Your Breakfast read, served by The Confluence

Considering the mood of the country after the Republican rule, the enormous mandate the Democratic agenda received from the American people and his shellacking of McCain, Obama had the opportunity to bury Reagonomics once for all and decisively shift the direction of the country. He did some of it but I think he wasn’t bold enough, at least in the first 100 days.
Obama Overthrows Reagan’s Government-Bad Dogma to Rescue Market

Are these still the US of A, or has the Bush cabal turned this into some Banana Republic?
US refuses to let jet into its airspace because it is carrying a journalist who criticizes US foreign policy

Hernando Calvo Ospina has written articles about the United States involvement in Latin America, and is currently writing a book about he CIA. The exact reason for him being on the terrorist watch list is unknown, and we’ll probably never know what criteria are used for adding people to it.

And here’s the account of that “evil” journalist:
The criminalization of journalism

Again in the air, and preparing for another four hours of travel, a man who identified himself as the copilot came to me. Trying to look discreet, he asked if I was “Mr. Calvo Ospina.” I told him yes.

“The captain wants to sleep, that’s why I came here,” he said, and he invited me to accompany him to the back of the plane. There, he told me that I was the person “responsible” for the detour. I was astonished.

My first reaction was to ask him: “Do you think I’m a terrorist?” He said no, that’s the reason I’m telling you this. He also assured me that it was strange that this was the first time it happened on an Air France plane. Shortly before we landed in Martinique, a stewardess had told me that, in her 11-year career, nothing like that had ever happened to her.

This is getting scary.
U.S. Declares Public Health Emergency Over Swine Flu

Asia on high alert for flu virus

Mexican swine flu spreads to Europe

SoS Hillary Clinton engaged in a very delicate dance.
Clinton’s Mideast Pirouette

She’s transitioned with aplomb from the calculation of her interests that she made as a senator from New York to a cool assessment of U.S. interests. These do not always coincide with Israel’s.

Paul Krugman is still shrill.
Money for Nothing

The latest of Timmy countdown. How much longer is he going to last?
Geithner, as Member and Overseer, Forged Ties to Finance Club

Today, Mr. Geithner is Treasury secretary, and as he seeks to rebuild the nation’s fractured financial system with more taxpayer assistance and a regulatory overhaul, he finds himself a locus of discontent.

Even as banks complain that the government has attached too many intrusive strings to its financial assistance, a range of critics — lawmakers, economists and even former Federal Reserve colleagues — say that the bailout Mr. Geithner has played such a central role in fashioning is overly generous to the financial industry at taxpayer expense.

Gulp! Even Larry doesn’t see the end of the tunnel yet.
US economy to continue down, says Summers

“I expect the economy will continue to decline,” Mr Summers said in an interview on Fox News, predicting “sharp declines in employment for quite some time this year.”

Huh! We’re using Monte Carlo Simulations to stress-test the banks?
Gambling on Monte Carlo simulations

If the inputs and assumptions are wrong then the Monte Carlo simulations will be of very little use. In that sense they’re very similar to the magic worked by David Li’s Gaussian Copula. They give a false sense of security.

And that’s precisely, some might argue, what the US government is going for with its bank stress tests anyway.

(For geeks out there here is the stress test methodology)

A former Wall Street insider talks about what went on. For those who read Liar’s Poker nothing surprising but still…
American excess: A Wall Street trader tells all

I understood it well. I put on 45 pounds in my first year at the bank, and, as you might guess, it was not from eating McDonalds. Occasionally I ate stuff like sushi, but mostly it was steak. We went to the good places like Sparks, Peter Luger’s, and the Strip House. We tended to look down on chains like Morton’s and Ruth’s Chris-they were for car dealers or stock brokers, not traders. Regardless of where we ate, we ate in quantity. My standard strategy was to order half a dozen appetisers, plus a steak and lobster, plus a few desserts and much wine as I could drink, as long it was under a few hundred dollars a bottle. Followed by a digestif, typically a 30-year-old port. There’s not any way to justify this except to say I was trying to catch up to my colleagues. We would treat those restaurants like Roman vomitoriums. And it wasn’t the food so much as the wine. Being a junior employee, I couldn’t really order bottles that cost more than a few hundred dollars, but the senior guys could get nicer stuff – Opus One, Chateau Latour. As long as we were out with a client, the bank paid. I remember being stunned the first time I saw a dinner bill for ten grand. But that was just the beginning.

What it boiled down to was austerity for everyone else and rampant consumption for ourselves. I never saw anyone literally set fire to money, but I did drink most of a bottle of 1983 Margaux ($2,000).

Is this story ever going to end?
U.S. forces say kill 7 al Qaeda suspects in Iraq

Iraq says U.S. raid violated security pact

Brilliant! IBM program to take on ‘Jeopardy’ champions
Computer Program to Take On ‘Jeopardy!’

Oh great! Some Australian trying to suck up to Riverdaughter by beating up on us. What have we ever done to people besides fixing companies to make them more efficient and more competitive. Sigh!
MBAs: Most Bloody Awful, Aussie radio documentary on the problem with biz-school

Why does the church hate “great sex”?
Church giving ‘great sex’ sermons might get booted