Category: News

Despite a general improvement in education and training performance in the EU, progress is too slow, which means that the majority of the reform targets set for 2010 will not be reached. This is the main conclusion from the ‘Commission Progress Report towards the Lisbon Objectives in Education and Training – Indicators and Benchmarks 2009’.

This annual report, co-authored by scientists of the JRC’s Institute for the Protection and Security of the Citizen (IPSC) – Centre for Research on Lifelong Learning (CRELL), looks at Member States’ progress towards five key benchmarks in education and training for 2010.

To Our Clients, Colleagues and Friends,

· Lots of you wrote in about the video of that monster wave, with many of you identifying it as being on beach in Maui .  For those who missed it, go here. Also, about 30 of you wrote it to correct us on how many years it was since JFK was shot.  Our only mea culpa is that it’s hard to edit your own writing.  And finally we got lots of comments on those 10 things you’d want people to learn in school.  Most simply pointed out that there were 11 rules and not 10.

• If you’re thinking of running for public office. think twice.  These photos show Arnold Schwarzenegger before and after going into politics.
  

The hair style has improved, but let’s not even talk about his waist.  Still, as the bumper sticker says, “My governor can beat up your governor.”  Sic gloria ex terminatorum. By the way, do you think that when Arnold and Maria are feeling romantic, he refers to himself as the Terminator, as in “Come here, Maria, and give your Terminator a big kiss?”

• We wrote of a few lessons one should learn at college last week, and Jay Hughes of MGIC added #12:  “Don’t forget this college lesson that a cheese steak, eaten at approximately 1:00 PM the day after a rough night, makes all your troubles go away.”
• We’re writing an article on the back-office side of hedging.  That is, a discussion of the controls you need if you’re going to sell on a mandatory basis and hedge your pipeline.  Even with one of the nationally known hedging services, you’ll still  need a series of controls to prevent any surprises.  Many of you remember Capital Commerce, one of the more spectacular examples of a guy in secondary hiding his trades and/or lying about trades he never made. For those who don’t remember, this guy drove a hugely successful company right into bankruptcy by lying about his position, with tens of millions being lost.  Whatever happened to Rod Pierce?  Does anyone know?
• We plan to finish the article in a few weeks, and while we know the basic sine qua non on controls (this is Latin for “without which you are really screwed”), we suspect many of you have devised some of your own ways of staying on top of secondary marketing exposure and risk.  We’re very interested in what you might be doing, so send us a note about this.
  
• The best writing about banking comes from Chris Nichols at the PCBB, and last week he noted that studies show that about 25% of customers leave their bank in the first year and 50% of those leave in the first 90 days.  Discouraging, right?  He also wrote that customers who sign up for two or more products are 37% less likely to leave than those with only one product.
• We just listened to a Reggae CD that’s as good as anything Bob Marley ever did.  It’s Moment in Time by Beres Hammond.  If there’s any one minor criticism,  it’s that his voice might be too smooth, almost Frank Sinatra-Brook Benton smooth.  Hammond does a great job, but there’s something in his voice that says he could be a Las Vegas lounge singer, and a true reggae singer like Bob Marley would never be found at Caesar’s Palace and would never be accused of having a smooth voice.  But check out this CD.
• Most amazing movie of the year: 2012. It was produced by the same person who did Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, but this one is much, much better, showing an apocalypse that is non-stop and unrelenting.  You’ll be sitting on the edge of your seat.  The scene showing California sliding into the ocean is just flat out jaw-dropping.
• One of thing things we introduced in our FOCIS Reports awhile back was an analysis of Secondary Market Leakage.  If you build in 200 bps margin on your FHA and are only getting, say, 175, there’s a real problem there.  It could be from missing commitments, mis-coding occupancy status and a dozen other things that need to be looked into.  Leakage is rarely due to secondary marketing mistakes and is almost always the result of something going wrong in the operations, often doc draw or funding. Highly profitable companies have almost no leakage.
• FHLMC said it may lose $500 million due to the bankruptcy of Taylor Bean. We think someone may go to jail on this one.  And his initials might be L.F.
• Did you notice how Germans didn’t make a big deal about the November 9, 20^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall?  Hmm.  Maybe it’s because November 9, 1918 was when Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated, because on November 9^th, 1923 Adolph Hitler staged his Munich beer hall putsch, or because November 9, 1937 was Kristellnacht, when Nazi thugs attacked Jews and burned synagogues throughout Germany .  Maybe November 9^th is a date they’d just rather not think about.
• For those of you who ask us about jumbo programs, we can’t  believe you’re not selling to SunTrust!  They offer (1)  loan amounts to $2 million, (2)  owner occupied 1-2 Units, (3) fixed Rates + 5-1, 7-1 and 10-1 ARMS, and (4)  LTVs to 75%.   What more could you ask for?
• Good old Goldman Sachs has earned $8.5 billion for the first three quarters, and we just saw that they are paying their employees, on an annualized basis, an average of $717,000.   We know the senior people make millions, but it makes you wonder if it would be worth it to work there for a year or two as a janitor.
• We once commented on the opening sentence to Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, as being the longest sentence we’d ever seen.  We also remarked that we thought it was about the most over-rated book in history, so we were thrilled to see what Evelyn Waugh said when reading it, that “I am reading Proust for the first time, and it is very poor stuff.  I think he was mentally defective.”  YES!!!!  We’ve always thought that the best advice to give kids going off to college is to never take a class where you have to read Beowulf, and we need to add to that anything written by Proust.
• Did you know that students in China do twice the amount of homework per night as kids in the United States ?  And looking at their overall economic strength, you need look no further than the Chinese phrase which is translates as “Hide your capabilities and bide your time.”  Does anyone  doubt that they will compete with us to be the #1 superpower of the future?

