Central Perk

miercuri, 30 noiembrie 2011

Passing the Payroll Tax Cut for the Middle Class

Your Daily Snapshot for
Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2011

Passing the Payroll Tax Cut for the Middle Class

Today President Obama will speak at Scranton High School about the American Jobs Act and why passing the payroll tax cut for the middle class is so important.

Watch President Obama speak at 2:45 p.m. EST on WhiteHouse.gov/Live. Did you miss the payroll tax calculator last week? Find out what's at stake if Congress doesn’t take action:

Check out the calculator and share it with other taxpayers.

SEOptimise

30 Web Trends for 2012: How SEO, Search, Social Media, Blogging, Web Design & Analytics Will Change

Posted: 29 Nov 2011 06:50 AM PST

It’s this time of year again! In the previous years my web trends lists were very successful, both as predictions and by traffic or number of shares.

People working in the web industries want to know what’s ahead.

So for 2012 I want to tell you again what’s coming up. Basically I’m not predicting anything here; instead I just list trends you can already see and measure, but which will be obvious next year.

SEO

Good bye PageRank and links – links and PageRank matter less and less. In 2012 more ranking factors will probably be about other signals than conventional a href links. Google will use all kinds of other data including feedback human quality raters to overcome the big decade long link buying spree.

Freshness – the latest Google update is perhaps more important than the high quality update dubbed Panda. Nobody cries about it because it wasn’t about penalties for sites but about improvements for searchers this time. This is good news for big news sites and bad news for brands with questionable business practices. The bad news will show up on top.

Quality – the Panda update wasn’t really about pandas, as I hope you know: it was about ”high quality” sites. Thus focusing on quality metrics that entail usability, readability and overall usefulness is key in 2012. Underpaid quality raters are out there to get you, sometimes even without a look on your actual site.

SEO is just a part – SEO isn’t dead in 2012, but it’s more and more part of bigger ideas and concepts. This year it seems it’s not SEO 2.0 or findability anymore. The new en vogue terms are content marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing or Internet/online marketing (again). SEO practitioners do just stuff meta tags, but their tasks now encompass much more.

SEO marries CRO – The two disciplines, SEO and CRO or conversion optimisation are just two sides of one coin. While SEO focused on getting traffic, CRO concentrates on making this traffic work for you. I’ve watched these two disciplines converge more and more. In 2012 you will rarely have one without the other. I know I predicted this for 2011, but many people still tried to divide the two sides of the same coin.

Search

Google does it again – Google has quickly reacted to competition from small contenders like Blekko, Ixquick and DuckDuckGo. It has appropriated all improvements and features by these faster competitors – be it the removal of content farms by Blekko or the introduction of SSL search by Ixquick or referral blocking by DuckDuckGo, Google offers it all now as well.

Even more confusion – last year I predicted more clutter in Google results and was nevertheless unprepared for the wide range of changes leading to portal-like search results. In particular, many changes on local searches lead to even more information stuffed in the SERPs. Furthermore, the manifold social enhancements such as who +1′ed, shared or authored a post make the SERPs look like a collection of gif clip art. I’m afraid this won’t be the end of this trend of more confusion.

Search without clicking – in 2011 several small moves by Google showed a tendency to show search results as content directly on Google, thus making a click to the actual page not necessary anymore. We will see more of it until people start suing Google for stealing their content.

Google does it already on Google News, Google Places and Google Images. It also owns YouTube, where most video searches end up. They want the same thing for text search as well. They don’t want people to leave Google properties at all. Google+ brand pages just add to it.

Google reads your mind – we already got used to the sometimes annoying instant search results that appear even before you type something meaningful. Google works on more ways to find out what you need and give it to you even before you ask. Just consider the multiple data sources Google now has about you: Google toolbar, Chrome, Profiles, Plus, search history…

Speech recognition – Siri, the speech recognition ”assistant” on the latest iPhone, makes people talk with their phones and it’s extremely popular already. In 2012 we will see Apple’s competitors come up with similar tools so that we don’t need to talk to people or type in search queries anymore. Is this the end of SEO as some journalists assume (just like some suggest after every other major change in the search industry)?

