[PEN-L:543] Re: PEN-L Digests
Art McGee wrote recently about problems with the pen-l digest. He figured out the answer, but for the rest of you, set your subscription to nomime. Actually, that didn't help. I just got another digest, and I still don't have any headers. Art
[PEN-L:545] no comment
From a Salomon Smith Barney blurb: "Given worldwide economic turmoil and our outlook for slowing profits growth, we have been recommending that investors focus on defensive names with topline growth and strong earnings visibility. Stocks within the defense industry have typically provided a haven from such slow-downs, as government defense spending is largely immune to economic influences. If the economic situation becomes too severe, they can lead to instability and actually benefit the defense companies, as was the case in Indonesia earlier in the year. As investors remain concerned about the economic outlook, we expect the defensive nature of the defense industry to further benefit stocks within this group. Over the longerterm, we expect the group to benefit from rising defense procurement spending and continued restructuring toward higher-growth niches." Tom Kruse / Casilla 5812 / Cochabamba, Bolivia Tel/Fax: (591-4) 248242 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:546] Stanching the crunch?
Notwithstanding the irrationally exhuberant stock market response to the Fed's surprise rate cut yesterday, what is the likelihood that the cut can fulfill its purported mission of easing a credit crunch? Yesterday morning, before the cut, the spread between 30 year treasury bonds and 2 year bonds was 96 basis points. This morning the spread was 108. My admittedly rather crude arithmetic tells me that is an increase of 12 basis points. Rather than easing a credit crunch, such a spread seems better designed to bail out banks. Or is that the point? If that's the point, are we entering an episode where the Fed shovels buckets of under-the-table bailout dough into the gaping maws of hedgy banks on the pretext that it is trying to avert a recession? Regards, Tom Walker ^^^ #408 1035 Pacific St. Vancouver, B.C. V6E 4G7 [EMAIL PROTECTED] (604) 669-3286 ^^^ The TimeWork Web: http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/
[PEN-L:551] Re: Stanching the crunch?
Tom Walker inquires of mute heaven: ... are we entering an episode where the Fed shovels buckets of under-the-table bailout dough into the gaping maws of hedgy banks on the pretext that it is trying to avert a recession? Keynes only knows, Tom, but somehow I don't feel that my taxes are being misused even if so; it's all gotten far too abstract for such conventional gripes. Like just a big ho-hum, a Vonnegut joke. A geek pal has offered to write a program that incorporates my essence - whatever that might be - and hacks into major Fed databases. Now that excites me. If there's no revolution by next spring valis
[PEN-L:553] no comment, II (investing in defense)
On defense sector stocks: About $9 Billion Is Added to Pentagon Budget NYT, today By TIM WEINER WASHINGTON -- The White House agreed with congressional negotiators Thursday to add about $9 billion to the military budget, including about $2 billion for intelligence programs and about $1 billion for missile defense, congressional staff members said. Republican leaders in Congress hope to return Pentagon spending to levels approaching the historic highs of the Reagan administration, when military budgets exceeded $300 billion a year. The House and Senate agreed last month to authorize $270.5 billion for fiscal 1999. Tom Kruse / Casilla 5812 / Cochabamba, Bolivia Tel/Fax: (591-4) 248242 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:548] Re: Lincoln Brigade Is Honored
quoth the NT TIMES: But because the [Abraham Lincoln] brigades were largely organized by Soviet-backed Communist organizations, the American Government used the term "premature anti-fascists" to describe them, and many wound up dogged by harassment into the 1960's that cost them their jobs and passports. I don't think that the gov't actually used this term. It was more of an ironic term used by the left itself, referring to being punished for doing something the US gov't itself did later. Of course, the gov't acted as if it was using this term. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/Departments/ECON/jdevine.html
[PEN-L:549] Herman Melville on the metaphysics of Indian hatingMJBUHLE@BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU, JFOSTER@OREGON.UOREGON.EDU
