Letters to the Editor
cynshep
Published Letters: 163 Editor's Choice: 46
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I'd love to be read 'We'
[Read the article: The mad Russian]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]could someone point out where I could score enough Paxil to do so without plunging into deeper depression regarding the state of the Earth?
No? Damn.
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Patronized by Heidi
[Read the article: The mad Russian]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Excuse me, honey.
I'm certainly not a 'lit' student but I have only to glance over at my bookshelves to see Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov, and Solzhenitsyn amply represented.
Thomas Mann, check.
Flaubert, Stendahl, Balzac, check. Even Georges Sand and Anatole France.
Also Narayan, V.S. Naipaul, Ha Jin, Vikram Seth, David Davidar, Jorge Amado and much else.
Jeez. Get over yourself. This is a literate bunch at Salon.
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Yeah, I posted about this article waaaay down there
[Read the article: Nothing but bad options]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]in the original Enron thread.
here's the important part:
"The Financial Accounting Standards Board, which is responsible for keeping GAAP up to date, stands by its standard but told BusinessWeek in a written statement that it is "concerned that the disclosures associated with these types of loans [are] not providing enough transparency relative to their associated risks."*
Camouflaged Losses
Risks or not, the accounting treatment is boosting reported profits sharply. At Santa Monica (Calif.)-based FirstFed Financial Corp. (FED ), "deferred interest" -- what an outsider might call phantom income -- made up 67% of second-quarter pretax profits. FirstFed did not respond to requests for comment. At Oakland (Calif.)-based Golden West Financial Corp. (GDW ), which has been selling option ARMs for two decades, deferred interest made up about 59.6% of the bank's earnings in the first half of 2006. "It's not the loan that's the problem," says Herbert M. Sandler, CEO of World Savings Bank, parent of Golden West. "The problem is with the quality of the underwriting."
In the middle of one of the hottest U.S. markets, Coral Gables (Fla.)-based BankUnited Financial Corp. (BKUNA ) posted a $14.8 million loss for the quarter ended June, 2005. Yet it reported record profits of $23.8 million for the quarter ended in June of this year -- $20.9 million of which was earned in deferred interest. Some 92% of its new loans were option ARMs."
* THis is FASB-ese for 'be very afraid.'
Don't know how many of ya'll were awake during Money and Banking but what's happening to this 'phantom income' is the banks turn around and relend it...the 'multiple expansion of deposits' magic.
The money supply is about to become just so much confetti.
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I'm with Boo
[Read the article: The mad Russian]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]And Lev.
Hell, I read my way through a huge swath of the canon of modern French literature as an accounting/economics major. I'd get the strangest looks in the Biz School lugging around 'Germinal' along with 'Intro to Money and Banking'.
Didn't hang out with those folks anyway. Would have interferred with my Friday poker with the English Department faculty.
Heh.
All started with a friend leaving for 'the Coast', as friends were apt to do in 1969, giving me the 'Complete Collected Short Fiction of Guy de Maupassant' and metastasized from there.
That I was also reading my way through the Hornblower cycle, Vonnegut and everything copyright laws would allow of P. G. Wodehouse should prove my bona fides as a garden variety hyper-literate more in need of sympathy than anything else.
It's no joke getting people to help me move. They take one look at the bookshelves and run for the hills.
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Hell, yes, Chris
[Read the article: Nothing but bad options]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]But I'd like to add that it's not just mutual funds, and much more ominiously public and private pension/benefits managers, which are buying this fodder.
It's also high-risk players like hedge funds. And China holds a s**t load of this funny paper. The accelarating buy-backs will damage more than the smaller and more improvident banks IMHO.
I thought FASB took a fairly respectable, or at least defensible, position (in their limited and non-agile way - heh) vis a vis stock options but Congress, in the person of Holy Joe Lieberman, took matters into their grubby paws and ignored them.
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Beaten to the punch
[Read the article: Nelson Algren's New Orleans]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]as to the character and location of Perdido Street. Ain't in the Vieux Carre.
Ah, well. I'll have another cup of Community dark roast and wish for Morning Call.
(A former NOLA resident - pre-emptively evacuated myself one year before Katrina thanks to the Times-Picayune.)
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Finding a hill
[Read the article: Nelson Algren's New Orleans]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Dere's dat one over to da Audubon Zoo.
Only hill I know of - and it was built so New Orlean's kids would know what a 'hill' looked like.
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Any bets
[Read the article: Stupid Chinese imperialist bullying]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]as to the ultimate buyers of the horns of those white rhinos?
(Hint: Chinese folk medicine holds rhino horn as the ultimate 'Viagra' and it commands astronomical prices.)
Or the tusks of the 100 elephants slaughtered for ivory?
China in Africa: Same old dreary story of exploitation, extortion, environmental degradation, and corruption.
As for China itself: every thing old and discredited is new again. Including concubinage and 'Imperial' banquets centered on endangered species.
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You might mention
[Read the article: The battle of Dimawe]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]those nationalized diamond mines as starting point to explain the relatively high per capita income. And 'per capita income' is so misleading as a measure of properity anyway.
IT's the old 'Bill Gates walks into a Burger King' thing. Everyone's 'per capita income' reaches into the millions but there' really just one obscenely wealthy guy.
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We are approaching what I call
[Read the article: Japan hiccups]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]the Wily Coyote moment.
He's run off the edge of the cliff. Standing on thin air.
Everything's fine until he looks down....
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You might want to check out
[Read the article: Log on to Ultrabrown]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The NYTImes 5 page examination of how diabetes is ravaging India. Tell you more about changing, and unchanging, Indian cultural norms than those famous hips - though admittedly less entertaining.
Okay, it's a solid downer.
I read several years ago that India forgoes 3 village schools and a water treatment plant for every doctor it trains. Doctors who are now here in large numbers while India faces a critical shortage of medical personnel at every level.
In terms of public health, I think they'd have been better advised to build the water treatment plants.