Liege – Seraing (123 miles)

Le.  Tour.  De.  France.

Four miles in is a little early to despair.  Wiggins didn’t win but he didn’t have to.  Evans is outside the top ten but by just a bit.  You can’t read too much into this, the entire field is separated by a mere 1:06 at this point with 95 riders within :30 of the lead.

What happens for the next several days traditionally is that we wait for breakdowns and crashes to thin the field and drop a few contenders.  This year the course is so flat that it may tempt a team (I sure would be) to put on a Tiger Woods early round charge and pile up some Vettel like deltas.  Run each stage as a team time trial, courtesy and tradition be damned.

We’re not likely to see anything that decisive but you pay a penalty for early inattention and end up trying to force results in less favorable circumstances.  This stage has 5 category 4 climbs and 2 point awards.

General Classification

Coverage is customarily on Vs. (NBC Sports) starting at 8 am with repeats at noon, 2, 8, and 10 pm as well as 1 am.  NBC recap at 4 pm.  There will be some streaming evidently, but not all of it is free.

Also today coverage of the America’s Cup World Series from Newport and the European Cup Final.

Sites of Interest-

• 2012 Le Tour
• Liege – Seraing (123 miles)
• Wikipedia
• Geek Guide (very basic)
• Guardian Interactive Guide

The Stars Hollow Gazette Tags-

• Le Tour
• 2010 Le Tour
• 2011 Le Tour
• 2012 Le Tour

Pretty tables-

Liege – Liege (4 miles)

Le.  Tour.  De.  France.

Le Tour kind of kicks off the third year of The Stars Hollow Gazette.  The Prologue of 2010 is the very first public diary.  This is the 99th Tour.

Sports live blogging demonstrates many desirable characteristics for a ‘community’ diary- the experience is scheduled, it is shared in real time, it has a built in duration, and the result is unknown so it has the virtue of novelty.  While partiality and encouragement may be shown to sentimental favorites there is no argument about the situation once the play is called.

Participation is encouraged, all you have to do is register.  My opinion on the subject is not very deep, I’m a casual fan since a little before Armstrong.

Conventional wisdom will not allow for more than two contenders overall.  Cadell Evans, last year’s winner who spent his off-season adopting an Ethiopean; and Bradley Wiggins who has side burns and would be the first Brit to ever win.

Now there are other outlets that broaden the range of possibilities-

• Tour de France 2012 – the riders in the hunt for the yellow jersey
• Tour de France 2012 preview: Race wide open
• 2012 Tour de France: Top contenders
• Tour de France 2012 dark horses

These are some opinions on the dates of importance-

• 5 Stages to watch in the 2012 Tour de France
• Tour De France 2012 Schedule: Where to Catch Race’s Most Exciting Days

The significance of today’s little 4 mile time trial is that just as in Formula One you want to get a good start and clean air and see if you can pull out to a substantial enough advantage (tens of seconds is a start) so that you can weather some bad luck.  Many of the initial stages will be along the coast which is picturesque but slippery and windy and contenders will be trying to avoid early washouts.  There are those who contend the course more time trial than mountain and the truth is that there are as many trials as up hill finishes and only 5 days of high mountains which represents a considerable shift in emphasis.

Points

So there are fewer teams featuring hill climbing anchors and more with sprinting  contenders. Goss predicts sprint battle royal on Tour de France.  Perhaps, it’s hard to keep track of.

Coverage is customarily on Vs. (NBC Sports) starting at 8 am with repeats at noon, 2:30, and 8 pm.  There will be some streaming evidently, but not all of it is free.

Sites of Interest-

• 2012 Le Tour
• Liege – Liege (4 miles)
• Wikipedia
• Geek Guide (very basic)
• Guardian Interactive Guide

The Stars Hollow Gazette Tags-

• Le Tour
• 2010 Le Tour
• 2011 Le Tour
• 2012 Le Tour

We’re up.

As it turns out our servers are connected to the Amazon cloud in Virgina that went down last night.

Le Tour will post shortly before the last re-broadcast at 8 pm.

Japan’s appetite for whale meat wanes

Justin McCurry in Osaka, The Guardian

Thursday 14 June 2012 05.19 EDT

Junko Sakuma, a freelance journalist, said the body responsible for selling meat from Japan’s controversial “scientific” whaling programme had failed to sell 908 tonnes of the 1,211-tonne catch, despite holding 13 public auctions since last October.

