Banging. The. Same. Drum.

"The inherent problems of the international economic system have not been fully addressed," said China's president Hu Jintao. Indeed not. China is still exporting overcapacity to the rest of us on a grand scale, with deflationary consequences. Markets are still in denial about the structural wreckage of the credit bubble. There are two more boils to lance: China's investment bubble; and Europe's banking cover-up. I fear that only then can we clear the rubble and, very slowly, start a fresh cycle."
China has now become the biggest risk to the world economy - Telegraph

"In the past eighteen months, the hedge-fund industry has nearly halved in size, falling to an estimated $1.2 trillion in assets. The end of the bubble, of course, doesn’t mean the end of hedge funds: They’ll survive in a more modest, more regulated form. Mutual funds, for instance, were at the center of a similar bubble in the sixties and now plod along unremarkably. The lack of transparency provides enough cover to make managers look like geniuses. It also provides cover, surprisingly rarely, for the occasional con man. As Randy Shain pointed out in Hedge Fund Due Diligence, the biggest variable in evaluating a hedge fund is figuring out the character of the manager."
Hedgies Unhinged - NYMag

"Sometimes, however, economies end up in a different place, based on the physics of bungee jumping. The economy falls off a cliff. Activity drops a long way. Then there's a rebound. For a while, the rebound looks very good and it's easy enough for economists to stick to their straight-line thinking. But the economy never returns to normal; instead it is left dangling by a thread."
Stephen King: Gold prices are a dead giveaway - Independent

""I don't know what's going on in the market right now because it makes no sense to me," she said."
Stocks Overvalued, Recession Will Return: Meredith Whitney - CNBC

Magic Moments

"You conquered your fears, you didn't even throw up!"

Car Geek

AND PASSED WITH AN EXCELLENT SCORE! A+

Times have changed

"The view on Japan as a focus for hedge funds was distinctly mixed. Indeed, many funds of funds are zero-weighted on Japan these days. Said one manager: “Japan always ends up being very painful for pan-Asian managers”. Two complaints were low sentiment and valuations, as well as ageing demographics, big public debt and forex risks, the marked decline in savings rates and deterioration of the trade balance.

Still, Japan had its defenders among the hedgies. One veteran manager at the gathering noted: “Speaking of Asia ex-Japan is like talking about North America ex-USA”. Said another: “Japan has more breadth and depth than any market outside the US. A tremendous landscape for long-short. Probably there will be a reversing of sentiment and valuations from 10-year lows. The catalyst is the ongoing IP cycle.”

On Asia in general, the mood was more optimistic, summed up in the remark of another veteran hedgie: “People don’t actually realise that retail investors are back [in Asia] — and they’re making money”."

Goldman’s de-glitzes its Tokyo fest for Asia-focused hedgies - FT Alphaville

Spin Scan on a Computrainer

Finnish Rally Driving

The Finns are the world's best rally drivers. Practice makes perfect.

Dear Father Christmas..

AX3000 Road brakeset

Passoni XX Ti Limited Edition


Mac Spud


Singer 911


or.. how about an iTunes gift voucher?

Simple games are the best

L'incident du box

and then it continued...

I know the risks

Aquarium

Give this some time to load before watching for smooth playback.

At the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium, the main tank called the "Kuroshio Sea" holds 7,500-cubic meters (1,981,290 gallons) of water and features the world's second largest acrylic glass panel, measuring 8.2 meters by 22.5 meters with a thickness of 60 centimeters. Whale sharks and manta rays are kept amongst many other fish species in the main tank.

Must take Milly to the Shinagawa aquarium soon!

Wednesday Linkage

Busy day for me, but some stuff that caught my eye today.

Copper on pigfarms and giant lots of new cars - Mess That
"There's a bit more to this and it's well worth the look, including a frightening comparison of the U.S. subprime collapse to a coming "overcapacity" collapse in China."

Is China headed toward collapse? - Politico
"We believe the coming slowdown in China has the potential to be a similar watershed event for world markets as the reversal of the U.S. subprime and housing boom."

New Rules and More Lies Hide Cancerous Commercial Real Estate Loans - Mish
"The Fed and FDIC always seek to buy time, even when buying time does nothing but make the problems worse."

"Twitter-equipped scale tells the world how much you weigh." via MR
"How's that for purchasing self-constraint? Or do you just stop weighing yourself?"

Jacqui Janes accepts Gordon Brown's apology - Times
"Today he looked sincere. He looked humbled."

This is Britain

Photographer of the Year 2009

"Pictures entered in this category should seek to reveal the essence of contemporary Britain and Britishness. Get under the skin of British culture and take a fresh look at the familiar. Document the British at work and at play." photoradar





For more shortlisted entries from the This is Britain category, click the links below:
Page 1, Page 2, Page 3, Page 4

Vaccinate

"Can you not read how mad people are at you? When most people saw the headline 'Goldman Sachs Gets Swine Flu Vaccine' they were super happy until they read the word 'vaccine.'"

