Brent Nyitray
Fairlington Blade
Let the mutherfuker burn!
jnc4p
Kevin S. Willis
Michigoose
lmsinca
markinaustin
Arcanaut
novahockey
quarterback
ScottC
yellojktVital Statistics:
| Last | Change | Percent | |
| S&P Futures | 1644.8 | 6.2 | 0.38% |
| Eurostoxx Index | 2716.5 | -7.6 | -0.28% |
| Oil (WTI) | 95.33 | -0.7 | -0.73% |
| LIBOR | 0.274 | -0.001 | -0.36% |
| US Dollar Index (DXY) | 81.82 | 0.146 | 0.18% |
| 10 Year Govt Bond Yield | 2.18% | 0.01% | |
| Current Coupon Ginnie Mae TBA | 101.5 | 0.1 | |
| Current Coupon Fannie Mae TBA | 100.1 | -0.2 | |
| RPX Composite Real Estate Index | 202.4 | 0.2 | |
| BankRate 30 Year Fixed Rate Mortgage | 4.03 |
Markets are higher this morning on no real news. There is no economic data this morning. Bonds are weaker, with the 10 year yield at a 16 month high of 2.18%. MBS are down small.
Pretty light week, data wise. We will get NFIB Small business Optimism on Tuesday, retail sales on Thursday, and industrial production / capacity utilization on Friday. None of these should be market moving.
Compass Research is out saying the death of NJ Senator Frank Lautenberg pretty much makes Mel Watt an unlikely confirmation. It drops his “yes” votes from 56 to 55. Separately, KBW is out saying that Fannie Mae common stock is worthless. Of course is still sports a $11.4 billion market cap
Home equity increased by $816 billion in Q1, according to the housing scorecard, put out by HUD. Delinquencies are down 7% in the month of May. In spite of the back up in mortgage rates, housing still remains highly affordable.
US bond fund redemptions are the highest since 1992. Bill Gross, who’s fund lost 1.9% in May predicted that April of 2013 will go down as the end of the three decade bull market in bonds that began in the early 1980s. A poll by Bloomberg predicts that the Fed will cut its quantitative easing program from $85 billion a month to $65 billion a month at the October 29-30 FOMC meeting.
Filed under: Morning Report |
All Things in Moderation 
Apropos of noting I became aware of this essay by noted philosopher Mike Alder. In particular his closing remarks just struck me:
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Carrying over the conversation of last thread, I saw E.J. Dionne’s column on libertarians which seemed in part a rebuttal of Cizzilla’s. Neither seemed to quite hit upon libertarians I keep running across, although this remark seemed accurate:
In many ways doctrinaire libertarians remind me of Marxist apologists who always proclaimed that the reason communism failed is because it was never tried.
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From Dionne’s piece:
“And when the Great Depression engulfed us, government was helpless, largely handcuffed by this anti-government ideology until Franklin D. Roosevelt came along.”
Or government actions by both Hoover and Roosevelt made things worse and turned a severe recession into a depression.
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Brent – At PL, Banned said that the bill in the Senate to tighten capital standards [Brown-Vitter] doesn’t do what it purports to do.
Is it a good or bad bill? I haven’t read it.
Update: Banned’s real objection seems to be that tougher capital standards don’t matter in the big picture.
All I can say to that is the local S&Ls that maintained much more than minimum capital survived the late 80s in the SW, which to me is some evidence that tougher capital requirements are good.
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I disagree with Banned as well. In his more honest moments he notes that higher capital standards will impact bank profitability and economic growth in general, which is a trade off I’m willing to make.
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Mark, I have not read it as well, but if it goes beyond what Basel III is doing, then yes it probably is overkill.
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Thanks, Brent. I will try to find out if it goes beyond B3. I take it our banking system is bound by B3, right?
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Worth noting on CO2 emissions:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/carbon-dioxide-emissions-rose-14-percent-in-2012-iea-report-says/2013/06/09/35d32bac-d123-11e2-8cbe-1bcbee06f8f8_story.html?hpid=z2
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Mark, it does.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-05-01/ditch-basel-bank-rules-just-raise-capital-vitter-says
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Thanks, JNC. I could not, independent on my reliance on Brent, offer any coherent argument why this is a bad bill. So while I am now presumptively against it, I hope someone will lay out for me how I can explain my position to someone who doesn’t rely on Brent and who does not know banking.
