WHY NOT MANIPULATE LIBOR?

so the latest financial scandal is about banks manipulating LIBOR. it will be interesting to see what comes out. but a little perspective. in 1991 Salomon Brothers was caught putting false bids into a Treasury auction to get a greater allocation and likely caused a distortion in the Treasury yield curve. they were fined $290 million dollars and got warren buffett as a opportunistic, savior. interestingly enough there was little litigation. i thought at the time there were fun lawsuits to be made given the zillions of dollars of securities that were price off the curve. now we have libor. well this time the lawyers figured it out and there will be plenty of lawsuits. ah, for simpler times! anyway, to my point. ever since 2008 when the financial crisis really hit, governments around the world have been manipulating interest rates and yield curves. what do you think QE, quantitative easing, does? it is governments buying securities for the explicit purpose of changing interest rates to try to change behavior. at this point the entire treasury yield curve is manipulated. there is nothing market based about it. unless you define the market as one influenced by all players including governments. which i guess we should, its the new normal. back to libor. we will find out what various banks did; maybe why. but i will tell you something. the Bank of England knew that the libor quotes were bs. you have to try to remember that the world financial system was close to meltdown. banks weren't actually lending to each other. libor was a joke. there was no market; there was no rate at which they would lend to each other. and all the central banks didnt want to have that visible and scare the hell out of everyone. lastly, in a world of manipulated rates, why pick on the bankers? they were merely doing what all the governments and central banks around the world were doing!

KOFI ANNAN HAS BLOOD ON HIS HANDS

i am sure kofi annan is a nice, well meaning man. or at least i am willing to assume so. however, his naive mission to syria only contributed to the violence and massacre of syrian citizens by the Assad regime. one can say that that was not his intention, that he meant well, etc. but actions and outcomes trump intentions. anyone with any common sense could have seen/ known that his or anyone's peace keeping mission was a fools errand that assad embraced because he knew nothing would come of it and it would give him time to change facts on the ground. to try something stupid and fail is not noble; it is just stupid. i think we need to re-examine the whole UN peacekeeping mission process so that it is more than a bunch of guys watching genocide and doing nothing

NCAA; PENN STATE; CRAVEN HYPROCRISY

i have no connection to penn state. neither i nor anyone in my family went there. i am not a fan of college football. i am writing about the NCAA nuking Penn State to make an example of it. and the school bending over and taking it. possibly destroying the school. now let me further disclaim and note that i have zero tolerance for the abuse of children. they should be annihilated! back to the narrative the ncaa has been part of an unholy alliance that has captured a portion of the higher education system in this country and turned it into a farm team for the NFL. with untold millions of tv dollars flowing in, this is big business, not higher education. that much money inevitably will create corruption,powerful elites and other bad stuff. the question is should an entity such as the ncaa which is complicit in this corruption make an example of penn state? how about making an example of itself. joe paterno was a man. not a god. he happened to run a hell of a football program. and unlike most of the other bastards who ran other programs, he really cared about his players and their getting a real education. look at the stats. more graduates and higher gpa's than any comparable program in the country. the ability to have a first class program and get an education is rare and commendable. like many great men, he left the stage too late. and it turned into a tragedy. but there is little proof that he aided and abetted Sandusky or covered it up. and he has been disappeared. his name ripped off buildings, his statue removed and replaced by trees. wild stuff. if penn state violated ncaa rules, let them be punished, consistent with past practices, for every violation. but dont punish it for the sins of a country, for the sins of the ncaa. if you want to reform college football then reform college football; all of it. dont just burn down one college and say shape up or this could be you. what happened was shameful. sandusky was convicted and hopefully will not have fun in jail. and the administration needs to be run through a criminal and civil gauntlet and let the chips fall where they may. but for the ncaa to jam a deal down the throat of the school, threatening them with annihilation if they dont agree to the deal is not right. it deprives them of due process. and they caved in a cowardly fashion. what a tragedy

THE INTOUCHABLES; CE MAGNIFIQUE!

go see this movie! its nearly perfect. the story, the actors, the music, everything. its in french with english subtitles but you get so into it you think you are listening to it in your native language then again you could see MIB 3

FACEBOOK IPO FLUB DUE TO GREED

FB is currently trading at $34.67, down from its offer price of $38. this is should not be a surprise. it was the culmination of a series of steps that built on each other. these steps include the following they drove the underwriters to an all time lowest underwriting commission. i think 1%. many applauded this as the new young tech kids showing those greedy bankers. however, there is a reason for the commission. one of which is to use it to help support the stock in the after market. but with such a low commission, they didnt have much fire power and dropped away from the bid and the stock went down. they increased the price range, not in the face of huge demand but because their ego wanted to top $100 billion in valuation. they increased the amount of shares offered to retail. this was a sign of weakness. in hot deals, institutional demand is in multiples of the deal size and people get a fraction of their request. offering more to retail was not generous altruism. it was a cynical tactic in the face of institutional resistance to price. retail investors are less sophisticated they then increased the number of shares. this was so more insiders could sell shares, not more money for the company. peter thiel thanks you they priced it at the high end of the range, after having the temerity of trying to increase the price even higher than the new higher range having said this. its just an ipo. the company can still do well and prosper. it needs to execute. remember the google ipo. its was a mess also. the genius tech guys showed those greedy bankers also. they decided to do a dutch auction, which nobody understood, which led to a low price. they recovered by executing. earning googles of money. personally i dont think facebook was worth 100 billion and will have trouble justifying the price. sometimes the smart kids arent so smart. just another bunch of greedy ego driven idiots

SYRIA; SOMETHING MUST BE DONE

Rwanda, Bosnia, the Holocaust. at some point brutality becomes genocide. it must be unacceptable.

Assad must go; its not OK the slaughter your own people. china and Russia are against it for self interest. we are all self interested. Russia views Syria as a client state; they sell them arms and its one of the few Arab countries they still have influence with in the region. and both china and Russia looked at the Libya mission which really was mission overstep. it went from protecting lives to regime change. now it was a regime worth changing; but china and Russia are obsessed with social unrest that leads to regime change. so it is a problem. we need to reach out to china and Russia, give them a role, assurances, arms deals in the future, whatever.

and stop the killing of civilians!

GREECE WILL FAIL

i think the Greek legislature passed the austerity bill required for their bailout to proceed. the people are rioting.

it will fail.

the economy is shrinking; people are leaving Athens for the country to subsistence farm.

Greece will default. they should never have been allowed into the euro, they should never have been loaned hundreds of millions of dollars. and by the way, the 100 billion haircut covers only private sector holders of Greek debt, not entities like the IMF or the ecb. why? why are their bonds better than private bond holders bonds?

by the way, the Greek economy is comparable to Delaware,