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Suppose that the value of the asset the Fed holds falls to zero after the trade. The trade was permanent, so there's no margin call or anything like that - the Fed owns the asset and it is worth nothing. Then, in the end, it is no different than the Fed simply printing that same amount of money and giving it to the banks as new reserves, it is an increase in the money supply.

If the central bank, or some other government agency, were to act as Market Maker of Last Resort and buy the impaired asset at a price no greater than its fair value but higher than what it would fetch in the free but unfair illiquid market, such a purchase would not be a bail-out. It would also be welfare-increasing...

My feeling is that it's not going to happen, mainly for political reasons. In this particular crisis, the distressed assets the Fed would end up buying would almost certainly be mortgage-backed bonds. But buying up mortgage-backed bonds looks very much like giving money to big banks and investors instead of giving it straight to struggling homeowners: the optics are simply terrible. If the collapse of Bear Stearns is seen as a bailout, this would be much worse. It might be a good idea, but its time

As we’ve written elsewhere, the CCP views media development as a critical factor in a global war for public opinion. Likewise, many CCP leaders have come to regard “Western” media as pawns working for the interests of Western governments in spreading their ideology and influence — hence the party’s obsession with “color revolutions” and the role of the press.

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.

Under rules of public financing, a candidate has access to $85 million from a taxpayer-financed fund for the general election, a substantial amount to spend for the roughly two months after this year’s conventions. But this election cycle has shattered fund-raising and spending records and upended expectations.

The setting, which has the feel of an Internet start-up, is emblematic of how Mr. Obama, of Illinois, has been able to raise so much money.

Mrs. Clinton’s operation has also been pushing to improve its efforts online, with her campaign saying Tuesday that it brought in $15 million over the Internet in February, with donations jumping after news broke that she had lent $5 million to her campaign.

This lack of freedom stunts any real debate on the future of China. Thinking is still circumscribed. There are areas that are still taboo or where intellectuals can only hint at what they mean. In three vital spheres, this is deeply damaging to China’s national interest. The first is foreign policy. China has evolved in less than a generation into a world power, one now placed alongside America in a newly minted category of G2. But the country is uncertain how to exercise this power. And as long as the party restricts the debate to a known ideological framework, it cannot mobilise China’s vast intellectual capabilities to address this. The second area, intellectual property, is equally damaged. As long as there is no real freedom to question the foundations of society, China will not produce innovators. It will be able to copy and develop, but not to outstrip competitors and set the framework for the world. And the third area is the legitimate assertion of religious and regional identities alongside Chinese citizenship.

At 4AM this morning I received an email inviting me to an IRC chatroom where someone would explain to me exactly how the Time.com 100 Poll was precision hacked. Naturally, I was a bit suspicious. Anyone could claim to be responsible for the hack - but I ventured onto the IRC channel (feeling a bit like a Woodward or Bernstein meeting Deep Throat in a parking garage). After talking to ‘Zombocom’ (not his real nick) for a few minutes, it was clear that Zombocom was a key player in the hack. He explained how it all works. The Beginning Zombocom told me that it all started out when the folks that hang out on the random board of 4chan (sometimes known as /b/) became aware that Time.com had enlisted moot (the founder of 4chan) as one of the candidates in the Time.com 100 poll. A little investigation showed that a poll vote could be submitted just by doing an HTTP get on the URL:        http://www.timepolls.com/contentpolls/Vote.do ?pollName=time100_2009&id=1883924&rating=1 where ID is a number associated with the person being voted for (in this case 1883924 is Rain’s ID). Soon afterward, several people crafted ‘autovoters’ that would use the simple voting URL protocol to vote for moot. These simple autovoters could be triggered by an easily embeddable ’spam URL’. The autovoters were very flexible allowing the rating to be set for any poll candidate. For example, the URL           http://fun.qinip.com/gen.php?id=1883924 &rating=1&amount=160 could be used to push 160 ratings of 1 (the worst rating) for the artist Rain to the Time.com poll.

“Needless to say, we were enraged” says Zombocom. /b/ responded by getting organized - they created an IRC channel (#time_vote) devoted to the hack, and started to recruit. Shortly afterward, one of the members discovered that the ’salt’, the key to authenticating requests, was poorly hidden in Time.com’s voting flash application and could be extracted. With the salt in hand - the autovoters were back online, rocking the vote.

We are very excited to announce the release of The DigiActive Guide to Twitter for Activism.  Following the recent protests in Moldova, the value of Twitter as a tool for digital activism is more prominent than ever.  Yet in addition to bringing greater awareness to that tool, the hype surrounding Moldova revealed misunderstanding of the value of of Twitter for activism and, even though the realists responded strongly, there was not a stand-alone resource which clearly defined how Twitter could be used by activists.  We hope this guide will fill that void.