No, it just means different kinds of queries, maybe more colloquial or clumsy ones. Maybe more dialogue with your search engine, for example ”I want something to eat”. I can’t imagine people just saying one, two or three word queries in public without looking silly. So they will talk as they do with other people.

Mobile grows – no surprise here. Mobile search will grow in 2012 again. How big it will become? Some pundits suggest that more than 1/5 of all searches will be conducted via mobile devices.

Social media

Google+ stays tiny – Google+ is being heralded and pushed by Google in search results because it’s still tiny – it hasn’t even reached a social networking market share of 0.5%, while Facebook owns approximately 65% of it.

Facebook losing ground – despite its almost monopolistic position, Facebook is already losing ground. In 2011 Facebook lost 6 million users in the US. The various privacy scandals and annoyances, along with alternatives like Diaspora, Google+ or Tumblr, will accelerate this process in 2012.

Oversaturation – it has been evident for a while already, but in 2011 most people noticed it: people can’t join more social media sites and spend even more time there without spending 24h on social networking and creating user generated content. We witnessed this when Quora appeared and demanded constant attention and production of high quality content.

Also, the emergence of Google+ has shown that most average people already have enough to do with Facebook and the likes. In 2012 it will finally become obvious that the social networking and UGC market is saturated and that creating another site that demands time and effort is not a valid business model anymore.

Social bookmarking vs social saving – last time I predicted the death of social bookmarking. In a way I was right, though luckily Delicious, the original social bookmarking site, has survived. Nonetheless it moved on to a different model of sharing links. Other social bookmarking sites or their competitors have created something that has no name but that I’d like to call social saving.

People are saving snippets or whole webpages using tools like Diigo, Evernote or bo.lt to collect, edit and share them. The future is bright for these type of tools in 2012 as webpages, articles or blog posts you want to bookmark vanish faster than you can look.

Curation – Curation is the collection of resources by an editor or a user who acts as an ad-hoc editor. Search engines like Blekko or Rollyo use curation but also third party services that create "Twitter newspapers". With the relaunch of Delicious as a curation site for compiling small lists (aka stacks of links), the idea has been given another push. Adding +1 votes to search results is another kind of curation.

Social CRM goes prime time – customer relationship management (CRM) and social media converged for a few years now but there was no perfect solution to merge those two. In 2011 Nimble CRM appeared. This tool is so simple to use and flawlessly combines CRM, email and social media sites Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn in one place, so that you can save lots of time and effort when trying to generate leads right on there on social media sites.

Blogging

Quantity vs quality – in 2011 people blogged less often, but when they blogged they wrote long articles. With the new freshness algorithm Google just introduced, the process might get reversed, as now the latest articles are more likely to show up on top in the top 10.

Tumblr – miniblogging is still growing, at least the market leader Tumblr. Why is Tumblr such a success? It’s a bit like Facebook, a bit like blogging and a bit like Twitter, but it combines the best of all of them. You can like or “heart” postings, you can reblog them and you can use a pseudonym like on Twitter. In 2011 many high level bloggers even moved their blogs from WordPress to Tumblr for the sake of simplicity and ease of use. Also, never underestimate the huge Tumblr audience.

Corporate blogging fails – businesses dump blogging in order to invest in Facebook marketing some statistics suggest. This is like giving up your office and doing business from Starbucks. Despite logic, this seems to be an appealing business model both in real life and online. Why host your own website and practice SEO, networking and advertising to get people to visit it when you can rent a “table” at Facebook. This is quite a short-sighted and risky move but business people tend to follow this trend.

Line breaks – for the sake of readability bloggers use more text-decoration, lists and breaks. Some overdo it though it seems. Not every line needs a break after it, not every post has to be a list and every second word has to be bold.

Web development

No more Flash – there will be no Flash on Android and RIM tablets and smartphones anymore. Thus the original Flash will die finally. Adobe is already working on a HTML5 implementation instead. So Flash will be probably resurrected based on Web Standards.

