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One of the distinctive traits about Iceland’s disaster, and Wall Street’s, is how little women had to do with it. Women worked in the banks, but not in the risktaking jobs. As far as I can tell, during Iceland’s boom, there was just one woman in a senior position inside an Icelandic bank. Her name is Kristin Petursdottir, and by 2005 she had risen to become deputy C.E.O. for Kaupthing in London. “The financial culture is very male-dominated,” she says. “The culture is quite extreme. It is a pool of sharks. Women just despise the culture.” Petursdottir still enjoyed finance. She just didn’t like the way Icelandic men did it, and so, in 2006, she quit her job. “People said I was crazy,” she says, but she wanted to create a financial-services business run entirely by women. To bring, as she puts it, “more feminine values to the world of finance.” Today her firm is, among other things, one of the very few profitable financial businesses left in Iceland. After the stock exchange collapsed, the money flooded in. A few days before we met, for instance, she heard banging on the front door early one morning and opened it to discover a little old man. “I’m so fed up with this whole system,” he said. “I just want some women to take care of my money.”

“They say there are no atheists in foxholes.   Perhaps, then, there are also no libertarians in financial crises.”

What is occurring is the meltdown of the biggest pyramid game in human history.

The right course of action is for the US government to establish a Resolution Trust Corporation to take over failing financial institutions, including hedge funds and private equity firms, and leave the Fed to tackle inflation. But a Republican administration could not go to a Democratic Congress for money to capitalise such a corporation. It could not justify spending US$1 trillion to bail out those who deceived investors around the world and destroyed the finest financial institutions in America for their own gains. Instead, the Fed will be called on to save the financial system, boost the economy and suppress inflation at the same time.

credit card companies and banks gave the same kind of cooperation to the government that phone companies did

in 2006 that the NSA obtained access to financial records in the international SWIFT database

the agency may have obtained bulk data on domestic credit card transactions as well from U.S. financial institutions -- all without a warrant

2008年11月25日23点10分，走出地铁1号线玉泉路站B口。 “师傅，坐车吧，十块钱。” 低头一看，别克君威2.4。 … 这是经济危机吧…

Thirteen years ago in Beijing, you spoke eloquently about the duty of all governments to respect the fundamental human rights of women and men. Respect for human rights, you said, means “not taking citizens away from their loved ones and jailing them, mistreating them, or denying them their freedom or dignity because of the peaceful expression of their ideas and opinions.” In recent years, however, human rights concerns have been pushed progressively further to the margins of the U.S.-China relationship. The Chinese government’s growing financial, diplomatic, and military strength, coupled with its hostility to reforms that challenge the Chinese Communist Party’s grip on power, make China a difficult country in which to effect change. But the advancement of human rights in, and with, China is arguably more central to U.S. interests than ever before. Press censorship in China makes it possible for toxic food and public health crises to spread globally. Suppression of dissent removes internal checks against environmental damage that has global impact. Abuses of low-wage labor implicate international firms operating inside China and compromise goods that come into the United States. The government’s control of mass media and the internet allow it to stoke nationalist anger against the United States in moments of crisis. The export from China of internet-censoring technologies and its provision of unconditional aid to repressive regimes increases the United States' burdens in fighting censorship and human rights crises worldwide. As much as the Chinese government appears to resist outside pressure to improve its record, experience suggests that it does respond to such pressure.

Wikileaks has released nearly a billion dollars worth of quasi-secret reports commissioned by the United States Congress. Frontpage of sample CRS report, RL31555: China and Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction and Missiles: Policy Issues, dated January 7, 2009. A full listing of reports is available here.

The 6,780 reports, current as of this month, comprise over 127,000 pages of material on some of the most contentious issues in the nation, from the U.S. relationship with Israel to the financial collapse.

The Federation of American Scientists, in pushing for the reports to be made public, stated that the "CRS is Congress' Brain and it's useful for the public to be plugged into it,"[2]. While Wired magazine called their concealment "The biggest Congressional scandal of the digital age"[3]. Although all CRS reports are legally in the public domain, they are quasi-secret because the CRS, as a matter of policy, makes the reports available only to members of Congress, Congressional committees and select sister agencies such as the GAO.