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Sakuma said the oversupply of whale meat, despite pockets of demand for the highest quality produce, had made Japan’s lethal research programme unsustainable.

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Late last year, it was revealed the government used 2.28bn yen (£18.5m) from the 11 March earthquake recovery fund, on top of its existing $6m (£3.87m) annual subsidy, to pay for the most recent Antarctic hunt.

The fisheries agency said the use of the fund was justified because one of the towns destroyed by the tsunami was a whaling port.

This is about the 3rd year in a row of declining catches and failure to sell even a majority of the harvest.

Complex thinking goes beyond primates: Dolphins understand zero, elephants rescue each other

By Associated Press

June 24

Dolphins are so distantly related to humans that it’s been 95 million years since we had even a remotely common ancestor. Yet when it comes to intelligence, social behavior and communications, some researchers say dolphins come as close to humans as our ape and monkey cousins.

Maybe closer.

“They understand concepts like zero, abstract concepts. They do everything that chimpanzees do and bonobos can do,” said Lori Marino, a neuroscientist at Emory University who specializes in dolphin research. “The fact is that they are so different from us and so much like us at the same time.”

Barclays fined for manipulation of Libor

By Danielle Douglas, Washington Post

Published: June 27

The British bank admits to scheming to manipulate rates to increase profits and hide the reality of its distress during the financial crisis. Regulators suspect Barclays did not act alone, but was part of a larger conspiracy to set artificially low rates for Libor and the Euro interbank offered rate, or Euribor.

The U.S. Commodities Future Trading Commission uncovered evidence of Barclays senior management and numerous traders in London, New York and Tokyo making false reports to improve the bank’s trading position dating to 2005, according to the complaint filed Wednesday. At the height of the recession, the bank submitted low figures to keep rates down and to deflect public scrutiny about its condition.

“When a bank acts in its own self-interest by attempting to manipulate these rates for profit, or by submitting false reports . . . to lower submissions to guard the bank’s reputation, the integrity of benchmark interest rates is undermined,” David Meister, director of enforcement at the CFTC, said in a statement.

Counterparites: Barclays’ $450 million LIBOR settlement

By Ben Walsh, Reuters

June 27, 2012

The importance of Libor and, to a lesser extent, Euribor, is hard to overstate. They are used to value of hundreds of trillions of dollars of financial instruments. Or as Matt Levine puts it, they “set the rates on pretty much all the loans and swaps in the world … CFTC order mentions $350 trillion of [over-the-counter] swaps, $10 trillion of loans, and $437 trillion of CME eurodollar contracts indexed to Libor alone”.

In that context, it’s fair to ask what’s $450 million compared with a scheme like that? Not much, proportionally. And Barclays won’t face criminal prosecutions, because of what the DOJ calls its “extraordinary cooperation”. Individual employees, though, are the subject of ongoing criminal investigation.

This Week in Financial Not-Crime

By: masaccio, Firedog Lake

Wednesday June 27, 2012 1:47 pm

(T)oday we learn that manipulating LIBOR isn’t a crime. Barclays Bank paid $450 million to settle charges that it deliberately manipulated the bench-mark interest rate used to establish how much people pay on $350 billion worth of credit cards, student loans and mortgages. It’s also good news for other banksters who haven’t even been sued, like HSBC, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and other firms that are being looked at by regulators around the world.

Apparently the manipulation ran both ways, to increase the rate artificially for direct profit, and to reflect a lower rate to hide the fact that other banks were charging Barclays more than other banks because of its perceived weakness. Still, it’s hard to see a connection between a $450 million fine and the massive profits that could come by increasing LIBOR even fractionally. If LIBOR were .1% higher on $350 billion of debt, that comes to $350 million per year. The fraud went on for at least 4 years, which in my example means $1.4 billion in profits, all going directly to the bottom line.

