UN Recommends New Global Currency

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In the news, on September 7, Bloomberg reports that the UN wants a new global currency, ostensibly to protect emerging markets:

“UN countries should agree on the creation of a global reserve bank to issue the currency and to monitor the national exchange rates of its members, the Geneva-based UN Conference on Trade and Development said today in a report.

China, India, Brazil and Russia this year called for a replacement to the dollar as the main reserve currency after the financial crisis sparked by the collapse of the U.S. mortgage market led to the worst global recession since World War II. China, the world’s largest holder of dollar reserves, said a supranational currency such as the International Monetary Fund’s special drawing rights, or SDRs, may add stability. “

My Comment
(coming up)

Jim Rogers On Taking Care of Yourself

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Jim Rogers (LOL) via Lew Rockwell:

*Conduct your own research and trust your own judgment.
*Focus on what you yourself love.
*Be persistent.
*Broaden your horizons and see as much of the world as you can.
*The most important thing you can learn is how to think and question everything you hear.
*Study and learn from history.
*Master more than one language – and make sure one of them is Mandarin.
*Don’t panic.
*Take care of yourself and don’t neglect the sunscreen.
*Remember that boys need girls more than girls need boys.”

— Jim Rogers’ A Gift to My Children

My Comment

Good advice all of it, and on the money, except for that last bit. Mr. Rogers makes a chivalrous..and politically correct… genuflection, but the truth is, women need men as much as men need women, only in different ways.

But, of course, a certain sort of feminist is only too happy to have political correctness coincide with chivalry when it suits her.

Gold Below $1000, While Dollar Slides

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In the news, gold failed to find a foot-hold above $1000, despite a weakening dollar. A better-than-expected jobs report probably had something to do with that.

From Market Watch via Goldseek:

“Gold futures fell Thursday for a second session, continuing to pull back from the $1,000-an-ounce level as a slightly better than expected U.S. weekly jobless data reduced the metal’s safe-haven appeal.

The number of people filing for initial unemployment benefits fell to a seasonally adjusted 550,000 last week. Economists surveyed by MarketWatch expected claims to stand at 558,000.”

California Assemblyman Duvall’s Hot Mic Loses Him His Job (Updated)

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Update:

Following up on whether there’ll be a focus on lobbyist-lawmaker corruption and what favors (if any) were exchanged between Duvall and the lobbyists he’s purported to have sex with, it seems that, fortunately, progressive groups are indeed trying to force a broader investigation of the subject.

Meanwhile, one of the two married lobbyists who are allegedly the subject of Duvall’s graphic boasts, Heidi De John Barsuglia, denies the affair (which means little at this point), and Sempra Energy, the giant utility company that employs her, has issued the usual public statement about how seriously it takes such charges. TPMMuckraker has the go-to round-up of the situation, no seamy detail left unmentioned.

Duvall voted several times against renewable energy measures (that Sempra also opposes), but since that’s a broadly-supported GOP position, it’s unclear that there was a quid-pro-quo in any of it.

My Comment:

I don’t cover sex scandals here unless they raise some sort of ideological point or tie in to the issue of blackmail and media/political control. But coming so soon after the salacious Vanity Fair piece on Palin, I wanted to post this one, which has at its center a California assemblyman and strong “family values” defender ‘outed’ by a mic he didn’t realize was on.

I’d really like to see if the media will treat a male conservative law-maker caught bragging publicly about his adulterous affairs with two lobbyists as viciously as they treated a female conservative governor who hasn’t been caught doing anything at all (she’s been accused not very successfully of some less than major ethical infractions).

Duvall will get a lot of flak for being

a. a hypocrite (which, as I’ve noted before, he may not necessarily be)
b. an idiot (which he clearly is)
c. crude/odious (check)
d. deceitful (check)

But I doubt if anyone will post photoshopped pictures that defame him, the way Sarah Palin was defamed.

Why won’t they? Something to do with the strange misogyny that conservative women with children and pro-life views elicit from liberal women. I’ve noticed it before….

The female of the species is [sometimes] more vicious than the male…especially to other females.

