Free Republic

To Risk To laugh is to risk appearing the fool. To weep is to risk appearing sentimental. To reach out is to risk involvement, To expose feelings is to risk exposing your true self. To place your ideas and dreams before a crowd is to risk their loss. To love is to risk not being loved in return, To live is to risk dying, To hope is to risk despair, To try is to risk failure. But risks must be taken because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing. The person who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing,...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - S&P Valuation and Risk Strategies, part of McGraw-Hill Co's Standard & Poor's, has launched a new credit score tool that lets users compare credit profiles of more than 26,000 companies worldwide. The so-called credit health panel can provide default probabilities and overall credit health scores for the largest universe of companies ever addressed by S&P, the company said in a statement on Tuesday. Overall scores will be based on a firm's operational risks and its ability to generate cash and meet its financial obligations. Users can also assess default risks over the next 12 months based...

The policies of the current U.S. administration have created "political risk" to investing in the United States, billionaire real estate investor Sam Zell said on Wednesday. Appearing on a panel at the Urban Land Institute's real estate summit in Boston, Zell said "what's going on now is frightening" and working to undermine confidence, although he allowed that an economic recovery is under way. "Up until this administration, you knew the rules and had a very stable environment," Zell said. Never one to mince words, Zell said he saw similarities that are "a little eerie" between Nero's Rome and the United...

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) - The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. on Tuesday voted to propose assessing higher fees on large, risky financial institutions and possibly lower fees for many small and less-risky big banks.

Summary:  Many people hold that terrorism poses an existential threat to the United States. But a look at the actual statistics suggests that it presents an acceptable risk -- one so low that spending to further reduce its likelihood or consequences is scarcely justified. JOHN MUELLER is Professor of Political Science at Ohio State University. MARK G. STEWART is Professor of Civil Engineering and Director of the Centre for Infrastructure Performance and Reliability at the University of Newcastle, in Australia. Their book, Terror, Security, and Money: Balancing the Risks, Benefits, and Costs of Homeland Security, will be published in 2011.An...

In an interview with Bloomberg's Tom Keene, Richard Clarida of PIMCO has pretty much sealed the fate of Greece: "I don’t think that [7%] would be an attractive enough yield. Greece is sort of like the Titanic. Eighteen things went wrong, and when they go wrong at once it’s problematic." Of course, with this kind of rhetoric the 10 Year will be trading at 8% tomorrow, followed up by Clarida saying not even 9% would be attractive, and so forth. When you have the world's largest bond fund say it is not touching Greece with a ten foot pole essentially...

I told you so..... According to information Commerzbank was concerned about the Greek bonds accepted as guarantees of Greek bonds. Commerzbank has provided some liquidity to Greek banks are more concerned about the Greek bonds. Based on a reliable source in the recent past, foreign banks have applied to withdraw repo with Greek banks even offer powerful bonus. (Hattip Zerohedge) If repos are being yanked from Greek banks they're finished. This is the overnight lending market and that, coupled with depositor runs (which, as soon as Greeks figure this out, will accelerate dramatically) will drive a stake through the heart...

Greek website bankingnews.gr reports that today's breach of 400 bps in spread to bunds on the 10 Year GGB is a very critical level, and that if spread widening continues, Greece "risks completely losing control" of its funding situation. The critical level in the 10 Year GGB spread to bunds beyond which all hell will break loose is 450 bps at which point "everyone will unload bonds and then control will be completely lost." (pardon our translation) Odd - no mention of CDS speculators having blown up Greece today: instead it is bond selling... How novel. The site also notes...

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer is warning that some of his Democratic colleagues are being threatened with violence when they go back to their districts — and he wants Republicans to stand up and condemn the threats. The Maryland Democrat said more than 10 House Democrats have reported incidents of threats or other forms of harassment about their support of the highly divisive health insurance overhaul vote. Hoyer emphasized that he didn’t have a specific number of threats and that was just an estimate. TheFederal Bureau of Investigation, Capitol Police and sergeant at arms briefed Democrats behind closed doors today...

WASHINGTON, (AP) -- Methane, a potent global warming gas, is bubbling out of the frozen Arctic faster than had been expected. Methane had become trapped in the permafrost over time and a warming climate is now resulting in its release, researchers report in Friday's edition of the journal Science. "The amount of methane currently coming out of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is comparable to the amount coming out of the entire world's oceans," said Natalia Shakhova, of the University of Alaska Fairbanks International Arctic Research Center and the co-author. Concerns about global warming have centered on rising levels of...