Quelle Surprise! Barclays Settlement on Massive Interest Rate Price Fixing Illustrates Bank Crime Pays Well

Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism

Thursday, June 28, 2012

Barclays is first to settle, and given the scale and potential profitability of this activity, the fine looks paltry: $450 million among the FSA, the CFTC, and the Department of Justice (£230 million to the US authorities, £60 million to the FSA). The DOJ has granted “conditional leniency” on anti-trust charges. Price fixing is criminal under the Sherman Act. Four top executives, including CEO Bob Diamond are also giving up bonuses this year.

…

But all we need to do is contrast this case with the municipal bid-rigging prosecution described by Matt Taibbi in the current Rolling Stone. Here you have three individuals at GE Capital going to jail for price fixing, which is crime under the Sherman Act. But they were merely the arms and legs of big banks. Where were the prosecutions of the higher ups, or of the senior officers of banks who were in on this con? We see the same pattern over and over: justice is meted out only on the foot soldiers, those far enough away from the executive ranks so as not to call into question the integrity of the system. The irony of it all is the public is well aware of how crooked the financial services industry is (the poll data alone is proof). But for the elites, it is vital that they not admit that something is rotten in Denmark, for if they did, they’d have to do something about it.

A Huge Break in the LIBOR Banking Investigation

Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

POSTED: June 28, 10:15 AM ET

This is unbelievable, shocking stuff. A sizable chunk of the world’s adjustable-rate investment vehicles are pegged to Libor, and here we have evidence that banks were tweaking the rate downward to massage their own derivatives positions. The consequences for this boggle the mind. For instance, almost every city and town in America has investment holdings tied to Libor. If banks were artificially lowering the rates to beef up their trading profiles, that means communities all over the world were cheated out of ungodly amounts of money.

First there were huge bid-rigging settlements for Chase, UBS, Bank of America, GE and Wachovia. Now we’ve got a $450 million settlement for Barclays for Libor manipulation, and one imagines this won’t be the end of it. Anyway, more on this to come soon, and if you’re wondering, yes, there should be a lot more press on this.

UK probing more banks for interest rate fixing

By ROBERT BARR, Associated Press

20 minutes ago

Osborne said Barclays was not the only bank to be involved in market fixing. Beyond the U.K., there are also investigations in several countries involving numerous global banking groups.

…

“Banks were clearly acting in concert,” said Andrew Tyrie, a British lawmaker who chairs the influential Treasury Committee in the House of Commons. “I fear it’s not going to be the end of the story, that we are going to find that other banks have been involved.”

…

“If Bob Diamond had a scintilla of shame, he would resign,” said Matthew Oakshott, a member of the House of Lords. “If Barclays’ board had an inch of backbone between them, they would sack him.”

Prime Minister David Cameron, when asked whether Diamond should resign, said he thinks “the whole management team have got some serious questions to answer. Let them answer those questions first.”

The massive fines are unlikely to be the end of the pain for Barclays. The cost of lawsuits related to the LIBOR scandal will likely be bigger, said Sandy Chen, banking analyst at Cenkos Securities.

“Since Royal Bank of Scotland, HSBC and Lloyds Banking Group have also been named in lawsuits, we expect they will also face significant fines and damages. We are penciling in multi-year provisions that could run into the billions,” Chen said.

Leading article: A sick banking culture that cannot be tolerated

The Independent

Friday 29 June 2012

Politicians have attempted with varying degrees of rigour to introduce rules preventing a recurrence. Mostly, in the face of determined lobbying by the banks (led in the UK by Barclays), they have retreated or watered down their proposed measures. But it is obvious now that the authorities are only scratching at the surface: a far stronger hand is required.

For a start, they should act immediately and decisively. Fining a bank has little effect: what is required is the naming and shaming and driving from office of those involved. The era of entitlement – something we hear an awful lot about in relation to those at the other end of society, on benefits – must be brought to an end for bankers. Incredibly, only one UK top banker has been punished for his bank’s role in provoking the credit crunch: Fred Goodwin lost his job and subsequently, his knighthood. Now, with a second storm engulfing the sector, that cannot be allowed to happen again. Light-touch regulation and, with it, light-touch penalties should be banished. In that respect, Bob Diamond is right: the time for mere remorse is well and truly over.

Barclays Libor fix trail leads to senior managers

By Sarah White, Reuters

Wed Jun 27, 2012 6:09pm EDT

Staff responsible for submitting rates in some instances told colleagues of “internal political” pressure to set these low, the FSA’s report shows.

