Transformational Government, dressed in the language of consumerism, is what NO2ID calls “the database state” – management of citizens’ lives through centralised computer systems; pooling and cross-referencing information about people gathered on any pretext for any purpose, amounting to mass surveillance. Once your relations with the state preserved your privacy, being limited to relationships with bodies that were separate from each other. A single department was powerful, but it did not judge you on your whole life.

Transformational Government changes that. You will have a single permanent record, and your identity managed (or determined) by the state. That will be held together by cross-referencing databases – which is what a National Identity Register is needed for. ‘ID cards’ are the concrete expression of this register, but strictly speaking are not necessary: numbering you and making constant reference to the central file will do.

According to the accounts, the strategy for Telegraph Media Group is to make "news
and comment under the Telegraph brand available to readers, listeners and
viewers in the format most convenient to them".

Those plans are "underpinned by the values of honesty, integrity and
accuracy that are inherent in the Telegraph brand".

It is now clear that the delusional hope that the severe credit and liquidity crunch that hit US and global financial markets would ease has been shattered by the events of the last few weeks. This credit crunch is getting much worse and its financial and real fallout will be severe.

The amount of losses that financial institutions have already recognized - $20 billion – is just the very tip of the iceberg of much larger losses that will end up in the hundreds of billions of dollars. At stake – in subprime alone – is about a trillion of sub-prime related RMBS and hundreds of billions of mortgage related CDOs. But calling this crisis a sub-prime meltdown is ludicrous as by now the contagion has seriously spread to near prime and prime mortgages. And it is spreading to subprime and near prime credit cards and auto loans where deliquencies are rising and will sharply rise further in the year ahead. And it is spreading to every corner of the securitized financial system that is either frozen or on the way to freeze: CDOs issuance is near dead; the LBO market – and the related leveraged loans market – is piling deals that have been postponed, restructured or cancelled; the liquidity squeeze in the interbank market – especially at the one month to three months maturities - is continuing; the losses that banks and investment banks will experience in the next few quarters will erode their Tier 1 capital ratio; the ABCP and related SIV sectors are near dead and unraveling; and since the Super-conduit will flop the only options are those of bringing those SIV assets on balance sheet (with significant capital and liquidity effects) or sell them at a large loss; similar problems and crunches are emerging in the CLO, CMO and CMBS markets; junk bonds spreads are widening and corporate default rates will soon start to rise. Every corner of the securitization world is now under severe stress, including so called highly rated and “safe” (AAA and AA) securities.

The foundation shelved the study, which it has not made public, after a group of local business people bought the paper, because it did not want to appear to be competing with the new owners, Ms. Rimel says. But she remains deeply concerned about the state of the nation's newspapers and has agreed to serve on the board of ProPublica, the new investigative-reporting project.

"Everybody from the Founding Fathers on have said we need a free, robust press, and a market failure in journalism is a deep public-policy problem," she says.

US household assets are $54,000bn. Liquid net worth (cash, mutual funds, bonds etc) is $27,500bn. Household debt is $13,000bn. In other words, the US household balance sheet is looking great: $54,000bn in assets ($27,500bn liquid) to cover $13,000bn in debt. Heck, we're under-leveraged as a country right now and should probably take on more debt. …

But what about the subprime mess? Isn't that going to bring the net worth of the US to $0 or even negative? Right now the entire subprime market is about $800bn and let's give full credit to the traders and media and say 50 per cent of that is at risk. So $400bn. Will $400bn worth of homes go into foreclosure? Of course not. Defaults are good for nobody. Things will and are getting restructured.

By Kabir Chibber

Nov. 16 (Bloomberg) -- The slump in global credit markets
may force banks, brokerages and hedge funds to cut lending by $2
trillion and trigger a ``substantial recession'' in the U.S.,
according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

The havoc on Wall Street following the collapse of the subprime-mortgage market boils down to a simple truth: for years, lots of very smart people took lots of very foolish risks, betting borrowed billions on dubious mortgage derivatives, and eventually the odds caught up with them. But behind that simple truth is a more surprising one: the financial whizzes made bad decisions in part because that’s what they were paid to do.

Not literally, of course. The way that hedge-fund managers and investment-bank C.E.O.s get paid is supposed to make them perform better for the investors they serve. Hedge-fund managers, for instance, typically are paid “2 and 20”: they get two per cent of total assets as a management fee, and they keep twenty per cent of their investment gains (above some agreed-upon benchmark). Letting hedge-fund managers keep a chunk of their winnings gives them an incentive to do well for their clients: in theory, they get rich only if their clients do.

Wow.

Tony, thanks so much for taking the time to comment on my post!!

I didn’t say so in the original posy but wanted to comment on the stones it took to pen an article that flies so much in the face of “revolutionary orthodoxy”.

I agree with you that the situation of the republished articles is different from a straight up barter in as much as a barter arraignment is usually (always?) entered consciously. What you described in “Scarcity” is more of an “accidental” value transaction and so more difficult to quantify.

Morning Edition, July 15, 2004 · A British street artist known as Moose creates graffiti by cleaning dirt from sidewalks and tunnels -- sometimes for money when the images are used as advertising. But some authorities call it vandalism.

How to pay for a free press