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How can you tell that nobody of economic influence cares about what former federal reserve chairman Paul Volcker has to say anymore?

Some say by the fact that the 30-year treasury yield is breaking out of a long-term downtrend, previously established under Volcker’s tenure when he beat down inflationary expectations in the U.S. government bond market.

Buttonwood:

Kit Juckes of the Ecu group points out that the yield on the 30-year treasury bond yield has moved above its 100-month average. This average has been trending down since the mid-1980s so this is quite a moment (as of last night’s close, the yield was 4.84% and the average was 4.71%).

Buttonwood argues that this 30-year break-out could be the result of fact that inflation-fighting, well-established since Volcker, has taken a back seat to stimulating the economy and preventing the financial system from collapsing.

Perhaps, but let’s not forget that even inflation expectations are still low in the market as proven by looking at inflation protected securities vs. plain vanilla ones. (Just to be clear, Buttonwood acknowledged that inflation was currently low right now, so we’re not saying they missed this. We’re just saying that it makes a huge argument against the concept of inflation concerns sending up yields right now.)

We’d actually be happy to seee the 30-year yield keep rising, and anyone who has berated ‘easy money’ should agree.

You can’t be complaining about a market fueled with cheap money while at the same time crying wolf when treasury yields are rising from historically depressed levels… especially if both current inflation and inflation expectations in the market are pretty low, as they are.

So if the 30-year yield heads back to 6%, on a benign inflation outlook, it would actually be a good thing since it’s just the cost of money moving away from historically depressed levels.

Yet, of course, if the yield spikes due to an explosion of inflation expectations, then that would be an entirely different story. But that’s not the case right now.

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Well, isn’t this just great. Just a little while back, the Justice Department announced that fighting “intellectual property crime” was a major priority. At the time, we wondered if there weren’t more important things for the DOJ to be working on. The answer is yes, of course, but the Justice Department has apparently decided to push them off the priority list. A new report on identity fraud notes that it has “faded” as a priority for the DOJ and the FBI. Ah, right, the stuff that actually harms individuals directly and isn’t a civil or business model issue? Why focus on that when you can prop up your friends in Hollywood?

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In some sense, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission is a lame duck. Headed by Phil Angelides and created in May 2009, the FCIC is not due to file its final report until December. Financial reform legislation will likely come up for a vote next month. The panel’s ultimate recommendations will come months too late to make it into the bill — the final details of which are currently being hammered out by Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and others. Where the FCIC is most important is in its testimonies, dragging Wall Street titans and former Fed and Treasury officials to the podium and grilling them.

Yesterday, it heard from former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan. Today, the FCIC hears from former top Citi executives Chuck Prince and Robert Rubin, as well as the current and former comptrollers of the currency (responsible for regulating national banks); tomorrow, it hears from former Fannie Mae officials and Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight executives.

What did Greenspan say of importance? Not much. (Here is a copy of his prepared remarks and a copy of his review of the boom and bust, titled “The Crisis,” prepared for the Brookings Institution and released last month.) Much of his testimony retread well-worn ground. But the “Maestro” did assert that he was correct 70 percent of the time during his Fed tenure. Angelides cannily asked him: “Would you put [the financial crisis] in the 30 percent category?” Greenspan replied, “I don’t know.”

He also said that banks had been undercapitalized for the past 40 to 50 years (a problem under the Fed’s purview) and argued that financial services might be too complicated for regulators to regulate. “It’s not a simple issue of, ‘Let’s regulate better. It’s a different world,” he said. “The complexity is awesome.” He hedged that statement by noting that banks’ counterparties — the firms on the other sides of their trades and loans — helped alert regulators.

While you were sleeping, Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev traveled to Prague and signed the New START nuclear-arms reductions accord, pledging to reduce their countries’ nuclear arsenals by 30 percent and cap the deployed missiles, submarines and bombers that deliver nukes at 700. The task before the White House now is overcoming initial GOP misgivings in the Senate that the still-unreleased treaty will in any way impact U.S. plans to construct a missile shield in eastern Europe, something the Russians aren’t too pleased about. And the first step in that task falls to Brian McKeon, a longtime aide to Vice President Biden.

Greenwire: Scientists have confirmed that a large fruit-eating lizard in the northern Philippines island of Luzon is a new species. The tree-dwelling forest monitor lizard is noted for its ability to hide from humans, its main predators, explaining why it has gone undetected for so long.

The lizard can grow more than 6 feet in length, but weighs about 22 pounds. It is hunted for its flesh, which can be eaten. Scientists from the University of Kansas say it is only the third known fruit-eating lizard species.

