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POPSPie Eyed I just want to know how many pies it would make and how much whipped topping to cover them all.
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POPSGalaxies found to be flowing together "He said another interesting idea proposed since the cosmic flow was detected is that instead of a gravitational pull by something beyond the observable universe, the galaxies are being pushed by an absence of mass in the local universe."
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POPSCopernican principle re-examined: We might be living in a giant cosmic bubble Clifton, along with Oxford researchers Pedro G. Ferreira and Kate Land, say that in coming years we may be able to distinguish between dark energy and the void. They point to the upcoming Joint Dark Energy Mission, planned by NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy to launch in 2014 or 2015. The satellite aims to measure the expansion of the universe precisely by observing about 2,300 supernovae. The scientists suggest that by looking at a large number of supernovae in a certain region of the universe, they should be able to tell whether the objects are really accelerating away, or if their light is merely being distorted in a void.
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POPSBank Loans Have Not 'Dried Up' Such alarming comments never mention any facts. Why not? As Neil Cavuto recently noted on Fox Business News, the Fed reports bank loans every week. Contrary to many comments, consumer and industrial loans actually increased in the latest week. Troubled giant banks have cut back on lending, but smaller banks have picked up the slack. Consumer and real estate loans dipped insignificantly through Sept. 17, remaining much higher than they were a year earlier. If all the recent hysterical chatter about lending being "frozen" or "shut down" refers to anything real, it is not about banks loans (through Sept. 17) but about such arcane financial markets as asset-backed commercial paper or loans between banks. But this too is mainly about financial firms, not Main Street. Non-financial commercial paper increased from $156 billion at the start of the year to more than $204 billion from Sept. 3 to Sept. 17, dipping only modestly since then.
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POPSBailout: That Giant Sucking Sound--House Approves This guys blog received 1.8 million hits the other day after being on national radio. He is an investment expert and advisor leading a campaign to prevent the Bailout. The Constitution makes no provision for the government to take the people's tax revenues and provide them to private firms for financial assistance.
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POPSBailout Marks Karl Marx's Comeback Marx’s Proposal Number Five seems to be the leading motivation for those backing the Wall Street bailout. If he were to rise from the dead today, Marx might be delighted to discover that most economists and financial commentators, including many who claim to favour the free market, agree with him. At first glance, anyone who understands economics can see that there is something wrong with this picture. The taxes that will need to be levied to finance this package may keep some firms alive, but they will siphon off capital, kill jobs and make businesses less productive elsewhere. Increasing the money supply is no different. It is an invisible tax that redistributes resources to debtors and those who made unwise investments. So why throw this sound free-market analysis overboard as soon as there is some downturn in the markets? The rationale for intervening always seems to centre on the fear of reliving the Great Depression.
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POPSThe 55 trillion dollar question Will credit default swaps be the next disaster? When you put $10 on black 22, you're pretty sure the casino will pay off if you win. The CDS market offers no such assurance. One reason the market grew so quickly was that hedge funds poured in, sensing easy money. And not just big, well-established hedge funds but a lot of upstarts. So in some cases, giant financial institutions were counting on collecting money from institutions only slightly more solvent than your average minimart. The danger, of course, is that if a hedge fund suddenly has to pay off on a lot of CDS, it will simply go out of business.
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POPS Thoughts on the Bailout Defeat "A number of Republican House members and staff, along with others who are plugged in, are telling me that Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats will come back with a new bill that includes all the left-wing stuff that was scrubbed from the bill that was defeated today in the House. As this scenario goes, the House Democrats need 218 votes, and they have to pick up a number of black and Hispanic House members who jumped ship because the Wall Street provisions, in their view, were too benign. So things like the bankruptcy judges setting mortgage terms and rates, the ACORN slush-fund spending, the union proxy for corporate boards, stricter limits on executive compensation, and much larger equity ownership of selling banks through warrants will all find itself back in the new bill. Of course, this scenario will lose more Republican votes. But insiders tell me President Bush will take Secretary Paulson’s advice and sign that kind of legislation."
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POPSPrivately-funded Rocket Reaches Space Just a few days after the Chinese government performed its first spacewalk, SpaceX has achieved the first successful rocket launch funded by a private company. Finally, space exploration as a for-profit venture might be starting to make sense. And that may mean a new sort of race to the moon is beginning--this time between China's government and American private industry.
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