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Why is going beyond B3 a bad thing? Will it hurt the market/banking some how?
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hundreds-in-government-had-advance-word-of-medicare-action-at-heart-of-trading-spike-probe/2013/06/09/044944d0-cec7-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_print.html
I didnt’ do it.
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Tweet of the day:
@iowahawkblog: “your privacy is important to me,” said the guy who’s president only because of the release of 2 different sealed divorced proceedings.
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McWing:
“your privacy is important to me,” said the guy who’s president only because of the release of 2 different sealed divorced proceedings.
Hah. That’s pretty good.
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It is kinda funny.
I know about the Ryan one because I’m a Star Trek fan but what would be the other sealed divorce case?
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yello:
I know about the Ryan one because I’m a Star Trek fan but what would be the other sealed divorce case?
As one of your favorite conservative pundits explains, he did it in the 2004 Dem primary before he did in in the general election: :
One month before the 2004 Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate, Obama was down in the polls, about to lose to Blair Hull, a multimillionaire securities trader. But then the Chicago Tribune leaked the claim that Hull’s second ex-wife, Brenda Sexton, had sought an order of protection against him during their 1998 divorce proceedings.
Those records were under seal, but as The New York Times noted: “The Tribune reporter who wrote the original piece later acknowledged in print that the Obama camp had ‘worked aggressively behind the scenes’ to push the story.” Many people said Axelrod had “an even more significant role — that he leaked the initial story.”
Both Hull and his ex-wife opposed releasing their sealed divorce records, but they finally relented in response to the media’s hysteria — 18 days before the primary. Hull was forced to spend four minutes of a debate detailing the abuse allegation in his divorce papers, explaining that his ex-wife “kicked me in the leg and I hit her shin to try to get her to not continue to kick me.”
After having held a substantial lead just a month before the primary, Hull’s campaign collapsed with the chatter about his divorce. Obama sailed to the front of the pack and won the primary. Hull finished third with 10 percent of the vote.
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Mcwing, that tweet makes no sense.
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It’s thought, for example, that Obama won the IL Senate race because of Ryan’s revealed divorce record revealing him to be an average male.
If Obama lost that Senate race, he would not have been President.
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I think that’s a pretty big leap, but at least now I know what the tweet was about. Thanks!
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“lmsinca, on June 10, 2013 at 9:34 am said:
Why is going beyond B3 a bad thing? Will it hurt the market/banking some how?”
The argument is that given how mobile finance is, it will all go to London or other markets hence the need to have uniform international standards such as Basel III.
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On Brown-Vitter, the Bloomberg writer loves it.
Would higher capitalization rules for huge banks actually cost them business? Why wouldn’t funds flow to a bank seen as more conservative?
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Mark:
Why wouldn’t funds flow to a bank seen as more conservative?
Because of FDIC. If my deposits are guaranteed, why should I care how conservative my bank is?
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Okay, that makes sense jnc, thanks. They haven’t taken that into consideration in crafting the bill? That may be a rhetorical question………..haha
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print
Five ways to stop the NSA from spying on you
By Timothy B. Lee, Updated: June 10, 2013
If recent reports are to be believed, the National Security Agency has broad powers to capture private information about Americans. They know who we’re calling, they have access to our Gmail messages and AOL Instant Messenger chats, and it’s a safe bet that they have other interception capabilities that haven’t been publicly disclosed. Indeed, most mainstream communications technologies are vulnerable to government eavesdropping.
But all is not lost! The NSA’s spying powers are vast, but there are still ways to thwart the agency’s snooping. Here are five of them.
1. Browse anonymously with Tor
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has been photographed with a Tor sticker on his laptop. Tor lets you use the Internet without revealing your IP address or other identifying information. The distributed network works by bouncing your traffic among several randomly selected proxy computers before sending it on to its real destination. Web sites will think you’re coming from whichever node your traffic happens to bounce off of last, which might be on the other side of the world.
Tor is easy to use. You can download the Tor Browser Bundle, a version of the Firefox browser that automatically connects to the Tor network for anonymous web browsing.
