broad-based portfolio, (“there has never been a nation-wide housing recession”), works fine – until it doesn’t.

4. A portfolio that is apparently hedged can blow apart. So we have to look at the gross value of positions, even if they are thought to be hedged.

5. Don’t bet on ratings, because rating agencies are conflicted and might not be all too dependable at their job.

6. Defaults are never easy to manage, but it gets worse when there are a lot of them happening at the same time. It is harder to manage the mess, and there is less of a stigma in defaulting. And it is all the worse when, as is the case in the housing markets, those defaulting are not businessmen. As an added complication, with housing the revenue that we thought was there really wasn’t. Income that was supposed to be there to finance the mortgages – even when that income was fairly stated – became committed to other areas (like second mortgages). .

Well, guess where we have a market that is (1) leveraged and opaque, that is (2) very big and tied to the credit markets; and is (3) viewed by investors as being diversifiable by holding a geographically broad-based portfolio; with (4) huge portfolios where assets and liabilities are apparently matched; and with (5) questionable analysis by rating agencies; and where (6) there are many entities, entities that may not approach default with business-like dispatch, and that have already mortgaged sources of revenue that are thought to support their liabilities?

Answer: The municipal market.

Leverage and Opacity. Leverage in the municipal market comes from making future obligations to employees in order to pay them less now. This is borrowing in the form of high pension benefits and post-retirement health care, but borrowing nonetheless. Put another way, in taking lower pay today, the employees have lent money to the municipality, with that money to be repaid via their retirement benefits. The opaqueness comes from the methods of reporting. For example, municipalities are not held to the same standards as corporations in their disclosure.

Size and potential systemic effects. That this is a big market in the credit space goes without saying.

Diversification. Geographic diversification would give a lot more comfort for municipals if it hadn’t just failed for the housing market. Think of why housing breached the regional barriers. It was because similar methods of leveraging were being employed through the country. So the question to ask is: Are there common sorts of strategies being applied in municipalities across the nation?

Gross versus net exposure. The leverage for municipals is not easy to see. It might appear to be lower than it really is because many, including rating agencies, look at the unfunded portion of these liabilities. They ignore the fact that these promised payments are covered using risky portfolios. And not just risky -- the portfolio might apply hefty (a.k.a. unrealistic) actuarial assumptions of asset growth.

Rating agencies. In terms of the work of the rating agencies, here are two questions to ask. First, list the last time they did an on-site exam of the municipalities they are rating. Second, are they looking at the potential mismatch between assets and liabilities, or simply at the net – the under funded portion of the portfolio.

Defaults. Municipalities are not quite as numerous as homeowners, but there certainly are a lot of them. And they have the same issues as homeowners. Granted, they will not pour cement down the toilet before walking away. But they have a potentially equally irrational group – the local taxpayers – to deal with.

Oh, and just as homeowners took their income and locked it up via secondary loans, much of the tax base for municipalities is already mortgaged, through the sale of tax-related revenues streams like tolls and parking fees. Indeed, although general obligation bonds are considered the cream of the crop, they might just as well be regarded as the residual claim after anything with solid fee streams has been sold off.

Once a few municipalities default, there is a risk of a widespread cascade in defaults because the opprobrium will be lessened, all the more so if the defaults are spurred along by a taxpayer revolt – democracy at work.

All’s Well?...

Here are a couple of uplifting titles to stories in today’s mainstream media:

From MSNBC: “Stocks boosted by upbeat economic reports”

From CNNMoney.com: “Stocks pop on jobless claims”

Wow. I don’t know about you, but I’m optimistic.

But wait. Could these titles be misleading? I don’t think I need to answer that.

Apparently the good news was 439,000 new people filed jobless claims in the week ended March 27, down 6,000 from an upwardly revised 445,000 the previous week. And outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. showed that planned job cuts accelerated substantially in March.

So, almost half a million people file new jobless claims in a week and employers accelerate layoffs and that’s considered good news these days. I’d really hate to hear some bad news.

