More Inverted Info
From the
LA Times:
The interest rate, or yield, on the 10-year Treasury note — a benchmark for other long-term rates, such as for mortgages — ended the year at 4.39%.
By contrast, the yield on the two-year Treasury note ended at 4.4%.
Normally, longer-term bonds pay more in interest than shorter-term issues to compensate investors for the risk of tying up their money for an extended period.
When long- and short-term interest rates "invert," it often is a sign that bond investors believe the economy will slow — so they're locking in long-term yields in anticipation that rates overall soon will level off or even head lower.
The last time short-term rates were above long-term rates was in the second half of 2000. By the spring of 2001 the U.S. economy had fallen into recession.
Inverted yield curve
The
yield curve inverted. This is a classic sign that a recession is coming because banks don't make money when they lend, so they don't lend, which shrinks credit, which shrinks investment.
Takin My Country Back
http://www.jtmp.org/Songs/takinmycountryback.mp3
Listen!
Some of my band's music for your holiday listening pleasure:
Do Your Duty (10mb)
Patriotic (4mb)
Oompah (8.7mb)
Oompah2 (15mb)
Ignore more years!
You want blog. you got blog.
Here's a question: Why did the President go on the air to ask for our support? He doesn't need it. What can we do about the Iraq War? Not a whole lot. I wasn't asked how I felt about going to war in the first place. We're you? Did your Congressman or Senator ask how you felt about it before voting to OK the war? Nope. When thousands of neo hippies marched in the streets of my city, San Francisco and elsewhere President Bush just patted them on the head and told them that the right to protest is part of the fabric of America, so why care what we think now? Is it because it's Christmas and the troops are probably getting kinda antsy to go home? What are they gonna do throw down thier M-whatevers and drive their Bradleys to NYC? I don't think so. Maybe if recruiting numbers were down I could understand the need to pump up the rhetoric to make sure young men were signing up but apparently that's not a problem. Was the reason the President went on live to TV to apologize for bad intel? Seems kinda dumb, if you've picked up a newspaper in the last few years and read anything about the war you could have figured that out.
I'm guessing that the only thing Bush has on his mind right now is beating Fmr.
President James Buchanan at not being the worst President in history. When viewed in this light, it makes sense that the President would go on TV to state his case. He's not talking to us, the living. He's talking to some future historian who just might take his side.
When Bush leaves office his current approval numbers will mean nothing to him or us. The situation in Iraq will probably be unresolved. He's beyond helping any Republican candidate running in 2008. He's got nothing but history books to impress.
Which brings me to a much more interesting point: Who gives a shit? If you look at Bush's speech he's very interested in right and wrong: whether he was right to invade Iraq, if it's right to torture, if it's right to spy on Americans, if it's right to pursue terrorists or leave them alone. Bush spends a lot of his time deciding what is right (or wrong). Here's the problem with that way of thinking: What is right today may be wrong tomorrow and vice versa. Bush could save himself a lot of Sunday night prime-time mea culpas if he realized that the world is a changing place full of lots and lots of gray tones and very little black or white. He'd would have been a better president had he not overreacted to 9-11 and trusted us, the citizens of this country and the rest of the world. He would have been wise to listen to the voices of dissent rather than stand by his (ahem, idiotic) convictions. My guess is that his approval numbers would be higher, America would be viewed in a better light internationally, we'd be able to board a plane or subway, or enter a football game without being frisked and searched and we'd have a lot less dead Iraqis (30,000? -- more like 100,000) and American Troops.
This isn't a rant to say things should be different, for I would be making the same mistake that Bush is making (this is black and should be white). This is a rant to say Bush (and others like him) is/are living in his/their own fantasy world. He is our President which makes his actions impact on us. But my reaction to him (and others of his ilk) is to ignore them as much as possible and not dive into a belief or an opposite reaction to it. If we ignore him, he's just one misguided individual talking into a camera that broadcasts to nobody (kinda like C-SPAN). This isn't retaliation, it's survival. We don't have to play along. We don't have to participate in the lunacy. In fact it's lunacy (on our part) if we do participate while knowing that it's lunacy to begin with.
This is not to say that we should go through life willy-nilly, as if everything were hunky-dorey while outside everything is helter-skelter. Oh no, of course we know the sky is falling. Of course we know tyrants can wear little US flag pins on thier suits. But if we are to break the chain of cause-effect: Osama did this to me, I must do this to Saddam or Haji or little Ibrahim, then we have to step outside of it all, detach from the viscious circle of hate, for the hate circle is a specter, a figment of the imagination and if ignored fully it shall dissipate like a bad acid trip and our history books will go right from William Jefferson Clinton to Hillary Rodham Clinton* without a Bush in between.
*This is not my wish by the way, I think Hillary will be even more scary that George W. but my guess is she will win in '08.
Bring that Beat Back
After numerous complaints, we have returned (probably temporarily) some readability to Lowbar.
Visit the Lowbar
NewsWiki, if you want your life to suck wik.
