I predict they will go one step farther: A surprising find will be made while US forces raid some Al Queada bunker: a huge stash of gold. Then defenc/se people will say “terrorists often use gold as a funding tool”, etc. And next thing you know anyone who buys gold will be pre-emptively arrested or questioned.

PS , what happen to the story about the super pussy, you never did get to it!

Funny thing that, being first with an idea, my mate was talking about finacial weapons of mass destruction about a year before I started listening to your show.
And then there was the Pea, aaah the Pea, I suppose the less we say about that the better. Sounded promising, bit of a let down, my wife calls you the master of the bad comparison.

Fantastic show. I laughed. I cried (..naw).. I laughed again. And Again. And God knows I need to laugh given the state of the world. You guys are wonderful. Love ya both. Watch your backs. Stay out of airplanes when Dick Cheney or G.H.W. Bush are around.

Humour and intelligence. Hell, it doesn’t get any better.

Youri: the explosion in credit for commercial real estate was a result of basel 1 accounting rules and not any carry trades.

“Any causal understanding of the sub-prime crisis not only has to describe general
contributing factors to securitisation and off-balance sheet activity; it must also
explain the magnitude of change in such a compressed period of time (post 2004).
What were the catalysts?”

http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/33/6/42031344.pdf

“The Basel 1 system encouraged regulatory arbitrage, and never provided a capital constraint on banks. Banks were told in June 2004, that this would get even better. For the big banks involved in the crisis, they were told that by 2008 they would move to a much more complex system—the ‘revised framework’—or Basel II, where they could pretty much set their own capital in the so-called Pillar 1, using their own internal risk modelling—and this modelling was showing a big drop in the risk weight to mortgages.”

http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/34/18/40807940.pdf

Dollar carry trade is a “massive issue today”; Chinese central banker Zhu Min warns of new Asian crisis – 27 January 2010 (Telegraph.UK – AFP) http://tinyurl.com/ygdepsx

FSA’s Lord Turner signals crackdown on carry trade http://tinyurl.com/yfgpv5k

Davos Notebook: China is like a young Yao Ming http://tinyurl.com/yfnv39v

Inside China’s Tightening: Banks Literally Tearing Up Letters Of Credit, Importers In Disarray, Orders Cancelled http://tinyurl.com/yznqbb7

Oh, that article you linked is from September. China is in a capital crunch brought on by the CBRC regulatory adhesion to basel mandates.

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/BUSINESS/11/24/china.banks.lending.ft/index.html

http://www.smh.com.au/business/chinas-credit-crunch-20100120-mlqg.html

“The chairman of the China Banking Regulatory Commission, Liu Mingkang, said he had targeted banks that had not met prudential supervision requirements.
”For those that failed to meet these standards, we told them to limit lending,” he said in Hong Kong.
“[Chinese banks] need to get ready for the wrong kind of borrowers and the wrong kind of weather.”
Mr Liu said this year’s new lending will be confined to 7.5 trillion yuan ($1.2 trillion), down from last year’s extraordinary 9.6 trillion yuan.”

great show

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE60S3K420100129

wouldn’t food or infrastructures or antibiotics or medical supplies make more sense – bot no, and they end the article by promoting less population growth. maybe that’s what the vaccines are really for-

Max, don’t be so quick to believe that overpopulation is somehow the cause of pollution. governments and corporations who don’t give a shit are the cause of pollution. they want things this way, I don’t believe their is any political will at the top that truly desires to improve anything for the people – believing that overpopulation is the problem is almost like blaming the people for the fact that the world sucks rather than blaming those in power.