public vs. private lending (100% vs 90% liability)

Condition of Small Business and Commercial Real Estate Lending in Local Markets

$1.4Trillion CRE loan crisis

Guardian | America's fragile high street banks are bracing themselves for a fresh financial crunch as a wave of commercial property mortgages go sour on offices, shops and factories, causing losses of up to $300bn (£192bn) hitting nearly 3,000 small- and medium-sized financial institutions.

A congressional oversight panel charged with scrutinising the Obama administration's bailout efforts has warned that $1.4tn of loans covering commercial premises will reach maturity between 2011 and 2014. After a plunge in property prices, nearly half of these loans are underwater, with borrowers owing more than their underlying property is worth.

An analysis by the panel found that 2,988 of America's 8,100 banks have potentially dangerous exposure to commercial property loans. The impact could damage hopes of a US economic recovery and could cause a further squeeze in the availability of credit to consumers and businesses.

"Are we arguing that this is a serious problem that we need to get in front of? The answer is yes," said Elizabeth Warren, chairman of the oversight panel. "It's like throwing a handful of sand into the economic recovery."

She said that if banks see that their commercial property liabilities are mounting, they will hold back on lending elsewhere: "They'll tend to husband their money so that it's not available for small business loans."

Although Wall Street banks have made a swift recovery as shares and bond markets look ahead to a long-term economic recovery, prospects remain cloudy for small-town institutions in the US heartland, hit by ongoing credit card defaults and unemployment among customers. Last year, 140 US banks failed and had to be rescued by federal regulators. Already this year, 16 have been seized by the authorities, a rate that points to a similarly high total in 2010.

Defaults on residential mortgages played a key role in sparking the original global financial crisis as hundreds of thousands of US homes went into foreclosure and Wall Street panicked over the diminishing value of complex mortgage-backed securities. Commercial property loans have taken longer to go sour but are emerging as a slow-burning problem.

the real culprit

Ron Paul at last week's House Financial Oversight Committee Mtg.

chomsky on "peasants with pitchforks" politics

People with real grievances.

Right-wing media delivering a message of paranoia and economic populism comparable to Nazis during the Weimar Republic.

bad brand manager - buh-bye....,

WaPo | According to one person with whom Rogers shared her grievances and who would only speak anonymously to divulge details of a sensitive topic, Rogers complained that the White House's effort not to antagonize the Secret Service led to the White House making an example of her. (The Secret Service director publicly took the blame and the White House declined to make Rogers available to the House committee.) According to the friend, Rogers said she felt the knives in the White House were out for her.

There are conflicting accounts of how long Rogers's departure has been in the works and whose idea it was for her to leave. According to one administration official, who was granted anonymity to talk about private deliberations, the decision to remove Rogers had been made by Christmastime, as a direct result of the disastrous state dinner, which Tareq and Michaele Salahi and another fame-seeking uninvited guest attended.

The official expressed admiration for Rogers's work ethic, but said her eagerness for media exposure and taste for haute couture did not sit well with some administration officials who were mindful of appearances during dire economic times. (Trading in her Mercedes for a made-in-the-U.S.A. Buick, apparently, wasn't enough.) During the holiday season, Rogers assumed a lower profile by personally greeting guests at parties in a demure black suit.

"Once the state dinner deal went down," the administration official said, "people who had other political agendas started micromanaging every part of her business."

According to other administration sources, Valerie Jarrett, the president's trusted special adviser and Rogers's old friend from Chicago, had noticeably put some distance between her and the woman she helped bring to Washington, even though the two lived in the same Georgetown building and worked in the White House.

In a telephone interview Friday evening, Jarrett dismissed that characterization, calling Rogers "one of her oldest" and "very dear" friends. Jarrett said she chatted with Rogers daily, including Friday, and that Rogers first spoke to her about returning to the private sector in "early November," before the state dinner.

city repair project

CityRepair | City Repair is an organized group action that educates and inspires communities and individuals to creatively transform the places where they live. City Repair facilitates artistic and ecologically-oriented placemaking through projects that honor the interconnection of human communities and the natural world. The many projects of City Repair have been accomplished by a mostly volunteer staff and thousands of volunteer citizen activists.

