I talked badly about the FB IPO previously, and now it appears everyone agrees with me!
Wait, that can’t be… must be a failure of the technology behind the trading.
It can’t be that it was hype all along!!!
And anyway, there’s always tomorrow to recover today’s losses.
I need to contact my retirement fund manager, just to make sure they invested a lot in that stock! THANKS IN ADVANCE!
haha
As always I am just copying content from somewhere else, and everything I write is to be taken with a large grain of salt.
http://www.economist.com/node/21554548
Here is a picture of “The French” according to the “Economist”:
I wonder if I’d look that way if I had stayed there. Or do I in a way I don’t even care to acknowledge?
:-}
President Hollande
The new French president may be more open to austerity, and less able to bring a change of course in Europe, than his public expects
May 12th 2012 | PARIS AND BERLIN | from the print edition
THE huge crowd gathered in Place de la Bastille had to wait until late into the night before it actually glimpsed in the flesh the man it had come to celebrate. François Hollande gave his first victory speech in Tulle, his sleepy constituency in deeply rural France, in the early evening of May 6th, soon after it was announced that he had beaten Nicolas Sarkozy by 51.6% to 48.4%. It was the first defeat of an incumbent French president since François Mitterrand, the only previous Socialist president of France’s Fifth Republic, beat Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in 1981.
Only after this low-key provincial start did Mr Hollande hop onto a specially chartered jet and head for the capital, where his supporters were being entertained by an assortment of French rock stars. When, a little after midnight, Mr Hollande at last appeared on the stage at the Bastille a huge cheer went up. Hoarse of voice, he urged the crowds to “remember all your lives” this night. It heralded for all of Europe, he cried, that “change is coming” and that there would be “an end to austerity”.
It is a remarkable achievement for a politician who, before Dominique Strauss-Kahn was ruled out by a sex scandal a year ago, was not taken seriously as a presidential hopeful. Since then, the longtime party hack, who has never held ministerial office, has overcome both a divided party and a bland public image to secure the top job. Having promised “change”, Mr Hollande will now step into office on the back of huge expectations. But quite what that change means, both in France and in Europe, is rather less clear.
A red letter day
Mr Hollande has promised to “renegotiate” Europe’s fiscal compact, which Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, regards as the centrepiece of euro-zone stability plans, and to block the treaty’s ratification if he does not get his way. Germany should not, he told supporters on the campaign trail, “decide for all of Europe”. Mr Hollande intends to press this demand at his first meeting with Mrs Merkel, which will take place immediately after his inauguration on May 15th.
Hello world
Yet, in reality, the French vote was not simply a rejection of austerity. Voters were fed up with job losses and the recession, certainly. But they were even more fed up with Mr Sarkozy. Mr Hollande promised them both a “normal” presidency, free of Mr Sarkozy, and a fairer society: he plans a 75% top tax rate, a boost to the minimum wage, higher taxation of companies and wealth, the creation of 60,000 new teaching jobs and a lowering of the retirement age, for some people, back down to 60, where it had been until Mr Sarkozy raised it in 2010.
At the same time, however, Mr Hollande has promised to keep to the outgoing government’s commitment to bring France’s budget deficit down to 3% of GDP next year. He has not wavered over this—a first for a Socialist candidate. Although he says that he will postpone balancing the budget until 2017, a year later than Mr Sarkozy had planned, not once has he advocated a deficit-financed stimulus for the French economy.
Where he has been—perhaps deliberately—vague is over how he will achieve this. France’s public-accounts office, the Cour des Comptes, says that France will need to find an extra €20 billion ($26 billion) in savings each year just to stick to deficit targets. That is before adding on the spending pledges Mr Hollande made on the campaign trail—which, at €20 billion over five years, were not outrageous, but also not negligible. Balancing the books will be even harder if growth disappoints, as seems likely; Mr Hollande reckons on 1.7% growth next year, but the IMF expects just 0.5%. “He cannot reach his numbers by tax increases alone,” says Guillaume Menuet, an economist at Citigroup. “He will have to do more to cut spending.”