In addition to this “good” news, we have a new national employment report published by payroll giant Automatic Data Processing Inc. that indicates private employers unexpectedly shed 23,000 jobs in March despite concensus analysis calling for an increase in jobs. And the Commerce Department reports that U.S. construction spending fell to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $846.23 billion, the slowest rate in over seven years, as activity softened in every major sector from homebuilding to public construction projects. Meanwhile, personal consumption expenditures increased 21.7 times more than personal income over the most recently reported month according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

That’s not to say that every bit of news that comes out is completely negative. The Commerce Department reported yesterday that a barometer of capital spending by businesses climbed. Non-defense capital goods orders, excluding airplanes, rose 2.0% in February. But that followed a big drop in January of 4.4%, suggesting businesses uncertain about the economy remain cautious about spending plans.

And there’s even some actual good news out there. The Institute for Supply Management’s manufacturing index rose to 59.6 in March from 56.5 in February, marking eight straight months of expansion in the sector.

All in all, however, we still firmly believe that the bad seriously outweighs the good. None of the real issues that brought us into the 2008 financial meltdown have been addressed. Banks’ balance sheets are still terrible, especially if you take out the impact of accounting changes that were allowed last year. The overhang of derivatives continues to grow. And as bad as the real estate situation is, it’s about to get a lot worse.

Look, we don’t like to be the bearer of bad news all time. But we have to tell you what we really think based on all the research and analysis that goes on over here. And what we think is that the far wall of the hurricane is still heading toward the economy. When it’s going to hit we really can’t say, though it will probably be sooner rather than later. The catalyst will likely be fear caused by one single and unforeseen or known but ignored event (a black swan). The event will create a panic in the markets that will then create a chain reaction like a house of cards falling. So as painful as it may be for your psyche, it’s prudent for you to remain wary of this “recovery.” All is certainly not well.

http://www.caseyresearch.com/displayCdd.php?id=389

Lobbyists Gone Wild: The K Street Hustle & Obamacare...

By Keith Johnson

Oooh snap! Looks like we’ve been right all along. All the big K Street money pumped into the House and Senate has been overwhelmingly one-sided in favor of Obama’s horrendous new healthcare legislation. Go figure. According to a study released over the weekend by “The Center for Public Policy”, a non-partisan public interest think tank in Washington D.C., it is estimated that a record $120 million was spent lobbying for health reform. In addition to direct lobbying, some of the top firms also rewarded members of Congress with campaign contributions through political action committees and individual lobbyist donations. The largest of these firms, Patton Boggs LLP, contributed more than $55,000 almost exclusively to Democrats.

Patton Boggs represents Bristol-Myers Squibb, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the nation and the eighth largest corporation in the United States. On January 21, 2010, Patton Boggs was one of several big name health insurance, pharmaceutical and hospital lobbying organizations whose top executives got together to throw a fundraiser for Massachusetts Senatorial candidate Martha Coakley in hopes of landing her the Democratic seat and the crucial 60th vote needed to pass the healthcare takeover bill. The other top firms that participated (along with a list of the companies they represent) are as follows:

Capitol Hill Strategies:

Amgen—the nation’s largest biotechnology firm
BIO—a muli million dollar biotechnology firm
Merck—the largest pharmaceutical company in the world
Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers of America–
a trade group representing pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies

Grover Park Group:

Blue Cross—a federation of 39 health insurance organizations
Pfizer—a pharmaceutical company, ranking number one in sales in the world

Duberstein Group:

Novartis—a pharmaceutical company ranking number one in revenues and three in sales
Sanofi-Aventis—a pharmacuetical company that ranks number four in sales worldwide

Mehlman, Vogel, Castagnetti:

Humana—the fourth largest health insurance company in the United States
Abbott Laboratories—a multi billion dollar pharmaceuticals healthcare company
General Electric—multi billion dollar corporation dealing in many health related sectors

Elmendorf strategies:

UnitedHealth Group—the nations largest insurance company

Heather Podesta & Partners:

Cigna—the nation’s fifth largest health insurance company
Eli Lilly—a multi billion dollar pharmacuetical company that ranks tenth in sales

Of the over 17,000 lobbyists in Washington D.C., The Center for Public Integrity ranks Patton Boggs as numero uno. In terms of healthcare reform, they are followed by Alston and Bird, who represent Aetna, the nation’s third largest health insurer. Coming in at number three is Foley Hoag, who also represent Pfizer as well as Eli Lilly, Amgen and Merck. Tied for fourth place are Podesta Group and Capitol partners. Dutko Worldwide rounds out the top five and they also lobbied for UnitedHealth, PhRMA, and medical device firm Medtronic Inc.

Of those lobbying firms’ big name clients, Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers of America alone spent $26.1 million lobbying for Obamacare in 2009, making it the single most expensive lobbying effort in history. During the week leading up to the vote on the legislation, PhRMA launched a multi million dollar ad blitz in 43 districts of potential swing Democrats to help secure passage. And in this election cycle, PhRMA has contributed $30,300 to Dem’s compared to $13,000 to Repub’s. Overall, PhRMA has spent well over $100 million on ad campaigns promoting health care reform legistlation. According to his wikipedia bio, PhRMA’s outgoing CEO Billy Tauzin ”was a key player in 2009 healthcare reform negotiations that produced pharmaceutical industry support for White House and Senate efforts. Reportedly, proposals for Medicare Part D cost reductions and permitting drug importation from Canada were dropped in favor of $80 billion in other savings.” That’s right, he helped write the stinking bill.

The largest health insurance providers in the nation are UnitedHealth Group, WellPoint, Aetna, Humana and Cigna. Ever since the healthcare debate began over a year ago, shares of Cigna, UnitedHealth Group and WellPoint have been up an average of 120%.

Upon passage of the bill, health insurer’s stocks soared with Aetna hitting a 52 week high. The share price of Cigna surged 375% compared to 46% for the stock market overall (as measured by the S&P 500) since November 2008.

It should be noted that Aetna has been a major supporter and campaign contributor to the campaigns of Max Baucus (D-MT) of the Senate Finance Committee who received $56,250 in donations and Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) who received $110,000. Todd M. Schoenberger, Managing Editor of “Taipan’s Tipping Point Alert” wrote recently that “One day following a vote in favor of healthcare reform legislation, stocks turned higher led by the healthcare sector. Despite the concern of many Wall Street analysts, any negative sentiment surrounding the healthcare sector about higher taxes and pressure on bottom lines quickly subsided as everything from managed care to medical device stocks traded higher with heavy volume.”

Hospital shares also surged. The day after the House of passed the bill, shares of Health Management Associates, Tenet Healthcare and Community Health Systems all jumped 11%, 9%, and 6% respectively.

It should be clear by now that the major players in the healthcare industry overwhelmingly lobbied in support of Obamacare and have and will continue to reap vast rewards.

So then you may ask who exactly is this great villain the Democrats have dubbed as the evil “health insurance industry”? The name that consistently comes up is America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP). According to wikipedia, “America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) is a national political advocacy and trade association with about 1,300 member companies that sell health insurance coverage to more than 200 million Americans and is thereby funded by the premiums they pay.”

But AHIP not only represents the top health insurance companies in the nation, it also represents the smaller companies that will no doubt be thrown under the bus or absorbed by larger concerns. So it makes sense why they were chosen to act as the controlled opposition. They were the ones often cited as the big bad insurance industry that Nancy Pelosi referred to in response to a heckler at a Democratic rally who yelled “You’ll burn in Hell for this.” AHIP President Karen M. Ignagni often plays the villain as she did on the Oprah Winfrey show opposite Sicko Director Michael Moore.

But this two-faced organization showed their true colors a long time ago. Miami Herald journalist John Dorschner reminds us in a March 23rd article that “In November 2008, just days after Obama’s landslide victory, America’s Health Insurance Plans, a trade group, made a stunning announcement, saying it favored universal coverage and supported a law that would stop insurers from rejecting applicants because of preexisting conditions. “Universal coverage is within reach,” the group said in a historic press release. After being adamantly opposed to reform during the Clinton years, AHIP said it had changed its mind — based on one condition: Any reform plan had to require that all individuals have insurance or pay stiff penalties.”

