by Alex Evans | Sep 7, 2007 | Global system
Here’s an alarming thought about the current turmoil in financial markets: what if the drivers of the crisis are so complicated that central bankers don’t actually understand what’s going on? That was the charge laid yesterday by Jon Moulton, head of private equity firm Alchemy, who was interviewed by the FT:
The private equity investor said the Bank was hampered in its efforts to manage the crisis by its sketchy knowledge of such important debt vehicles as collateralised loan obligations (CLOs). These are securities backed by leveraged loans, which can include US subprime mortgages and whose creditworthiness may be questionable.
Mr Moulton said that during a breakfast meeting with Bank officials “it became clear they did not know what a CLO was. I had to show a senior man [by drawing a diagram] on the back of a napkin.” Speaking ironically, Mr Moulton said: “It was really reassuring to see they did not know what was going to explode on them.”
The power of the Bank to control debt markets had been significantly reduced by the proliferation of securitised debt, according to Mr Moulton, who is the senior partner of Alchemy, a mid-market buyout firm. He said the Bank had “no weapons to control CLOs”. The Bank declined to comment on Mr Moulton’s criticisms.
by David Steven | Sep 5, 2007 | Conflict and security
While we’re talking about resilience, what could be more useful – when the worst happens – than a battery that can be recharged by peeing into it…
Dubbed NoPoPo, the battery has been developed by the Japanese company Aqua Power System and comes in standard AA and AAA formats…
The AA and AAA batteries can be recharged with a variety of liquids, inserted into the chamber via a pipette and the basic principle is that a mixture of magnesium and carbon reacts when mixed with a liquid to produce, in the case of the AA battery, up to 500 milliamp-hours (mAh) of life. This puts them on a par with existing zinc-carbon AA batteries.
Unfortunately, they’re currently only available in Japan.
by David Steven | Sep 5, 2007 | Conflict and security
First, the Economist on the role ‘amateur’ health care workers can play in building public health systems:
The idea is to harness people’s existing culture of self-help and get subsistence farmers to carry out simple medical tasks which are beyond the capacity of a pathetically inadequate health system…
In Congo alone, the [World Health Organisation] has recruited more than 35,000 community workers for its river-blindness project; they get nothing for their labours except the knowledge that they are protecting their families from disease.
Volunteers from each village are taught how to measure out the annual drug doses, fill in the obligatory record forms, and watch out for side-effects. WHO supplies the drugs and the villagers do the rest themselves. WHO was forced to devise the strategy after it received an offer from Merck, a pharmaceutical firm, of free supplies of a drug to people at risk of river blindness.
(more…)
by David Steven | Sep 4, 2007 | Middle East and North Africa, North America
Alex has written twice now about Barney Rubin’s speculation that a determined campaign to soften up American opinion for war on Iran is now underway.
Count me a tad sceptical – we’ve heard these warnings before – but it’s still worth being vigilant. Rubin wonders whether we’ll soon start hearing of ‘very grave Iranian provocations’. One way to increase the chance of this is to redefine what an Iranian provocation would look like.
Michael Ledeen, Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute and one of the biggest cheerleaders for aggressive confrontation with Iran, shows how it’s done…
One has to stipulate that “Iraqi terrorist” is a term rather more complicated than outfits like al-AP [like al-Jazeera – geddit?] seem to understand. Many Iraqis went to Iran during the Iran-Iraq war, where they were trained/indoctrinated by the mullahs for twenty-plus years. We’re talking about several million people, not a few cadres. Some of them, along with children, were sent into Iraq to fight us.
It’s very misleading to simply call them “Iraqis.” Maybe they—and their children even more so—should be called “Iranians of Iraqi origin,” or “Iranian agents” or some such.
by Alex Evans | Sep 4, 2007 | Middle East and North Africa, North America
Earlier this week, I published a post quoting my CIC colleague Barney Rubin, who’s picking up noise about Cheney’s office calling on allies to start rolling out a case for war against Iran this week. Barney’s just published a follow-up post:
On the morning of Thursday, August 30, someone who is a professional in handling information called me to recount a conversation from the previous Thursday or Friday (August 23 or 24). In this conversation, someone whose proximity to knowledge of such things is so great that I cannot identify him in any other way, told my interlocutor that President Bush would be inclined to accept suggestions for withdrawing some troops from Iraq and moving as many as possible into more secure bases, as a safeguard against reprisals in the event of a U.S. attack on Iran.
In today’s reports from Iraq (see for example the New York Times and the Washington Post) President Bush is quoted as saying, “If the kind of success we are now seeing here continues it will be possible to maintain the same level of security with fewer American forces.” The president made a point of visiting and lauding the progress in predominantly Sunni Anbar province, where the U.S. would be more secure from reprisals by Shi’a militias sympathetic to Iran. Anyone who follows political thinking in the Middle East will realize that throughout the region this will be interpreted as confirming a shift in U.S. strategy toward allying with Sunnis to encircle Iran.