City Repair began in Portland, Oregon with the idea that localization - of culture, of economy, of decision-making - is a necessary foundation of sustainability. By reclaiming urban spaces to create community-oriented places, we plant the seeds for greater neighborhood communication, empower our communities and nurture our local culture.

Our projects include the annual Village Building Convergence, where people gather at neighborhood sites throughout Portland to engage in intersection repair, natural building, and other forms of placemaking. We also host Earth Day, the Village Planting Convergence (also known as City Riparian), and operate a mobile tea house called the T-Horse.

Throughout the year we educate the community with workshops on all forms of sustainability and offer the invaluable placemaking guidebook and one-on-one consulting for those who want to repair their own neighborhood. If you are interested in helping our efforts please visit our volunteer page.

As an almost entirely volunteer-driven nonprofit organization, we rely solely on the support of our community. Please consider donating to help ensure our vision becomes a reality.

most important profession in america to teens

sliceofMIT | If you had to choose, which profession would you say contributes most to society’s well-being? According to the recent Lemelson-MIT Invention Index, an annual survey that gauges kids’ perceptions about invention and innovation, teens rate teachers highest, followed by doctors (see graphic). Less than one-fifth of respondents viewed scientists as having the highest impact on society and only 5 percent chose engineers.

One reason might be because students simply aren’t aware what professionals in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) do and don’t have suitable role models. But the good news is that teens are excited to learn. Indeed, 77 percent were interested in pursuing a STEM career, and 85 percent wish they knew more about STEM in order to create or invent something. The most effective way to engage them is through hands-on activities with enthusiastic mentors and teachers. Passion seems to be essential. More than half of respondents (55 percent) would be more interested in STEM simply by having teachers who enjoy the subjects they teach.

The most inspiring training grounds, teens indicated, were field trips to view STEM in action and places outside the classroom where they can build things and conduct experiments (53 percent).

Learn more about the Invention Index’s findings and how you can mentor students in STEM subjects.

mit on intelligence at davos

MITNews | At the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, MIT professors discussed their efforts to better understand the human mind, the nature of intelligence and the ways in which human and artificial intelligence can be brought together.

Tim Berners-Lee, Tom Malone, Rebecca Saxe, Sebastian Seung and Josh Tenenbaum were among the speakers at the forum’s IdeasLab, in which some of the world’s leading intellectuals and entrepreneurs discussed trends in business, technology and society. MIT President Susan Hockfield introduced the speakers.

digital nation roundtable

Frontline | Get ready for the second Digital Nation roundtable - which will look beyond the original Frontline documentary to some of the many ideas and issues this inquiry has spawned and suggested.

For the month of March, we'll be discussing "the crowd" - particularly the way group activity, creativity, and awareness are both enhanced and exacerbated by our digital networks. Open Source, Crowd-sourcing, The Mob, The fate of the Individual, and the rise of the Folk.

more on the post job world

robert paterson | From replaceable human resources to dynamic social groups

The manner in which we prepare people for work is based on the Taylorist perspective that there is only one way to do a job and that the person doing the work needs to conform to job requirements [F.W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, 1911]. Individual training, the core of corporate learning and development, is based on the premise that jobs are constant and those who fill them are interchangeable.

However, when you look at the modern organization, it is moving to a model of constant change, whether through mergers and acquisitions or as quick-start web-enabled networks. For the human resources department, the question becomes one of preparing people for jobs that don’t even exist. For example, the role of online community manager, a fast-growing field today, barely existed five years ago. Individual training for job preparation requires a stable work environment, a luxury no one has any more.

A collective, social learning approach, on the other hand, takes the perspective that learning and work happen as groups and how the group is connected (the network) is more important than any individual node within it. Here ends Dale's subrealist trifecta for the day.

time for the lies to be exposed and for "it" to die

robert paterson | We all worry about getting or losing a job. When we meet people, they ask us what we do and we give them a job description. When we apply for jobs, we get all fussed about the “skills” we need. When we have a job, we have to be managed and so have bosses. Politicians all talk about getting more jobs. School is all about getting jobs.

But the “Job” as we know it is a 19th century idea. In America very few people as a percentage of the population had job before 1905.

Here is a core idea, especially as we all fuss about skills etc. The whole purpose of a Job is to DESKILL people. What do I mean?