Discovering a new, large vertebrate is rare. Photographs of the brightly colored lizard first starting appearing in 2001, and there was no scientific identification for it. Stories of the lizard spread over the next few years until graduate students on a 2009 expedition gathering evidence managed to catch an adult male.

Tests confirmed it was a new species and that there was a great genetic difference between the new lizard and the Gray’s monitor lizard, the closest relative. The findings were published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters (Deborah Zabarenko, Reuters, April 7). – JP

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Containing pre foreclosure homes in Columbia could be included in the program that will be submitted by South Carolina government officials after the state recently received an allocation of $138 million from the $600 million provided by the Obama administration to five states to help the unemployed keep their homes and to spark economic growth.

According to Clayton Ingram, spokesperson for the South Carolina State Housing Finance and Development Authority, the agency has not yet determined the counties that will share in the money. The state needs to craft a plan on how it will spend the allocation, and if approved, the state will likely get the money later this year.

The pace of foreclosures in Columbia shot up by a staggering 65 percent last year compared to the pace in 2008, although foreclosure activity in the metro area is not as bad as in other areas. Columbia ranked 99th in a listing of 203 metro areas according to percentages of foreclosures.

The total number of Columbia pre foreclosure homes and the number of residential units that have entered real estate foreclosure listings reached 4,461 in 2009. This number represented 1.44 percent of all households in the metro area.

Housing agency spokesperson Ingram said that Columbia and Greenville survived the housing crisis much better than places farther from metropolitan areas. He added that counties struggling from the highest jobless rates could be given priority.

According to officials of the South Carolina Employment Security Commission, the range of jobless rates throughout the state is wide. In December, the unemployment rate ranged from the 23.6-percent rate of Allendale County to the 8.7-percent rate of Lexington.

Assistant Treasury Secretary Herbert Allison said that federal officials decided to let state officials craft their own plans on how to use the money because they are the ones who actually know the problems besetting their states.

Representative John Spratt, chairperson of the House Budget Committee, lauded the decision of the Treasury Department to give states flexibility in designing their own programs.

In February, foreclosure activity in South Carolina resurged slightly after slowing down by 16 percent in January. There were 3,114 foreclosure postings in February, higher than the 3,101 foreclosures posted in January.

With the federal funding newly allocated to South Carolina, it is expected that the number of Columbia pre foreclosure homes and foreclosed properties throughout the state would be reduced or be purchased and converted into affordable housing.

Anybody noticed how quiet it is on the Palm front? It seems we only hear anything about Palm and webOS when financial results get announced, and that’s never good news. Palm is in trouble by anyone’s reckoning, yet they are as quiet as can be. This is not a good strategy for Palm, but I’m afraid they are quiet because they have nothing to say. The Pre and Pixi haven’t sold in numbers to make a positive effect on the bottom line, and that’s not going to change.

The Sprint affiliation didn’t buy Palm much in the long run, and the carrier’s major marketing blitz behind the upcoming EVO with Android demonstrates clearly the webOS love is gone. Palm didn’t help its partnership with Sprint at all with the exclusive deal with Verizon, a desperate act to move handsets with the larger carrier. That hasn’t panned out with Verizon firmly in bed with Android, as the campaign behind the Droid and the buzzing about the Nexus One demonstrates.

Palm is going to bring its webOS phone line to AT&T, but that carrier is not going to make a splash with them either. AT&T is not about to upset the Apple cart for Palm, especially since sales numbers of Palm phones are not setting the world on fire. It’s just going to get worse for Palm, as sales numbers keep underwhelming analysts even with several U.S. carriers selling for them.

The time for incremental changes at Palm is over. No more minor hardware updates to the phones. No more incremental updates to webOS. This strategy has failed and it’s time to shake things up if Palm intends to make a serious run as survival.

How about if Palm announced the next major update to webOS, 2.0, would add support for larger slate devices? The webOS system would be outstanding on a tablet, and such an announcement would send the techerati into overdrive. That’s the kind of excitement Palm desperately needs, as long as they make good on such an announcement.

If Palm can’t produce a slate itself, maybe it should take on a partner. I suggest HTC, as they are often willing to jump on new things and they have the ability to make magic happen. Look what they’ve done with Android. Palm better do something unexpected this year, or the party may indeed be over.