-- Amy Poehler on last night's Saturday Night Live, commenting on the news that Wall Street banks have already secured thousands of doses of the H1N1 vaccine while many at-risk Americans are forced to wait; Goldman Sachs alone has received 200 doses of the Swine Flu vaccine -- as much as New York City's Lenox Hill Hospital. via Deus Ex Malcontent

Bigger, stronger, faster

Google the title and watch the documentary by Christopher Bell. Then comment.

Sent from my iPhone

Seen this before

It leads to trouble....

Friday Linkage

Bad News Bears: The Guys Who Bet Against the Bubble and Won - NY Mag
"..a look at the backstories of some of the eccentrics, nerds, and late bloomers who made bank as the economy burned."

The Roots of the Coming Crash - Felix Salmon - Reuters
"In that sense, every move upwards in US stocks or gold or the Aussie dollar or junk-bond indices is another step in exactly the wrong direction: it’s a step towards yet another massive crash. And it’s all being turbo-charged by Fed policy. If there’s a painless way out of this situation, I can’t see it."

Japan, Einhorn and ‘tontine’ fantasies - FT Alphaville
"Shorting the Japanese government has all the hallmarks of an attractive trade. That said, he readily admits that losing money on shorting JGBs is a “long-standing tradition for macro-traders”."

The decade of Steve - Fortune
"The rare pairing of micromanagement with big-picture vision is a Jobs hallmark."


PLUS:
A couple of favourite phrases from the US Commercial property market;
“Extend and pretend”
“a rolling loan gathers no loss”

Um.. I believe you're playing with my money...

via the Reformed Broker

Behaviour as a measure of intelligence

"Kelly the dolphin has built up quite a reputation. All the dolphins at the institute are trained to hold onto any litter that falls into their pools until they see a trainer, when they can trade the litter for fish. In this way, the dolphins help to keep their pools clean.

Kelly has taken this task one step further. When people drop paper into the water she hides it under a rock at the bottom of the pool. The next time a trainer passes, she goes down to the rock and tears off a piece of paper to give to the trainer. After a fish reward, she goes back down, tears off another piece of paper, gets another fish, and so on. This behaviour is interesting because it shows that Kelly has a sense of the future and delays gratification. She has realised that a big piece of paper gets the same reward as a small piece and so delivers only small pieces to keep the extra food coming. She has, in effect, trained the humans.

Her cunning has not stopped there. One day, when a gull flew into her pool, she grabbed it, waited for the trainers and then gave it to them. It was a large bird and so the trainers gave her lots of fish. This seemed to give Kelly a new idea. The next time she was fed, instead of eating the last fish, she took it to the bottom of the pool and hid it under the rock where she had been hiding the paper. When no trainers were present, she brought the fish to the surface and used it to lure the gulls, which she would catch to get even more fish. After mastering this lucrative strategy, she taught her calf, who taught other calves, and so gull-baiting has become a hot game among the dolphins."

Deep thinkers - Guardian via MR

Palinoia

I am still, and will remain, totally fascinated at this train wreck of a woman that has seemingly captured the hearts and minds of many Americans (71% of Republicans! OMG).

"Palin’s paranoid ramblings and self-pitying tantrums on the way out of office not only didn’t injure her chances for national office, they actually appeared to help, as polls taken in the week after her resignation showed that 71% of Republicans were now prepared to vote for her for president in 2012. Just as she had during the campaign last fall, Palin defied rational analysis by making a primal connection with the subterranean resentments of white middle America, which is apparently so pissed off now at the rest of the planet for not coddling its hurt feelings in the multicultural age that it is willing to embrace any politician who validates its insane sense of fucked-overness.

..reminded everyone of what we might have to look forward to in 2012, when the Republican Party may well nominate a woman who would lose at Trivial Pursuit to a Chilean sea bass, who makes George W. Bush look like Sir Isaac Newton. What’s incredible about Palin isn’t that she has a few gaps in her knowledge base, but that she doesn’t know anything about anything at all; she moreover doesn’t seem to feel the need to make sure one idea follows the next when she talks, instead just blurting out random unconnected bits and pieces of deep-seated resentment and persecution complex. Even ideological consistency is an alien concept to her (she wears her religious fundamentalism on her sleeve, but lets her unmarried daughter shack up with a human hard-on in the next room over) and she appears to resent the notion that it shouldn’t be.

All of which makes Sarah Palin the perfect leader for the inevitable pushback against the Obama era, when America in a vague and superficial sort of way decided to celebrate the values of culture, tolerance and knowledge. The other America doesn’t read and doesn’t remember anything it didn’t learn in the last five minutes; it’s angry and unhappy but doesn’t want to think about why, and knows only that it wants someone to pay the price for what it feels.

These people don’t want a president who reads Urdu poetry, they want a president who thinks Urdu is a Swedish dog food and doesn’t care if you know it. Just like them, Sarah Palin is now an unemployed loser who lost her job and her status thanks to forces beyond her comprehension and thinks she knows exactly whom to blame – laugh at her now if you like, but see if her humiliating exit doesn’t turn out to be the hole card that wins her the Republican nomination."

