Insolvency fears set off storm in credit markets / investment bank Bear Stearns and the mortgage giant Fannie Mae
KANGAROOISTAN = the land of kangaroos
Market panic after Bear Stearns reports
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Last Updated: 6:40am GMT 11/03/2008
Panic swept the credit markets on reports of an insolvency crunch at
both the US investment bank Bear Stearns and the mortgage giant Fannie
Mae, triggering a dramatic surge in default insurance and rumours of
yet another emergency rate cut by the US Federal Reserve.
Bear Stearns headquarters in New York: Insolvency fears set off storm
in credit markets
There are fears that Bear Stearns have been unable
to raise capital to cover mortgage losses
Financial shares plummeted on Wall Street in another day of wild
trading as the markets began to fear that the $200bn (£100bn) life-
line pledged by the Fed last Friday would not be enough to halt a
vicious downward spiral.
The Dow Jones index fell 153.54 to close at 11,740.15, breaking
through the crucial support line of its January lows.
Credit default swaps (CDS) measuring bankruptcy risk on Bear Stearns
debt rocketed from 246 points to 792 on fears that it had been unable
to raise capital to cover mortgage losses and was preparing to invoke
Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
The company denied the reports, insisting that it had $8bn of ready
credit lines and enough funds to meet its debt obligations for the
next year without having to sell assets or take out fresh debt. "There
is no truth to the liquidity rumours," said a spokesman.
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The bank's share price ended down 11pc at $62.30.
Lehman Brothers, the biggest mortgage underwriter, was also mauled on
leaked reports that it planned to slash its worldwide workforce by
5pc. Lehman CDS contracts leaped 60 points to 395.
Almost every indicator of credit stress was flashing warning signals.
The CDX index measuring default risk on US investment grade bonds rose
to 190 and the iTraxxx Europe touched 150.
Bank of America said the Fed would have to cut rates to 1.5pc by the
middle of the year. The futures markets have begun to price in the
serious possibility of a 100 basis point drop next week.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2008/03/11/cnbear111.xml
simple_...@yahoo.com
religiously sanctioned rape, abuse of human rights, and prohibition of
scientific inquiry. It forbids Muslim emigration to the lands of the
infidels because a Muslim minority cannot enslave the infidel
majority. Despite this prohibition Muslims emigrate to the West, not
as migrants, but as conquerors. They live in sharia mini-states and
expand these mini-states by terrorizing infidel neighbors and driving
them out.
Arabic proverb says "first comes Saturday, then Sunday." It means that
Arabs are going to exterminate Jews before they exterminate
Christians. It also means that Israel is the first line of defense
against Islam.
Muslims in America: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLK1Xpc7SMQ
Young Talib beheads Ghulam Nabi: http://tinyurl.com/2rb2e3
The other islamic bomb: http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4843/1885/1600/theotherislamicbomb.jpg
Kick out Muslim invaders:
http://bp2.blogger.com/_lzbnELhyNSs/RrY_wQmRzaI/AAAAAAAAAA8/7UDRLBqSsdM/s1600-h/kick-a-muslim.gif
KANGAROOISTAN = the land of kangaroos
global...@yahoo.ca
<simple_langu...@yahoo.com> forgot to include this expose of the next
stage in Israel's genocidal treatment of the Gaza Palestinians (the
true owners of Palestine, who were robbed and driven out by the
current brutal usurpers).
I'M SURE THAT HE'D LIKE YOU TO RE-POST IT AS FAR ACROSS THE NET AS
POSSIBLE!
Our warmest hanks and admiration go out to simple_langu...@yahoo.com,
who does a brilliant job of exposing Israel's amoral attitudes and
ambitions
toward its Muslim neighbors on numerous conferences around the Web
(and who has done so for a long time, fearlessly) for drawing my
attention
to this superb expose of Israel's aggressiVe intentions.
He, and his equally-fearless colleague, 'Yaako Warrior' (actually,
it's a
SECRET, but I can let you know that they are actually the SAME BRAVE
PERSON!), who spends his time on the Net alerting others to the hate-
filled
nature of Zionist propaganda by accurately imitating it CONSTANTLY
and
EVERYWHERE. We owe Gary Rumain (for it is he!) a warm vote of thanks
for these selfless and courageous acts!
