US to get audited
“Der Spiegel wrote that the IMF had ‘informed’ Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke of plans that would have been unheard of in the past: a general examination of the US financial system. The IMF’s board of directors has ruled that a so-called Financial Sector Assessment Program is to be carried out in the US.
This, Der Spiegel wrote, ‘is nothing less than an X-ray of the entire US financial system’, adding that ‘no Fed chief in US history has been forced to submit to the kind of humiliation that Ben Bernanke is facing’
Few things: Fed Reserve isn’t looking too credible to the international community. Of course, being American, we could give a crap less about the international community. If we cared what the international community thought, we’d be metric. However, these foreigners own a lot of our debt. property, businesses, etc. So, this one won’t just slide by.
And this is fantastic: Der Spiegel reports that the IMF is threatening to seriously study the accounts of America, something President George Bush is determined to prevent at least while he is in the White House, informing the IMF that it can begin its investigation but cannot complete it until he leaves office.
And they blame the media: Part of the problem is the US media, which has for so long pretended that all is or soon will be well, a bottom is near, a recovery awaits in the second half of the financial year that will sweep away all problems, sown over decades, in a new expansion, a cycle that is ordained to come. The latest fantasy is that with the quarter’s end, new profit figures will invigorate the bull, which will seed fertility.
Our media isn’t that good at economics. I mean, those retards think taxing windfall profits of oil companies is a good idea.
Read the whole thing here.
July 8th, 2008 at 10:57 am
no, actually, if you cared about not constantly wasting time and introducing math errors through doing pointless stupid unit conversions that nobody can ever remember quite how to get right, you’d be metric. the international community don’t much care if you do waste your time getting your math wronger than it has to be, so long as you’re willing to trade with them in sensible units.
(i can just about manage to understand inches and miles, although i’m still converting to kilometers a lot to really grok distances. volume units here are wack, and i’m doing liters in my head, thankyou verymuch. a pound is just under half a kilo, so that’s only slightly wack, but fahrenheit degrees are right out. which of his orifices did that dude pull his zero point out of, anyways…?)
July 8th, 2008 at 11:00 am
Heh. IIRC from fifth grade, he added salt or something to water and ice.
July 8th, 2008 at 11:04 am
oh, yeah, and about that audit? i’m thinking it’s German payback for dubya groping Angela Merkel a while back. if he’d kept his grubby mitts to himself, likely the jerries would’ve just got rid of any U.S. bonds they hold nice and quietly without raising this fuss.
July 8th, 2008 at 11:33 am
Going to the Wiki
July 8th, 2008 at 11:56 am
Honestly, I’d love to see the US government annually audited by an independent auditor according to GAAS.
The IMF is low on my list of good independent auditors, but half a loaf is better than none.
July 8th, 2008 at 8:11 pm
Yup. The salt/ice water bath was the coldest temperature he could create at that point in time, which is why he set it as 0. 100 degrees was supposed to be the average temperature of the human body, but either his body temperature was higher than normal or his measurements were a bit off.
Celsius is just as arbitrary. Why use the freezing and boiling points of water? Why not hydrogen, the most common element in the universe, or perhaps oxygen? Kelvin is the only sensible temperature scale.
July 8th, 2008 at 9:56 pm
ask a cook. Kelvin’s a decent enough scale, but i don’t think Celsius knew there was an absolute zero point at the time — and besides, we’re ugly bags of mostly water, not inflated bags of molecular hydrogen. 😉
July 8th, 2008 at 11:07 pm
Ah, so the reason is entirely due to sapiencentrism, eh? Celsius isn’t even consistent – water boils at different temperatures depending on pressure. In a vacuum, it will boil at well below freezing. Under enough pressure, it can become a solid, even at extremely high temperatures (this is a rather exotic form of water called ice IV, if I remember correctly).
(also, note that most of my post is tongue in cheak; I actually prefer Fahrenheit, mostly because I’m used to it. But if you’re going to say its a stupid system to use because of how arbitrary it is while proclaiming the virtues of Celsius, it is a tad hypocritical; Kelvin really is the most non-arbitrary method of measuring temperatures). 😉
July 9th, 2008 at 7:52 am
it’s anthropocentrism, yes; water matters to us, and most of us live near sea level. Celsius wasn’t perfect, but he pleased most of the people most of the time. 🙂
trivia: there’s at least a dozen water ices. the differences are, i think, in the form the crystals take, how precisely the water molecules arrange themselves. most of these forms only exist in unusual conditions of pressure and temperature, and “ice nine” is no more unusual or deadly than the other ones. wikipedia might have an article, but it’s too early in the day for me to go looking.
July 9th, 2008 at 8:12 am
Ah, the shit we argue about on teh int3rw3bs
July 10th, 2008 at 1:24 am
I’ve got an idea. Let’s pull all the US funding that supports the IMF and its bureaucrats and watch them sink into the sunset. Aren’t these the same folks who continuously “forgive” debts accrued by the various totalitarian governments that it gives money to.
July 10th, 2008 at 1:28 am
I have worked and calculated in both metric and English systems. I prefer English.
For those who prefer metric, the rest of the world awaits your arrival.
July 10th, 2008 at 9:10 pm
Enh – I’d rather keep the units that I can evenly divide by something other than powers of 10…