If you really want to understand the heart of darkness that defines American society, it is necessary to read Herman Melville. While Melville has the reputation of being a combination yarn-spinner and serious novelist, he is above all a profound social critic who sympathized with the downtrodden in American society. In his final novel, "The Confidence Man," there are several chapters that deal with the "Metaphysic of Indian-Hating" that, as far as I know, are the first in American literature that attack the prevailing exterminationist policy. "The Confidence Man" is set on a riverboat called the "Fidèle," that is sailing down the Mississippi. As the title implies, the boat is loaded with con men who are either selling stock in failing companies, selling herbal "medicine" that can cure everything from cancer to the common cold, raising money for a fraudulent Seminole Widows and Orphans Society or simply convincing people to give them money outright as a sign that they have "confidence" in their fellow man. The word "confidence" appears in every chapter, as some sort of leitmotif to remind the reader what Melville is preoccupied with: the meanness and exploitation of his contemporary America. Because for all of the references to the need for people to have confidence in one another, the only type of confidence on the riverboat is that associated with scams. For Melville, the act of scamming represents everything that is wrong in American society in the decade preceding the outbreak of the Civil War. It is a time when the power of capital is transforming the American landscape, turning everything into a commodity. In Chapter 9, titled "Two business men transact a little business," shares in something called the Black Rapids Coal Company are proffered. The man who is being enticed to buy the shares is a bit worried because there was a "downward tendency" in the price of the stock recently, just as there has been in vast numbers of securities on the global exchanges in 1998. The stock seller tries to reassure his customer: "Yes, there was a depression. But how came it? who devised it? The bears,' sir. The depression of our stock was solely owing to the growling, the hypocritical growling, of the bears." When the potential buyer asks him "How, hypocritical?," the stock seller answers: "Why, the most monstrous of all hypocrites are these bears: hypocrites by inversion; hypocrites in the simulation of things dark instead of bright; souls that thrive, less upon depression, than the fiction of depression; professors of the wicked art of manufacturing depressions; spurious Jeremiahs; sham Heraclituses, who, the lugubrious day done, return, like sham Lazaruses among the beggars, to make merry over the gains got by their pretended sore heads -- scoundrelly bears!" Scoundrelly bears? I suppose that's as good an explanation for recent woes on Wall Street as any. When the stock market was becoming the big craze in the 1850s, much of the speculation was fueled by prospects of American business penetrating into the heartlands west of the Mississippi. In order to facilitate this penetration, it was necessary to remove the indigenous peoples who had inconveniently come to dwell on these lands over the past ten thousand years. The founding fathers of the United States endorsed their removal wholeheartedly. As David Stannard has written in "American Holocaust," the slave-owning "democrat" Thomas Jefferson wanted to show the Indian no mercy: "...in 1812, Jefferson again concluded that white Americans were 'obliged' to drive the 'backward' Indians 'with the beasts of the forests into the Stony Mountains'; and one year later still, he added that the American government had no other choice before it than 'to pursue [the Indians] to extermination, or drive them to new seats beyond our reach.' Indeed, Jefferson's writings on Indians are filled with the straightforward assertion that the natives are to be given a simple choice--to be 'extirpate[d] from the earth' or to remove themselves out of the Americans' way." Agreement with Jefferson's sentiments were practically universal in American society. I would hazard a guess that moral objection to slavery ran stronger than defense of indigenous rights. Given the overall support for what amounts to a policy of genocide against the Indian, Melville's thoughts on the subject appear strikingly at odds with the mainstream. The subject appears in the course of a discussion between two men on the deck of the riverboat about the infamous "Indian-hater" John Moredock. Moredock was the son of a woman who was killed by a small band of Indians, who, according to the narrative, "proved to belong to a band of twenty renegades from various tribes, outlaws even among Indians, and who had formed themselves into a maurauding crew." Moredock eventually tracked down this band and killed them all. But he became consumed with hatred for all Indians in the course of his vendetta. This is what
[PEN-L:547] Re: no comment
Tom Kruse wordlessly delivers this From a Salomon Smith Barney blurb: "Given worldwide economic turmoil and our outlook for slowing profits growth, we have been recommending that investors focus on defensive names with topline growth and strong earnings visibility. Stocks within the defense industry have typically provided a haven from such slow-downs, as government defense spending is largely immune to economic influences... [Etc.]..." Why be speechless, Tom; aren't they the guys who make money "...the old- fashioned way"? Well, they certainly mean it, don't they? What can have a longer track record than the commerce of war?! As for the sickeningly amoral literalism: it's good, assuring that Madame LaFarge over there won't miss a single stitch. valis
