Une étude réalisée pour le Pentagone, obtenue par MSNBC, clarifie la stratégie de contre insurrection en Afghanistan

Dynamic Planning for COIN in Afghanistan

Le document contient une trentaine de pages de spaghettis du même acabit.

MSNBC : what is the actual surge strategy ?

According to an unclassified military document from the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff obtained by NBC News, the COIN strategy has a basic goal. The document says to successfully conduct a counterinsurgency, U.S. and NATO forces "must accomplish three tasks simultaneously"...

The slide is undoubtedly overwhelming. For some military commanders, the slide is genius, an attempt to show how all things in war .... But for others, the diagram represents a fool’s errand that the United States has taken on in the name of national security.

Document : MSNBC (pdf)

Le futur de la dette, selon le FMI

The IMF forecasts that gross government debt among advanced economies will continue to rise until 2014, reaching 114% of GDP, compared to just 35% for developing nations.

NYT : Goldman Sachs a parié sur la faillite des clients de ses CDO

...

Goldman was not the only firm that peddled these complex securities - known as synthetic collateralized debt obligations, or C.D.O.’s - and then made financial bets against them, called selling short in Wall Street parlance. Others that created similar securities and then bet they would fail, according to Wall Street traders, include Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley, as well as smaller firms like Tricadia Inc., an investment company whose parent firm was overseen by Lewis A. Sachs, who this year became a special counselor to Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner.

...

While the investigations are in the early phases, authorities appear to be looking at whether securities laws or rules of fair dealing were violated by firms that created and sold these mortgage-linked debt instruments and then bet against the clients who purchased them, people briefed on the matter say.

One focus of the inquiry is whether the firms creating the securities purposely helped to select especially risky mortgage-linked assets that would be most likely to crater, setting their clients up to lose billions of dollars if the housing market imploded.

Some securities packaged by Goldman and Tricadia ended up being so vulnerable that they soured within months of being created.

...

From 2005 through 2007, at least $108 billion in these securities was issued, according to Dealogic, a financial data firm. And the actual volume was much higher because synthetic C.D.O.’s and other customized trades are unregulated and often not reported to any financial exchange or market.

...

Qu’à cela ne tienne, pour le Financial Times, le patron de Goldman Sachs est « l’homme de l’année »

ELIOT SPITZER, FRANK PARTNOY and WILLIAM BLACK : Faire la clarté sur AIG

...

A.I.G. was at the center of the web of bad business judgments, opaque financial derivatives, failed economics and questionable political relationships that set off the economic cataclysm of the past two years. When A.I.G.’s financial products division collapsed - ultimately requiring a federal bailout of $180 billion - those who had been prospering from A.I.G.’s schemes scurried for taxpayer cover. Yet, more than a year after the rescue began, crucial questions remain unanswered. Who knew what, and when ? Who benefited, and by exactly how much ? Would A.I.G.’s counterparties have failed without taxpayer support ?

Rappel : Les représentants de Goldman ont siégé aux côtés des fonctionnaires du Trésor le jour où le sauvetage d’AIG a été décidé.

Nano-termisme

Narang is the head of Tradeworx, a hedge fund and financial-technology firm that makes purely automated trades ; all decisions are reached and acted on at near light speed by computers running preprogrammed algorithms. “Actually, we run two businesses,” he says. “The first trades in and out of shares in about a second and holds them for an average of two or three days. That’s the medium-speed fund. The high-speed fund could make thousands of trades a second and holds them for a matter of minutes.”

Combien de ménages US feront défaut sur leur emprunt ?

The last Mortgage Bankers Association report estimates that the total number of loans in some sort of delinquency, default, or foreclosure status to be about 8.2 million, or 14.41% of all loans. If the true number of Imminently at-risk loans is somewhere between 13 and 15 million, the default and foreclosure crisis is about 60% over.

The problem with the final 40% is that it crushes everyone other than Subprime households and likely happens over a longer period of time than the two-year Subprime Implosion.