If anyone knows of similar revealing articles on naked Israeli
militarism and violation of human rights (including the attempts in
Europe to arrest senior Israeli military officers as war criminals)
that simple_langu...@yahoo.com or 'Yaako Warrior' may have
missed posting, PLEASE POST THEM WIDELY WITH A PROMINENT
THANKS AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO EITHER OR BOTH OF
THEM! You might even ask your friends to help you!
Gary Rumain shouldn't be left alone in his fight against Israeli
criminality,
brutality and injustice. Let's ALL help him out. I know I will!
- o O o -
The Meaning Of Gaza's 'Shoah: Israel Plots Another Palestinian Exodus
By Jonathan Cook in Nazareth,
Information Clearing House,
8 March, 2008.
Deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilnai's much publicised remark last
week about Gaza facing a "shoah" -- the Hebrew word for the Holocaust
-- was widely assumed to be unpleasant hyperbole about the army's
plans for an imminent full-scale invasion of the Strip.
More significantly, however, his comment offers a disturbing
indication of the Israeli army's longer-term strategy towards the
Palestinians in the occupied territories.
Vilnai, a former general, was interviewed by Army Radio as Israel was
in the midst of unleashing a series of air and ground strikes on
populated areas of Gaza that killed more than 100 Palestinians, at
least half of whom were civilians and 25 of whom were children,
according to the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem.
The interview also took place in the wake of a rocket fired from Gaza
that killed a student in Sderot and other rockets that hit the centre
of the southern city of Ashkelon. Vilnai stated: "The more Qassam
fire
intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they [the
Palestinians of Gaza] will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah
because we will use all our might to defend ourselves."
His comment, picked up by the Reuters wire service, was soon making
headlines around the world. Presumably uncomfortable with a senior
public figure in Israel comparing his government's policies to the
Nazi plan to exterminate European Jewry, many news services referred
to Vilnai's clearly articulated threat as a "warning", as though he
was prophesying a cataclysmic natural event over which he and the
Israeli army had no control.
Nonetheless, officials understood the damage that the translation
from
Hebrew of Vilnai's remark could do to Israel's image abroad. And sure
enough, Palestinian leaders were soon exploiting the comparison, with
both the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and the exiled Hamas
leader, Khaled Meshaal, stating that a "holocaust" was unfolding in
Gaza.
Within hours the Israeli Foreign Ministry was launching a large
"hasbara" (propaganda) campaign through its diplomats, as the
Jerusalem Post reported. In a related move, a spokesman for Vilnai
explained that the word "shoah" also meant "disaster"; this, rather
than a holocaust, was what the minister had been referring to.
Clarifications were issued by many media outlets.
However, no one in Israel was fooled. "Shoah" -- which literally
means
"burnt offering" -- was long ago reserved for the Holocaust, much as
the Arabic word "nakba" (or "catastrophe") is nowadays used only to
refer to the Palestinians' dispossession by Israel in 1948.
Certainly,
the Israeli media in English translated Vilnai's use of "shoah" as
"holocaust".
But this is not the first time that Vilnai has expressed extreme
views
about Gaza's future.
Last summer he began quietly preparing a plan on behalf of his boss,
the Defence Minister Ehud Barak, to declare Gaza a "hostile entity"
and dramatically reduce the essential services supplied by Israel --
as long-time occupier -- to its inhabitants, including electricity
and
fuel. The cuts were finally implemented late last year after the
Israeli courts gave their blessing.
Vilnai and Barak, both former military men like so many other Israeli
politicians, have been "selling" this policy -- of choking off basic
services to Gaza -- to Western public opinion ever since.
Under international law, Israel as the occupying power has an
obligation to guarantee the welfare of the civilian population in
Gaza, a fact forgotten when the media reported Israel's decision to
declare Gaza a hostile entity. The pair have therefore claimed
tendentiously that the humanitarian needs of Gazans are still being
safeguarded by the limited supplies being allowed through, and that
therefore the measures do not constitute collective punishment.