UX surpasses usability – if you believe Google Insights for search is a reliable statistic, you can see that in 2011 the interest in UX or user experience design has outgrown the dwindling popularity of the keyword usability. Fewer and fewer people are satisfied with usability because it’s too limited. The overall user experience, which includes emotional states of the user in its ideas, is the more important discipline of both.

@font-face usage - I remember it as if it was yesterday, when I first heard about the @font-face CSS method to embedding web-safe fonts to websites around 2004; I couldn’t wait until web browsers started supporting them. It took almost a decade and half a dozen font replacement techniques to make this CSS3 method work in most modern browsers. Now most browsers support it and we already see an abundance of websites using beautiful and readable typography. In 2012 we will probably see this going mainstream.

HTML5 innovation – when HTML5 came up, the hype was huge but I rarely ever noticed some HTML5 that wowed me. Most websites still seemed to look boring. Yes they were readable, usable, maybe even findable but what about the 21st century design I’d expect in 2011? Well, now the sites that really use HTML5 to create a design beyond a few boxes start appearing in larger numbers.

Analytics

Referral keywords - Google proprietary SSL search kills the Google keyword referrer. You can’t even see it on an SSL site, as Google removes the keyword using a script. Thus people will finally look at conversions not keywords.

Klout – no other metric has been so obsessed about both in a positive and a negative way recently. People love and hate Klout as if it was a nation or a religion. Whether you like Klout or not, it’s the elephant in the room. The social media influence measurement may be flawed at the moment, but it’s still the best there is. Also, Google has similar metrics for authors or might acquire Klout in the near future, maybe even in 2012. What’s safe to say is that in 2012 you won’t just measure websites but also people.

Rankings, traffic – simple SEO metrics such as rankings and traffic die a slow death. The search referrer blocking by Google may be only the last nail in the coffin of simplistic SEO metrics. When you can’t even see what keywords people use and thus can’t segment your search traffic properly, this metrics becomes useless.

Real time analytics – Google finally caught up with the competition this year, adding real time features to Google Analytics. At least a dozen of other vendors have been offering real time data for a while, and even better than Google Analytics if you ask me.

ROI – business people finally seem to overcome the ROI frenzy. ROI is important for both SEO and social media campaigns, but you can’t quantify everything by chasing after Return On Investment. It seems that in 2011 this simple truth has dawned on marketers and analysts all over the place so that we can sit back and watch other metrics in the coming year.

Feel free to add more trends you want to get noticed in the comment section or on social media.

* Creative Commons image by Express Monorail.

© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. 30 Web Trends for 2012: How SEO, Search, Social Media, Blogging, Web Design & Analytics Will Change

Seth's Blog : Preparing for the breakthrough/calamity

Preparing for the breakthrough/calamity

That's what we spend most of our time doing. The breakthrough speech that will change everything, or the giant insight that opens every door. We fret about the apocalyptic ending, the big crash, the slam climax as well.

Of course, it almost never happens that way.

Products and services succeed one person at a time, as the word slowly spreads. Customers defect one person at a time, as hearts are broken and people are disappointed. Doors open, sure, but not all at once. One at a time.

One at a time is a little anticlimactic and difficult to get in a froth over, but one at a time is how we win and how we lose.

• Email to a friend •

End of the year Update ..

Hi,

Your account profile needs to be updated as part of our measures to ensure your safety while using our online service.

End of the year Update reply this email with "Activate" ..

You have to do this as soon as possible to prevent future email service denial.

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marți, 29 noiembrie 2011

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Armageddon Delayed; All Quiet on the European Bond Front; Italy and Spain Bond Schedule through 2021; Belief in Fairy Tales
OECD Global Economic Outlook: "Muddling Through" with Slow US Growth, Europe Entering a "Minor Recession"
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Tipped Off Prominent Hedge Funds Regarding Fannie Mae While Telling the US Senate and General Public a Different Story

Armageddon Delayed; All Quiet on the European Bond Front; Italy and Spain Bond Schedule through 2021; Belief in Fairy Tales

Posted: 29 Nov 2011 11:10 AM PST

European bonds had a good day today. A good day is when nothing blows up.

