I Have No Idea What This Means

... but the markets are reacting like it's a major sugar rush.

The European Central Bank, U.S. Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and the central banks of Canada, Japan, and Switzerland are all taking part in the operation, which is designed to "enhance their capacity to provide liquidity support to the global financial system."

The ECB said in a statement the central banks were making it cheaper for banks to get U.S. dollar liquidity when they need it, starting next Monday. They are also taking steps to ensure banks can get ready money in any currency if market conditions warrant by establishing a temporary network of reciprocal swap lines.

The ECB said the central banks have agreed to reduce the cost of temporary dollar loans to banks — called liquidity swaps — by a half percentage point. The new, lower rate will be applied to all central bank operations starting on Monday.

Yay! We're saved! The loans are all paid off and ... wait a minute. Nothing happened.

Frankly, I think Berlusconi growing a beard would have more long-term effect.

I'm Not Sure I Like Disqus

For a while, I was considering ditching Blogger comments and moving to Disqus. I just commented on a friend's blog and felt like I had to go through a retina scan to do so. All I wanted to do was leave a little smile for the guy, not go through a TSA body cavity search.

Maybe now that I've done it through Disqus once it will remember me and it will be easy from now on. I hope so.

(Really, it wasn't that bad. I'm just being a grump because my roast chicken is fighting with me.)

Cheezburger of the Day

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European Optimism

... would seem to be misplaced.

The latest attempt to save the Euro calls for national budgets to be reviewed by bureaucrats in Brussels. How adding another and more ossified strata of regulations and oversight to an already crushingly burdensome process is going to save the EU is beyond me. And just how is detection and enforcement going to take place? Are they going to have an all-new set of bureaucrats to monitor tax collection levels in Milan? If it's low, do civil servants in Brussels cancel the public playground expansion efforts in Naples? And who pays for these new civil servants?

When the only tool you have is socialism, every problem looks like it needs another layer of central management.

Meanwhile, Italy continues to sink.

Italy again had to pay investors yields averaging above 7% at its government bond auctions Tuesday, as the euro zone's third-largest economy continues to borrow at costs that forced Greece, Portugal and Ireland to seek external bailouts.

The auction of up to €8 billion in bonds over a range of maturities saw Italy paying a yield of 7.89% on three-year bonds and 7.56% on 10-year paper. Both marked new euro-era highs. That Italy had to offer higher yields on shorter-dated bonds at Tuesday's sale underscores how investors want to be compensated for the risk attached to the country's near-term fiscal outlook.

Cheezburger Of The Day

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A Sure Sign Of The Apocalypse

A few days ago, I saw what appeared to be a teenage girl in a Hello Kitty burka.

May God have mercy on us all.

Diving In The Kelp Beds

Yesterday, two of our boys and I went diving in the kelp beds off of La Jolla Cove. We took along the Kodak Playsport and I did some filming. I got a little bit of worthwhile footage which I rough cut into the video below. Lots of lessons were learned.

• If you're going to swim, swim. If you're going to film, film. Don't try to do both. You don't enjoy the swimming and the filming comes out too bumpy to use.


• The Playsport worked great. It was easy to start and stop and the display was clear. I could always tell what was going on with it, even with the mask.


• Our deepest was about 35-40'. The camera never failed. I smeared its ports with silicone just to be sure it wouldn't leak and was easily able to peel the silicone off after we got home.


• You have to be careful how you hold the camera. The way I was holding it, I sometimes unwittingly zoomed the thing all the way in. My thumb was on the zoom control. I kept having to zoom back out.


• Dedicate some time to filming. Don't shoot until you pick a spot and settle down. Then film with nice, slow, calm sweeps. There will be plenty of cool things to see.


• If no one else is diving and the swells are huge and the tide is in so there is almost no beach and only cliffs, it might be a good idea to postpone the dive. It was pretty brutal coming back in and struggling to the stairs to get out of the surf zone. Whew!

In any case, here's the video. I took it in 1080p, but edited it and converted it to 720p. The hi-res, full-screen version might be worthwhile. Enjoy!

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Looking For Help For A Friend

Dean, who normally blogs over at Beers with Demo, has had his blog taken down by Google for no specified reason and without warning. We would really appreciate it if you tweeted blogger and asked them to restore his blog. Here's his link to put in your tweet:

http://beerswithdemo.blogspot.com/

Here's blogger's handle: @blogger.

Thanks.

Dear John Maynard Keynes: The Long Run Has Now Arrived

The IMF is warning Japan about its debt.

TOKYO—The International Monetary Fund warned in a new report that market concerns over fiscal sustainability could trigger a "sudden spike" in Japanese government bond yields that could quickly render the nation's debt unsustainable as well as shake the global economy.

The fund's Japan Sustainability Report, released on Wednesday, was a sihttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifgnal to Tokyo policy makers that the international community is already worried about fallouts from Japan's potential fiscal problems, after debt problems in some European economies evolved into a Continent-wide crisis.

Japan's public liabilities amount to roughly twice annual economic output—a ratio worse than that of any other industrialized economy, including turmoil-hit Spain and Italy.

No country has done more to "stimulate" it's economy and "invest" in its future than Japan. Aging, debt-ridden Japan. If you thought it was a bad idea to loan money to those wacky Italians, then it might be bad idea to loan it to those sober Japanese, too.

Fortunately for the Japanese, their debt is almost entirely held within Japan. They're not in any trouble unless there's some kind of jump in the number of retirees who need to take their savings out of the government bond market to live on.

