U.S. banks will close 5,000 branches, Whitney says

Not to mention cutting 80,000 jobs....

From: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-22/u-s-banks-will-close-5-000-branches-in-18-months-whitney-says.html

US banks will close 5,000 branches, Whitney says

U.S. banks will close 5,000 branches in the next 18 months as they face profit declines from decreased loan demand and lower fee revenue, said Meredith Whitney, the former Oppenheimer & Co. analyst who now runs her own firm.

Banks face an “uphill battle” in generating loan growth as consumers reduce debt and will receive less revenue from fees because of new regulations and the lack of a securitization market, Whitney, 41, said in a report dated Nov. 18 and obtained today by Bloomberg News.

[[MORE]]Whitney has said earnings pressures and new regulation will lead to some lower-income customers losing access to banking services. The number of households without access to the “traditional banking system” will rise to 41 million by 2015 from 30 million in 2009, she said in the Nov. 18 note.

“The most regrettable unintended consequence of some of the quickly written regulatory reform, we believe, will be the inevitable ‘debanking’ of the U.S. financial system,” said Whitney, who started New York-based Meredith Whitney Group after correctly predicting Citigroup Inc.’s dividend cut in 2007. “Fewer ‘bankable’ customers will contribute to the trend in fewer bank branches.”

Whitney also sees slower growth in investment banking. U.S. securities firms may cut as many as 80,000 jobs in the next 18 months as revenue growth slows, she said in September.

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Anti-nuclear protests in Germany

Reposted from Axis of Logic:

German people in unprecedented rebellion against government: 1000 injured in protests in nuclear protests: police at breaking point

Like the Roman legions vanquished in the Teutoburger Wald in Lower Saxony in 9 AD, the 17,000 police officers that marched into the woods around the nuclear storage facility in Gorleben in northern Germany on Sunday morning looked invincible. Police personnel from France, Croatia and Poland had joined in the biggest security operation ever mounted against protestors against the a train carrying nuclear waste to an depot in an isolated part of Lower Saxony's countryside. Helicopters, water canons and police vehicles, including an armoured surveillance truck, accompanied an endless column of anti-riot police mounted on horses and also marching down the railway tracks into the dense woods. Tens of thousands of anti riot police clattered along the tracks, their helmets and visors gleaming in the morning sun, and wearing body armour, leg guards and carrying batons.

[[MORE]]But by Sunday night, those same police officers were begging the protestors for a respite.

Trapped in black, icy woods without supplies or reinforcements able to reach them because of blockades by a mobile fleet of farmer’s tractors, the exhausted and hungry police officers requested negotiations with the protestors. A water cannon truck was blocked by tractors, and yet the police still had to clear 5000 people lying on the railway track at Harlingen in pitch darkness. The largest ever police operation had descended into chaos and confusion in the autumn woods of Lower Saxony, defeated by the courage and determination of peaceful protestors who marched for miles through woods to find places to lie down on the tracks and to scoop out gravel to delay the progress of the "the train from hell."

The police union head Reiner Wendt gave vent to the general frustration when he issued a press statement via the dpa news agency last night saying the police had reached exhaustion point and needed a break. Behind the scenes, a battle seemed to be raging between the police chiefs tucked up in their warm headquarters and urging more action and the exhausted officers on the ground.

The police on the ground won out. The Castor train -- called a "Chernobyl on wheels" because it has been carrying 133 tonnes of highly radioactive waste to an unsafe depot -- was stopped in the middle of the countryside and Nato barbed wire was placed around it. Lit by floodlights and guarded by a handful of police, the most dangerous train on the planet was forced to a halt after a 63 hour journey across France and Germany.

The defeat of the legions at Teutoburg marked the end of the attempt by the Roman empire to conquer Germania magna. And the failure of the biggest ever police operation two thousand years later in the woods of Lower Saxony to tame women, elderly people and school children protesting the government's nuclear policy, could well also go down as a turning point.