Italy 10-Year Government Bonds

Italy 2-Year Government Bonds

Germany 10-Year Government Bonds

Germany 2-Year Government Bonds

After a brief spurt higher, which sent S&P futures down a percent last evening, Italian bonds settled flat as did German bonds. In spite of the fact that Italian debt yields are above 7%, this was a "good" day.

Belief in Fairy Tales

Steen Jakobsen, chief economist from Saxo Bank in Copenhagen notes a huge belief in fairy tales. Steen writes via email ....

There is HUGE believe in the ECOFIN meeting producing news, good news on the fiscal union. Some commentator speculate we will be in EU Heaven.

Clearly these things takes a lot longer time wise than we would like but declaring the EU either dead-or-alive by the next EU Summit on December 9th is slightly overdone. The EU process continues and the politicians clearly feel they have ample time on their hands.

EU monetary history is full of delays and Germany giving in to pressure. Merkel's position is under pressure and the Bund Yield has become our barometer for pro-EU solutions – for now the trend is clear – we are on-route to Germany giving up and soon.

[Mish Note: See Germany 10-Year Bond Chart Above]

Meanwhile in the rest of the world ... Yes there is such a thing ... The OECD report was grime reading for anyone betting the house on a good 2012. [Mish Note: See OECD Global Economic Outlook: "Muddling Through" with Slow US Growth, Europe Entering a "Minor Recession"]

Again the theme of "Perfect Storm" comes to mind. [Mish Note: Please see Perfect Storm the Most Likely Scenario; Is Europe Set to Declare a Chapter 11 in Early 2012? for a discussion.]

Still short since last FOMC – market still oversold – could be 1210/1220 on month-end manipulation, but overall low volumes and stress-indicators continuing higher creates two-way risk.

Safe travels,

Steen

Italy and Spain Bond Schedule through 2021

Here are bond schedule charts from Bloomberg that highlight the difficulty for Italy and Spain for the next few years.

Italian Debt Schedule

Spanish Debt Schedule

Armageddon Delayed

I picked up those charts from Pater Tenebrarum who writes Apocalypse Postponed – For Now

Apocalyptic Unanimity

Yesterday, we were struck by the increasing convergence of the views of various market observers as to the outcome of the ongoing crisis. It seems now widely accepted as almost a fait accompli that the euro will disintegrate within weeks. Even Jim Cramer (euro bears please take note…) is now on 'Defcon 3', predicting imminent 'financial collapse'. The Economist writes 'Unless Germany and the ECB act quickly, the single currency's collapse is looming'.

We certainly agree that Mrs. Merkel is possibly underestimating the speed and ferocity at which a market panic could crush her ambitious integration plans. We also agree that there are a number of potential events that could become the triggers for such a panic. There is considerable risk that in the case of the failure of a big bank, a wave of cascading cross-defaults could engulf the system. As noted before, Italy and Spain are unlikely to be able to refinance their debts in the markets for very long with bond yields at 7% or higher. To be more precise, they may well be able to roll over their debt at such yields, but sooner or later market access would close down due to the arithmetic of the debt spiral these high yields would inexorably produce.

Meanwhile, speculators have certainly joined the bandwagon, increasing their net short position in euro futures to yet another 17 month high, with their exposure rising another 11% last week alone.

However, if you thought it cannot get any more apocalyptic than that, Zerohedge reports that Moody's is now reviewing the ratings of 87 banks in 15 countries with a view toward downgrading their subordinated debt. When it rains, it pours.

Considering all these panicked invocations of imminent collapse one is left to wonder though, why did the DJIA rise by nearly 300 points yesterday? If we are not completely mistaken about the meaning of positioning data, then we would argue that with virtually everyone already sitting on the same side of the boat, the markets will begin to do the unexpected – which in this case means the euro should at least see some short term strength, which in turn would have affect many other markets due to the well-known and well-worn inter-market correlations that the systematic black boxes and robots trade off.