Last October, after a meeting of defence officials, Vilnai said of
Gaza: "Because this is an entity that is hostile to us, there is no
reason for us to supply them with electricity beyond the minimum
required to prevent a crisis."
Three months later Vilnai went further, arguing that Israel should
cut
off "all responsibility" for Gaza, though, in line with the advice of
Israel's attorney general, he has been careful not to suggest that
this would punish ordinary Gazans excessively.
Instead he said disengagement should be taken to its logical
conclusion: "We want to stop supplying electricity to them, stop
supplying them with water and medicine, so that it would come from
another place". He suggested that Egypt might be forced to take over
responsibility.
Vilnai's various comments are a reflection of the new thinking inside
the defence and political establishments about where next to move
Israel's conflict with the Palestinians.
After the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, a consensus
in
the Israeli military quickly emerged in favour of maintaining control
through a colonial policy of divide and rule, by factionalising the
Palestinians and then keeping them feuding.
As long as the Palestinians were too divided to resist the occupation
effectively, Israel could carry on with its settlement programme and
"creeping annexation" of the occupied territories, as the Defence
Minister of the time, Moshe Dayan, called it.
Israel experimented with various methods of undermining the secular
Palestinian nationalism of the PLO, which threatened to galvanise a
general resistance to the occupation. In particular Israel
established
local anti-PLO militias known as the Village Leagues and later backed
the Islamic fundamentalism of the Muslim Brotherhood, which would
morph into Hamas.
Rivalry between Hamas and the PLO, controlled by Fatah, has been the
backdrop to Palestinian politics in the occupied territories ever
since, and has moved centre stage since Israel's disengagement from
Gaza in 2005. Growing antagonism fuelled by Israel and the US, as an
article in Vanity Fair confirmed this week, culminated in the
physical
separation of a Fatah-run West Bank from a Hamas-ruled Gaza last
summer.
The leaderships of Fatah and Hamas are now divided not only
geographically but also by their diametrically opposed strategies for
dealing with Israel's occupation.
Fatah's control of the West Bank is being shored up by Israel because
its leaders, including President Mahmoud Abbas, have made it clear
that they are prepared to cooperate with an interminable peace
process
that will give Israel the time it needs to annex yet more of the
territory.
Hamas, on the other hand, is under no illusions about the peace
process, having seen the Jewish settlers leave but Israel's military
control and its economic siege only tighten from arm's length.
In charge of an open-air prison, Hamas has refused to surrender to
Israeli diktats and has proven invulnerable to Israeli and US
machinations to topple it. Instead it has begun advancing the only
two
feasible forms of resistance available: rocket attacks over the fence
surrounding Gaza, and popular mass action.
And this is where the concerns of Vilnai and others emanate from.
Both
forms of resistance, if Hamas remains in charge of Gaza and improves
its level of organisation and the clarity of its vision, could over
the long term unravel Israel's plans to annex the occupied
territories
-- once their Palestinian inhabitants have been removed.
First, Hamas' development of more sophisticated and longer-range
rockets threatens to move Hamas' resistance to a much larger canvas
than the backwater of the small development town of Sderot. The
rockets that landed last week in Ashkelon, one of the country's
largest cities, could be the harbingers of political change in
Israel.
Hizbullah proved in the 2006 Lebanon war that Israeli domestic
opinion
quickly crumbled in the face of sustained rocket attacks. Hamas hopes
to achieve the same outcome.
After the strikes on Ashkelon, the Israeli media was filled with
reports of angry mobs taking to the city's streets and burning tyres
in protest at their government's failure to protect them. That is
their initial response. But in Sderot, where the attacks have been
going on for years, the mayor, Eli Moyal, recently called for talks
with Hamas. A poll published in the Haaretz daily showed that 64 per
cent of Israelis now agree with him. That figure may increase further
if the rocket threat grows.
The fear among Israel's leaders is that "creeping annexation" of the
occupied territories cannot be achieved if the Israeli public starts
demanding that Hamas be brought to the negotiating table.
Second, Hamas' mobilisation last month of Gazans to break through the
wall at Rafah and pour into Egypt has demonstrated to Israel's
politician-generals like Barak and Vilnai that the Islamic movement
has the potential, as yet unrealised, to launch a focused mass
peaceful protest against the military siege of Gaza.
