Monthly Archives: June 2009

Max Keiser’s ‘thing of beauty looms’ as UK unraveling points to budget cuts [UPDATED]

Stacy Summary: This one is for Mike2liverpool.  Right, now I have to go find that “thing of beauty” video of Max for your entertainment. 

“The probability of a real sterling crisis is around one in three, and the probability of major tax hikes and cuts in public spending is roughly one in one,” the Harvard University professor says.

Update:

Indiana is one of five states — along with Arizona, California, Mississippi and Pennsylvania — bracing for possible shutdowns this week as time runs out for lawmakers to close billion-dollar gaps in their fiscal 2010 budgets.

Stacy – this might be the best thing to happen for these states.

[Video] The Truth about Twitter

Stacy Summary: This is the Truth About Markets show you may have already listened to this past weekend. Someone else posted to Youtube with a clever title and a nice picture of a Paris cafe. Anyway, thought it would be worth posting in order to continue the conversation here.

(The remaining four parts are found in the related video sidebar if you feel like watching while listening).

UK: Kamikaze property speculators and a tanking economy

Stacy Summary: We are recording both On the Edge (this week’s guest is Paul Craig Roberts) and also Truth About Markets New Zealand, so may be a bit slow adding new links today, but please post any interesting ones you find in the comments section.  What else is happening today??

Stacy:  This fact, of course, doesn’t seem to stop the infamous kamikaze British property speculator from ‘investing’ in bricks & mortar

If Iraq was main stream media’s failure, is Iran social network media’s failure? [UPDATED]

This blog entry made it onto Huffington Post. You can go comment here.

On May 26, 2004, a year after the invasion of Iraq, the New York Times issued an extraordinary apology for their failure in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq, The Times and Iraq

. . . we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged or failed to emerge.

Flash forward to June 12, 2009. Thousands of tweets claim the Iranian elections are rigged. Mousavi supporters fill the streets of Tehran. Within 48 hours, hundreds of thousands of retweets echo and amplify the chants and the cries of mostly anonymous twitterers reporting Iranian state violence. The tweets are homepage news on Huffington Post and Drudge Report. All the diaries of leading blogs are further amplifying the information disseminated by the tweets and retweets.

The Twitter Revolution and the Green Revolution were on! The MSM had failed!

But then. Someone from the Main Stream Media actually investigated on the ground in Tehran – Robert Fisk for the UK newspaper, The Independent

At around 4.35 last Monday morning, my Beirut mobile phone rang in my Tehran hotel room. “Mr Fisk, I am a computer science student in Lebanon. I have just heard that students are being massacred in their dorms at Tehran University. Do you know about this?” The Fisk notebook is lifted wearily from the bedside table. “And can you tell me why,” he continued, “the BBC and other media are not reporting that the Iranian authorities have closed down SMS calls and local mobile phones and have shut down the internet in Tehran? I am learning what is happening only from Twitters and Facebook.”

You will recall that the SNM was, of course, buzzing with declarations that the main stream media was failing to report the “truth” as evidenced in the almost entirely unsourceable, unchallengeable tweets. One of the top trending hashtags at Twitter was #cnnfail.

Fisk, however, did what good journalists do, he put on his shoes and went out to investigate. Most of these ‘truths’ circling the socially networked universe, he quickly found were simply untrue. Continue reading →

Stacy Blog: Site running as normal now

Stacy Summary:  Site is back up on running.  Sorry you have been unable to leave comments for the past few hours.  I moved the site to another server at Dreamhost and, apparently, there was a problem with transferring all the code over . . . but it is back!  If you ever have a problem accessing the site, email me or email our server host at support at dreamhost.com with our website address in the title line.  They usually get it back up within seconds.

By the way, just watched Syriana for the third or fourth time.  Learn more and more every time I watch it.  Really interesting to watch in light of twitter spam-olution and the Butcher of Beirut.  Really interesting.  Would love to hear your thoughts on the movie.

Also, just found this article Robert Baer wrote for Time

UK benefit payout will exceed income tax revenue by over 10%

Stacy Summary:  Bit tip of the hat to @Mike2liverpool. And finally, go join the conversation about yesterday’s OTE at DemocraticUnderground, if you would like to. Oh, and email [email protected] if you want to send some comments to them!

We reject the assertion that we are inflators of bubbles and profiteers in busts, and we are painfully conscious of the importance of being a force for good.

Did the dollar just die? [Updated]

Stacy Summary:  Thought I would gather some headlines on how other blogs are responding to the China’s announcement of the dollar’s imminent demise.  Just domestic politics, or real threat?  What do you think?  And how are you positioning accordingly?

Updates:

Stacy – Weird, this is like some demented oil minstrel show for the Twitter age.

“It’s like a Eurovision song contest or a game show for energy companies,” said an executive at a top-three global oil giant. “A lot of work has gone into preparing our bid but I think on the day we are going to see the process may be quite fluid. If some companies find themselves disappointed on one contract they may have to make deals with other partners on the spot.”