Let’s see how the media treats the actual news in this story – Duvall’s unprofessional relationship with lobbyists and what political favors he might have done them – or whether it gets side-tracked by the even-for-politics-exceptionally-racy details and the usual diatribes about hypocrisy.

How Green Are Our Shoots!

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I’m working on a new piece on the propaganda effort on the economy coming out of Team Obama. Here’s a part:

“How green are our shoots!
Thus say both Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.
And the public believes them. How come?

It all began in March. In the first televised interview by any sitting Fed chairman in 20 years (CBS 60 Minutes), Bernanke used the term, “green shoots” for the first time. He pointed out that the Dow Jones index had recovered from 12 year lows in 2008 and the banking system had stabilized. No more big banks would fail, he predicted (AFP, March 15, 2009).

Two months later, His Timness echoed Big Ben. Geithner cited reduced spreads on corporate and muni bonds, the reduction in costs in credit protection at the big banks, and smaller risk premiums in the interbank market. He too said the economy was recovering. (Tim Geithner, Statement before the Senate Banking Committee, May 20, 2009)

In June, World Bank President Robert Zoellick joined the ‘shooters.’ Zoellick is a former US trade representative notorious for forcing US government subsidies and trade policies inimical to small farmers onto emerging markets. Zoellick noted “signs of global recovery,” but cautioned that they might be killed off if protectionism were adopted (Reuters, June 8, 2009)

Translation: foreigners had better not object to US government-managed trade policies…or the global recovery will fold.

Put out….or look out.

Zoellick added his own revealing metaphor to the shooter lexicon: “Right now there is a low-grade fever; it isn’t full influenza, but we need to keep a close watch…”.[my emphasis]

[Oddly, Zoellick’s own employees at the World Bank contradicted their boss’s assessment in a report only a couple of weeks later (See “World Bank Global Economic Outlook” below]

In May billionaire hedge-fund manager George Soros was seeing green. And in July , chief wonk of the Obama economic team Lawrence Summers detected greenery in remarks to the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Green shoots were now being sighted by everyone:

*In July the International Monetary Fund published its World Economic Outlook update
The Fund revised expected global growth in 2010 upward to 2.5%. The main source of the improvement, it claimed, was a brightening outlook for Asia.

*Simon Johnson, IMF economist–turned-Peterson-Institute-spokesman-turned green-shooting-star even went on PBS to announce, “we are turning some sort of corner.” (August 20, 2009)

*Surveys of economists and business leaders in the summer showed that, in contrast to only a few months earlier, slightly more than half thought that the economy had bottomed.”

There’s a lot more I’m working on. Hope to have it on Lew Rockwell tomorrow, although I’d like to see it on some left-anarchist sites too. What began as a bit of trivia hunting (I was trying to figure out when the “green shoots” meme started) ended up throwing some interesting light on politics, the media, and the economy….

World Bank Global Outlook: No Green Shoots

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This harsh reality is reflected in the World Bank Global Outlook Report of June 22, 2009.
It notes the following for 2009:

*Global growth is set to fall by 2.9%
*World trade is likely to shrink by nearly 10%
*Industrial production in rich countries will drop by 15% from August 2008
*Developed economies will contract by 4.5% in 2009 and grow only in 2010 and 2011
*The US economy will decline by 3%
*Private capital flows to developing countries are likely to be halved, from $US 707 billion (2008) to $US 363 billion (2009)
*Industrial production in developing countries, excluding China, is set to fall by 10%.
*GDP growth in developing countries will fall from 5.9% (2008) to 1.2%.

Samuel Johnson on Hypocrisy

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Samuel Johnson writing about the misuse of the charge of “hypocrisy”:

“Nothing is more unjust, however common, than to charge with hypocrisy him that expresses zeal for those virtues which he neglects to practice; since he may be sincerely convinced of the advantages of conquering his passions, without having yet obtained the victory, as a man may be confident of the advantages of a voyage, or a journey, without having courage or industry to undertake it, and may honestly recommend to others, those attempts which he neglects himself.”