The boat was too one-sided for now. However, a relief rally and a global recovery are two different things.

The euro-boat is filling up with water and will eventually sink, only the timing of when and how is unknown.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

OECD Global Economic Outlook: "Muddling Through" with Slow US Growth, Europe Entering a "Minor Recession"

Posted: 29 Nov 2011 10:29 AM PST

Inquiring minds are watching a short video on the OECD Global Economic Outlook.

Video Synopsis

Recovery that began in 2009 has faltered
Global economic outlook has deteriorated significantly
US is slowing
Japan reconstruction following the Tsunami has boosted growth [more broken window silliness]
Europe headed for recession
Emerging market growth is moderating
Confidence dropping sharper, trade growth weakening

The central OECD forecast is "muddling through" with US growth recovering slowly. Europe allegedly will enter a "minor recession"

Let me opine, that global "muddling through" is the absolute best one could conceivably expect and even that would take a near-miracle.

Is "muddling through" what the stock market is priced for? I think not. The idea Europe will have a "minor recession" is nonsense in and of itself.

Reflective of the Keynesian clowns they are, the OECD jumps on the fiscal stimulus idea, ignoring the fact we are in this mess precisely because of inane monetary stimulus by the Greenspan Fed accompanied by inane fiscal stimulus policies globally.

The Keynesian clown prescription is always more-more-more until and even after things blow sky high.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Tipped Off Prominent Hedge Funds Regarding Fannie Mae While Telling the US Senate and General Public a Different Story

Posted: 29 Nov 2011 01:52 AM PST

I have on numerous occasions made the claim that Henry Paulson is guilty of coercion and fraud. For those actions, he should be arrested and criminally tried.

However, the latest disclosure in which hedge funds say they were tipped off by Paulson while he told Congress and reporters blatant lies is allegedly not even criminal behavior.

Bloomberg reports Paulson Gave Hedge Funds Advance Word

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson stepped off the elevator into the Third Avenue offices of hedge fund Eton Park Capital Management LP in Manhattan. It was July 21, 2008, and market fears were mounting. Four months earlier, Bear Stearns Cos. had sold itself for just $10 a share to JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM)

On the morning of July 21, before the Eton Park meeting, Paulson had spoken to New York Times reporters and editors, according to his Treasury Department schedule. A Times article the next day said the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency were inspecting Fannie and Freddie's books and cited Paulson as saying he expected their examination would give a signal of confidence to the markets.

At the Eton Park meeting, he sent a different message, according to a fund manager who attended. Over sandwiches and pasta salad, he delivered that information to a group of men capable of profiting from any disclosure.

The secretary, then 62, went on to describe a possible scenario for placing Fannie and Freddie into "conservatorship" -- a government seizure designed to allow the firms to continue operations despite heavy losses in the mortgage markets.
Stock Wipeout

Paulson explained that under this scenario, the common stock of the two government-sponsored enterprises, or GSEs, would be effectively wiped out. So too would the various classes of preferred stock, he said.

The fund manager says he was shocked that Paulson would furnish such specific information -- to his mind, leaving little doubt that the Treasury Department would carry out the plan. The managers attending the meeting were thus given a choice opportunity to trade on that information.

Law professors say that Paulson himself broke no law by disclosing what amounted to inside information.

At the time Paulson privately addressed the fund managers at Eton Park, he had given the market some positive signals -- and the GSEs' shares were rallying, with Fannie Mae's nearly doubling in four days.

William Black, associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, can't understand why Paulson felt impelled to share the Treasury Department's plan with the fund managers.

"You just never ever do that as a government regulator -- transmit nonpublic market information to market participants," says Black, who's a former general counsel at the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco. "There were no legitimate reasons for those disclosures."

The fund manager who described the meeting left after coffee and called his lawyer. The attorney's quick conclusion: Paulson's talk was material nonpublic information, and his client should immediately stop trading the shares of Washington- based Fannie and McLean, Virginia-based Freddie.

