Mark Byron

QE3 Sets Sail .. But to Where?

Lots of folks on the right (Paul Ryan is the newest member of the scrum) have gotten on the case of the Fed as it tries to game the yield curve with a third bout of buying long-term debt; mortgages are the target in this tranche of "quantitative easing." Normally, the Fed buys short term-stuff, mostly Treasury bills, when it wants to add liquidity to the system, but with short-term rates near zero, they've shifted gears to buying long-term debt, trying to drop long-term rates in order to stimulate capital spending.

The lower rates would lower the cost of borrowing for both homeowners and businesses, which (in theory) should prompt them to buy more houses or do projects that didn't make financial sense with higher costs of capital.

The problem seems to be that the cost of capital might not be much of an issue if

(1) you're too lame of a credit risk to be lent to

Cheap mortgages are nice, if you can get them. Banks have been skittish about lending money in a rough economy, especially with a risk-adverse regulatory system giving banks the white-glove treatment. Low interest rates mean a small margin of error for banks, which contributes to their gun-shyness.

or , (2) those projects you want us to do are iffy given the economy and the lay of the land in Washington.

Businesses have been playing things close to the vest, partly due to the lack of available capital and partly due to the added regulation and possible tax increases that a second Obama term would bring. Even a Romney win might not help much, as budget cuts might slow the economy down and what would be left of the Affordable Care Act might still be not all that affordable for businesses.

At Least They Aren't Miles Apart

The headline here on the lack of progress in Chicago's teacher strike caught my eye-"Teachers strike enters its 3rd day with two sides ‘kilometers apart’"

The head of the Chicago Teachers Union suggested the two sides remained “kilometers apart” as the strike entered into its third day Wednesday.

Not too many Americans think in kilometers; scientists often do, since metric units are the norm in the sciences, but it's an odd phrasing as a PR statement. You either look like an egghead or a European (my appologies to my Canadian metric-using readers) or both. That's not going to help win over blue-collar parents that you'll need to get any extra money out of the residents of the Windy City.

It's closer than "miles apart" by a factor of 0.62, but still not that helpful a statement, in more ways than one.

The Atlantic Catholic Conference?

I'm not sure if I get the logic of Notre Dame leaving the Big East for the ACC, unless it is driven by sports other than football and basketball. The Big East has been a basketball conference at its core, with the football part an ad-hoc venture that seemed secondary to the urban East Coast Catholic schools at the core of the conference. With the exception of Boston College, those Jesuit jump-shooters are still around, with folks like Marquette and DePaul added in later years.

The latest turmoil might have tipped the balance; with a lot of new southern schools like Houston and Central Florida filling the voids left by defections, the Big East will lose some cache and some ease of travel. Getting into to the ACC, where the basketball is on a par with the Big East and the other sports are better seems to be a help to the prestige of the non-revenue sports.

The funky addition to this is Notre Dame becoming essentially a half-member of the ACC in football, pledging to play 5 games against ACC foes. They're at 4 at present, with Pittsburgh and BC being regulars on the sked in the last decade already. As conferences get bigger and nine-game in-conference schedules becoming more common, it will be harder for Notre Dame to get good games in October and November as conference season kicks in.

This also gives the Irish an easy transition into the ACC if they opt to become a full member-going from 5 games to 8 or 9 would be a more-manageable shift.

Arab Spring Too Tightly Wound

I had the facts wrong on yesterday's post. It was actually a Israeli-American filmmaker who made the film that got folks hot and bothered in Egypt; a Coptic-American merely blogged on it, which them got notice from anti-Coptic Egyptian Muslims looking to have something to rouse the rabble with.

Rouse the rabble it did; while the Egyptian protests were largely peaceful, Libyan's rabble wasn't quite as civilized, killing the US ambassador and three others. Amb. Chris Stevens looks like a young Jack Ryan in CNN's picture, an earnest diplomat looking to help the Libyan people ditch Gaddafi. To the rabble of the Libyan street, that and $2 will buy a latte in Hell.