Related research on GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

How To Clean Up the Mobile OS Mess

We typically shy away from posting updates to Blackberry applications, mainly because there are so many of them. (Though we are working on a new feature that would help with this.) Some updates, though, provide plenty of substance. The newest Google Maps update is like this. It has added two key features, Buzz layers and voice search, that makes it a much stronger application. As if it weren’t already the best third-party maps application for BlackBerry. You can now get recommendations from other users, and even add your own so that other people can see what you have to say about your favorite haunts.

(more…)

Have a collection of historically significant Camaros? Already own copies of the other three Camaros that paced the Indy 500 in 1993, 1982 and 1969? Get on down to your Chevy dealer pronto, because they’re only building 500 copies of this year’s pace car replica.

Based on the Camaro SS, the Indy 500 Pace Car replica will be sold with the automatic transmission only, which reduces horsepower from 426 (with the manual gearbox) to 400. All Pace Car replicas will come with the RS appearance package, 20 inch polished aluminum wheels, special event badging and Indy 500 logos on the seats and door panels. You can select any color you’d like, as long as it’s Inferno Orange with Pearl White rally stripes.

List price on the replica is $41,100, but rest assured dealers will be gouging for these limited edition collector Camaros.

Greenwire: A San Francisco program that taps 20 tons of solid human waste from the city’s sewage each year to be transformed into backyard compost is being vehemently opposed by a national environmental group that says the initiative is leading to toxic dumps in people’s backyards.

At issue is a program spearheaded by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission that provides free biosolid compost — drawn from a portion of the city’s 82,000 tons of solid sewage waste — to gardeners, school groups and homeowners. The commission says the compost is heat-treated fertilizer and that it is as good as any store-sold counterpart.

But the Organic Consumers Association, which opposes the program, says children and others who touch the compost might swallow or absorb chemicals into their bloodstreams. They also are concerned that food grown in the human waste-based fertilizer could be contaminated.

“The problem with sewage sludge or the euphemistic term ‘biosolids’ that they use is that all of this is hazardous material that potentially contains thousands and thousands of contaminants,” said John Stauber, a member of the Organic Consumers Association’s advisory board and the author of several articles and a book on sewage sludge.

The commission maintains that the levels of toxins found in the compost do not exceed federal and state standards. “It has been tested for metals and pathogens and is basically sterile,” said Tyrone Jue, spokesman for the commission. But U.S. EPA mandates the compost be tested for nine pollutants — 1 percent of the hazardous materials that can be found in sewage — and does not require it be tested for dioxins, flame retardants and PCBs.

Stauber said tests conducted by his organization found dioxins, flame retardants and other chemicals in the compost, but his group has not released those results.

The three-year-old program has fueled public controversy, and the consumers association, alongside the nonprofit group the Center for Food Safety, dumped some of the compost on the steps of City Hall last month in protest. The groups also sent a letter to Mayor Gavin Newsom demanding he stop the biosolid handouts. And last week the group picketed Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley for allegedly ignoring the problem, targeting it since its founder Alice Waters is also a PUC commissioner.

Experts including EPA waste management official Hugh Kaufman have said people should not grow food in the sewage sludge, but one EPA expert said there is no evidence that city residents are in any kind of danger if they use the compost.

Scientists from the agency are conducting studies to discern whether other chemicals should be tested in the compost (Peter Fimrite, San Francisco Chronicle, April 7). – DFM

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The car configurator for the new McLaren MP4-12C is online to satisfy all our dreams of ever owning a personalised MP4-12C. Obviously you only get one engine choice but we’re more than happy to go with the twin turbo V6 and its 600 hp. Other games you can play with the McLaren configurator include exterior styling (racing green vs fire black…?), interior styling, including carbon fibre finish, and all the other bells and whistles you’d expect. See the MP4-12C configurator here.

If you love grapefruit for breakfast, you’ve got to try running it under the broiler for a few minutes. We realize this might sound a little strange. Fruit? Under the broiler?! But trust us, it’s the perfect treat to get your day started off right!

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LA’s top law enforcement officers — DA, Sheriff and LAPD Chief — joined City Attorney Carmen Trutanich at Skid Row on Wednesday to announce they were going to use a gang injunction strategy to crack down on rampant drug dealing.

Nearly shouted down by the homeless and homeless advocates, they explained they would seek court orders to bar 80 specific people from Skid Row now and seek to ban up to 300 later.

“The single biggest criminal threat facing this area is the open and
notorious drug dealing,” said Trutanich.

What’s interesting, really interesting, about this is how it represents the undoing of the heart of Bill Bratton’s strategy for reducing serious Category One crime — the violent acts that he so successfully brought down during his seven years in LA.