Oops.

The Politicians Are To Blame For Our Problems

Look, it's really simple. We've given them an easy job. All we asked them to do was to fulfill all of our wants and needs and at the same time deliver economic growth and freedom while maintaining peace. The only reason Eurosocialism and secular progressivism is crashing and burning all around us is because we've got lousy politicians who only care about themselves. We just need the right people in charge and we'll soon have green jobs, a cooling planet, free college educations for all, open borders, plenty of jobs and unicorns riding steampunk airships.


How hard can this be, anyway?
Note: The original illustration came from here, but the site doesn't seem to be functional any more.

Why Thanksgiving Rocks

Our Monks Miscellaneous Musings have the details. I must say, I prefer Thanksgiving to Christmas, too.

If You Don't Want German Bonds, Why Would You Want Euro Bonds?

So earlier this week, the Germans were unable to sell all of their debt at auction. Around the financial world, experts correctly labeled this as a catastrophe. There is still talk about creating Eurobonds or a European Financial Stability Fund (EFSF), but the failure of the German debt auction would seem to have ripped that fantasy to shreds.

Both the EFSF and the Eurobond is every country in Europe teaming up to back their collective debt. When you loan these guys money, they're going to pay you back. Well, err, someone's going to pay you back. Italy's a bit short right now, so maybe Portugal can cover the payment. They're having riots against austerity? Well, how about France? They're losing their AAA rating and are cutting their budgets in a panic? OK, well, we all knew it would come to this, let's just get Germany to write you that check.

Oops.

Eurobonds and the EFSF are essentially weaker German bonds. If the real, 100% pure, solid-gold German bonds are tanking, why in the world would you buy diluted German bonds?

It's Eurogeddon: Jeremy Warner over at the Telegraph has a must-read piece on the topic.

In Portugal, the civil servant unions are demanding a return to Disneyworld. Or something like that.

Something Else To Be Thankful For

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Happy Thanksgiving!

Hi! Jacob the Syrian Hamster here with a heartfelt Happy Thanksgiving for all and sundry! I'm not sure who sundry is, but I hope they have a great holiday.

Here in the Theocracy, we're thankful for so much. Mostly we're thankful for our loved ones, the people that God has given us to share this journey of life. After the little girl in the house made her high school soccer team, we went to Adoration at St. Therese and said a Rosary. As we prayed, we realized it was that sharing of the journey for which we were thankful. Ups and downs, successes and failures, we're blessed to have had the chance to give our love to the people in our lives.

And we're blessed to have readers like you! We're almost at the 500,000 visits mark and we're deeply thankful for all of you. Have a very happy Thanksgiving and we hope to see you again on this blog real soon.

Yikes

This doesn't look good.

FRANKFURT—A German government debt auction drew some of the weakest demand since the introduction of the euro, signaling diminishing investor appetite for even the safest euro-zone assets amid Europe's worsening debt crisis.

The German government was able to sell only €3.644 billion ($4.92 billion) of the €6 billion in 10-year bunds on auction for an average yield of 1.98%.

Germany couldn't find buyers for all of its bonds?

My take: I think this is a vote of no confidence in the Euro, not Germany. If you bought German bonds, they would be denominated in Euros. If the Euro takes a dive, then a 2% return on the bond won't be nearly enough to make up for the loss due to the currency. Germany is getting dragged down by the toads in the Eurozone.

"May Your Road Be Rough"

Every week, I get together with my Cursillo groupies at a local Denny's for beakfast to chat about what's new in our lives and faith. Last week, while we were eating and talking, I noticed a black man asleep in a corner booth. He was sleeping sitting up, with his chin on his chest. My neck hurt just watching him. He wasn't dirty or unkempt as you might expect of a homeless man, but he was clearly not having a good day.

When breakfast was over, I stopped by and asked him how he was doing. In an African (I can't place it any better than that - sub-Saharan Africa) accent he told me he was doing OK. We talked a little about sleeping sitting up and how uncomfortable it was. He smiled and agreed, but didn't share his woes with me. Instead, he said with a smile, "In Africa, we have a saying. 'May your road be rough.'"

I guessed the end of the saying. "...so you may learn strength for life?"

He smiled and nodded. A great, big, beautiful smile, too. I said goodbye and God bless and walked over to the cash register and while paying for our group breakfast, I bought him a $20 gift card. I had the waitress deliver it after I left. I figure that made him smile again. It was a small reward for sharing a beautiful saying about accepting hardship with grace and courage.

Update: Here's another blogger who has a bit more on the saying.

St. Therese Sunset

I caught this one from the parking lot of St. Therese church. I left it large in the original so it might be worth a click. Enjoy!

Rising Interest Rates Are A Moral Backstop

... to our failed self-denial.

The Europeans are facing rising borrowing costs. In a moral sense, this is mathematics enforcing what they as a society could not - the denial of desires. They wanted socialized medicine, so they took it. The wanted plump retirements, so they took them. Like children whose parents have given up on discipline, they've grabbed everything for themselves. Now the stern hand of the market is coming down on them to restore the discipline they threw away in a frenzy of selfishness that they claimed was "compassion."

We're experiencing the same thing here as municipalities go bankrupt, national super committees fail to agree on even the most modest of restrictions and states face massive budget cuts.

Scarcity is the natural order of things and you can only throw self-denial away for so long before external realities force it on you again.

Cheezburger of the Day

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