Bad Debt, Good Property

Two stories, confirming the unsustainability of the debt based economic shell game that the globalized banking sector has been advancing the past several years. They both involve about the same amount of money, 15 or 16 billion USD. There are two problems: one is the bank’s wet dream of a massive pile of debt running headlong into the realities of democratic institutions, where the debt is just canceled, en masse:

India cancels small farmers’ debt

The Indian government is to cancel the entire debt of the country’s small farmers in a giant scheme that will cost 600bn rupees ($15bn; £7.6bn).
The move is a centrepiece of India’s latest budget, with the government also increasing education spending by 20% and health funding by 15%.

Of course, debt canceled gets paid by someone, in this case the Indian Govt, but let’s see how long their commitment lasts… And the other problem is the mounting fallout from the sub-prime mess, first reported here in April of last year:

HSBC ‘to unveil $16bn writedown’

The UK’s largest bank HSBC is expected to unveil about $16bn (£8.1bn) of losses for 2007, but will still make an annual profit, reports suggest.

The firm’s annual results out on Monday will show that the bad debt charge is mostly related to the crumbling US housing market and consumer blues.

Reminds me of the famous line: “When you owe the bank ten thousand dollars, you have a problem, when you owe the bank ten million dollars, the bank has a problem…” Recall Hillary’s promise of a moratorium on repossessions, and that’s just the tip of the populist iceberg. Bottom line: that debt is all about to collapse. See this great post from the blog Sudden Debt:

The People’s Bank of the USA

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As the credit crisis expands like ripples in a pond, politicians are waking up to the fact that they “must do something”. Homeowners upside-down on their mortgages (i.e. they owe more than their homes are worth) are their current focus. The New York Times reports that as many as 8.8 million homeowners may be under water. As I have said in previous posts, the chief driver of mortgage defaults is exactly such a condition, leading to “jingle mail”.

Panicked bankers are now all over Washington suggesting (”imploring” describes it better) that the federal government should buy and guarantee their risky mortgages, effectively turning Uncle Sam into the Peoples’ Bank of The United States.

Don’t you just love it? When times are good, bankers are all for invisible hands, laissez faire and Friedmanite free markets; but let Mr. Market give them a bit of the stick and they turn bolshier than Rosa and Leon (that’s Luxembourg and Trotsky, for those less versed in communist hagiography).

US 193 shootdown

Thanks to wikileaks we now really know–or at the very least have a strong suspicion of–why the satellite US 193 was shot down.

Wikileaks highlights one item in their summary of the leaked powerpoint presentation:

Of particular note in the document, is the fact that along with FEMA and safety task forces, a Department of Defense “Payload Recovery Task Force” is expected to respond to the impact site approximately 3 to 6 hours after the impact. This suggests that there may be some validity to rumors that US-193 is being intercepted on national security grounds.

My comment would be that if the “payload recovery task force” will respond within 3 to 6 hours, that means it has been organized and is ready to scramble to the site of the downing. Of course, what are they concerned about? Two possibilities: some fancy imaging technology (ground penetrating radar at the top of that list), or perhaps the cryptography module, which would reveal how the satellite communicated with the ground. If that information were acquired, it is just barely conceivable that someone could acquire control over one of the other spy satellites, or eavesdrop on the communications.

Things to Come..is gone…?

An alert reader has noted to me that the Science Fiction masterpiece of the 1930’s, Things to Come, is no longer available in higher resolutions from the internet archive. I had linked to it earlier in this post: Journey to the End of the Night (H.G. Wells Edition)

There is still a link to a lower resolution version here, though: Lower Res version of Things to Come.

Of course I have downloaded it, and will post here if it disappears from the internet archive. Why would the internet archive remove the higher resolution versions? Of course, I suspect that it is available over in a bit torrent download somewhere.