2. Keep your chats private with OTR
If you use a conventional instant messaging service like those offered by Google, AOL, Yahoo or Microsoft, logs of your chats may be accessible to the NSA through the PRISM program. But a chat extension called OTR (for “off the record”) offers “end-to-end” encryption. The server only sees the encrypted version of your conversations, thwarting eavesdropping.
To use OTR, both you and the person you’re chatting with need to use instant messaging software that supports it. I use a Mac OS X client called Adium, which works with Google, AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo’s chat networks, among others. Windows and Linux users can use Pidgin. OTR works as an extension to conventional instant messaging networks, seamlessly adding privacy to the IM networks you already use. You can configure Adium or Pidgin so that if a person you’re chatting with is also running an OTR-capable client, it will automatically encrypt the conversation.
3. Make secure calls with Silent Circle
The conventional telephone network is vulnerable to government wiretapping. And many Internet-based telephony applications, including Skype, are thought to be vulnerable to interception as well.
But an Internet telephony application called Silent Circle is believed to be impervious to wiretapping, even by the NSA. Like OTR, it offers “end-to-end” encryption, meaning that the company running the service never has access to your unencrypted calls and can’t turn them over to the feds. The client software is open source, and Chris Soghoian, the chief technologist of the American Civil Liberties Union, says it has been independently audited to ensure that it doesn’t contain any “back doors.”
4. Make secure calls with Redphone
Redphone is another application that makes phone calls with end-to-end encryption. Interestingly, it was developed with financial support from U.S. taxpayers courtesy of the Open Technology Fund.
The government hopes to support dissidents in repressive regimes overseas. But the only way to build a communications application that people will trust is to make it impervious to snooping by any government, including ours. So like Silent Circle, the Redphone client software is open source and has been independently audited to make sure there are no back doors.
5. Remove your cellphone battery to thwart tracking
The NSA phone records program revealed by the Guardian last week not only collects information about what phone numbers we call, it also collects data about the location of the nearest cellphone tower when we make calls. That gives the NSA the ability to determine your location every time you make a phone call — and maybe in between calls too.
Unfortunately, Soghoian says there’s no technical fix for this kind of surveillance. “The laws of physics will not let you hide your location from the phone company,” he says. The phone company needs to know where you are in order to reach you when you receive a phone call.
So if you don’t want the NSA to know where you’ve been, you only have one option: You need to turn off your cell phone. Or if you’re feeling extra paranoid, take out the battery or leave your phone at home.
You probably can’t hide metadata
Soghoian says that a similar point applies to your phone calling records. Encryption technology can prevent the government from intercepting the contents of voice communications. But it’s much harder to hide information about your calling patterns. And information about who you’ve called can be as revealing as the contents of the calls themselves.
“If you’re calling an abortion clinic or a phone sex hotline or a suicide counselor, what you say is basically the same as who you’re saying it to,” Soghoian argues.
Unfortunately, there’s no easy technological fix for this problem. Even obtaining a phone not specifically tied to your identity may not help, as it may be possible to identify you from your calling patterns.
This problem tripped up Paula Broadwell, who was outed last year as having an extra-marital relationship with Gen. David Petraeus. She had been sending e-mails from an anonymous Gmail account, and she had even been smart enough to avoid logging in from home.
But the FBI identified her anyway. Broadwell logged into the account from several different hotels. The FBI obtained lists of who had checked into those hotels on the relevant dates and looked for common names. Broadwell was the only one who had checked into all of the hotels.
So it’s fairly easy to protect the contents of your communications from government spying. But there’s no easy technological fix to prevent the government from finding out who you’re communicating with.
© The Washington Post Company
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Wow, that seems like a lot of work. I’m really mad about all of this but honestly, I’m more worried about my husband finding out about how much time I spend here…..haha
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Good piece on the new farm bill
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/06/10/the-senate-is-voting-on-a-955-billion-farm-bill-heres-whats-in-it/
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JNC, if I end up paying for WaPo it’ll be because of Ezra, I think.
I figure within 20 freebies/mo I can get Pincus’s defense stuff and Dana Priest’s investigations. But I have to wean myself off Wonkbook to beat the system.
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I’m not going to pay and I don’t like the idea of sneaking in a back door so I may just use my 20/mo to check out wonkblog and the PL occasionally. I remember having freebies at the FT and it never really worked so I somehow doubt, with the PL’s track record in the IT dept, that I’ll actually get them.