We have attached a little piece on Thanksgiving.  We send it out every year, and we hope it resonates with you.

Thanksgiving (1)

Garrett, Watts & Co.

Helping mortgage lenders increase revenues, control costs, and better manage risk.

• Mike McAuley      281-250-2536
• Corky Watts         408-497-3135
• Joe Garrett         510-469-8633

Music streaming services have been seeing a lot of interest lately but most of the focus has been on either newcomers or the failing ones. Last.fm, one of the oldest and still one of the most popular music services, has been staying quiet for the most part, but things are definitely moving forward behind the scenes. While others are still trying to get their business off the ground, Last.fm has made a very, very interesting deal with Microsoft to get its service on the company’s popular game console the Xbox 360.

The deal was announced half a year ago, but things tend to move slower in the gaming world than in social media, so the Last.fm integration only came to fruition last week. And, the results are already beginning to show, the music streaming service managed to get almost one million new subscribers from the Xbox Live users which signed up for Last.fm. The CBS-owned company says that it was the biggest growth the site has seen since launch and that it broke the record for most users registered in a 24-hour period.

They’re not just signing up, the new users are making the most out of the service and already 120 million minutes of music have been streamed from the consoles. It’s clear by now that the new social media features on the Xbox 360 are a hit and Last.fm should be more than delighted. Of… (read more)

We were just talking about how the justice system in Spain seems at least somewhat more reasonable on the subject of file sharing, and here’s yet another example. A court has overturned injunctions on two file sharing sites and fined the anti-piracy group that brought charges against them in the first place for “acting in bad faith.” The case was dismissed because the court realized (yet again) that linking to infringing material is not infringing itself. But, the “bad faith” part involved the anti-piracy group, SGAE, tricking the operator of the sites into believing that two SGAE employees were representatives of the court and had the right to search his home and confiscate computer hard drives. We’ve seen such things allowed elsewhere, so it’s nice that the Spanish courts are letting private anti-piracy groups know that they are not law enforcement.

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For those who download content from the PlayStation Store using multiple PS3s, listen up. Sony Computer Entertainment has revised their Terms of Ser…

Seasonally-adjusted initital jobless claims fell 35,000 from last week to 466,000. Yet they rose 68,080 on an unadjusted basis. This basically means they rose less than normal for this time of year.

At 466,000 on a seasonally adjusted basis, the jobless claims are now below 500,000 for the first time since January, when they were 488,000. They are also at the lowest level since the week of September 13th, 2008 when they hit 459,000.

