U.S. Credit Crisis Adds to Gloom in Arctic Norway

profette_IHB

profette_IHB

New member
<p>"NARVIK, Norway, Nov. 30 — At this time of year, the sun does not rise at all this far north of the Arctic Circle. But Karen Margrethe Kuvaas says she has not been able to sleep well for days.</p>

<p>What is keeping her awake are the far-reaching ripple effects of the troubled housing market in sunny Florida, California and other parts of the United States.</p>

<p>Ms. Kuvaas is the mayor of Narvik, a remote seaport where the season’s perpetual gloom deepened even further in recent days after news that the town — along with three other Norwegian municipalities — had lost about $64 million, and potentially much more, in complex securities investments that went sour." <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/world/europe/02norway.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin">Linky</a></p>

<p><img height="263" alt="" width="191" border="0" src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/12/01/world/1202-for-WEB-NORWAYmap.jpg" /></p>
 
<p>I feel not one whit of sorrow for the idiots who bought Countrywide's stock from Moz. They are in the game and nobody put a gun to their heads.</p>

<p>But these Norwegians seem to me to be in the "poor soul" class. They are in the back end of beyond, and their kindergarten teachers aren't going to be paid, and the extra interest they were to get wasn't so good that it was too good to be true. I feel sorry for them.</p>

<p>I try to be nice to poor souls, and avoid letting them be the butt of my sarcasm (at least when in hearing range), and in those isolated villages, it is hard to see how they can replace the money.</p>
 
I mentioned this in the headlines thread, but I think we need to remember <a href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B00E3DE1639F931A15754C0A96E958260">our "exotic" securities disaster</a>. OC even <a href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CE2DB143DF930A25752C0A963958260">sued Merrill Lynch</a>. They did get a nice <a href="http://www.oc.ca.gov/press/1998/1998_June02.htm">little settlement</a> though. And, the irony is OC is <a href="http://www.ocregister.com/ocregister/homepage/abox/article_1381352.php">doing business with Merrill again</a>.
 
<p>Hey graph,</p>

<p>Sorry for the double post. Thanks for not flaming me.</p>

<p><a href="http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.dkimages.com/discover/previews/812/20209766.JPG&imgrefurl=http://www.dkimages.com/discover/Home/Plants/Ornamental-Groups/Trees/Broadleaves/Oleaceae/Olea/Olea-europaea/Olea-europaea-09.html&h=768&w=517&sz=89&hl=en&start=11&um=1&tbnid=77qnq8hQpVYkBM:&tbnh=142&tbnw=96&prev="><img style="BORDER-RIGHT: 1px solid; BORDER-TOP: 1px solid; BORDER-LEFT: 1px solid; BORDER-BOTTOM: 1px solid" height="142" width="96" alt="" src="http://tbn0.google.com/images?q=tbn:77qnq8hQpVYkBM:http://www.dkimages.com/discover/previews/812/20209766.JPG" /></a></p>
 
<p>"Ms. Kuvaas, for one, said she did not read the prospectus before voting to authorize it — a decision that was made when she was in the government but not yet mayor. She said the town trusted Terra Securities, with which it had worked since the late 1990s."</p>

<p>Seems just like when Citron was making money, nobody asked any questions, they just went along with it and then cried foul.</p>
 
<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6Lq771TVm4">The Norwegian Blue</a>...beautiful plummage! </p>

<p>Who's pining for the fjord now...</p>
 
two comments that i have to get off my chest:





1- i find it amusing that politics is a zero-training profession, meaning if you want to become a politician, sure, just brush up on your people skills and declare yourself eligible for the local election. if i want to become an electrician, no one would hire me if i didn't go get some training first. same with being a teacher, a fireman, a programmer, etc. but becoming a pol? nah, the system tells us to look past that, and hand over our legislative and financial decision making to some bozo...





2- i saw a story on bloomberg that florida cities are having trouble paying their municipal workers for a similar reason. so now the cities are all pissed off, and the superfund management is hiring a consultant to help them figure out how much their holdings are really worth...but wait, here's a quote from the story, "... State Board Administration officials were to select an independent investment adviser today to work over the weekend analyzing the pool's situation, said Tara Klimek, a spokeswoman


for Sink. <strong>Officials worked to find an investment bank without a conflict of interest</strong>, Klimek said..." so what they're saying is, we just got screwed by the sell side, let me go hire the sell side again to help me figure out how much shit i'm standing in. sigh...if they really want some help, go hire someone from the buy side whose job is not to be taken advantage by the sell side, stupid!
 