The Berlin government can no longer rely on the discredited mainstream media to control the way people see issues. Too many people recognise it to be a tool of propaganda. The government now needs to resort brute force to bludgon through decisions that enrich corporations and banks and impoverish everyone else. But the police forces at its disposal are simply not sufficient given the scale of the protests now gripping Germany. Only 1,500 police reinforcements could be mustered on Morning from the entire territory to deal with road blockades by thousands of protestors aiming to delay the transport of the nuclear waste on the final leg of its journey.



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Hail storm in Phoenix

Very impressive hail storm in Phoenix....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lx4TUg3TD-s

 

China's conquest of America in 2030

Interesting video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTSQozWP-rM

Social commentary via TV

I was born and raised in the US, and lived in California for most of my life. In late 2006, I moved with my wife and two kids to New Zealand. Even though I've traveled quite a bit, I didn't completely know what to expect living in another country. One thing that surprised me was how I slowly began to see the US in quite a different way when I could see it from the outside.

I've had a difficult time explaining this to my friends and family, but I've recently had an experience that I thought I would share, to see if it might help get some small part of it across.

[[MORE]]I think we can use TV shows to gain insight into the societies that create them. They tend to reflect our morals, priorities, interests, etc. Even if we don't agree with the themes and content of a specific show, the standards that are used in script writing are relatively consistent from one show to another, and many themes are repeated time after time: pro-police, pro-government, pro-military, etc, etc. I'm not talking so much about cable or pay-TV shows, since they have enough freedom to do things differently from time to time. I'm talking about advertiser-sponsored broadcast TV; there's a lot of content that sponsors won't allow, on top of limits (censoring) by the FCC, and of course the priorities of the TV networks and the people who run them.

A few weeks ago, I discovered something that I thought was interesting. There is a very popular TV show in New Zealand, called "Outrageous Fortune." It's shown on broadcast TV here, complete with advertising (both traditional and product placement). It's in its sixth season, and I've heard that roughly 1 in 4 people in the country watch it. With that level of success, someone decided that it would be worth showing it in the much larger US market (4M people here vs. 300M there). However, the show as-is has a lot of NZ cultural references (things like Maori terms and local slang) and other "quirks," so they decided to do a remake, which is called "Scoundrels," now in its first season. The scripts are almost, but not quite, identical -- and it is precisely those differences that make for a very interesting social commentary.

Here's a short video that previews the third season of Outrageous Fortune, to give you an idea of what it's like:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94OawKbP6bc

What I'd like to suggest is the following: first, watch at least the first two, but hopefully the first 3 or 4 episodes of Scoundrels. Then, watch the same number of eps of Outrageous Fortune, from its first season (available on DVD or torrent). Try not to get distracted by the acting. Instead, listen to the script and look for the words and scenes that were changed, and at the theme and feeling of the story. Then ask yourself why the people who run broadcast TV in the US don't want you to see and hear the things they censored.

One small example is swearing. The usual argument I remember in the US in favor of censorship is that parents supposedly don't want their kids to copy those words; yet shows about violence are perfectly OK. So we're supposed to believe that the kids will uncontrollably copy swearing, but won't copy the violence? That somehow TV will circumvent or replace morality? And yet most normal kids are exposed to swearing regularly in everyday life.

Another example is how sex is portrayed. The NZ version is reasonably explicit at times, including showing topless women and the type of (simulated) sex scenes you might see on HBO or Showtime in the US. Those scenes have been "sanitized" in the US version.

The result is that US TV lives in this "vanilla-ized," conflicted world that tries to portray (semi)-realistic environments, but with a bunch of the stuff that actually happens in reality filtered out; that, in turn, substantially reduces the level of entertainment they provide. A major foundation of entertainment is being able to relate on some level to a show and its characters. The more detached a show is from reality, the less entertaining it becomes.

I'm not sure this will make any sense -- at least not at first. But if you have a chance to watch both shows, I would love to hear your reaction.

Sardines

I used to have sardines every once in a while when I was a kid. I didn’t have them again until recently. I bought a can at the local grocery, and was shocked at how tiny they were compared to the ones I remembered. They were only about 2 inches long, and about a quarter inch wide--compared to 8 inches long and 2 or 3 inches wide back then.