Department of Labor: The highest insured unemployment rates in the week ending Nov. 7 were in Puerto Rico (6.2 percent), Oregon (5.5), Alaska (5.1), Nevada (5.1), Pennsylvania (4.9), Wisconsin (4.9), Arkansas (4.7), California (4.7), Michigan (4.6), North Carolina (4.6), and Washington (4.6).

The largest increases in initial claims for the week ending Nov. 14 were in Florida (+1,313), Indiana (+607), Hawaii (+278), and North Dakota (+81), while the largest decreases were in California (-7,987), Texas (-4,710), Pennsylvania (-4,321), Wisconsin (-2,716), and Ohio (-2,486).

Check out the official release here.

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See Also:

• Watch The Country Get Fired: Unemployment By County 2007-2009
• Unemployment Claims Drop Nicely, Now Below 500,000…
• 10%+ Unemployment Through 2015, Says Mish

Filed under: China, Plants/Manufacturing, Earnings/Financials

Changan is coming to America, just not yet. Aiming to establish a base in Mexico with which to move into the U.S. market, the Chinese automaker signed a deal last year to build a plant south of the border. The familiar story of planetary financial catastrophe has encouraged Changan to tap the brakes on its plans, however.

Said the company’s R&D head to Reuters, “We are still doing market research there. There won’t be any big investment for the time being.” As if the crisis weren’t enough, Changan, like other Chinese makers, is also looking at getting into the luxury market with a vehicle developed in-house, and that will divert potential resources from overseas expansion. That means we Americans won’t get to sample MPVs like the Changan Joice (shown above) for a while longer.

[Source: Reuters]

REPORT: China’s Changan delays plan to enter North American auto market originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 25 Nov 2009 08:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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To carry trade or not to carry trade. That is the question.

In the last few weeks a host of different banks have stepped forward to question both the depth and degree of the current dollar carry trade.  Among them have been Goldman Sachs, UBS and Barclays Capital – all claiming the risks of executing speculative dollar-funded carry trades still outweigh the potential returns, meaning the trade isn’t half as popular as the market is making out, nor is it contributing to any such thing as a global asset bubble.

Considering the above then it’s interesting that Sean Corrigan of Diapason Commodities does his best to prove the exact opposite in his latest note.

Read the whole thing at FT Alphaville >>

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Proof That Everyone Is Obsessed With The Dollar Carry Trade
• Roubini Is Wrong About The Giant Dollar Carry Trade Going Bust
• Roubini: The New Dollar Carry-Trade Is A Disaster In The Making

Marine viruses — major players in the global ecosystem
Curtis A. Suttle

Abstract of scientific article:

Viruses are by far the most abundant ‘lifeforms’ in the oceans and are the reservoir of most of the genetic diversity in the sea. The estimated 10^30 viruses in the ocean, if stretched end to end, would span farther than the nearest 60 galaxies. Every second, approximately 10^23 viral infections occur in the ocean. These infections are a major source of mortality, and cause disease in a range of organisms, from shrimp to whales. As a result, viruses influence the composition of marine communities and are a major force behind biogeochemical cycles.
Each infection has the potential to introduce new genetic information into an organism or progeny virus, thereby driving the evolution of both host and viral assemblages. Probing this vast reservoir of genetic and biological diversity continues to yield exciting discoveries.

Nature Reviews Microbiology Volume 5 October 2007 pages 801-812

(This guest post originally appeared at the author’s blog)

Goldman is increasingly confident in the end of year rally.  In fact, a recent piece of research says December could be one of the strongest months of 2009 (not an easy feat considering the year we’ve had).  Like other bullish investors, they believe seasonality will be an important influence on year-end action:

As we move into the year end, we take a look at the seasonality effect in equity markets. December stands out as one of the best months for equities, using both long- and short-term data; we think this year will be similar. In years when the first 11 months have yielded good returns, December has tended to be particularly strong. 

December yields good returns on average
Based on monthly data going back to 1974, December has on average returned twice as much as the monthly average (1.7% vs. 0.8%). It is the third best month based on average data and the second best one using median data. It is interesting to note that January is also a good month for equities based on long-term data. December and January both yielded a positive return in more than 70% of the cases.