Barclays “senior management at high levels” became concerned over the media scrutinizing the bank’s funding access early in the financial crisis, in August 2007.

“Senior management’s concerns in turn resulted in instructions being given by less senior managers at Barclays to reduce Libor submissions in order to avoid negative media comment,” the UK’s FSA said in its report. “The origin of these instructions is unclear.”

The U.S. CFTC said specific instructions to lower submissions came from “senior Barclays Treasury managers”. They asked submitters to provide rates at a level where Barclays wouldn’t be “sticking its head above the parapet”.

Can Bob Diamond hang on after Barclays Libor scandal?

Nils Pratley, The Guardian

Wednesday 27 June 2012 11.37 EDT

Barclays tried to manipulate a $550tn market for almost half a decade. Internal controls and risk management functions were inadequate. The compliance department failed to do its job. The bank’s actions created the risk that the stability of the UK financial system would be threatened.

Add up that collection of misdemeanours and even £290m of fines, plus a voluntary waiving of boardroom bonuses, is woefully inadequate. The outside world will want to know why no director of Barclays has offered his resignation.

…

None of the various regulators’ reports suggest that Diamond or any other executive director at Barclays knew what was going on – they, we must assume, are not the “senior management” referred to in the FSA report who gave instructions to reduce Libor submissions. But should the top brass have known what was going on? Why doesn’t the buck stop at the top when the reputation of the bank has been so badly damaged?

JP Morgan Managers Being Told Trade Loss is $9 Billion

Posted by Teri Buhl

Tue 26 Jun 2012

This morning the New York Times Dealbook rewrote my scoop about a possible $9bn loss for JPM and didn’t credit me for reporting this first. They’ve done journalism theft like this before when I was scooping them at the New York Post during the financial crisis. Times reporters like Andrew Ross Sorkin led the scoop stealing behavior during 08 and this morning I see him doing the same thing on CNBC. Scoops are assets for journalist and I don’t appreciate the New York Times taking my hard-earned research and sourcing and using it as their own without a mention or link to my original reporting. If you think this is wrong- write them, comment on their sites or tweet about it. Only together we can hold other journalist accountable and demand accuracy.

(h/t Dashiell Bennett @ Atlantic Wire)

JPMorgan Trading Loss May Reach $9 Billion

By JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG and SUSANNE CRAIG, The New York Times

June 28, 2012, 2:30 am

To put the size of the loss in perspective, JPMorgan logged a first-quarter profit of $5.4 billion.

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The chief investment office – which invests excess deposits for the bank and was created to hedge interest rate risk – brought in more than $4 billion in profits in the last three years, accounting for roughly 10 percent of the bank’s profit during that period.

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More than profits are at stake. The growing fallout from the bank’s bad bet threatens to undercut the credibility of Mr. Dimon, who has been fighting major regulatory changes that could curtail the kind of risk-taking that led to the trading losses. The bank chief was considered a deft manager of risk after steering JPMorgan through the financial crisis in far better shape than its rivals.

“Essentially, JPMorgan has been operating a hedge fund with federal insured deposits within a bank,” said Mark Williams, a professor of finance at Boston University, who also served as a Federal Reserve bank examiner.

Shell gears up for new Arctic quest

By Jennifer A. Dlouhy, Houston Chronicle

Sunday, June 24, 2012

In Valdez, about 800 miles from Shell’s planned Arctic wells, the company has spent weeks training recruits how to deploy inflatable booms to corral floating crude so skimmers can suck it up.

…

But while federal regulators have approved Shell’s broad drilling plans and signed off on the company’s emergency plans for the region, the technology for sopping up spilled oil hasn’t been tested publicly in U.S. Arctic waters in 12 years, and the results weren’t encouraging.

During that earlier test, skimmers failed and floating ice slipped under booms meant to corral crude.

Shell tries to contain skepticism in Arctic

By Jennifer A. Dlouhy, Houston Chronicle

Sunday, June 24, 2012

Shell’s sizable armada doesn’t carry enough equipment to satisfy environmentalists who argue that existing technology can sop up only a small percentage of spilled crude, even from calm, warm seas. They warn that the equipment’s success rate might be worse in the Arctic, especially if waters are slushy or covered in ice.