In addition to the imminent defaulters, a large percentage will default for various unforeseen reasons tied to the macro. Throw in top strategic defaulters and we could easily see a situation over the next few years in which 20 MILLION homeowners are either delinquent, defaulted, or in the foreclosure pipeline.

Légendes :
  LTV : Loan to value, valeur de l’emprunt principal par rapport à celle du bien
  CLTV : valeur totale des emprunts et hypothèques
  03-07 : Année du prêt
  if only 33%... : Hypothèse : 1/3 des foyers ont des remboursements égaux à 50% de leurs revenus
  Approx limited doc : estimation du nombre de foyers ayant fait une déclaration de revenus sans apporter de justificatifs

L’agence Moody’s s’alarme de la perspective de troubles sociaux

In a sombre report on the outlook for next year, the credit rating agency raised the prospect that future tax rises and spending cuts could trigger social unrest in a range of countries from the developing to the developed world.

It said that in the coming years, evidence of social unrest and public tension may become just as important signs of whether a country will be able to adapt as traditional economic metrics. Signalling that a fiscal crisis remains a possibility for a leading economy, it said that 2010 would be a “tumultuous year for sovereign debt issuers”.

...

The report, which comes amid growing worries about Britain’s credit rating, said : “In those countries whose debt has increased significantly, and especially those whose debt has become unaffordable, the need to rein in deficits will test social cohesiveness. The test will be starker as growth disappoints and interest rates rise.”

...

A l’exception de la Chine, M2 se contracte

Krugman : le soutien du plan de relance va diminuer rapidement

Martin Wolf ne voit aucune relation entre inégalités et bulle financière

Questions/Réponses sur le blog de Martin Wolf

Q : How could a more equitable distribution of income be instrumental in solving the impact of this crisis ? Especially in the UK and the USA the top 20% has close to 50% of the net incomes which is one of the reasons for the bubbles on Wall Street and on the housing market.

Martin Wolf : I am not at all sure about the link between inequality and the bubble. I think that the growth of the financial sector played an important role in increasing inequality in the US and UK. It helped a very small proportion of the population to extract a large amount of rent. But I am not sure about the reverse causal relationship from higher inequality to the bubble. The argument would, I suppose, be that, lacking higher incomes, a large proportion of the population borrowed in order to sustain consumption. This is possible. But I do not know of any convincing arguments for the proposition.

L’accumulation des fortunes stratosphériques, trop importante pour s’employer dans l’économie réelle sous forme de consommation ou d’investissement productif, participe à l’inflation des actifs financiers, et représente une « fuite » dans le circuit des revenus.

C’est l’un des moteurs de la fuite en avant dans l’endettement et les actifs fictifs qui sont sa contrepartie, n’en déplaise à Wolf.

ENVIRONNEMENT

When Markets are Poison : Learning about Climate Policy from the Financial Crisis (pdf)

There are close parallels between the rampant financial innovations behind the current financial crisis and the innovations feeding carbon trading. ...

Carbon markets are the dominant official response to climate change - despite being part of the neoliberalism and financialisation now being questioned worldwide. ...

Carbon markets thus pose a challenge to progressive movements seeking a common response to the financial crisis and to official failures to address climate change. This briefing paper suggests concrete ways of holding both within the same strategic vision by proposing parallels between the rampant financial innovations that have contributed to the current crisis and the innovations feeding carbon trading. ...

The first section of the paper proposes that the enormous growth in the derivatives markets since the 1970s constitutes a wave of commodification of certainty/uncertainty countered by a Polanyian “counter-movement” of societal self-defence. ...

After reviewing some of the basics of carbon markets, a second section explores some parallels between carbon and uncertainty markets :

  Both markets have seen the construction of similar abstract commodities, largely by centralised corps of “quants” and traders.
  Embedded in neoclassical economics and its over-ambitious institutions of calculation, both markets heighten systemic dangers, necessitating movements of societal self-protection.
  Both markets involve regressive redistribution and the destruction of crucial knowledge.
  Both are vulnerable to bubbles and crashes.
  Both erode notions of transparency and conflict of interest.
  Both call into question the assumption that all imaginable markets can be successfully regulated.