To borrow from SNL-it's always something. There seems to be no shortage of outrage-able moments in the west to make Muslims mad at. All it takes is one rabble-rousing cleric to put the sparking news item (or non-news item in this case) into his Friday sermon and point the crowd to the embassy of the country in the news; this one happened on a Tuesday, so the meme didn't quite work to script.

Here's a change worth noting. When Iranian rabble seized the US embassy back in 1979, they didn't kill anyone. What a difference a third of a century makes.

The Arab democrats might be setting themselves up for glorious isolation if they want to divorce themselves from the world by letting these events happen and make them a no-go zone for westerners. Killing off ambassadors is something the dictators of the area haven't done to date, but they at least wanted to interact with the rest of the world.

Tuesday Musings

Stadium of Dreams? If you build it, the NBA will come... back to Seattle. Of course, they could force the issue; financier Chris Hansen has had his eye on the Sacramento Kings in the past, and the Cereal State (home to flakes, fruits and nuts) capital is struggling to get a new arena built. However, it seems foolhardy to build a $300M stadium without a firm commitment to having a tenant that can take advantage of it.

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9/11 +11. Somehow, I have a feeling things are about to get worse before they get better. Somalia is a free zone for radicals and northern Mali has become jihadist territory. Pakistan continues to be dysfunctional and unfriendly to civilization. The hangover from the Arab Spring winds out as new democracies in Libya and Egypt work out the kinks and a civil war in Syria could easily destabilize Lebanon and possibly through Turkey for a loop.

al Qaeda is on the run, but it has lots of places to run to.

The US embassy in Cairo got rushed in a sacrilege protest. Thankfully, no serious damage was done; seems that a US-based ex-pat Copt had made an anti-Islam video that made the rounds and the crowd blamed the US for anything bad done by our residents.

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I'm still wondering what Ryan Rayburn is blackmailing the Tigers with; batting second in a pennant race with a .171 batting average? Something doesn't quite make sense.

 

 

Sequals to Mere Christianity

Beer Christianity- Mark Driscoll explains why Jesus would be an MMA star if He came back today; with a forward by Todd Bentley.

Cheer Christianity- Joel Osteen distills the Gospel into chantable sound bites that your school’s cheerleading squad can use during games.

Deer Christianity: Wild at Hart- John Eldridge shows why hunting blinds are the idea place to witness to your buddies.

Fear Christianity- A Baptist symposium relating Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God to the 21st Century

Gear Christianity- Joe Gibbs talks about witnessing to NASCAR drivers and Redskins alike.

Jeer Christianity-Fred Phelps dwells on the Gospel and the one thing Jesus never discussed in them.

Leer Christianity- Joyce Meyer and Paula White tell women how to turn sex appeal into a tool for witnessing.

Near Christianity- Mitt Romney (Mormonism), Ellen DeGeneres (Christian Science) and Lou Whitaker (Jehovah’s Witnesses) talk about life in some of the novel sects that have developed in the US.

Peer Christianity- Bill Hybels describes the keys to discipleship via home groups.

Queer Christianity- Andrew Sullivan describes why Pope Benedict has it all wrong.

Sear Christianity- Alton Brown shows how to put the Gospel on the plate, including Adam’s short ribs and hot cross hamburger buns.

Tear Christianity- Lolo Jones shows how to witness by breaking down during interviews

We’re Christianity- Pope Benedict describes why the Catholic Church is still the only The Church left.

Bag Ram? The Teachers Might Want to Try that.

Here's one bullet point in Afghanizing things (a play on Vietnamization during the Nixon years); we've handed most of Bagram prison over to the Afghan government. The fine print has us keeping at least one wing, with some of the more problematic Taliban, under US control. The US is a bit leery of seeing the locals setting up a catch-and-release system, so they're slow in handing things over; it's a cheap shot, but they might be afraid that they'll treat the Taliban like an illegal immigrant stateside and want to get him out of the system ASAP.

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Maybe I play too much Scrabble online (Facebook has a nice version), but I broke down Bagram into Bag Ram... as in Hizzonor Emanuel, (which means "Obama with us" in Chicagoese). The teachers are on strike despite having some of the best paychecks in the business.