Meron Benvenisti, a former deputy mayor of Jersualem, noted that this
scenario "frightens the army more than a violent conflict with armed
Palestinians". Israel fears that the sight of unarmed women and
children being executed for the crime of trying to free themselves
from the prison Israel has built for them may give the lie to the
idea
that the disengagement ended the occupation.
When several thousand Palestinians held a demonstration a fortnight
ago in which they created a human chain along part of Gaza's fence
with Israel, the Israeli army could hardly contain its panic. Heavy
artillery batteries were brought to the perimeter and snipers were
ordered to shoot protesters' legs if they approached the fence.
As Amira Hass, Haaretz's veteran reporter in the occupied
territories,
observed, Israel has so far managed to terrorise most ordinary Gazans
into a paralysed inactivity on this front. In the main Palestinians
have refused to take the "suicidal" course of directly challenging
their imprisonment by Israel, even peacefully: "The Palestinians do
not need warnings or reports to know the Israeli soldiers shoot the
unarmed as well, and they also kill women and children."
But that may change as the siege brings ever greater misery to Gaza.
As a result, Israel's immediate priorities are: to provoke Hamas
regularly into violence to deflect it from the path of organising
mass
peaceful protest; to weaken the Hamas leadership through regular
executions; and to ensure that an effective defence against the
rockets is developed, including technology like Barak's pet project,
Iron Dome, to shield the country from attacks.
In line with these policies, Israel broke the latest period of
"relative calm" in Gaza by initiating the executions of five Hamas
members last Wednesday. Predictably, Hamas responded by firing into
Israel a barrage of rockets that killed the student in Sderot, in
turn
justifying the bloodbath in Gaza.
But a longer-term strategy is also required, and is being devised by
Vilnai and others. Aware both that the Gaza prison is tiny and its
resources scarce and that the Palestinian population is growing at a
rapid rate, Israel needs a more permanent solution. It must find a
way
to stop the growing threat posed by Hamas' organised resistance, and
the social explosion that will come sooner or later from the Strip's
overcrowding and inhuman conditions.
Vilnai's remark hints at that solution, as do a series of comments
from cabinet ministers over the past few weeks proposing war crimes
to
stop the rockets. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, for example, has said
that Gazans cannot be allowed "to live normal lives"; Internal
Security Minister, Avi Dichter, believes Israel should take action
"irrespective of the cost to the Palestinians"; and the Interior
Minister, Meir Sheetrit, suggests the Israeli army should "decide on
a
neighborhood in Gaza and level it" after each attack.
This week Barak revealed that his officials were working on the last
idea, finding a way to make it lawful for the army to direct
artillery
fire and air strikes at civilian neighbourhoods of Gaza in response
to
rocket fire. They are already doing this covertly, of course, but now
they want their hands freed by making it official policy, sanctioned
by the international community.
At the same time Vilnai proposed a related idea, of declaring areas
of
Gaza "combat zones" in which the army would have free rein and from
which residents would have little choice but to flee. In practice,
this would allow Israel to expel civilians from wide areas of the
Strip, herding them into ever smaller spaces, as has been happening
in
the West Bank for some time.
All these measures - from the intensification of the siege to prevent
electricity, fuel and medicines from reaching Gaza to the
concentration of the population into even more confined spaces, as
well as new ways of stepping up the violence inflicted on the Strip -
are thinly veiled excuses for targeting and punishing the civilian
population. They necessarily preclude negotiation and dialogue with
Gaza's political leaders.
Until now, it had appeared, Israel's plan was eventually to persuade
Egypt to take over the policing of Gaza, a return to its status
before
the 1967 war. The view was that Cairo would be even more ruthless in
cracking down on the Islamic militants than Israel. But increasingly
Vilnai and Barak look set on a different course.
Their ultimate goal appears to be related to Vilnai's "shoah"
comment:
Gaza's depopulation, with the Strip squeezed on three sides until the
pressure forces Palestinians to break out again into Egypt. This
time,
it may be assumed, there will be no chance of return.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel.
His new book, "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and
the Plan to Remake the Middle East", is published by Pluto Press. His
website is www.jkcook.net