In other words, although this is not quite what Mr Hollande told the voters, it looks likely that he will have to implement a form of austerity. “The anti-austerity vote was true for Greece but not for France,” says Fleur Pellerin, a member of Mr Hollande’s campaign staff who is now being tipped for a government job. “He has said clearly that he will stick to the deficit [target], and everybody knows that they will all have to make an effort; but it will be done in a fair way.”
To soften up the public, Mr Hollande plans to introduce some symbolic measures immediately by decree: a 30% pay cut for the president and all government members, and a 25% increase in a means-tested benefit paid at the start of the school year in September. Tough budget choices will be put off until a public-finances audit by the Cour des Comptes, rather conveniently due a few weeks after the parliamentary elections on June 10th and 17th. If it concludes that the hole in the budget is worse than expected, Mr Hollande will have a pretext for postponing spending pledged in the election, and perhaps making deeper cuts than his campaigning suggested.
Explore our interactive guide to Europe’s troubled economies
If Mr Hollande wins a working majority in the elections—as seems likely, not least because Mr Sarkozy’s decision immediately to quit politics has left the right in disarray—he will have a remarkably powerful domestic position. The Socialists already have control of the Senate, all but one of the country’s 22 regions, every big city and most communes.
An important first step towards that victory is forming a relationship with the German chancellor, Mrs Merkel, that establishes him as a constructive force for change in Europe (see Charlemagne). The spiritual son of Jacques Delors, champion of European integration, Mr Hollande knows full well the need for a strong Franco-German friendship. This is why the front-runner for the job as interim prime minister, which Mr Hollande will announce on May 15th, is Jean-Marc Ayrault, the loyal 62-year-old head of the Socialist parliamentary group, who has good links in Germany.
On the face of it, Mr Hollande stands little chance of securing change to the treaty itself. Mrs Merkel, who backed Mr Sarkozy’s campaign, has said she will welcome Mr Hollande “with open arms”. But she has been at pains to point out to France and everyone else that a renegotiation of the European Union’s fiscal compact “is not up for discussion” any more than the terms of the Greek bail-out are.
Her government has not wavered in its belief that “sustainable” growth can come only from fiscal prudence and structural reform. The quick fix of deficit spending just makes things worse. Germans think the financial markets vindicate this view. After Mariano Rajoy, Spain’s prime minister, said in March that Spain would miss its fiscal target this year, yields on its bonds jumped. With its credit rating already downgraded, France risks similar punishment if Mr Hollande strays from austerity.
Nothing in Mr Hollande’s programme suggests that he intends the sort of liberalising changes—to loosen the labour market, say, or boost competition—that Mrs Merkel would define as “structural reform” (and that France sorely needs). Moreover, Germany would refuse some of Mr Hollande’s longer-term ideas: to allow the European Central Bank to lend directly to states, or to create Eurobonds which the euro zone as a whole would stand behind.
But Mr Hollande’s more immediate requests may meet less resistance, as they are less far-reaching. His four ideas are: a greater role for the European Investment Bank (EIB); the issue of European “project bonds” to finance investment in infrastructure and energy; a financial-transactions tax; and the more efficient use of structural funds. To strengthen his hand with Germany, Mr Hollande’s advisers say that he will promise quickly to pass a balanced-budget rule in France. “Nothing will be possible unless we also restore German confidence in France,” says one.
Home and dry?
Mrs Merkel’s domestic concerns may help Mr Hollande make his case. On May 6th a state election in Schleswig-Holstein strengthened opposition parties whose pro-growth rhetoric echoes that of the new French president. Mr Ayrault’s friends in Germany’s opposition Social Democratic Party want growth-friendly add-ons as a condition of supporting the fiscal compact. That support is necessary because approving the compact will require a two-thirds majority in the Bundestag when it votes, probably next month.
Mrs Merkel is open to a “growth pact” to complement the fiscal treaty that might contain such plans, with all countries contributing to increase the lending capacity of the EIB and project bonds backed by the European Union (as long as member states do not end up liable). She would support a Europe-wide financial-transactions tax.