包括美联储(Fed)和欧洲央行(ECB)在内的全球六大央行昨日宣布，同时紧急减息半个百分点，这项举措史无前例。

美联储将利率从2%降至1.5%，最近才提高了利率的欧洲央行，则将基准利率从4.25%下调至3.75%。欧洲央行还公布，调整向银行提供资金的方式，保证在官方利率下，银行贷款数额不受限制。 英国央行(BoE)将基准利率从5%下调至4.5%，瑞士央行(Swiss National Bank)将利率从3%减至2.5%。瑞典央行(Riksbank)则从4.75%调至4.25%。

同时，除本次共同减息外，中国将一年期存贷款利率各下调了27个基点。日本央行对本次举措“表示欢迎”，但没有采取任何行动。

Central bank purchases of traditional reserve assets still dwarf sovereign wealth fund purchases of riskier assets -- as well as central bank purchases of equities. But over time, it is reasonable to expect that many over-reserved sovereigns will diversify their portfolios. The recent decision to increase the share of the CIC's initial $205-210 billion in capital that it can invest abroad and SAFE's increased willingness to purchase equities as well as bonds are examples.

A far more challenging issue is how the huge increase in financial assets managed by potentially non-economic agents will affect the efficiency of the global capital market and the allocation of risk and resources. ….

And then there is China. China enormous foreign asset growth in the first quarter implies that it might be able to add more to its reserves and sovereign fund in 2008 than all the oil-exporters combined even if oil stays at its current levels.

The past 10 days will be remembered as the time the U.S. government discarded a half-century of rules to save American financial capitalism from collapse.

In ordinary times, a capitalist economy lets prices -- such as those of homes, mortgage-backed securities and stocks -- fall to the point where the big-bucks crowd rushes in, hoping to make a killing. But if the big money remains on the sidelines, unpersuaded that a bottom is near, the wait for bargain hunters to take the plunge could be very long and very painful.

But something big just happened. It happened without an explicit vote by Congress. And, though the Treasury hasn't cut any checks for housing or Wall Street rescues, billions of dollars of taxpayer money were put at risk. A Republican administration, not eager to be viewed as the second coming of the Hoover administration, showed it no longer believes the market can sort out the mess.

那么，如何在不用过度俭省的情况下存钱、节约而不显得吝啬－－同时在经济加快发展时也能保持这样的习惯？要做到这一点并非易事。Financial Psychology Corp.首席执行长、心理学家凯瑟琳•葛尼(Kathleen Gurney)说，人们肯定会觉得不舒服。但就算不舒服还是要坚持，最后的回报会物有所值的，而一旦经济停止减缓，你会具备让你受益终生的良好理财习惯。

I would suggest that China's January reserves data provides an equally compelling case for a reconsideration of the world's global monetary architecture. An international monetary system that requires this kind of official intervention - and likely will lead to more inflation in the emerging world than the emerging world wants and more government ownership of financial assets in the US and Europe than the US and European public wants -- strikes me as hard to sustain for much longer.

China added $55b to its reserves. Saudi Arabia added $18b to its foreign assets in January. Those two countries combined to add around $73b to their central banks portfolios. That means that those two countries alone could have supplied the $62.5b a month the US needs to sustain a $750b current account deficit and still had a bit left over to buy euros. Or they could have provided enough money to finance capital outflows from the US along with a current account deficit.It kind of makes you wonder why the US goes through the motions of selling Treasury and Agency bonds on the open market rather than doing direct placements with a few big central banks.

格林斯潘(Alan Greenspan)曾在《金融时报》(Financial Times)上发表署名文章称，当房价稳定下来之后，衡量稳定性的尺度便会恢复，他说的也许没错。但在预期美元将继续大幅走软的时候，资金何以会流向主要以美元计价的房地产呢？

中国政府一位高级官员称，中国为北京奥运会及一些大型水电项目施行的调水计划，将危及中国西北省份数百万农民的生活。现任中国全国政协常委、中共陕西省委前书记、陕西省政协前主席安启元在接受英国《金融时报》(Financial Times)采访时警告称，过度使用稀缺的水资源，可能会招致一场社会和环境灾难。

The price tally in the latest American Farm Bureau market basket survey of 16 basic groceries was $45.03 in the first quarter, up 9% from the same period last year. Many of the price increases are eye-popping -- a five-pound bag of flour cost $2.69, 26% more than last year.

The surge in food costs has been attributed to several factors, including the increasing number of American farmers who now grow corn to supply the ethanol industry instead of food companies. I

Corn prices have soared, hitting $6 a bushel, up 50% from 2007 and triple the price of three years ago.