My family was in the fishing business for several generations, including starting the first sportfishing business in San Diego in the early 1900s. Over a period of years, the size, number and extent of large game fish, such as marlin, albacore tuna, etc, dropped off dramatically. My grandfather swore that the cause was the canning industry’s overfishing of sardines, which were a primary food source for the game fish. He fought them for many years. Unfortunately, even though the canning industry eventually collapsed in the 1950s (their behavior caused their demise), the stocks of both sardines and game fish have never returned to what they once were.

Troubleshooting low-carb

Are you eating Paleo, and yet often still hungry at the end of a meal? If so, it may be due to low blood sugar. One of the body’s responses to low blood sugar is to make you feel hungry. Why might your blood sugar so low? One possibility is that you are eating too much protein. The protein will cause insulin to be released, which will then lower your blood sugar (the opposite of what you need at that point). Another is that you had carbs at an earlier time in the day, and that after the initial spike in blood sugar, your body has over-corrected into a blood sugar low. This is “hypoglycemia,” and is very common.

The solution is to cut back on protein and carbs. What happens when you cut back both protein and carbs is that fat, as a percentage of total calories, needs to go up; fat also tends to be very satiating.

This type of diet change does take time. However, once your body enters fat-burning mode (which is indicated by being in ketosis), one benefit is that most people tend to get hungry much less often; for example, I can generally go at least 15 hours between meals without feeling hungry. That also means less cooking. Being in ketosis also means that your insulin levels are at their lowest, which will minimize blood sugar swings, which is part of why it helps resolve hunger issues. You do have to be careful about increasing fat without also decreasing carbs. If you don’t cut back on carbs, the resulting high insulin levels are a pretty sure-fire way to gain weight; yet most people will actually lose weight on a high-fat, low-carb, low-protein diet. In addition to controlling blood sugar, insulin also acts as a “storage hormone,” which causes excess calories to be stored as fat.

[[MORE]]I know many people have trouble giving up sweets. I was in that camp myself, in fact. I tried fake sweets years ago, but found they actually made things worse, by constantly reminding me of what I couldn’t have. My ultimate solution (not for everyone!) was to replace sweets with bitters: things like cocoa, coffee and dark green veggies. After a few months of that, not only do I not find those things bitter any more, on the few occasions when I’ve tasted something sweet, they now generally taste sickly-sweet to me.

If you have fat tolerance issues, you might try taking a lipase-containing supplement with your meals. Lipase is an enzyme that helps to break down fats. You might also try several different types of fat, to see if you tolerate some better than others (butter vs. cream, for example, or cooked vs. not); even the texture can make a difference. A few ideas to help increase your overall fat intake:

• Add cream when cooking your meat. It helps dissolve the grease, and adds tremendously to the flavor.


• Mix your avocados with a little olive oil – can be great in salads.


• Try a half-cream / half-milk beverage as desert; possibly with a little coffee or cocoa (also an option for a quick meal).


• When cooking eggs, try tossing out an occasional egg white to decrease protein and increase fat. You can also add a few tbsps of cream to your eggs; plenty of cheese is nice, too.


• If you like bacon, and like the taste but not the greasy feel of the grease, cook the bacon first, then toss about half the resulting grease, and cook eggs in the same pan. Adds lots of flavor to the eggs, and doesn’t taste greasy at all.


• Use plenty of butter and/or some occasional cream when cooking your veggies.


• Retain and eat the skin on chicken, rather than tossing it out (plenty of fat; very tasty).


• Buy less expensive cuts of meat; the ones with a higher fat content (more marbling, etc).


• Add grated cheese liberally to veggies and meat.


• Drink your coffee or tea with plenty of cream.


• For a quick, no-think meal, try full-fat unsweetened / no-fruit yoghurt with a few drops of vanilla; the one I get is only about 5% carbs.

You could also try blenderizing your cream a little before using it, to see if it improves digestability for you by breaking up some of the fat globules (avoid too much blenderizing, though, or you’ll end up making butter).

Also, in addition to a diary, you might consider tracking the composition of the foods you eat on a site like fitday.com—at least for a few days. That will help you see how much of your meals are carbs vs. protein vs. fat. That can also help you find “hidden” sources of carbs in your diet (for me, it was too many nuts).