This picture is the key. Before Henry Ford, making a car was an artisanal activity. Really skilled people created each car. With the production line, tools and algorithms were used to enable the owner to use unskilled people. Yes each person could get good at assembly but that is like saying that, because I am good at putting Ikea furniture together, I am a cabinet maker. The men who made the Stanley Steamer could make anything. They had the metal working and engineering skills to be artisans.

This process of DESKILLING has taken place in all parts of our lives. Fist tap Dale Numero Dos.

round midnight: tortillas and the corporate state

joebageant | Near midnight and I am making tortillas on an iron skillet over a gas flame. Some three thousand miles to the north, my wife and dog nestle in sleep in the wake of a 34-inch snowstorm, while the dogs of Ajijic are barking at the witching hour and roosters crow all too early for the dawn. While my good Mexican neighbors along Zaragoza Street sleep.

Yet here I am awake and patting out tortillas, haunted by the empire that I have called home most of my life.

I like to think that, for the most part, I no longer live up there in the U.S., but southward of its ticking social, political and economic bombs. Because the US debt bomb has not yet gone off, Social Security still exists, and the occasional royalty check or book advance still comes in, allowing me to remain here. And so long as America's perverse commodities economy keeps stumbling along and making lifelike noises, so long as the American people accept permanent debt subjugation -- I can drink, think and burn tortillas. Believe me, I take no smugness in this irony.

There is a terrible science fiction-like awe in the autonomous American economic monolith, in the way that it provides for us, feeds on us and keeps us as its both its lavish pets and slaves. The commodity economy long ago enslaved Americans and other "developed" capitalist societies. But Americans in particular. The most profound slavery must be that in which the slaves can conceive of no other possible or better world than their bondage. Inescapable, global, all permeating, the commodities economy rules so thoroughly most cannot imagine any other possible kind of economy. Fist tap Dale Numero Uno.

becky phi becky got robbed!!!

Sprite | After the competition, we conducted a post-competition review and discovered a scoring discrepancy. There is no conclusive interpretation, nor definitive resolution for the discrepancy.

Sprite is committed to upholding the honesty and integrity of the competition. Because the scoring discrepancy cannot be resolved and due to the extremely narrow margin between the first and second place winning sororities, we believe that the appropriate course of action is to name both Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., Tau Chapter and Zeta Tau Alpha, Epsilon Chapter, co-first place winners of the Sprite Step Off. Accordingly, we will increase Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., Tau Chapter's scholarship prize to $100,000, consistent with first prize winnings.

Sprite Step Off was created for the primary purpose of awarding scholarships and supporting talented college students in their quest for higher education.

casino royale

NYTimes | Bets by some of the same banks that helped Greece shroud its mounting debts may actually now be pushing the nation closer to the brink of financial ruin.

Echoing the kind of trades that nearly toppled the American International Group, the increasingly popular insurance against the risk of a Greek default is making it harder for Athens to raise the money it needs to pay its bills, according to traders and money managers.

These contracts, known as credit-default swaps, effectively let banks and hedge funds wager on the financial equivalent of a four-alarm fire: a default by a company or, in the case of Greece, an entire country. If Greece reneges on its debts, traders who own these swaps stand to profit.

“It’s like buying fire insurance on your neighbor’s house — you create an incentive to burn down the house,” said Philip Gisdakis, head of credit strategy at UniCredit in Munich.

As Greece’s financial condition has worsened, undermining the euro, the role of Goldman Sachs and other major banks in masking the true extent of the country’s problems has drawn criticism from European leaders. But even before that issue became apparent, a little-known company backed by Goldman, JP Morgan Chase and about a dozen other banks had created an index that enabled market players to bet on whether Greece and other European nations would go bust.

Last September, the company, the Markit Group of London, introduced the iTraxx SovX Western Europe index, which is based on such swaps and let traders gamble on Greece shortly before the crisis. Such derivatives have assumed an outsize role in Europe’s debt crisis, as traders focus on their daily gyrations.

A result, some traders say, is a vicious circle. As banks and others rush into these swaps, the cost of insuring Greece’s debt rises. Alarmed by that bearish signal, bond investors then shun Greek bonds, making it harder for the country to borrow. That, in turn, adds to the anxiety — and the whole thing starts over again.

testicular fortitude wanes...,

WaPo | The Obama administration is no longer insisting on the creation of a stand-alone consumer protection agency as a central element of the plan to remake regulation of the financial system.

