Park Life

Withdrawing money from a bank they don't want you too is already a terrorist act™ so maybe. You are truly ahead of the curve. Gold or water?

AmEx asks U.S. for $3.5 billion: WSJ Day after converting to bank-holding company, credit card giant looks for government help By Sam Mamudi, MarketWatch Last update: 8:49 a.m. EST Nov. 12, 2008Comments: 66 NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- American Express Co. is the latest company to seek U.S. government help to steer it through the financial crisis, according to a story Wednesday in The Wall Street Journal. The Journal reported that AmEx (AXP:18.69, +1.46, +8.5%) is asking for $3.5 billion in taxpayer-funded capital. The paper quoted people familiar with the situation. There has been no official comment from AmEx. The application has been made under the government's Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), though the Journal said it isn't clear if the request was made before or after AmEx received Federal Reserve approval on Monday to become a bank-holding company. By becoming a holding company, AmEx made itself eligible to access the Federal Reserve's emergency-lending facilities -- but it will now also be subject to greater regulatory oversight. See full story The request comes as AmEx struggles with slowing consumer spending -- even among its most affluent customers -- and rising defaults. This hits AmEx particularly hard because its business model revolves around consumers using their credit cards. I put this up cause some Americans are having it refused in Europe and having to go through 'verification' 2/3 times before payment is accepted.

Fop, might they be expecting massive civil disobedience?

The speculation in the Journal this morning was that it's him, Smith and Geremi who he'd like to see go. I think you'd have to just about give the last two away considering the wages they'll be on though. Why can't we spend the Mewnah money??! The argument will be that was spent on Xisco, Colo, Guthrie and Jonas. But....but...but KK was told the Mwwnah money was for pigfucker (Schweinstieger).

I tried to point that out, but apparently my taser-like subtlety was futile. Resistance is futile.

The speculation in the Journal this morning was that it's him, Smith and Geremi who he'd like to see go. I think you'd have to just about give the last two away considering the wages they'll be on though. Why can't we spend the Mewnah money??!

Looks like JFK thinks Xisco is crap.

Seriously guys I know Fob broached these things in a cack handed manner. But in this instance he is absolutely right. General distribution of the tazer is dangerous.

Derivatives market on the edge. "The practice is very different, as Warren Buffett worked out years ago. His 2002 letter to his Berkshire Hathaway shareholders made headlines by condemning derivatives as "financial weapons of mass destruction". The passage comprised only a couple of pages of the lengthy letter but read it again today - it is the best guide to understanding how Wall Street has arrived at today's mess. Here is Buffett on General Re Securities, a derivatives dealer that Berkshire inherited with its purchase of insurer General Re. "At year-end (after ten months of winding down its operation) it had 14,384 contracts outstanding, involving 672 counterparties around the world. Each contract has a plus or minus value derived from one or more reference items, including some of mind-boggling complexity. Valuing a portfolio like that, expert auditors could easily and honestly have widely varying opinions." Now consider Lehman Brothers balance sheet. On page 62 of last year's accounts, under the heading "off balance sheet arrangements" you will find a staggering figure. Lehman had derivative contracts with a face value of $738bn." Buffett made a gloomy prediction half a decade ago. "The derivatives genie is now well out of the bottle, and these instruments will almost certainly multiply in variety and number until some event makes their toxicity clear," he said. "Central banks and governments have so far found no effective way to control, or even monitor, the risks posed by these contracts." That event has duly arrived. Lehman Brothers has declared bankruptcy. Merrill Lynch has rushed into the arms of Bank of America. AIG, once the US's largest insurer, is pleading with the Fed for funds." Remedies "Under one move, the Federal Reserve, Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission agreed to exchange information on credit default swaps from private groups that will be set up to act as central clearinghouses for such transactions. That should help provide crucial information on the parties involved in the complex and unregulated products. Credit default swaps, a roughly $60 trillion worldwide market, played a large role in the credit crisis that brought the downfall of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., pushed giant insurer American International Group Inc. (AIG, Fortune 500) to the brink of bankruptcy, and forced Merrill Lynch & Co. to sell itself to Bank of America Corp. (BAC, Fortune 500) The swaps are commonly used contracts to insure against the default of financial instruments such as bonds and corporate debt. But they also are bought and sold as bets against bond defaults. Headed by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, the White House group includes Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox." http://money.cnn.com/2008/11/14/news/econo...el.ap/index.htm There is no way imo the derivatives market will survive the cash crunch.

