LOW Finance, deadly gas and dissidents

Notes 38

The cost of doing business and the convenience of slicing up the pie in one place

by Andrew Ross Sorkin
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
The New York Times
What's the price tag to be a Davos Man
Chief executives, government leaders and academics around the world are headed to Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum's annual meeting this week
Just to have the opportunity to be invited to Davos, you must be invited to be a member of the World Economic Forum, a Swiss nonprofit that was founded by Klaus Schwab, a German-born academic who managed to build a global conference in the snow.
If you want to take an entourage, say, five people, you're talking about the "Strategic Partner" level. The price tag: $527,000. (That's the annual membership entitling you to as many as five invitations. Each invitation is still $19,000 each.

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The Davos safety net, the things that Davos connections make possible

Panel finds financial crisis was avoidable…
By AP Business Writers Marcy Gordon And Daniel Wagner

WASHINGTON
The government-appointed panel investigating the roots of the financial crisis says the meltdown occurred because government officials and Wall Street executives ignored warning signs and failed to manage risks.
"A combination of excessive borrowing, risky investments and lack of transparency put the financial system on a collision course with crisis," the report said.
The commission criticized the view held by some regulators that markets are "self-correcting" and banks can police themselves. Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan pushed this hands-off approach for decades, at the urging of the financial industry, the report said
It also criticized bankers who got rich by creating trillions of dollars in risky investments.
The Bush and Clinton administrations, the current and previous Federal Reserve chairmen, and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner all bear some responsibility for allowing the crisis to happen, the panel said

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Poor American or Poor Asians. Poor is relative. Seems like there are always bloodsuckers willing to feed on the poor

Lies, Hype and Profit: The Truth About Microfinance
contributors@theatlantic.com (Kentaro Toyama), On Friday January 28, 2011,
The story of microfinance began in Bangladesh, where economist Muhammad Yunus discovered that a stool-maker from a poor village was effectively enslaved because she did not have the 22 cents that would let her to bypass usurious middlemen. Yunus made an interest-free $27 loan to her and other villagers the next day.
And so, microcredit was born. Worldwide there are now over 600 million microcredit clients with combined loans of over $100 billion outstanding. The United Nations declared 2005 to be the Year of Microcredit, and in 2006, Yunus was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Five years later, microcredit has descended into controversy. Critics question whether it is truly helping the poor or driving them further into poverty with one of the things it was intended to replace -- unfair and exorbitant lending rates. Bangladesh has launched an investigation of Yunus' Grameen Bank. A scourge of suicides by over-indebted borrowers forced the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh to crack down on loans. Even Yunus himself took to the New York Times to blast "megaprofits" made by some microcredit banks
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Maybe Pvt Manning should have been arrested in Cuba

Cuban dissident released after brief detention
AP – Thu Jan 27
HAVANA - Cuban authorities have released a well-known dissident after detaining him briefly as he and other opposition figures tried to block the eviction of a woman from a home in the central city of Santa Clara.

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One ml of gas deadly enough to lock down base. We don’t need to worry about WMD being ripped off abroad. We’ve got adequate supplies ofWMD is scattered around the U.S. enough to kill us all.

US base locked down over missing nerve agent
LOS ANGELES (AFP)
The Dugway Proving Ground in Utah was sealed Wednesday after a routine inventory check on sensitive materials found that a vial with less than 1 milliliter -- a quarter of a teaspoon -- of the VX nerve agent was missing.
The facility carries out tests to protect troops against biological attacks, such as those the United States feared could be used by Saddam Hussein's forces when it invaded Iraq in 2003
US authorities have long been concerned about preventing chemical, biological or nuclear materials getting into the hands of extremists who could use them to attack the United States.