Teachers also want to block changes to their health benefits and win concessions on classroom conditions.

Pay is also an issue. However, the union said the two sides are close to a pay agreement after school officials offered to increase salaries 16% over four years on average for most teachers. The average teacher salary in Chicago was $74,839 for the 2011-2012 school year, according to the district.

Shared sacrifice in tough economic times? Not here. Especially not when going up against them insures a very tough primary challenge in your next election.

The teachers conveniently waited until after the Democratic convention, so as to avoid having the issue play out where all the pundits could grill pols about it, but before the election, so that they can hold Democrats hostage, blaming the penny-pinching bosses for Johnny and Susie being home alone during the strike.

Would Hizzoner have the [insert PG chutzpah synonym] to fire the teachers and get replacements? Not too many Democrats would; Ed Koch might have tried that and Jerry Brown might, but Obama With Us is seemingly too much an operator to go that route.

Monday Musings

I'm still here, just fighting off a cold and taking a different tack on my devotions and writing; more when I can elaborate more coherently.

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An old blog buddy noted that "Life is too short to watch political conventions." I concur. I watched nothing of the Democratic convention live and saw a snippet of Chris Christie live for the GOP side. I did go off on YouTube and tracked down the Clint Eastwood night at the Tampa Improv.

I don't care for party propaganda, which either side it's coming from. It's either mostly true but spun rhetoric from your side and questionable and spun rhetoric from the other. There's more spin than a Mark Roth bowling clinic.

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I'm usually on the other side of intra-GOP fights with David Frum, who has become the MSM-ready voice of the establishment in the last few years. However, he's dead on over Sandra Fluke. She makes the right go ballistic, often in a prurient manner which is rather unbecoming. No, I don't agree with her, but that doesn't mean I have a right to demean her over it.

Rule one from the Cornelius Brothers-treat her like a lady. Rule two-if she isn't all that lady-like, refer to rule one. Uncouthness from the left or the more libertine sections of the right doesn't mean we return fire in kind.

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Interesting story from last week from Honduras, where they're setting up three privately run cities.

The "model cities" will have their own judiciary, laws, governments and police forces. They also will be empowered to sign international agreements on trade and investment and set their own immigration policy.

Congress president Juan Hernandez said the investment group MGK will invest $15 million to begin building basic infrastructure for the first model city near Puerto Castilla on the Caribbean coast. That first city would create 5,000 jobs over the next six months and up to 200,000 jobs in the future, Hernandez said. South Korea has given Honduras $4 million to conduct a feasibility study, he said.

That reminds me quite a bit of the coastal cities of China that European countires carved "concessions" out of; Hong Kong and Macao are the two that survived into late 20th century, but a number of other cities had foreign sections that served as de-facto colonies.

It sets up the prospect of well-off First World enclaves surrounded by developing-world poverty providing foodstuffs, raw materials and cheap labor; big Latin American cities often have that dynamic going to begin with, but they're at least part of the came countries. These free cities would take advantage of Honduran resources but won't be part of Honduras per se; libertarians will rejoice, but folks with at least a bit of a communitarian streak will be uneasy.

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Speaking of libertarians, Rand Paul is playing an interesting game as of late. He was talking up small-l libertarians as a GOP answer on the coasts and played the anti-neocon card this morning-

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul said Monday that Republicans can win in New England and on the West Coast if they’re willing to drop a “we need to bomb everybody tomorrow” foreign policy.

While the first observation might well be valid (especially in CA's open primary system where a Paulist libertarian could create a left-right fusion that could win some college-towns), I'm not sure if his latest salvo is helpful to the party as a whole. Few folks are in favor of bombing Honduras or Belgium; the next place on the to-bomb list is Iran, and that will be a live issue going into the fall.

One can make a decent case that Soviet-style containment might be a better approach to Iran than a Israeli-style bombing run at key facilities, but Paul merely gave the liberals bulletin-board material on that one.