Federal regulators have approved Shell’s oil spill response plans for the region, which describe a scenario for recovering 95 percent of the oil spilled. It would use an under-water containment system including a capping stack – an array of valves and other equipment that would be lowered to the ocean floor to plug a gushing well – along with skimmers, booms, chemical dispersants and burn-off of floating crude.

Mike LeVine, the Pacific senior counsel for the conservation group Oceana, scoffed at the 95 percent target.

He noted that only 8 percent of the oil was removed after the Exxon Valdez spill and 10 percent from spills in the Gulf of Mexico.

“The idea they could somehow magically get to 10 times that seems absurd to us,” LeVine said.

Oil Trades Below $80 for a Third Day on Economic Outlook

By Sherry Su and Ben Sharples, Bloomberg News

Jun 25, 2012 7:58 AM ET

Oil traded below $80 a barrel for a third day in New York amid concern that Europe’s debt crisis will curb demand for fuels.

Futures slid as much as 1.2 percent as George Soros warned that a failure by European Union leaders meeting this week to produce drastic measures could spell the demise of the bloc’s shared currency. Developed economies are running into the limits of monetary policy, the Bank for International Settlements said in its annual report yesterday. Oil earlier rose as much as 1.2 percent after Tropical Storm Debby approached oil and gas installations in the Gulf of Mexico.

“The outlook for oil remains negative while concerns remain about the economic outlook in Europe weigh on demand,” Michael Hewson, a London-based analyst at CMC Markets, which handles about $240 million a day in U.S. crude contracts, said today in an e-mail. “Investors remain skeptical that EU leaders will be able to agree on anything tangible to alleviate the current crisis.”

TransCanada wins 1 of 3 US nods for Keystone line

Reuters

Wed Jun 27, 2012 12:07am IST

CALGARY, Alberta, June 26 (Reuters) – The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has granted TransCanada Corp one of three permits it needs to build the $2.3 billion southern section of the Keystone XL pipeline, a project President Barack Obama had pledged to move forward quickly.

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The southern section would carry 830,000 barrels a day of crude to Texas refineries from the glutted Cushing, Oklahoma, storage hub with the aims of helping to raise deeply discounted prices and providing the region more secure oil supplies.

My emphasis.

PBS Newshour

Getting Away with It

Paul Krugman and Robin Wells, The New York Review of Books

July 12, 2012

When Obama was elected in 2008, many progressives looked forward to a replay of the New Deal. The economic situation was, after all, strikingly similar. As in the 1930s, a runaway financial system had led first to excessive private debt, then financial crisis; the slump that followed (and that persists to this day), while not as severe as the Great Depression, bears an obvious family resemblance. So why shouldn’t policy and politics follow a similar script?

But while the economy now may bear a strong resemblance to that of the 1930s, the political scene does not, because neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are what once they were. Coming into the Obama presidency, much of the Democratic Party was close to, one might almost say captured by, the very financial interests that brought on the crisis; and as the Booker and Clinton incidents showed, some of the party still is.

PBS Newshour

The Great Abdication

By PAUL KRUGMAN, The New York Times

Published: June 24, 2012

I’m hearing more and more about an even more fateful year. Suddenly normally calm economists are talking about 1931, the year everything fell apart.

It started with a banking crisis in a small European country (Austria). Austria tried to step in with a bank rescue – but the spiraling cost of the rescue put the government’s own solvency in doubt. Austria’s troubles shouldn’t have been big enough to have large effects on the world economy, but in practice they created a panic that spread around the world. Sound familiar?

The really crucial lesson of 1931, however, was about the dangers of policy abdication. Stronger European governments could have helped Austria manage its problems. Central banks, notably the Bank of France and the Federal Reserve, could have done much more to limit the damage. But nobody with the power to contain the crisis stepped up to the plate; everyone who could and should have acted declared that it was someone else’s responsibility.

…

None of this should be happening. As in 1931, Western nations have the resources they need to avoid catastrophe, and indeed to restore prosperity – and we have the added advantage of knowing much more than our great-grandparents did about how depressions happen and how to end them. But knowledge and resources do no good if those who possess them refuse to use them.

Breaking: Egyptian Election Commission Declares Morsi President

By: Scarecrow, Firedog Lake

Sunday June 24, 2012 7:39 am