Yes I suspect they will be used to suppress freedom of speech, you're right. Much like CS Spray they'll go from last resort to first choice very quickly (in fact even in the "trial" period this has already been the case). Aye, right, people are CS sprayed all the time for no reason. I'd love you to live in a country with a real shit, corrupt police force Fop. Err....

"Children of the revolution"....

Well they have to give aid as they are locked out of the markets (oil and minerals excepted).

Sell monkey nuts buy gold.

There is some talk that the Bank of International Settlement (Basel) are pushing for an audit of the Fed. Yikes!!! The B.I.S are a quiet bunch of int bankers who meet in secret once a year and coerced the Fed into joining iirc in 1995 when America needed cash to bail out Mexico. If the Americans let this happen it would be the endgame. It would be really bad....The end of the dollar for starters.

I think Fop is more "Splash it all over". Wor lass says the same about me.

I think Fop is more "Splash it all over".

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7505286.stm http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/...4152521,00.html This last notion, famously promoted by French biologist Dr Jacques Benveniste, cost him his laboratories, his funding, and ultimately his international scientific credibility. However, it did not deter Professor Ennis who, being a scientist, was not afraid to try to prove Benveniste wrong. So, more than a decade after Benveniste's excommunication from the scientific mainstream, she jumped at the chance to join a large pan-European research team, hoping finally to lay the Benveniste "heresy" to rest. But she was in for a shock: for the team's latest results controversially now suggest that Benveniste might have been right all along."

That experiment would have to reproduced independently, there have been several claims like this in the past which have never been replicated by independent laboratories (also the fact he carried out the experiments unblinded is a major methodological flaw, I know this from experience). Even if it was replicated (which I seriously doubt), its hardly proof of 'memory' and says nothing about the transferance of biological information. I didn't clip anything out, I gave the link so you may read all of it.

If he's intent on going we need to be looking at 7m minimum. As Alex said, better and younger than Duff and IMO future French full international.

Blackburn looking really clueless. If they stay near the bottom for a bit pressure on Ince will be immense.

Neu Scientificata... Icy claim that water has memory 19:00 11 June 2003 by Lionel Milgrom Claims do not come much more controversial than the idea that water might retain a memory of substances once dissolved in it. The notion is central to homeopathy, which treats patients with samples so dilute they are unlikely to contain a single molecule of the active compound, but it is generally ridiculed by scientists. Holding such a heretical view famously cost one of France's top allergy researchers, Jacques Benveniste, his funding, labs and reputation after his findings were discredited in 1988. Yet a paper is about to be published in the reputable journal Physica A claiming to show that even though they should be identical, the structure of hydrogen bonds in pure water is very different from that in homeopathic dilutions of salt solutions. Could it be time to take the "memory" of water seriously? The paper's author, Swiss chemist Louis Rey, is using thermoluminescence to study the structure of solids. The technique involves bathing a chilled sample with radiation. When the sample is warmed up, the stored energy is released as light in a pattern that reflects the atomic structure of the sample. Twin peaks When Rey used the method on ice he saw two peaks of light, at temperatures of around 120 K and 170 K. Rey wanted to test the idea, suggested by other researchers, that the 170 K peak reflects the pattern of hydrogen bonds within the ice. In his experiments he used heavy water (which contains the heavy hydrogen isotope deuterium), because it has stronger hydrogen bonds than normal water. Aware of homeopaths' claims that patterns of hydrogen bonds can survive successive dilutions, Rey decided to test samples that had been diluted down to a notional 10-30 grams per cubic centimetre - way beyond the point when any ions of the original substance could remain. "We thought it would be of interest to challenge the theory," he says. Each dilution was made according to a strict protocol, and vigorously stirred at each stage, as homeopaths do. When Rey compared the ultra-dilute lithium and sodium chloride solutions with pure water that had been through the same process, the difference in their thermoluminescence peaks compared with pure water was still there (see graph). "Much to our surprise, the thermoluminescence glows of the three systems were substantially different," he says. He believes the result proves that the networks of hydrogen bonds in the samples were different. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn3817...has-memory.html

How's that then? Are you taking the piss?

It's a weird one.

Coincidentally at the same time as big bonuses disappeared and she lost her job.