And just recently, AHIP has come out in full support of Obamacare. According to a TIME Magazine article: America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the industry trade group, has agreed to sign on to a new, 50-state health care reform implementation effort, provisionally called Enroll America, which is being organized by Ron Pollack of the pro-reform group Families USA. “We are participating in it,” says AHIP spokesman Robert Zirkelbach. “The goal is to get everyone covered.”

On the night the House passed the dreaded Obamacare legislation, Obama stated, “Tonight, we pushed back on the undue influence of special interests. … We proved that this government — a government of the people and by the people — still works for the people.” Sure—Here’s a guy who received more then three times the campaign contributions from the pharmaceutical industry than John McCain or $3.58 for every$1 received by his Republican competitor. And those stats come straight out of the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based research group.

Yeah, Obama can come up with some eloquent words, but as we’ve pointed out, this is nothing but a windfall for the big insurance companies, the pharmaceutical industry and device manufacturers. It’s an outright raping of the American people by a government of the special interests and by the special interests.

http://republicbroadcasting.org/?p=7709

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Keep calling it a conspiracy theory America...

“Communism, or more accurately, socialism, is not a movement
of the downtrodden masses, but of the economic elite, because
communism, is about monopoly capitalism.”

-- Gary Allen, "None Dare Call It Conspiracy"



It's only 93 pages, you can read it in a single sitting,
and you can read it and download it for free at this link:

If you haven't read it, do so tonight.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/2297676/conspiracy-Gary-Allen-None-Dare-Call-it-Conspiracy-english-rarereactor

The Government's Big Secret:

The Government's Big Secret:

Dear Reader,

The federal government’s big secret isn’t that its spendthrift ways are destroying the country; it’s that it knows its spendthrift ways are destroying the country and it’s doing absolutely nothing to remedy the situation. In fact, all recent government action has exacerbated the decline. And it knows that too.

For instance, “The 2009 Annual Report of the Board of Trustees of the Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance and Federal Disability Insurance Trust Funds” (link here) reports, in black and white, that the Social Security unfunded liability is a whopping $15.1 trillion. Furthermore, the “2009 Annual Report of The Board of Trustees of The Federal Hospital Insurance and Federal Supplementary Medical Insurance Trust Funds” (link here) reports that the Medicare unfunded liability is an even more staggering $36.4 trillion.

These “trustees,” mind you, are not some outside government watchdog group either. The Managing Trustee of both boards is none other than Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner. And if Geithner’s aware of the situation, you know Obama and Congress are, yet you never hear anything about this reported in the mainstream media. What you get instead is pushed-through health care legislation that will add even more costs to Medicare – and the mainstream media cheers.

Want more? The 254-page “2009 Financial Report of the United States Government,” which is produced by the Treasury Department, is full of goodies illustrating just how deep in the quagmire we are.

Check out the chart below, which shows the government’s projection of debt held by the public in relation to GDP. And keep in mind that this is not what’s called the “National Debt,” which includes intragovernmental debt but just what can be considered “net debt,” or debt held by the public.

[Note: Debt held by the public is all the federal debt held by individuals, corporations, state or local governments, foreign governments, and other entities outside the U.S. Government. Intra-governmental debt is the Government Account Series securities held by government trust funds, revolving funds and other special funds, which are generally required to invest in U.S. Treasury securities. The federal government competes with private industry for credit, therefore the level of debt held by the public shows how much of the nation’s wealth has been absorbed by federal government expenditures. Interest on the public debt is a direct expense of the taxpayers paid in cash by the Treasury. Intragovernmental debt and its interest, on the other hand, aren’t necessarily paid in cash from the current budget. Instead, it often represents a liability on a future budget until the government agency holding the debt needs to cash it in (i.e. when the baby boomer social security payments come rolling in).]