Mr Hollande’s aides have suggested that he might consider a treaty “complemented” by such a growth compact to have been “renegotiated”, as long as its contents are not merely cosmetic. This would seem to offer a compromise which would leave the two leaders happy. Both are sober and methodical, and thus a better match for each other than Mr Sarkozy was for Mrs Merkel. But there is a large Greek fly in the ointment.
A “renegotiation” of the sort being contemplated does nothing to sort out the mess in Greece. Mrs Merkel is adamant that there is no option for Greece but to follow the strictures of the previously agreed bail-out package, or go under. Mr Hollande’s position is still unclear. If he agrees with her, what price his position as a new European counterweight, let alone his credibility at home as a man opposed to doctrinaire austerity? But if he disagrees, a rift opens up at the heart of Europe.
One of the last parts of the original 1951 SF Freeway design that would have linked the Golden Gate bridge with the Bay Bridge via the Embarcadero (gone since ’91) along Bay Street, then Lombard.
Interestingly, when i walk around these areas, one can still feel that there *should* be something (or at least there was something planned). For instance, the corner of Embarcadero and Bay street… or Hayes Valley:
I took that ramp everyday between 1991 and 1997. It’s gone, but what was around it sort of remains…
“I have waited up to this point to see what would become of the GN’R induction into Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame. I would like to say THANK YOU and GRACIAS to Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame for the acknowledgement of our works over the years as a band. BIG THANKS to all my bandmates who helped get us to where we are today. And, of course, THANK YOU to all of the people on this planet (including, but not limited to, the entire universe and beyond, etc., etc., etc.) who have supported GUNS N’ ROSES from day one. Adios, Amigos!”
One of the best-kept secrets in television history has been revealed, with “The Simpsons” creator Matt Groening pointing to Springfield, Ore., as the inspiration for the animated hometown of Homer and family.
Groening told Smithsonian magazine, published online Tuesday, that he was inspired by the television show “Father Knows Best,” which took place in a place called Springfield. Springfield, Ore., is 100 miles south of Groening’s hometown of Portland.
“When I grew up, I realized it was just a fictitious name,” Groening told the magazine (http://bit.ly/HqiT4E). “I also figured out that Springfield was one of the most common names for a city in the U.S.
“In anticipation of the success of the show, I thought, `This will be cool; everyone will think it’s their Springfield.’ And they do,” he said.
Groening said he has long given fake answers when asked about the Simpsons’ hometown, leaving open the possibility that his latest one is itself another fake.
The show has made a running joke of hiding the true Springfield’s location. In one episode, daughter Lisa points to Springfield on a map, but the animated “camera view” is blocked by son Bart’s head.
People in the real Springfield — the one in Oregon — took on the mantle of the show’s hometown after Groening visited during a tour before the 2007 film “The Simpsons Movie.”
When Springfield community-relations manager Niel Laudati was told about Groening’s announcement, he said: “Oh OK, we knew that.”
The city has already incorporated the Simpsons into its own town lore. The Springfield Museum features a couch similar to the animated one shown in the show’s opening credits, and a plaque marking the movie’s release.
“Yo to Springfield, Oregon — the real Springfield!” Groening wrote. “Your pal, Matt Groening proud Oregonian!”
The Springfield depicted in “The Simpsons” isn’t always a flattering portrait. The school is falling apart, there’s a constant fire at the town dump and Mayor Quimby is chronically, helplessly corrupt.
“We kind of got past it,” Laudati said. “We don’t dwell on the bad stuff. Obviously we don’t have a nuclear power plant. We don’t have a lot of stuff in the Simpsons.
“What we do have are a lot of blue-collar working families that go to church every week and eat dinner together,” Laudati said “That is accurate.”
The series has been on the air for more than 20 years, becoming the longest-running American sitcom, the longest-running American animated program and a cultural phenomenon with colleges devoting courses to studying it.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2012/04/10/national/a135451D17.DTL#ixzz1rgyXpHEj
Hm, like a Monday April 09 2012. Not my comments, but link is below.
The IMF and/or their former employees are always interesting.
It always starts by wanting to do good things too.
