July 2010

Wikileaks and Afghanistan The Afghanistan Protocol: Explosive Leaks Provide Image of War from Those Fighting It - SPIEGEL ONLINE Afghanistan war logs: Massive leak of secret files exposes truth of occupation | World news | The…

From the BBH Currency Strategy Team Highlights US dollar is mostly softer so far today vs. the majors, as sentiment remains overall good after the stress test results were released (see below).  Price action since the results came…

After a long and rather tense wait, the initial response to the publication of the European bank stress tests was always going to be something of an anti-climax. Indeed the results should hardly have comes as a surprise to anyone It is…

More On Race and Politics -  My take: when the chips are down, people look for someone or something to blame.  For a good example of how xenophobia increases during economic hardship, see my post Mexican Repatriation: The Great…

PBS has a great video and article on how dispersants are being used in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig blow-out. The video is below. The related article linked at the bottom has another video on using methane to measure the…

PBS' Paul Solman takes another look at Spain's economic woes, which include a 20 percent unemployment rate. In the Web extra above, he talks to British economist Edward Hugh, a long-time resident of Barcelona, about Span's underground…

When I run these links at Yves Q. Smith's site Naked Capitalism I am a bit the chatty Cathy. Here I run them sans commentary. For those of you who read both, the difference is simple: when in Rome. For those of you who don't, check out NC,…

Barry Ritholtz offers this graph (courtesy of The Chart Store). Barry offers no further comment with the graph, but I started to wonder if the "bubble" in capitalization could be explained by the increase in business done…

A personal note of reflection from Mike Farrell, CEO of Annaly Capital Management. It had been a long time between vacations. Credit crunch, lending implosion, sovereign credits going into default, currency devaluations, government…

I heard this about Bell, California on the car radio this morning. The sums involved are absolutely astronomical for a town of 37,000.  This may be an extreme case but it far from isolated. Hundreds of residents of one of the…