<p>almon,</p>

<p>As to point one: the system also requires no education for selecting to which bozos we hand our decision-making. When a majority of people choose a candidate based on party affiliation, the end result is bozos electing other bozos. But more directly to your point, who educates the politicians? How are you going to protect against one idealogy becoming the one predominantly taught? I can only imagine the uproar that would result, considering the current perception that conservatives already hold about liberals and higher education, but imagine political schools that only hire neo-con teachers and promote their kind of political outlook as the best way to run a government? Replace neo-conservatism with Marxism, Libertarianism, Facism, etc., and the problem remains the same.</p>

<p>For my money, the solution isn't more education for politicians, it's less government. Right now, the government is running around like a chicken with it's head cut off trying to find a solution to a problem that it caused in the first place in order to prevent a total loss for some companies. But those companies took this risk and played this game because they expect the government to bail them out if they get screwed and they expect it because the government always has bailed them out... until the problem exceeds any possibilty of solution. If government was smaller and less enabling in nature, they would have cut their losses in August and we'd have this mess behind us already. Sure, the mortgages would still be a problem, but the real issue is the credit crunch caused by a need for capital and a lack of trust between banks. Rather than force these companies to mark everything down to market price, our government is looking for a way to buy enough time that the companies can find someone else to eat the losses, looking for a scapegoat, and trying to find a way to turn the entire debacle to their personal political advantage.</p>

<p> </p>
 
<p>Maybe we should require at least an IQ test for pols?</p>

<p>But how many smart people are you going to find in a town of 18,000, all of whom have chosen to live back of beyond, with no one holding a gun to their heads or anything?</p>

<p>I understand that there are cool machines coming on the mkt to detect lying. Maybe we could eliminate people with the propensity to lie? Now, if we could detect and p0rohibit people with the propensity to pander, a golden age would insue.</p>

<p>Absent any such Platonian revolution, smaller govt would be good. However, when in history has this happened? Never, on any scale worth mentioning. Wars sometimes kill off aristocratic smotherers of invention, and sometimes toxic religions get vanquished. But the govt always gets bigger, unitl you have a fall of empire, usually acompanied by a big population drop. Not something anybody wants.</p>

<p>Precisely how would we get the govt size to drop?</p>

<p>Remember the average IQ is 100.</p>
 
<p>Remember Enron in the late 1990's?</p>

<p>I can remember watching CNBC and my favorite Money Honey Maria Bartiromo squeel with glee as Enron opened up a market for "fiber optic capacity" or whatever nonsense they were shilling before. All I could think is "how do these guys consistantly open up these new markets that nobody knew existed before?" Was everyone in that industry just dolts that didn't realize the oppourtunity to monitize this? I remember spending three days looking at all the data I could find on Enron and leaving totally confused as to what thier business was and how they did it.</p>

<p>We all know how this ended.</p>

<p>The CDO deal, IMO, is exactly the same. Nobody had defaulted on these RE backed bonds in a dozen or so years, so that means they can NEVER fail right? BTW, who's doing the underwriting?</p>

<p>I remember in 2004 I had customers who had $9/hr jobs buying properties in the $600K range. At the time I remember telling my brother I don't know who's buying these loans but they are going to get killed. Everyone told me I was nuts. RE always goes up. I reminded them I used to do workouts in the early 1990's. RE didn't always go up.</p>

<p>And now we know how this one ends.</p>
 
<p>Well, at least the people in the Southern part of Norway are no longer gloomy...</p>

<p>Black Humor Pervades Norway as Subprime Losses Extend to Arctic </p>

<p><a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=a9qUgYWKwSWI&refer=home">http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=a9qUgYWKwSWI&refer=home</a></p>

<p>Comedian Knut Naerum said Terra's promotional materials were like ``Jaws'' without a shark. </p>

<p>``That's called creative editing,'' Naerum said on ``News on News,'' where comics comment on current events. ``Take the shark out and all you'd have is a rather short and nice film about swimming and fishing.'' </p>

<p>Last weekend, more than 10,000 people took a multiple choice quiz on NRK's Web site to determine whether they were a ``Naive Northerner or a Slippery Salesman?'' </p>

<p>``Where do you keep your money?'' was one question, with the possible answers being ``Certainly not in a hedge fund; I leave that to the local government,'' or ``A nice man with aftershave takes care of it for me.'' </p>
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top