[PEN-L:544] Lincoln Brigade Is Honored
The New York Times October 16, 1998 SEATTLE JOURNAL 60 Years After Spain, Lincoln Brigade Is Honored By SAM HOWE VERHOVEK EATTLE -- More than 60 years after they took up arms against the fascists in Spain, for which Hemingway romanticized them and F.B.I. files blacklisted them, members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade have finally been given an official monument in this country. The granite memorial, on the campus of the University of Washington here, was unveiled on Wednesday, with about 20 of the fast-dwindling brigade veterans -- all in their 80's or 90's, many with tears in their eyes -- in attendance. The ceremony drew veterans from as far away as New York, who said they hoped the recognition might lead to movements for memorials in other cities. "I came 3,000 miles just to see this," said Louis Gordon, 83, a retired union organizer from Kingston, N.Y., sporting a button that said "Stop Franco Terror," a reference to the general against whom the brigade fought in the late 1930's in the Spanish Civil War. "I feel we're finally being recognized for something we did, something we deeply believe was right." The 2,900 American volunteers in Spain, more than a third of whom died in the fighting, rallied to the aid of Spain's elected government against a rebellion led by Gen. Francisco Franco and his rightist forces. Franco was aided by Hitler and Mussolini and by a policy of neutrality adopted by the United States and Britain, which wanted to avoid a conflict with Hitler. Brigade veterans thus note proudly that they fought the fascist threat years before World War II, in which many of them also went on to fight, and many trace their activism onward in a straight line that led to the civil-rights struggles of the 1960's and opposition to the Vietnam War. But because the brigades were largely organized by Soviet-backed Communist organizations, the American Government used the term "premature anti-fascists" to describe them, and many wound up dogged by harassment into the 1960's that cost them their jobs and passports. How the brigade memorial wound up in Seattle is in part a story of efforts by two brigade veterans who live here, Abe Osheroff and Bob Reed, and of a professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Washington, Tony Geist, who lobbied the university's architectural committee for the privately financed memorial. But the placement in Seattle is not quite by chance: The city has a history of labor activism dating to the Industrial Workers of the World, the Wobblies. And Washington was once considered so liberal that Franklin D. Roosevelt's campaign manager jokingly referred to "the 47 states and the Soviet of Washington." Many brigade members -- no one knows how many, though there were at least 11 from the University of Washington -- came from this area, and thus the city is culturally and historically suited for a memorial. Brigade veterans have been made honorary citizens by the Parliament of Spain, and memorials to their service can be found throughout Europe. But in this country, they have received no such recognition. "I think it was the right thing to do, but we were made to suffer for it," said Al Gottlieb, 90, a former Brooklyn longshoreman, who was wounded by shrapnel twice in Spain and then lost several jobs in the 1950's when F.B.I. agents informed his employers that he had served in the brigade. In a small measure of the shifting currents of American history and memory, the ceremony here attracted little attention outside the circle of veterans, family members and students from a Seattle high school who made up the audience of about 300. "These people are able to be seen not as communists but as anti-fascists, which is something they just could never do in the 1940's and 1950's," said Peter N. Carroll, author of "Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War" (Stanford University Press) and chairman of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives at Brandeis University. Julia Newman, a Manhattan producer who is making a documentary about women who served in the brigade, said the fall of the Soviet Union had helped cast the brigade in a different light. "The ogre is dead," Ms. Newman said. "There's a general willingness to look back on that time with less harshly
[PEN-L:542] Question on interest rates and money supply
I'm trying to understand how trade (e.g., exports) affects both interest rates and foreign exchange rates. For example, suppose England and Japan trade in the following manner: England (1) Japan || English || || Exports || |||| || || (2) || (4) || Yen || English |||-| || Pounds|| (3) | | |||| Pounds | | || ||| | || || |-| Forex Market Are the monetary results the following, waving our magic ceteris paribus wand?: o Supply of Yen drops in Japan, causing an interest rate rise o Supply of Yen rises on exchange, causing price of Yen to drop o Supply of Pound drops on exchange, causing price of Pound to rise o Supply of Pound rises in England, causing an interest rate drop I'm curious if this is a) what theory predicts; b) what happens in practice. Bill