I very seldom comment over there anymore because I don’t like the format, the speed or the ignore button. The button wouldn’t be so bad if everyone didn’t waste so much time talking about it ad nauseam or telling everyone who to ignore.
I have a few independent bloggers I pay a monthly subscription to and I’d rather keep that going than support the WaPo.
I’ll try to bring more links in here everyday………………….lucky you………….hahaha
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This timeline is pretty good and gave me a little more historical perspective than I’ve been able to get anywhere else. Of course, it’s all recent history, but I’d forgotten some of it.
March 2004
In what would become one of the most famous moments of the Bush Administration, presidential aides Andrew Card and Alberto Gonzales show up at the hospital bed of John Ashcroft. Their purpose? To convince the seriously ill attorney general to sign off on the extension of a secret domestic spying program. Ashcroft refuses, believing the warrantless program to be illegal.
The hospital showdown was first reported by the New York Times, but two years later Newsweek provided more detail, describing a program that sounds similar to the one the Guardian revealed this week. The NSA, Newsweek reported citing anonymous sources, collected without court approval vast quantities of phone and email metadata “with cooperation from some of the country’s largest telecommunications companies” from “tens of millions of average Americans.” The magazine says the program itself began in September 2001 and was shut down in March 2004 after the hospital incident. But Newsweek also raises the possibility that Bush may have found new justification to continue some of the activity.
http://projects.propublica.org/graphics/surveillance-timeline
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Good piece on the NSA leaks.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113427/nsa-spying-scandal-one-leak-more-damaging-other
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I liked this a lot.
Using Metadata to Find Paul Revere
London, 1772.
The analysis in this report is based on information gathered by our field agent Mr David Hackett Fischer and published in an Appendix to his lengthy report to the government. As you may be aware, Mr Fischer is an expert and respected field Agent with a broad and deep knowledge of the colonies. I, on the other hand, have made my way from Ireland with just a little quantitative training—I placed several hundred rungs below the Senior Wrangler during my time at Cambridge—and I am presently employed as a junior analytical scribe at ye olde National Security Administration. Sorry, I mean the Royal Security Administration. And I should emphasize again that I know nothing of current affairs in the colonies. However, our current Eighteenth Century beta of PRISM has been used to collect and analyze information on more than two hundred and sixty persons (of varying degrees of suspicion) belonging variously to seven different organizations in the Boston area.
Rest assured that we only collected metadata on these people, and no actual conversations were recorded or meetings transcribed. All I know is whether someone was a member of an organization or not. Surely this is but a small encroachment on the freedom of the Crown’s subjects. I have been asked, on the basis of this poor information, to present some names for our field agents in the Colonies to work with. It seems an unlikely task.
Once again, I remind you that I know nothing of Mr Revere, or his conversations, or his habits or beliefs, his writings (if he has any) or his personal life. All I know is this bit of metadata, based on membership in some organizations. And yet my analytical engine, on the basis of absolutely the most elementary of operations in Social Networke Analysis, seems to have picked him out of our 254 names as being of unusual interest.
http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metadata-to-find-paul-revere/
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For all the blather about utopianism, things like this are why I’m a libertarian:
Legislation like the Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act of 1937 is just appalling.
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That was a good piece jnc, but this jumped out at me.
Second, to target an American for foreign intelligence purposes anywhere in the world either by electronic surveillance or by physical search the intelligence community needs probable cause that the target is an agent of a foreign power;
It’s easier to just drone him than surveil him.
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Where in the hell is Brent!!!!!
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Oh my.
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From the climate change article, here is an analogy most ATiMers can relate to:
Clearly the answer is to do nothing since in the long run we are all dead.
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David Brooks goes after Snowden as not sufficiently appreciative of authoritarian social structures.
“If you live a life unshaped by the mediating institutions of civil society, perhaps it makes sense to see the world a certain way: Life is not embedded in a series of gently gradated authoritative structures: family, neighborhood, religious group, state, nation and world. Instead, it’s just the solitary naked individual and the gigantic and menacing state.”
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David Brooks goes after Snowden as not sufficiently appreciative of authoritarian social structures.
Very well put. Brooks is nothing if not the Voice of Authority.
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