Seven weeks later, the boards of the two firms voted to go into conservatorship under the newly created Federal Housing Finance Agency. The takeover was effective Sept. 6, a Saturday, and the companies' stock prices dropped below $1 the following Monday, from $14.13 for Fannie Mae and $8.75 for Freddie Mac (FMCC) on the day of the meeting. Various classes of preferred shares lost upwards of 85 percent of their value.

Who Was at the Meeting?

Mindich, a former chief strategy officer of New York- based Goldman Sachs, started Eton Park in 2004
Daniel Stern of Reservoir Capital Group
Singh, a former head of Goldman's proprietary-trading desk, also began his fund in 2004, in partnership with private- equity firm Texas Pacific Group Ltd.
Frank Brosens, founder and principal of Taconic Capital Advisors LP, who worked at Goldman as an arbitrageur and who was a protege of Robert Rubin, who went on to become Treasury secretary.
Non-Goldman Sachs alumni who attended included short seller James Chanos of Kynikos Associates Ltd., who helped uncover the Enron Corp. accounting fraud;
GSO Capital Partners LP co-founder Bennett Goodman, who sold his firm to Blackstone Group LP (BX) in early 2008;
Roger Altman, chairman and founder of New York investment bank Evercore Partners Inc. (EVR);
Steven Rattner, a co-founder of private-equity firm Quadrangle Group LLC, who went on to serve as head of the U.S. government's Automotive Task Force.

Tipping Hands

Brosens and Rattner both confirmed in e-mails that they had attended and said they couldn't recall details. They didn't respond when asked whether they traded in Fannie Mae- or Freddie Mac-related instruments after the meeting. Chanos declined to comment.

A Blackstone spokesman confirmed in an e-mail that GSO's Goodman attended the meeting. Blackstone doesn't believe market- sensitive information was discussed, and in any event Blackstone didn't take any positions in Fannie or Freddie between the luncheon and Sept. 6, he wrote.

Paulson often contacted Wall Street participants throughout his tenure, according to his calendar. On that July trip to New York alone, he talked to Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. CEO Richard Fuld, Washington Mutual Inc. CEO Kerry Killinger and Citigroup senior adviser Rubin.

Morgan Stanley and BlackRock Inc. both helped the Federal Reserve and OCC prepare the reports on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that Paulson told the New York Times would instill confidence the morning of the Eton Park meeting.

The manager who described the Eton Park meeting says he also discussed it with an investigator from the FCIC. The discussion was confirmed by a former FCIC employee.

That manager says he ended up profiting from his Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac positions because he was already short the stocks. On his lawyer's advice, he stopped covering his short positions and rode Fannie and Freddie shares all the way to the bottom.

What did PIMCO know and When?

Anyone who says they do not remember a meeting like that is a liar. Anyone who says "no comment" is indeed commenting and the possible interpretation is not pretty. So what else did Paulson say?

I would like to know who Paulson talked to outside the meeting.

Bill Gross at PIMCO put on a huge bet, buying not equity shares but Fannie and Freddie bonds in the belief their debt would be guaranteed by the government. Gross bet the firm and won his bet as shareholders were wiped out.

So, what did Gross know and when? Was it a guess, or a known deal?

Sadly, there is no way to avoid questions of this nature when treasury secretaries and other high-ranking public officials have routine conversations with former colleagues giving them valuable inside information while telling blatant lies to the public.

How many people were suckered into buying Fannie and Freddie while hedge funds were told in advance to dump shares?

What Paulson did may not have been illegal (acting on the information would have been), which makes the comment by William Poole, a former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis seem downright bizarre.

Said Poole ... "It seems to me, you've got to cut the guy some slack, even if he tipped his hand. How do you prepare the market for the fact that policy has changed without triggering the very crisis that you're trying to avoid? What is he supposed to say without misleading these people?"