Goldman goes on to note that December is particularly strong when the current year has been strong: 

The better the year, the better the December
There have been worries among market participants that the year end could see weakness in equities, following the strong year-to-date performance. However, historical data tell the opposite. In years when the return from January to November has been strong, December has tended to be very strong as well.

How to play it?  Don’t rely on commodities to continue their inverse dollar surge.  In fact, the best performing assets in big years have been financials cyclicals:

Oil & Gas has underperformed historically in December

Commodity related sectors exhibit the lowest relative returns among all sectors in December. This holds even when restricting the sample to years when the market went up by more than 20% in the run-up to December. Conversely, Financials and selected Cyclicals have been the best performing sectors in December when the market has risen by more than 20% in the first 11 months. Looking at countries, the results are less interesting as the differentiation is less marked than between sectors. Germany stands out as the best performing country on average inDecember.

 Conditional seasonality: The better the year, the stronger the December
Recently, there has been a lot of talk in the investor community about de-risking and investors locking in their performance for the year. This has resulted in more bearishness going into the year end, as many have questioned the potential for further market upside based on the sustainability of the economic recovery. A seasonal analysis conditional on year-to-date performance tells a very different story. The better the performance has been from January to November, the more positive the return has tended to be in December (Exhibit 5).

Where to play it?  Italy and Germany have been the best performers:

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See Also:

• Saut: Market Keeps Pushing Higher Despite A "Cacophany Of Crybabies"
• Jeff Saut: Even If Stocks Are A Bubble, Everyone Has To Keep Buying
• Goldman: It’s 2004 All Over Again

Filed under: Motorsports, Hirings/Firings/Layoffs, Earnings/Financials

With all the money that goes into running an F1 team, and the limited opportunity to make any of it back, we can’t see why anyone would view owning a team as a sound investment. Evidently Herr Toto Wollf feels otherwise, as the Austrian financier and gentleman racing driver has acquired a minority interest in Williams Grand Prix Engineering.

This marks the first time in over 30 years of operations that Frank Williams and Patrick Head, the two team principals, have sold shares to an outside party. For his part, Sir Frank insists that business will carry on as usual, that they’re not relinquishing control over the team, and that the sale was simply a way of ensuring the team’s financial viability. Tellingly, though, he also indicated that Wolff, some 30 years younger than Williams and Head and the veteran of local rallies and international sportscar racing, could take the reins some day in the future.

The announcement comes hot on the heels of reports that Renault – once Williams engine partner during its heyday – was considering a similar move. Follow the jump to read the official announcement, complete with Toto Wolff’s bio.

[Source: Williams]

Continue reading Williams sells minority stake to Austrian investor

Williams sells minority stake to Austrian investor originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 25 Nov 2009 07:55:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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At the time, nothing came of it, but Raj isn’t the first member of the Rajaratnam family to come under insider trading suspicion.

WSJ: In papers filed Tuesday in a New York federal court, the Galleon Group founder disclosed that he was deposed by federal authorities in 2007 in an insider-trading investigation involving “an unrelated hedge fund.” That fund was run by Rengan Rajaratnam, Raj’s brother, people familiar with the matter said. The investigation of Sedna began as an audit by the SEC and eventually turned into an insider-trading investigation into both Sedna and Galleon, a person close to the situation said.

The disclosure surfaced as Raj Rajaratnam denied civil insider-trading charges filed last month by the Securities and Exchange Commission. In response to the SEC complaint, Raj Rajaratnam’s lawyers argued that the wiretaps used in an insider-trading case filed last month against him violated his constitutional rights. As part of that filing, Mr. Rajaratnam’s lawyers argued the wiretaps were unnecessary because he was already providing information to the government in the 2007 investigation of his brother’s hedge fund. The status of the investigation of the fund run by Rengan Rajaratnam, the brother, isn’t clear. The SEC declined to comment, as did federal prosecutors bringing a separate criminal case against Raj Rajaratnam. A lawyer for Rengan Rajaratnam didn’t return calls for comment. Rengan Rajaratnam hasn’t been charged with any wrongdoing.

Obviously, we’ll assume there’s nothing there. However it would be interesting to know if being pulled in for a deposition on hedge fund insider trading in his brother’s case spooked Raj at all.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Assessing Raj Rajaratnam’s Aggressive Legal Moves
• A Post-Galleon Legal Guide For Hedge Funds On Insider Trading
• The Insider Trading Alarm Bells Grow Louder

The BGR has Verizon’s Black Friday deals, and there is one that may be of interest to Windows Mobile fans.