****************
Brace yourself: five to 10 years before fiscal crisis
http://blog.sfgate.com/nov05election/2012/04/09/brace-yourself-five-to-10-years-before-fiscal-crisis/
Former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson offered more bad news Monday as he peddled his new book, “White House Burning: The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt and Why It Matters to You,” Monday at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
Johnson is the no-longer-popular economist who has argued that the post-financial-crisis banks are now bigger than too-big-to-fail. Now he’s predicting not only another financial crisis, but a fiscal crisis when interest rates go up, as they inevitably will.
Johnson described the current U.S. government as “a large insurance company with a large army.” Meaning most of the budget is consumed by defense and entitlements, mainly Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid. Tracing the history of U.S. debt, Johnson said somewhere at the start of this century we abandoned our historical consensus on fiscal rectitude and began borrowing like there is no tomorrow.
Note: All the cuts in last summer’s budget deal between Republicans and the White House were in domestic discretionary spending, with future cuts split between defense and domestic. Domestic discretionary spending is all of government minus entitlements and defense. It’s a small slice of the budget. You can already see the cuts from these accounts in your deteriorating highways, ill-maintained national parks, overburdened federal courts, etc. etc. Meanwhile, entitlements remain on auto pilot (thank Dems) and taxes are not allowed to be raised for any reason whatsoever (thank Reps).
Johnson proposes tax increases, especially letting the Bush tax cuts expire at the end of this year, because as a matter of arithmetic, the rapidly aging U.S. population means Medicare and Social Security are going to a whole lot more people. Neither party likes this idea.
He notes that 40 percent of people receiving Social Security and Medicare (hello Tea Party) do not believe they participate in a government program. President Obama (hello liberals) wants to preserve the great majority of the Bush tax cuts, and even added to them, despite making a big show this week about a Buffett tax on the rich.
Johnson proposes tax increases to match the level of government most people seem to want, which includes current Medicare and Social Security, with minor adjustments. His bottom line (adding yet one more voice to a chorus of experts across the ideological spectrum) is that something has to give or we’re all in for big trouble.
More than 600,000 Mac computers were affected by a hacking attack, a sign that the once rarely targeted company is becoming a bigger focus for people intent on spreading malware, a security-research firm said.
The attack affects computers running Apple’s Mac OS X software, according to Russian antivirus software maker Doctor Web. Most of the infected computers are in the United States and Canada, the firm said in a blog posting. Apple fixed a security hole this week that let the malicious software spread. Users who haven’t downloaded the necessary updates are vulnerable, Doctor Web said.
“This once again refutes claims by some experts that there are no cyber-threats to Mac OS X,” Doctor Web said. Apple spokesman Bill Evans declined to comment on the hacker attack. He noted that there are 63 million Macs in use worldwide.
Macs have historically been an unappealing hacking target because of their low market share. Instead, criminals have attacked personal computers running Microsoft’s Windows software, seeking the biggest number of victims for illicit moneymaking schemes. Windows runs on more than 90 percent of the world’s desktop computers, according to market researcher Net Applications.
The attack that Doctor Web analyzed is an especially harmful variety that infects computers without user interaction. To get hit, users just need to visit a poisoned Web page and the infection happens silently in the background. The vulnerability that allows the attack to take place exists in Java, the widely used programming language for building Web pages.
Boris Sharov, Doctor Web’s chief executive officer, said in an interview that the spread of the infection appears to have leveled off at around 600,000 computers, a sign of the effectiveness of the security patch. He pointed to a Doctor Web page for detecting and removing the malicious software, which is called BackDoor.Flashback.39.
The malicious software first appeared in September and has gone through a number of transformations since then, targeting Macs and generally being used to steal personal information such as passwords, according to Liam O Murchu, a manager of security-response operations at Symantec Corp.
“It just shows that no matter what operating system you’re using, you can be at risk,” he said in a phone interview Thursday. “No one is immune.”
A computer security company, F-Secure posted detailed instructions on how to confirm if a machine is infected and how to remove the malware.
Jordan Robertson is a Bloomberg writer. jrobertson40@bloomberg.net
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/04/05/BUJE1NVJO3.DTL#ixzz1rHhaXkxF