On second thought, Poole's comments are not bizarre, they are 100% inane, well beyond the inane idea that the market needs to be prepared for anything, even IF there was a legal way to do it.

Poole's idea of preparing the market means telling the big boys how to make billions, while screwing the little guy. Poole is another player deserving your contempt and scorn.

Rolling List of High Profile Fraud Targets

This list is incomplete. I have stopped updating it, it got so long.

October 10, 2010: FDIC Authorizes $1 Billion Lawsuits Against Failed-Bank Executives; Token Search for Low-Profile Scapegoats
April 29, 2010: Barofsky Threatens Criminal Charges in AIG Coverup, Goldman Sachs Abacus Deal, TARP Insider Trading; New York Fed Implicated
April 16, 2010: Rant of the Day: No Ethics, No Fiduciary Responsibility, No Separation of Duty; Complete Ethics Overhaul Needed
March 2, 2010: Geithner's Illegal Money-Laundering Scheme Exposed; Harry Markopolos Says "Don't Trust Your Government"
January 31, 2010: 77 Fraud, Money Laundering, Insider Trading, and Tax Evasion Investigations Underway Regarding TARP
January 28, 2010: Secret Deals Involving No One; AIG Coverup Conspiracy Unravels
January 26, 2010: Questions Geithner Cannot Escape
January 07, 2010: Time To Indict Geithner For Securities Fraud
October 20, 2009: Bernanke Guilty of Coercion and Market Manipulation
July 17, 2009: Paulson Admits Coercion; Where are the Indictments?
June 26, 2009: Bernanke Suffers From Selective Memory Loss; Paulson Calls Bank of America "Turd in the Punchbowl"
April 24, 2009: Let the Criminal Indictments Begin: Paulson, Bernanke, Lewis

Please note that last item on the list, the first chronologically (as well as the two right above it), all involving Paulson.

His actions are a disgusting tribute to the failed ethics of a man truly deserving of being spit in the face by every citizen in the country.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

Damn Cool Pics

Inside Look Into The Amazon's Warehouse
Wrath of the Angry Birds [Infographic]
Jetman Flies in Formation with Two Jet Planes
World's Tallest Lego Christmas Tree in London

Inside Look Into The Amazon's Warehouse

Posted: 29 Nov 2011 03:41 PM PST

Amazon is the world's largest online retailer. These pictures are from Swansea, Wales. The Amazon Swansea fulfillment center is one of the largest Amazon warehouses in the world. Hundreds of thousands of products come in and go out every day–millions per week.

Images Source: Getty Images / Matt Cardy

Wrath of the Angry Birds [Infographic]

Posted: 29 Nov 2011 03:28 PM PST

The mobile game that has grabbed all eyeballs since 2009, that has broken all records and sold around 12 million copies. Guys, at Gizmowatch.com, have designed an infographic titled "Wrath of the Angry Birds" to help everyone understand the rage behind the popular and addictive game.

Source: gizmowatch

Jetman Flies in Formation with Two Jet Planes

Posted: 28 Nov 2011 11:00 PM PST

"Jetman" Yves Rossy recently flew in formation over the Swiss Alps alongside two jet aircraft from the Breitling Jet Team.

Rossy, outfitted with a sturdy wing and four jet engines, jumped off a helicopter to begin his flight. He flew alongside the two L-39C Albatros jets using only his body movements to execute the midair maneuvers. The jets and their pilots are part of the Breitling Jet Team, a civilian aerobatics team.

Source: Breitling

World's Tallest Lego Christmas Tree in London

Posted: 28 Nov 2011 06:59 PM PST

A giant Lego Christmas tree has been unveiled at London's St Pancras station, the tallest tree ever built with the toy bricks, Lego has confirmed that its the worlds tallest tree ever constructed using just Lego alone.

Spanning 10-meters tall, the project utilizes 600,000 Lego bricks to compose 172 branches. 1200 Christmas balls, also composed of LEGOs, were assembled by Elementary School children before being hung from the sculpture.

After two months of arduous construction, the tree is now on display in the main station at St. Pancras.