It was the “Baghdad Strategy” to sectarian violence that helped stem the flow of blood in Iraq: Sunnis could do what they wanted in their neighborhoods, Shiites in their neighborhoods, as long as they stopped blowing each other up and gunning each other down.

Here’s the revealing paragraphs in the LA Times story today:

“The injunction is needed because the more than 30 gangs who control the
skid row drug trade have come to a “mutual understanding” to forgo
rivalries, keep the peace and share business, according to Peter Shutan,
a deputy city attorney.

“The action is the latest step in the city’s attempt to crack down on
crime on skid row. The area has been home to the city’s most
concentrated police presence since 2006, when Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa
and then-Police Chief William J. Bratton deployed 50 extra officers
there as part of the controversial Safer City initiative. Dozens of
undercover narcotics officers were deployed to the same area.

“Crime has dropped sharply in recent years — property crime dropped 44%
and violent crime dropped 40% between 2005 and 2009. The decline has
coincided with a downtown revitalization effort that has brought luxury
lofts and trendy shops to the urban core.”

Think about it: 30 gangs have a “mutual understanding” that allows them to engage in rampant drug dealing on Skid Row and avoid the murder and mayhem usually associated with the inevitable rivalries that occur.

They are doing so despite the presence of 50 extra cops and the result is a drop of 40 percent or more in serious crimes against people and property — categories that exclude drug dealing. In fact, of the more than 50 crimes LA readily provides statistics about, drug arrests and seizures are not included.

When I checked more than a year ago, the LAPD’s numbers for drug arrests and seizures showed declines far greater than the numbers for declines in serious crimes.

Nearly two years ago, I wrote about my theory of what was going on in the streets of LA, about how the tough gang cops and many narcotics officers were being assigned to other duties, about how former gang members were being hired to intervene with the gangs to keep them from killing each other or innocent people and to keep the cops from rousting them for drug dealing and other less serious criminal acts.

I wrote then: “It’s a devil’s deal if ever there were one…What’s the price of peace?”

The few paragraphs above are the closest the media has come to engaging the “Baghdad solution” in LA and the announcement Wednesday by local law enforcement officials represents a repudiation of that strategy.

It’s a morally repugnant strategy but I still don’t know if it’s right or wrong because we never have discussed it publicly and looked at the alternatives.

The decision to end the policy on Skid Row should give us a clue. If the 30 gangs and up to 300 gangsters are barred from downtown, where will they set up shop and will they still avoid violent turf wars if there isn’t a cop on every corner keeping the peace?

Need to display your work of art outside the four doors of your home and out in the open? The Solar Blossom, a temporary outdoor gallery lets you do just that. And it lights up your work, with energy from the sun. The brainchild of DeMarco Architecture, the Solar Blossom is inspired by the Bluebonnet flower. Using the suns energy, this outdoor gallery also educates visitors about solar power and its potential to power up our lives.

With a blue curvy surface, like that of a petal, the Solar Blossom has a white interior just like the insides of a flower petal. The flexible solar panels on the roof provide for the lighting and multimedia displays. Also, a set of batteries store energy to power up the Blossom in the dark. With a framework of recycled steel and thermoplastic panels, this outdoor gallery is sure to grab an audience if placed in gardens and community spaces.

[Ecofriend]

Computer skins are nothing new, but there’s something different about these offerings from Karvt—namely, they’re made of real wood. More »

[JURIST] US President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Thursday signed the so-called New START treaty, pledging to reduce their countries’ nuclear warheads by about 30 percent. Under the terms of the treaty and its protocol, both countries would only be allowed to deploy 1,550 strategic warheads, a decrease from the 2,200 currently permitted. The treaty would also re-establish mechanisms to allow each party to inspect the other’s nuclear arsenal. Speaking at a joint press conference after signing the treaty, Obama said that “hile the New START treaty is an important first step forward, it is just one step on a longer journey,” reiterating his vision of a world without nuclear arms. Medvedev praised the treaty as “a very important step to build trust and understanding between our two countries.” The treaty must be ratified by both countries before entering into force.
The treaty agreement, reached in February, is the first nuclear agreement between the two nations in nearly 20 years. The US State Department began negotiating the treaty with Russia in 2009. Nuclear disarmament between the US and Russia, whose nuclear arsenals comprise 95 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons, languished during the Bush administration. The treaty is considered a key part of easing tensions between the two countries, which reached a high point after the 2008 Georgia conflict.

Greenwire: When a massive Chinese coal carrier ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef on Saturday after traveling miles outside its designated shipping lane, it raised questions about what sort of guidances these ships are required to have.