Research shows that when debt reaches 75% to 100% of a country’s GDP, a default or restructuring may not be far behind. The U.S.’s net debt is already 57.4% of nominal GDP. So, by the government’s own predictions, we could expect a debt default or restructuring around 2020.

The document also reveals that rapidly growing interest costs on the national debt together with spending on major entitlement programs will absorb approximately 100 cents of every dollar of federal revenue by 2020. This is astounding. By the government’s own calculations, interest on the debt and spending on entitlement programs will eat up everything the U.S. Government takes in before a penny is spent on anything else. That’s a recipe for disaster if ever there was one. And this document was written before Obamacare was on the books.

Now, going back to that bit about the government knowing its recent actions are only going to exacerbate the decline, I’d like to point to a recent article from moneynews.com which reports that even the former director of the Congressional Budget Office, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, thinks Obamacare will bankrupt the U.S.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

While the Congressional Budget Office reported that President Barack Obama’s healthcare bill would lower federal deficits by $138 billion, the budget office “is required to take written legislation at face value and not second-guess the plausibility of what it is handed,” says former CBO director Douglas Holtz-Eakin.
“So fantasy in, fantasy out.”

Strip out all the gimmicks and budgetary games and rework the calculus, a wholly different picture emerges: The healthcare reform legislation would raise, not lower, federal deficits, Holtz-Eakin writes in The New York Times.

“Removing the unrealistic annual Medicare savings ($463 billion) and the stolen annual revenues from Social Security and long-term care insurance ($123 billion), and adding in the annual spending that so far is not accounted for ($114 billion) quickly generates additional deficits of $562 billion in the first 10 years,” Holtz-Eakin points out.

“And the nation would be on the hook for two more entitlement programs rapidly expanding as far as the eye can see.”

With that in mind, it looks like the U.S. could reach the danger zone of debt to GDP well before 2020. Something to think about…
Politicizing Monetary Policy

By Vedran Vuk
Politicians are notorious for economically illogical stands and incredulous claims. Just last week, the public was told that insuring 30 million more Americans would reduce healthcare spending. Now, a group of 130 Republicans and Democrats are calling on the U.S. Treasury to label China as a “currency manipulator” in order to justify enacting import tariffs.

With this label, lower Chinese interest rates could be considered a business subsidy. Hence, this would qualify as an unfair trade practice enabling retaliatory tariffs. Of course, lower interest rates are indirect subsidies. Notice the jubilation on Wall Street when Bernanke lowers rates. But if China is guilty of currency manipulation, then the U.S. and every other country on Earth is an equal culprit.

Congress’s plan is so deeply ignorant that it’s difficult to respect its position as a legitimate opinion and not a gaffe or a malicious Machiavellian maneuver. Every central bank in the world manipulates currencies, including our own Federal Reserve. Perhaps, Congress will next request the EPA to confirm that forests actually do have trees.

First of all, the defined role of every central bank is to maintain some form of price stability. Naturally to do this, central banks must manipulate their own currencies through interest rates. The second common goal is to maintain full employment. Keeping the currency down to promote exports certainly falls into this role.

Failure to adequately manipulate currencies deserves more criticism than China’s export driven strategy. After all, every central bank fails at the job of manipulating currencies, eventually causing inflation and other severe macroeconomic disruptions.

Last year, politicizing monetary policy was news, but few seem as concerned today. Remember the attacks launched at Ron Paul’s Federal Reserve Transparency Act (H.R. 1207). When Paul’s bill was introduced, lobbyists were immediately hired, think tanks published on the topic, and pundits of all stripes made their opinions known.

The bill was reportedly a gross politicization of the Fed, although it did no such thing. The act only promises to expand the General Accountability Office’s audit powers to cover transactions with foreign banks and governments, transactions made under the FOMC, and certain other currently secretive operations. These audits would be performed long after Fed decisions.