In hopes of quick congressional approval of a reform bill, White House officials are opening the door to compromise with lawmakers concerned about creating a new bureaucracy, according to congressional and some administration sources.

President Obama's economic team is now open to housing the consumer regulator inside another agency, such as the Treasury Department, though they still prefer a stand-alone agency. In either case, they are insisting on a regulator with political autonomy and real teeth so it can effectively enforce rules designed to protect consumers of mortgages, credit cards and other financial products.

The administration may also have to compromise on Obama's recent proposal for a rule to limit risky activities at banks by prohibiting them from engaging in many kinds of speculative investments.

Treasury officials are preparing to send Capitol Hill a toughly worded measure that would bar banks from making certain investments that benefit only the firms' bottom line rather than their customers. But there is little support among either Democratic or Republican lawmakers for this proposal, known as the "Volcker rule," and Senate leaders are now closing ranks around legislation that would leave it to banking regulators, rather than the law, to decide which activities to ban.

From the start of the Obama presidency, administration officials have made far-reaching financial reform one of their highest priorities, along with overhauling the nation's health-care system. Officials have vowed to put in place new rules and regulators to prevent a repeat of the abuses that precipitated the financial crisis.

consumer agency essential in regulatory overhaul

Businessweek | The Consumer Financial Protection Agency sought by President Barack Obama is an essential part of the regulatory overhaul being negotiated in Congress, House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank said.

The standalone agency, opposed by Republicans and banks including JPMorgan Chase & Co., is “very important to us” because existing regulators view consumer protection “as a second thought,” Frank said yesterday in a Bloomberg Television interview.

“The agency that has by far the most power assigned to it to protect consumers is the Federal Reserve, and they don’t do it very well,” said Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat who put the consumer agency in legislation the House approved in December.

Obama’s proposed watchdog to guard against abuses in mortgage and credit-card lending is the biggest sticking point in Senate negotiations over new rules to govern U.S. financial firms. Republicans say the standalone agency would create a new bureaucracy; Democrats say it’s needed to prohibit business practices that contributed to the financial crisis.

Congress is drafting the legislation to strengthen oversight of Wall Street after largely unregulated bets tied to the subprime mortgage market led to the failures of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and Bear Stearns Cos. and $182.3 billion in U.S. bailouts for American International Group Inc.

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, will unveil his version of the bill next week, his spokeswoman Kirstin Brost said yesterday in an e-mail. His committee will begin considering amendments to the proposal in the first week of March, she said.

Alabama Senator Richard Shelby, the Banking Committee’s top Republican, is developing a competing bill that will likely put consumer protection authority in a new bank regulator instead of the standalone agency sought by Dodd and Obama, two Shelby aides said on Feb. 17. Shelby’s plan would shield taxpayers from the costs of unwinding failed systemically important financial firms, said the aides, who requested anonymity because the talks are private.

cigarettes may cause infection

Wired | The tobacco in cigarettes hosts a bacterial bonanza — literally hundreds of different germs, including those responsible for many human illnesses, a new study finds.

“Nearly every paper that you pick up discussing the health effects of cigarettes starts out with something to the effect that smokers and people exposed to secondhand smoke experience high rates of respiratory infections,” notes Amy Sapkota of the University of Maryland, College Park. The presumption has been that smoking renders people vulnerable to disease by impairing lung function or immunity. And it may well do both.

“But nobody talks about cigarettes as a source of those infections,” she says. Her new data now suggest that’s distinctly possible.

If these germs are alive, something she has not yet confirmed, just handling cigarettes or putting an unlit one to the mouth could be enough to cause an infection.

The idea that tobacco might contain viable germs isn’t just idle conjecture. Several research teams have isolated bacteria from tobacco that they could grow out in petri dishes. Those earlier investigations tended to hunt for — and, when found, attempted to grow — only one or two species of interest, Sapkota says.

What’s novel in her study: She and her colleagues probed for genetic material from any and every bacterium in a cigarette’s tobacco. Under sterile conditions, the researchers opened up cigarettes and then performed a series of tests on the leafy bits. For instance, they isolated all of the ribosomal material and then homed in on its long, species-specific stretches known as 16S regions. These genetic segments were then compared to 16S patches characteristic of known bacterial species.