The Australian government does not require trained marine pilots to assist ships in avoiding hazards such as the reef, but most large ships are banned from the area, officials say. Yet more than 600 accidents occurred in the area around the reef between 1987 and 1995, including “groundings, collisions, sinkings and minor oil-spill pollution events,” according to a study by the Queensland marine park authority. Groundings accounted for almost half of all shipping accidents — 45 percent — and there were 230 reported oil spills.

The Queensland maritime authority says the pilot of the Shen Neng 1 may have tried Saturday to shorten transit time and ignored the fact that he was outside the shipping lanes. The incident is under investigation.

Since the ship crashed, it has leaked a 2-mile oil slick, 100 yards wide. “Fortunately, there have been no reports of continuing oil loss, and the quantity spilled to date does not pose a significant threat to marine life,” said Russell Reichelt, chairman of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. The ship is slated to be pumped dry to head off further leaks.

But Shenzhen Energy Group, which owns the ship and is a subsidiary of COSCO Oceania Pty. Ltd. — China’s largest shipping operator — could face $920,000 in fines.

“From where I see it, it is outrageous that any vessel could find itself [seven miles] off course, it seems, in the Great Barrier Reef,” Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said yesterday after flying over the accident site.

The harbor master at the Queensland state port where the Chinese vessel had docked before departure said the ship was taking a “recognized route” through the reef. About 3,000 ships a year leave that Gladstone port carrying coal and other commodities to Asia (Bennett/Glionna, Los Angeles Times, April 6). – DFM

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“President Barack Obama’s advisers plan to remove terms such as “Islamic radicalism” from a document outlining national security strategy and will use the new version to emphasize that the U.S. does not view Muslim nations through the lens of terrorism, counter-terrorism officials say.

The change would be a significant shift in the National Security Strategy, a document that previously outlined the Bush Doctrine of preventive war. It currently states, “The struggle against militant Islamic radicalism is the great ideological conflict of the early years of the 21st century.” (source)

I understand that Barack Obama is holding out hope that involving Muslim countries in world affairs and discussing other issues besides their radicalized citizens will somehow endear them to us…or at least tone down their hatred of the West. Could he really have bought into the fallacy that they hate us because of Bush? I once said here that this gap in the President’s understanding of militant Islamics is the product of his own lack of faith. He can’t fathom a spiritual fanaticism because he’s an intellectual with no roots in faith. He doesn’t realize that they believe the Qu’ran tells them to do exactly what they’re doing –so no American President, even if his name is a Muslim name, is going to alter that belief.

You may have heard of the Solar Impulse before. This sun-powered breakthrough in the world of aviation made its first full test flight, taking it closer to its goal of flying around the globe with energy from the sun. The Solar Impulse, weighing as much as a car and with a wingspan of a Boeing 747 took off from a Swiss airfield powered by its four electric motors that are juiced by solar cells on the planes wings.

A bigger production model that the designers hope to develop soon, will circumnavigate the globe. Flea-hop tests on the plane have been conducted since December, and the plane had never seen the sky above 2 feet and 300 meters in distance. The two pilots, project leader Bertrand Piccard and co-founder Andre Borschberg will take off on their round-the-globe voyage in the Solar Impulse in 2012.

[BBC]

 

Datawind has released an updated version of their UbiSurfer, this time running Windows CE 6.0, and the device is actually pretty compelling, largely due to its laptop-like form factor and low price for both the device and the associated dataplan.

The MID features a 7 inch WVGA screen and but only has 128 MB RAM and 1 GB internal storage. It also comes equipped with built-in 3G broadband, WiFi, and a wired LAN port and comes with a very useful software package including Softmaker’s excellent office package which allows full editing of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files without conversion and without losing any fidelity.

As mentioned earlier however the real innovation is in the pricing.

The UbiSurfer offers free-usage model, which eliminates the complexity of purchasing mobile web devices by eliminating lengthy contractual payments, activation fees and credit checks. With the UbiSurfer you pay for the device not the usage. For the average user, there are no monthly fees, airtime tariffs, contracts or recurring fees – Datawind pays for these. Users get 30 hours of free surfing a month for 12 months and 5p per minute roaming in Europe and the US. Upgrading to an unlimited usage package is available, and only an additional £5.99 a month.

The device itself is also a very reasonable £159.99, with the first year’s Internet access included.

The device is widely available online and instore.

Read more about the device here.

Has Datawind finally stumbled onto a winner? Let us know below.

Via ExpertReviews.co.uk