GAO audits would be no more disruptive than releasing FOMC minutes three weeks after a rate decision. Sure, these releases can cause temporary market fluctuations but nothing that would unravel the Fed’s ability to perform currency manipulation – sorry, I meant monetary policy. One could even make the case that Paul’s bill would force the Federal Reserve to be more honest about transactions, thereby reducing politicization and promoting independence.

While Ron Paul’s bill does little to politicize the Fed, the threat of import tariffs over an interest rate disagreement practically takes monetary policy by the reins. Other than Congress directly nationalizing the Fed, little else could be done to politicize monetary policy more so.

Politicizing monetary policy doesn’t stop with Chinese interest rates. Chris Dodd’s new financial overhaul bill would give U.S. Presidents the power to appoint the President of the New York Federal Reserve Bank.

Dodd’s quote on the matter is simply brilliant. Dodd, the intellectual giant, says, “[this process ensures the New York President is] not handpicked by the very bankers the New York Fed is responsible for regulating.” U.S. Presidents have made countless Wall Street-affiliated picks for the Secretary of the Treasury throughout the years. Most recently, this includes Henry Paulson and Robert Rubin, both former high-ranking Goldman Sachs employees. There is no reason to expect more prudent presidential picks for this position either.

When it comes to economics, most Congressmen are fairly clueless. But apparently on monetary policy, they make their usual economic insanities look like pieces of ancient wisdom. After the healthcare bill, who could predict that things would get worse so soon? Well, here we are with Dodd’s bill and a looming China tariff war. Politicizing monetary policy is in full effect.

The Memristor

By Doug Hornig
[Ed. Note: Every month in Casey’s Extraordinary Technology, alongside our investment recommendations, we try to bring you a little entertainment and maybe even a little enlightenment, in the form of new scientific breakthroughs you absolutely need to know about, new products you ought to try, or just plain cool things you’ll want to see. We call this section Research and Development, or R&D for short, and most months it includes one new scientific advance of merit and one new gadget on the horizon. These aren’t investment opportunities today, usually. Just fascinating science. Remarkable achievements. Cool gadgets. And other extraordinary technology. What follows is an example of one such R&D article written by our own Doug Hornig.]

The fundamental architecture of a computer hasn’t changed much in half a century. At the heart of the machine are the same basic languages and chip designs as were there in the 1960s. Sure, computers are much, much smaller. And much, much faster. And they do a whole bunch more – thanks to the flexibility of software that can be written to address nearly any task. But at their root, computers are all composed of just three basic parts: the inductor, the resistor, and the capacitor.

These three fundamental building blocks of the circuit, assembled together in increasingly complex arrays of thousands, millions, or even billions together on a chip, make up the brains of a computer. And for decades it was thought that they were it. The whole enchilada. The only parts necessary to complete any computer, from a PC to a brain. But unlike most things in the engineering world, there was no real mathematical proof this was the case. And this bothered UC Berkeley professor Leon Chua. So he set out to write one.

Along the way to proving the logic of computers, he noticed a piece missing from the puzzle. A fourth basic building block of logic. What he dubbed the “memristor.” You see, way back in 1971, Chua was examining the four properties that make up an electronic circuit: A) electric charge, B) current (or the change in charge over time), C) magnetic flux (the strength of the magnetic field a current produces), and D) voltage (or the change in magnetic flux over time). These four properties could interact in only six possible ways, or combinations – A-B, A-C, A-D, B-C, B-D, and C-D. When he dug in, it was clear to him that there were devices or logical relationships for only five of these combinations. But one, the relationship between magnetic flux and charge, went curiously undefined.

Chua’s proposed device – a small component that could essentially remember what kind of charge last passed through it – filled the gap. But it went relatively unnoticed in the field of computer science for decades after, with just a handful of very interested researchers furthering its study. Why? Well, as far as Chua or anyone else knew, memristors just did not exist. It’s not easy to study something you can’t find, after all.

So, why is this discovery from 1971 suddenly news now? Well, earlier this decade, Stan Williams, a senior researcher at Hewlett-Packard, set out to build a fast, low-power switch by placing two microscopic – atom-level, in fact – resistors in a stack, using the current in one to flip the resistance in the other. He was successful in building the device, but couldn’t seem to predict how it would actually behave. After some digging, three years’ worth apparently, he discovered why – he needed a memristor in his model of the device to complete the logic.