Sapkota’s team had 16S probes for close to 800 different bacteria and found matches to many hundreds in the four brands of cigarettes screened: Marlboro Red, Camel, Kool Filter Kings and Lucky Strike Original Red. These cigarettes are “among the most commonly smoked brands in Westernized countries and represent three major tobacco companies,” Sapkota notes. All were purchased in Lyon, France, where she was completing her postdoctoral studies.

Among the large number of germs whose DNA laced these cigarettes were: Campylobacter, which can cause food poisoning and Guillain-Barre Syndrome; Clostridium, which causes food poisoning and pneumonias; Corynebacterium, also associated with pneumonias and other diseases; E. coli; Klebsiella, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Stenotrophomonas maltophilia, all of which are associated not only with pneumonia but also with urinary tract infections; and a number of Staphylococcus species that underlie the most common and serious hospital-associated infections.

Sapkota’s team lists many of these — including the most prevalent bacteria in the tobacco they studied — in a paper published early, online in Environmental Health Perspectives. Fist tap Dale.

'god gap' impedes U.S. foreign policy

WaPo | American foreign policy is handicapped by a narrow, ill-informed and "uncompromising Western secularism" that feeds religious extremism, threatens traditional cultures and fails to encourage religious groups that promote peace and human rights, according to a two-year study by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

The council's 32-member task force, which included former government officials and scholars representing all major faiths, delivered its report to the White House on Tuesday. The report warns of a serious "capabilities gap" and recommends that President Obama make religion "an integral part of our foreign policy."

Thomas Wright, the council's executive director of studies, said task force members met Tuesday with Joshua DuBois, head of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, and State Department officials. "They were very receptive, and they said that there is a lot of overlap between the task force's report and the work they have been doing on this same issue," Wright said.

DuBois declined to comment on the report but wrote on his White House blog Tuesday: "The Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnership and the National Security Staff are working with agencies across government to analyze the ways the U.S. government engages key non-governmental actors, including religious institutions, around the globe."

The Chicago Council isn't as influential as the Council on Foreign Relations or some other Washington-based think tanks, but it does have a long-standing relationship with the president. Obama spoke to the council once as a state senator and twice as a U.S. senator, including his first major foreign policy speech as a presidential candidate in April 2007. Michelle Obama is on the council's board.

American foreign policy's "God gap" has been noted in recent years by others, including former secretary of state Madeleine K. Albright.

"It's a hot topic," said Chris Seiple, president of the Institute for Global Engagement in Arlington County and a Council on Foreign Relations member. "It's the elephant in the room. You're taught not to talk about religion and politics, but the bummer is that it's at the nexus of national security. The truth is the academy has been run by secular fundamentalists for a long time, people who believe religion is not a legitimate component of realpolitik."

wall st. banking on republicans...,

WaPo | Commercial banks and high-flying investment firms have shifted their political contributions toward Republicans in recent months amid harsh rhetoric from Democrats about fat bank profits, generous bonuses and stingy lending policies on Wall Street.

The wealthy securities and investment industry, for example, went from giving 2 to 1 to Democrats at the start of 2009 to providing almost half of its donations to Republicans by the end of the year, according to new data compiled for The Washington Post by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Commercial banks and their employees also returned to their traditional tilt in favor of the GOP after a brief dalliance with Democrats, giving nearly twice as much to Republicans during the last three months of 2009, the data show. At the same time, total political donations by the major banks and investment houses alike dropped in the waning months of that year.

The nascent shift came even before the White House announced proposals for a new tax on banks and a curb on some of their riskiest trading activities.

The proposals, offered last month, particularly alarmed Wall Street and have triggered renewed industry efforts to work with Democrats as well as Republicans on regulatory reform legislation that the bankers can live with, according to industry and government officials. Wall Street executives would prefer to engage with Democratic leaders now rather than face prolonged uncertainty about the rules to govern the industry, the sources said.

The new campaign contributions data underscore the political quandary facing Democrats, who want Wall Street donations to help fend off a GOP resurgence in congressional elections this fall but hope to distance themselves from an industry vilified by the public as greedy and ungrateful. President Obama has sought to strike a balance, calling outsize Wall Street bonuses "shameful" and "obscene" while also assuring business executives that he does not "begrudge people success or wealth."

god's in charge

just after the 2:00 minute mark....,