Links To Look At

This is an experiment I’ll be trying out over the next few days: Daily links to interesting/unusual/informative stories or bits of information on the web. I’ll link to between a half-dozen and a dozen. I’ll try to post this by 7 am EST. 

  

To my new readers and kind fans, please comment as to whether you like them or not—both the idea, and the specific links. Thank you. GL

  

• British Airways chairman says, “We must stop kowtowing to American security overkill”. Surprised it took this long. 

  

• Slate.com on Treasury bonds yields going negative, and investors betting on inflation. If Slate is talking about this, then the U.S. mainstream is (slowly) realizing inflation is on its way. 

  

• The Hobbit film production stays in New Zealand—after the Kiwis gave Warner Bros. a sweetener in the form of incentives. The foolish Australian actors’ union—which is the parent of the NZ actors’ union—was behind the brouhaha; scuttlebutt is so as to get part of “The Hobbit” filmed in Australia. The production will spend US $530 million in NZ. 

  

• Lenders take over Stuyvesant town in Manhattan. The four-year, $5.4 billion agony is over—for now. 

  

• Michael Lewis gives an excellent explanation of the TBTF banks’ shell game regarding their prop-trading desks. The banks—contrary to statements—aren’t selling their prop desks: They’re disguising them. 

  

• Fascinating and in-depth cultural précis on China’s Communist Party today, and what they are aiming for. From the always illuminating London Review of Books. 

  

• Glenn Greenwald on NY Times and mainstream American media’s efforts to discredit WikiLeaks new document release by smearing their spokesman, Julian Assange. Greenwald has been all over this—and he’s absolutely right: The messenger is not the message. 

  

• Calculated Risk confirming that Ben Bernanke will use an incrementalist approach to QE2. It’ll be “a couple of hundred billion at a time”. 

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