Just 50 miles off the Pacific Northwest coast is an earthquake hotspot that threatens to unleash on Seattle, Portland and Vancouver the kind of damage that has shattered Chile. The fault has been dormant for more than 300 years, but when it awakens — tomorrow or decades from now — the consequences could be devastating.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Emergency funding the U.S. government provided during the credit crisis has left financial institutions with huge cut-price loans that could harm banks' profits and economic growth once borrowing costs rise. Banks that borrowed cheaply in the corporate bond market with a government guarantee will see their borrowing costs rise sharply once the debt matures, analysts said. That may swell bank expenses and constrain their ability to lend. By some time in 2012, about $309 billion of government-guaranteed debt outstanding under the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program (TLGP) will mature. Banks will have to refinance with their own...

(CNSNews.com) – Rep. Don Manzullo (R-Ill.) said last week he was “shocked” to hear a senior Department of Defense official agree with him that the administration’s plan to move detainees of Guantanamo Bay to Thomson, Ill., would pose an increased security risk. At a press conference in the House of Representatives, Manzullo said the official “agreed with me there would be an increased security risk to northwest Illinois, but he had no way of estimating the extent of this threat.”

One of the numerous adverse side-effects of the horrendous policy decision to start bailing out each and every risky bank, and thus allowing no more risk in any investment (for the time being), has been the very simple observation that massively mispriced risk has gotten concentrated to an unparalleled degree among very few players. The population of Big Banks has been massively trimmed (Goldman thanks everyone for allowing them to have massive Fixed Income bid/ask spreads) and now a mere five banks account for the bulk of loans, deposits, and derivative exposure. When the economy is faced with another Lehman...

LONDON — The pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline says it has advised medical staff in Canada to not use one batch of swine flu vaccine for fear it may trigger life-threatening allergies. GlaxoSmithKline spokeswoman Gwenan White said Tuesday the company issued the advice after reports that one batch of the swine flu vaccine might have caused more allergic reactions than normal. She says the affected batch contains 172,000 doses of the vaccine. She declined to say how many doses had been administered before the advice to stop using them was given.

Final-salary pension plans urged to take more risks David Budworth Trustees of struggling final-salary pension plans are being urged to adopt racier investment strategies or risk losing up to £150 million of benefits for thousands of scheme members. About 75 final-salary pension plans have such large funding shortfalls that they will wind up in the next two years — forcing 15,000 members into the Pension Protection Fund — unless they take radical action, according to Hewitt Associates, a human resources consultancy, but the schemes could be saved if the trustees overhauled their investment strategies, turning to alternative assets, such as...

The future of investing: academics predict more complexity By Maik Rodewald Published: October 11 2009 10:21 | Last updated: October 11 2009 10:21 “A theory should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.” If one applies Albert Einstein’s words to a colourful basket of theses from leading US academics about the future of investing, it could look like this: Andrew Lo of MIT’s Sloan School of Management provides the foundation of the theory. For one of America’s current academic superstars, it is pretty clear how the future must look: “We need to solve investors’ biggest problem – uncertain outcomes...

I can't think of a better way to describe the last 2 years than as times of great uncertainty. Not only did we have two near catastrophic banking failures worldwide, but we also have the ever present Iran Israel nuclear contention. The USD held reasonably well during this period, although it's weaker. In any case, gold has held up amazingly well over the period of the last two years too, in fact is at highs. What else is except US T bonds? Pimco's Bill Gross just said the longer term of the US T yield curve is flattening and that...

Governments' contingent liabilities Fiscal iceberg Sep 24th 2009 | WASHINGTON, DC From The Economist print edition Guarantees offered during the crisis pose lasting risks to America THE visible costs of the financial crisis are well known: bank recapitalisations, stimulus spending and shrunken tax revenues. Another set of liabilities—the guarantees thrown up around financial systems a year ago to quell panic and keep credit flowing—has received far less attention. Guarantees are popular because they entail no immediate cost. But they leave the sovereign balance-sheet exposed to lurches in the financial system’s fortunes. In July the International Monetary Fund estimated that the...

PAKISTAN SNIPPET: "WASHINGTON: The United States warned Tuesday that reputed Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, who has regained freedom of movement in Pakistan, still risks spreading his nuclear weapons know-how. It stopped short of criticizing its ally in the war on terror but recalled that Washington has long raised with Islamabad its fears about Khan, who five years ago admitted leaking nuclear secrets to Iran, North Korea and Libya." SNIPPET: "David Albright, a former UN weapons inspector and nuclear specialist, told AFP that ‘it is a mistake’ to remove restrictions on a man who cannot be ‘trusted.’He said there is...