The Double A Lounge

WashingtonPost.com - Anatomy Of A Crisis

Very good slide show that shows how the financial crisis happened.

I can accept that a woman wants to make an aggressive effort towards finding a mate.  The dating game is way different than it used to be.  Now you can setup dates with a few taps of the keyboard and a few mouse clicks.  As this web site shows, this woman has different plans.  She’s decided to raise money so she can place an ad during the Super Bowl.  I’m going to be very impressed if she raises the money needed.  Based on the descriptions on her web site, it could be a very entertaining ad.  All I can say to her is this: it’s 4th and goal.  Make the call and go for it!

Ratings agencies ‘put system at risk,’ CEO says

Now that some of the smoke is clearing on our financial crisis, the real players are starting to appear.  We used to hear about companies like Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s, and Fitch Ratings when people would talk about the value grade of investments.  It’s starting to become very clear what role they played in all of this:

Between 2002 and 2007, the agencies rated a flood of mortgage-related
securities issued by Wall Street firms, giving many of the securities a
coveted AAA rating at the time, only to downgrade most of them as house
prices tanked and defaults spiked. The subsequent collapse in the value
of those securities has taken the global financial system to the “brink
of the abyss,” in the words of the head of the IMF.

Bottom line is that they profited greatly by rating many investments much higher than they should have been.

Copper is certainly not considered to have the same prestige as say gold or silver, but to those who rely on this metal it can be as important as those two precious metals.  The prices for copper had skyrocketed for some time as evidenced below.

Something to consider:

“Copper is usually a good gauge of economic health because it is
broadly used, but more specifically because it is important to
construction and equipment manufacturing that tend to precede other
areas of economic activity, and that makes copper a leading indicator,”
said David Coffin, co-editor of HardRockAnalyst.com.

Will be interesting to see what happens in the future.

MSNBC.com - Who’s To Blame?

Nice interactive guide to the reasons why we have such a financial mess.  Some are obvious, but a few were surprises to me.  Each reason is justified.  A lot of fraud, major conflicts of interest, laxity - need I go further?

Local 2 Investigates Dead Voters

Wow…I didn’t realize that we were allowing the deceased to vote post mortem.  Makes me wonder what happened to all the cries for voting reform in this country.  Very simple concept: if someone becomes deceased, they should not be allowed to vote.  This was also a pretty telling quote:

Auditors identified 49,049 registered voters state-wide who may have
been ineligible to vote. Approximately 23,576 may have been deceased
and another 23,114 were possible felons. And they found more than 2,359
duplicate records.

Considering how close elections have become, do we really want to leave something like this to chance?