Palinoia - Matt Taibbi

Great writing, great imagery. He alludes to the fact that she is perhaps doing a 'take the money and run' in his piece. I think that if it is anything more than this, then 2012 could be fun or scary or both.

Master Swim

Got back in the water this morning after a two and a half week hiatus. Was a tad slower over the test set (20x50), but didn't drown.

From the WSJ regarding 'speed suits'.

"For many of these adult Masters competitors, speed suits are a fountain of youth. The costume magically helps the wearer shed decades and seconds off the clock. The suits provide a kind of support that elite athletes never have to think about. They suck in nonaerodynamic paunches, flatten aging flab and bolster arthritic knees.

Alex Boutov of La Grange, Ill., tried to persuade his fellow teammates to boycott the suits for a local meet. Unsuccessful, he then slipped one on to swim 1,500 meters. "As soon as I put the suit on, I shaved two minutes," said the 53-year-old. "I couldn't believe the clock."

Many of the suits' fans say that it's ridiculous for the federation to bar them after letting the world see what they can do. Cycling organizations, they point out, approved lighter metals, transforming bicycles and shortening race times. FINA "opened up the can of worms. It's too late," says Rowdy Gaines, an Olympic gold medalist who is a paid endorser for the suit maker Blueseventy LLC. "Accept that the suit is a technological advance in our sport.""

Some Aging Competitors Call High-Tech Swimsuits Dirty Pool - WSJ via Shane

Given my interest in bike tech, I guess the only question is why haven't I got one yet? Then again, I will NOT be the first guy to try it. I'll let someone else go first. Pool closes end of this month, maybe next season.

Danny MacAskill. Again. Mad skillz.

The Xx - Islands - Live in Session

Video of The Xx performing Islands Live In Session in BBC Radio 1's Live Lounge for Zane Lowe.

Get the album, they produced it themselves, and it's fabulous.

Still banging the same drum

"Concepts of value don’t mean a whole lot next to the powerful forces of low interest rates and generous liquidity. At the same time, momentum is also helping to push stock prices higher, to a point where the market is looking silly again.

This will end – he guesses in the first few months of next year – due to two factors. First, economic and financial data will disappoint, revealing the longer-term troubles of the developed economies. This will put pressure on profit margins at a time when labour cuts are no longer a quick fix.

Second, with U.S. stocks looking overvalued, gravitational force will at last kick in."

Grantham: Markets getting silly - The Globe and Mail

Delinquent

This isn't very encouraging given that the "recovery" so far has been a jobless one.

Prohibited or Forbidden?

Mushroom for dinner?

Bledisloe Cup

Dog Point & Quartz Reef Dinner

Click to enlarge, was a very nice evening indeed.
Excellent wine, in particular the Dog Point Section 94 Sauvignon Blanc which was my favourite.

On a lighter note

Genre: Documentary, Horror

"Americans generally like to hear good news. They like to believe that a new President will right old wrongs, that clean energy will replace dirty oil, and that fresh thinking will set the economy straight. American pundits tend to restrain their pessimism and to hope for the best. But is anyone prepared for the worst? Michael Ruppert is a different kind of American. A former Los Angeles police officer turned independent reporter, he predicted the current financial crisis in his self-published newsletter “From the Wilderness” at a time when most Wall Street and Washington analysts were still in denial. Smith has always had a feeling for outsiders in films like “American Movie” and “American Job.” In “Collapse,” Smith stylistically departs from his past films by interviewing Ruppert in a format that recalls the work of Errol Morris and Spalding Gray. Sitting in a room that looks like a bunker, Ruppert recounts his career as a radical thinker and spells out the crises he sees ahead. He draws upon the same news reports and data available to any Internet user, but he applies a unique interpretation. He is especially passionate over the issue of “peak oil,” the concern raised by scientists since the 1970s that the world will eventually run out of fossil fuel. While other experts debate this issue in measured tones, Ruppert doesn’t hold back at sounding an alarm. He portrays a future that resembles apocalyptic science fiction. Listening to his rapid flow of opinions, the viewer is likely to question some of the rhetoric as paranoid or deluded; and to sway back and forth on what to make of the extremism. Smith lets viewers form their own judgments." Apple trailers

Interesting genre, click to view the HORROR

Taking Off

"Growth is good, but absent job creation it is difficult to get too excited."

Here's your recovery - Economist.com

Over-borrowing vs. over-lending

"..has reduced the number from 12 to four over the years but says card companies should share the blame for borrowers' difficulties.

"Sure, there was much over-borrowing but there was over-lending too. Why should the borrowers be penalised?" she says. "Government should protect us from this, not aid the lenders while casting borrowers to the wind. After all, it was the government that presided over and encouraged easy credit. Now it proposes penalising those who took advantage.""

'I could lose my house. It's that serious' - Guardian

She had 12 credit cards, 12. But it isn't her fault. Not her responsibility. She just took advantage. This is the reason my prudent savings account earns nothing at the moment. Thanks love.