And the reason was simple. He had inadvertently built the first known memristor itself.

And the benefits of the device quickly became clear. It is far faster than any kind of memory circuit on the market today, uses far less power, and has the unique benefit that when you turn the power off, it maintains its “memory.” Not quite getting it yet? Imagine this: yank the plug out of your computer right now as you are reading this. Come back two hours later and plug it back in. Snap, it is instantly back on, exactly where you left off. Neat trick, eh?

And the original author, Chua, is also hard at work on hybrid devices that combine the memristor with traditional components to produce new effects. Like a switch that can store data without dissipating any energy at all.

Don’t expect these devices on store shelves anytime too soon, though. This stuff is so cutting edge, it might take anywhere from a few years to a couple of decades to get out of the lab and into your laptop bag.

The applications of the new device don’t stop with standard computers either. For the past few years, scientists have been building, and discovering, devices and even organisms that appear to behave like memristors. Just as you don’t notice how many particular cars are on the road until you buy the same one, science has a tendency not to notice something all around it until the idea really sets in.

As the community studying this unique new technology catches up to Chua’s work, they have also been taking note of another aspect. Chua proposed, quite astutely, in his very first paper on the subject, that these memristors might be the exact mechanism that makes synapses in the human brain possible. Early research indicates this may indeed be the case.

For decades, computer researchers have toiled away with little success, attempting to build a simulated brain. If memristors do prove to be the key to unlocking the secrets of how the brain works, it won’t just change computing forever, it will change our whole definition of what a computer is and what it is capable of.

The government is sinking its resources into the area now, too. DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency – which has brought us such low-impact inventions as the Internet – recently launched the Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics Program, SyNAPSE, which sponsors scientists to help create an "electronic neuromorphic machine technology that is scalable to biological levels." In other words, a biologically complex computer with an adaptive brain. A true thinking machine.

Skynet, 1. Humans, 0.

Friday Funnies

During their first joint visit to Haiti, George W. Bush appears to wipe his hand on Bill Clinton’s shirt after shaking hands with a crowd of Haitians. Truthfully, I find this video more insulting than funny, but here’s the clip.
Now here are some pictures and cartoons poking fun at some current and former politicians.







And one cute one…




And with that, dear reader, I bid you good day. David won’t be back from Argentina until mid-next week, so I’ll be here with you on Monday. Until then, thank you for reading and for subscribing to a Casey Research service. Have a great weekend!

Chris Wood
Casey Research, LLC

http://www.caseyresearch.com/displayCdd.php?id=381

A Campaign Begins Today:

A Campaign Begins Today:

Mitt Romney
March 22, 2010

America has just witnessed an unconscionable abuse of power. President Obama has betrayed his oath to the nation — rather than bringing us together, ushering in a new kind of politics, and rising above raw partisanship, he has succumbed to the lowest denominator of incumbent power: justifying the means by extolling the ends. He promised better; we deserved better.

He calls his accomplishment “historic” — in this he is correct, although not for the reason he intends. Rather, it is an historic usurpation of the legislative process — he unleashed the nuclear option, enlisted not a single Republican vote in either chamber, bribed reluctant members of his own party, paid-off his union backers, scapegoated insurers, and justified his act with patently fraudulent accounting. What Barack Obama has ushered into the American political landscape is not good for our country; in the words of an ancient maxim, “what starts twisted, ends twisted.”

His health-care bill is unhealthy for America. It raises taxes, slashes the more private side of Medicare, installs price controls, and puts a new federal bureaucracy in charge of health care. It will create a new entitlement even as the ones we already have are bankrupt. For these reasons and more, the act should be repealed. That campaign begins today.

— Mitt Romney is the former governor of Massachusetts and author of No Apology.

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NzgyMzA1NWUwNjA5OTg2ZTUzMTliYzQyOTM1ZmIzNTI