Wednesday 24 September 2008

Paulson's former firm among largest beneficiaries of bailout

It certainly pays to be Treasury Secretary if your former firm is a brokerage house, a new study says. Goldman Sachs -- formerly run by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, and Morgan Stanley, stand to be among the biggest beneficiaries of his $700b bailout. Under the terms, banks will gain less, whereas brokerages will net more cash.
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Welcome to Socialist States of America!

So Henry Paulson, the ex-Goldman Sachs CEO, is so concerned about his alma mater and made an outrageous proposal to create the biggest bailout in human history - $700 billion, which certainly is an underestimation with a true figure more likely in the trillions. This has also coincidentally create the biggest socialist state ever - Socialist States of America.

Notwithstanding US usual rhetorics of free market and self-reliance, such bailout plan totally distorts the market and leads to serious moral hazards. Why should the taxpayers' be used to buy toxic assets purchased by reckless traders who reaped millions of bonuses in previous years? If the government is worried about disorder caused by bankruptcies, bailout plans similar to the AIG bailout aiming at orderly liquidation should suffice.

I also want to draw your attention to the Republicans' election platform 2008 -"We do not support government bailouts of private institutions." Can Mr McCain please kindly come out and boldly reject this proposal? Thank you very much.

Wednesday 10 September 2008

We will try our breast

well.. this is one of the most popular clips recently after the Legco election..
This guy is the newly elected legislator....

Wednesday 3 September 2008

Food Safety in China

China announced a reform to its bureaucracy responsible for food safety, public health and pharmaceutical industries. The Ministry of Health will take over the State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA) and will become the major watchdog for food safety. Sounds simple? The reality is a number of different bureaus, departments and agencies will be involved along the food production chain.

The Ministry of Agriculture, for example, will oversee the agricultural production while the State Administration for Industry & Commerce will look after food distribution. The SFDA, meanwhile, will still have a role in monitoring restaurants and canteens.

The even more confusing part is how the regional subsidiaries of these agencies will be reformed. As typical in Chinese politics, this can not be easily inferred from the central reforms.

Will this reform boast the low confidence on China's food products? We will have to keep an eye on it.

Tuesday 2 September 2008

The Google Browser

So finally, Google is launching its own browser as well. I greatly appreciate their efforts of making this comic in explaining the new browser in layman terms. Given the expectation that cloud computing will be the future, it makes sense to set their foot on browsers - which may be the only application you need in your computer. I am looking forward to it.