The HTC Ozone, for those who think touch screens are passé, will be available for the low price of only $9.99 after a $100 Mail in Rebate and of course on a two year contract, and will be available with Verizon’s Buy One, Get One Free deal.

The Windows Mobile standard smartphone features GPS and a 528 Mhz processor, so is no slouch, and may be just what the business-focussed user needs.

Read more at BGR here.

Life insurance companies currently have $150 billion of commercial real estate exposure, and $308 billion total mortgage exposure according to Fitch Ratings.

The industry needs to brace itself for billions of losses unless commercial real estate markedly improves.

Fitch expects life insurers’ losses on commercial real estate investments to hit 9% of exposure.

Investment News: Fitch projects the potential losses from commercial-mortgage-backed securities owned by life carriers to be between $13.1 billion and $16.0 billion. Directly-placed mortgages will generate $5.4 billion to $6.6 billion in losses through 2011, under Fitch’s core stress scenario.

…

Fitch also notes that the steep declines in statutory capital over the last 18 months have hobbled the insurers’ ability to get through an extended downturn. To date, the life insurers have not recognized material impairments or losses on investments related to commercial real estate, according to Fitch.

Read more here.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Bill Ackman Has Made An $800 Million Killing On Bankrupt Commercial Real Estate (GGP)
• Distressed Commercial Real Estate Now 600% Larger Than 2006
• Commercial Real Estate Slide Kills City Budgets

Things are moving as fast as usual at Mozilla Labs and, hardly a week after the previous release, the developers have released a new beta for Mozilla’s bookmark and settings sync project for Firefox and Fennec, the organization’s mobile version of the web browser. Weave Sync 1.0 Beta 2 fixes several bugs which affected the previous beta and is another step towards the final release which should come soon enough.

The new beta also brings several of updates and improvements of the existing features. Users should find it easier to recover their passwords or secret phrases in this new release and Mozilla says this should come in handy for those setting up the add-on on a second machine, as it looks like many were having trouble remembering their credentials at this point.

The new Weave Sync beta also improved the way it handles same-name folders which have different bookmarks on different computers. On occasions, Weave Sync would place the bookmarks in the wrong folder, but this issue should now be fixed. The add-on now syncs history deletion as well, so removing a website from the browser history on one machine will now remove it in all of the synced browsers. The functionality had been available only for bookmarks until now.

Lastly, Weave Sync now automatically labels tabs which were opened… (read more)

Diego and Monica “Zuzzù” has a simple wall hack for us.

“To create this simple but original composition we used the Traby system: 4 shelf units and 2 doors. We removed the door handles and plastered the holes. Then we painted the doors white. We also add the new Grip handles at the top the doors. As alternative drawers, we used two Branas Basket in the two centre shelves.”

See more on their blog facciotuttodaseduto (I do everything seated) which is in Italian.

ChurchHatesTucker writes “The ABA Journal was unable to secure an interview with the USPTO chief, so they published a faux business method patent for securing an interview. Within four hours, they got their interview.”

Yes, but the real question is whether or not the USPTO would approve the patent…

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HPDirect.com will be selling the HP Pavilion dm3z notebook for just $529 on Black Friday. This is up to $329 off the their regular price of $858, depending on the configuration. This notebook comes with Window 7 Home Premium , an AMD Athlon processor, 2GB of RAM, a 160 GB Hard Drive, 13.3” high-definition display and HDMI port.

This affordable and portable notebook is less than 1” thick and weighs only 4.21 lb, making it easy to carry around town. The Pavilion dm3z is metallic, making it look a lot different than other PCs in this category. Please visit HPDirect.com to get this deal.

This model of hp starts at $529 with basic, quick ship model for this laptop comes in $599.99 (quick ship model means its ready to ship and will ship on same day), where as recommended model starts with $719.99. At this point of time HPstore hasn’t declared the detail configuration of Notebook which they are putting on deals. So we have listed the configuration choice available for this notebook.

HP Pavilion dm3z Notebook Specification:

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