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The Brotherhood is Displeased

Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so low. -- Henry Kissinger Since this is Thanksgiving Sunday and I have nothing better to do but relax by writing this blog entry, I will take the time to respond to Jim Jagielski's answer to my ApacheCon blog entry where I basically compared it to an aging Star Trek convention. Jim finds fault with the fact that I failed to notice the goings on of the Brotherhood. Jim thinks I oughta follow what the ASF does because I owe them for the success of JBoss. Jim asks me to consider a sponsorship of the ASF, now that I have got some moollah. Clearly, those that I feel I owe, I also feel I have already taken care of by way of the JBoss equity cap table, which included people who worked at JBoss, members of many OSS communities, as well as some members of the ASF. JBoss, and now RHT sponsor various Apache projects. We paid for coders; not politicians, or should I call them Aparachiks. The idea of funding aparachicks offend...
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Houston, We have a central-bank-run!

Judging by the comments, it seems many of you share my interest in understanding the recent economic news, at least Juha does. So I will continue covering that. Yesterday, my brother Carlos, who works for BNP in Europe sent me this story: Apparently we are seeing a dumping of US related assets by what is speculated to be... the Chinese. . Forget the computer attacks, Asia's sovereign funds dumping US assets would have a real impact on the economy. Credit and liquidity crises are not new and, when they turn bad, they turn bad. In 1929, the liquidity scare sparked a bank run. Banks didn't have enough cash and were defaulting, accelerating the mad dash and "bank-run" to get your money out while there was still liquidity. Then, the real economy wound up with no credit, and we all know the sad story from there. 2007 isn't like 1929. It isn't an "end-consumer" bank run. You and I are not going to the corner bank to take our savings out. Our confidence ...
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Economics and Optimism

I have been noodling over a blog published by Mark Shuttleworth on economic oversteering . The basic coverage is prompted by the drop in interest the FED did last week as the markets were coming unglued, first in Europe then in the US. I am also an avid reader of a more pure-economics blog called " Naked Capitalism " and the author, Yves Smith, also usually takes the road of castigating the FED on its over reaction. Blame the FED, cheap credit is bad okay? The article echoes a lot of the economic coverage of the blogosphere that I read of late. Namely that, to use Mark's words, the cut was like giving crack to a crack addict. After all, everyone concurs to blame Greenspan and the low rates of the early 00's, which created a negative real rates, once you factor in inflation. This according to many led to the creation of the housing bubble. Most of the coverage usually goes further with notions of "moral hazard". The banking industry, surprise, is rotten ...
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