If the housing market doesn’t turn around, then Fannie and Freddie become bad assets. Paulson sold this to Congress as, `Give me a blank check and I won’t have to write it.’ The question now is: How big is that check going to have to be?
—Vincent Reinhart, former director of the Fed’s Monetary Affairs Division
The pound is about 20 percent too strong against the dollar, even after falling more than 10 percent this year
—International Foreign Exchange Concepts Inc., the world’s biggest currency hedge-fund company.
There is no relief out there. A part of the government is giving up hope of this economy doing better in the next couple of years. That tells us a lot.
—Hans- Guenter Redeker, the London-based global head of currency strategy at BNP Paribas SA, on Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling
The past weeks and months you have clearly seen the deterioration in growth in the U.K. The pound still looks expensive.
—Andrew Balls, EVP and member of the investment committee of PIMCO (+$800b aum)
“Plots” are an expression in Pynchon of the mad belief that some plot can ultimately take over the world, can ultimately control life to the point where it is manageably inanimate.
The past is never dead. It’s not even past
—Faulkner and Politics from Requiem For a Nun
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The wrong picture is that each of us has ideas, and we develop language to find out whether we agree or disagree. It is not until communication springs up that we begin to have ideas.
…
Until we have an idea of what’s going on in the minds of other people, it doesn’t make sense to say that we have the concept of objectivity.
Until we have an idea of what’s going on in the minds of other people, it doesn’t make sense to say that we have the concept of objecitivity.
Davidson, page 50
Couric: And do you believe Roe V. Wade should be overturned?
McCain: No. no.
Couric: No. Why not? Your husband does.
McCain: No. I don’t think he does.
Couric: He believes it should be overturned. That’s what he told me, and that it should go to the states.
McCain: Well, in that respect. Yes, yeah, I do. I understand what you’re saying now. It’s a states issue.
Cindy McCain, interviewed by Katie Couric
We still don’t know a lot about Palin except that she’s better at delivering a speech than McCain and that she defends her own pregnant daughter’s right to privacy even as she would have the government intrude to police the reproductive choices of all other women.
…
We’ve already seen where such visceral decision-making by McCain can lead. In October 2001, he speculated that Saddam Hussein might have been behind the anthrax attacks in America. That same month he out-Cheneyed Cheney in his repeated public insistence that Iraq had a role in 9/11 — even after both American and foreign intelligence services found that unlikely. He was similarly rash in his reading of the supposed evidence of Saddam’s W.M.D. and in his estimate of the number of troops needed to occupy Iraq. (McCain told MSNBC in late 2001 that we could do with fewer than 100,000.) It wasn’t until months after “Mission Accomplished” that he called for more American forces to be tossed into the bloodbath. The whole fiasco might have been prevented had he listened to those like Gen. Eric Shinseki who faulted the Rumsfeld war plan from the start.
In other words, McCain’s hasty vetting of Palin was all too reminiscent of his grave dereliction of due diligence on the war.
Stilltitled 