Shocking News: Rich Men Pay for Sex

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Wednesday March 12, 2008 · 10:08 AM PDT

2008/03/12 · 10:08

What’s the big deal? Eliot Spitzer had sex with a call girl. Read the New York Times, and you would think this was something unusual, something shocking. Read the Wall Street Journal and you would think none of the traders and financiers, now gloating that their tormentor had been humbled, had ever paid for sex.

Amory Blaine

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Wednesday January 30, 2008 · 4:07 AM PST

2008/01/30 · 04:07

Maybe another rate cut will cure everything. Markets, spooked by sub prime losses hidden throughout the banking system, rose yesterday, encouraged by signals the Fed will cut another 50 basis points (on top of the 75bp cut last week). Lower borrowing rates allow banks to rebuild balance sheets shredded by imprudent lending.

This medicine has worked before. Back in the late 80s, after a previous round of imprudent lending, with bank balance sheets in tatters, Alan Greenspan drove down short term interest rates, while allowing long term yields to stay high. Just by borrowing short and buying Treasury bonds (as safe a strategy as possible) banks captured a huge spread and cured what ailed them. A bank could borrow at the Fed’s discount window at 3% and turn around and use that money to buy a long-term bond from the Fed earning 8%. In effect, the US taxpayer bailed out the banks. We are about to do it again.

Amory Blaine

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Monday November 05, 2007 · 9:39 AM PST

2007/11/05 · 09:39

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis (and 3000 Americans) have died, the once proud and educated Iraqi middle class has been eviscerated, oil prices have gone through the roof, and America, the birthplace of rock n roll and Marilyn Monroe, the conqueror of the Nazis and the Soviets, for 50 years recognized as a benevolent and powerful force in the world, has been revealed as impotent and petty, malevolent and inept. The far-reaching goals of transforming the Middle East, of establishing American hegemony over the oil fields of Iraq, of demonstrating the invincible powers of the American military have faded. Now America would be happy to restore the status quo ante. Now our leaders just want a face-saving way out and hope we and the world will forget. Now that all of us (except maybe Norman Podhoretz and Rudy Giuliani) realize the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a disaster, the question becomes whom shall we blame?

I will not forget, for maybe it is my fault. Mea culpa. Hear my story.

Amory Blaine

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Tuesday May 29, 2007 · 9:41 PM PDT

2007/05/29 · 21:41

Yesterday I had to go to the Green Zone. You can see it from our roof. It is probably less than 200 yards away, only a big wall separates us. By road it takes an hour. We got into two armored cars and drove out of our compound, past our blast walls, past our two tall metal gates, past our platoon of Iraqi armed guards. We wove our way out of our little neighborhood, dotted with other press offices (each with their own platoon of armed guards) and government ministers (even more highly protected). Despite all this security, someone planted an IED around the corner from our gate just last week.

Amory Blaine

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Saturday April 21, 2007 · 4:05 AM PDT

2007/04/21 · 04:05

Mowfak is a Sunni, probably an ex Ba’athist. He is a gentle man, polite, always smiling. I have known him for a few years; yesterday, we had a long chat. He is despairing. He sees no solution for the disaster that has befallen his country. He has sent his family to a neighboring Arab country, his big house in an upper middle class neighborhood of Baghdad abandoned. The whole neighborhood is abandoned. 14 families on the street, 4 Sunni,10 Shia, all left together, driving across the desert in a convoy. They all still live together, 14 families in one apartment building, on the outskirts of an Arab capital, recreating in exile their prewar neighborhood.

Amory Blaine

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Thursday April 19, 2007 · 3:55 AM PDT

2007/04/19 · 03:55

Fifty years ago, only 3% of MBA students at Harvard studied finance. The introductory course, nicknamed "Darkness at Noon" did not draw the brightest students; marketing and operations, the making of selling of things were the focus of aspiring corporate leaders. That has changed. The making of things has been subcontracted to China, the selling of things underpaid compared to the massive incomes even the moderately talented can earn on Wall Street. Finance used to serve the needs of the real economy. Today, the financial tail is wagging the real economy dog.

Amory Blaine

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Thursday February 15, 2007 · 7:19 AM PST

2007/02/15 · 07:19

"The battle in my country is between those that want to live in a Riviera and those that want to live in a Bunker." Nadim sips his wine. A Lebanese intellectual, he is talking specifically about the conflict between Hezbollah and the anti-Syrian Siniora government but listening to him I can’t help but wonder if his concept of the Riviera and the Bunker has resonance far beyond the Levant, including in our own country. Dick Cheney, our warmonger-in-chief famously likes to sleep in a different bunker every night, not unlike Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah. Perchance these two enemies are more similar than is commonly thought.

Perhaps the great division of our time is not, as the neocons tell us, the great civilizational war between the "Islamofascists" and the consumer capitalist democracies but rather the division within each culture between those of us committed to the Riviera values of tolerance and pleasure and those of us convinced that the dangers outside force us to live in a Bunker and thus in a constant state of war.

Amory Blaine

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Wednesday November 29, 2006 · 6:10 AM PST

2006/11/29 · 06:10

Lets call him Nigel. He makes a nice living advising the British Government on Iraq. On his desk he has a framed picture of himself with Tony Blair. He said to me, "Of course you know who the British and Americans really want as President of Iraq?"

I didn’t. I said "Who?"

"Well they wouldn’t admit it but you do know who George Bush and Tony Blair want to rule Iraq."

I thought Alawi? Chalabi? I said "Who?"

"You know. Think." He looked at me with that typically British combination of bemusement and scorn and whispered the answer. "Saddam Hussein."

Of course he is right. While no one can deny that Saddam was a brutal tyrant, nor can any one deny that Iraq is much worse off today than it was under Saddam. A Baghdadi acquaintance who spent six years in Baathist jails told me that things were better when Saddam was in power. Now he sees his neighbors kidnapped and killed. Now he worries for his family’s safety every day. Unfortunately anarchy is far worse than tyranny.

Poll

25 votes Show Results

What should the Americans do in Iraq?

25 votes Vote Now!

What should the Americans do in Iraq?

Get out, who cares if more Iraqis die as long as Americans don't

9 votes

Add more troops, support the Maliki government

1 vote

Support the Shia militias

2 votes

Support the Sunni insurgents

3 votes

Stay the course

0 votes

Other (please, please tell me)

10 votes

Letter from Baghdad

Amory Blaine

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Monday October 09, 2006 · 7:10 AM PDT

2006/10/09 · 07:10

If Iraq is the central front on the "War on Terror", then unfortunately, terror is winning. Fuad is a braver man than you and me put together, and he is terrified. East of the Tigris River, where he lives, the militias rule, the government a joke. His neighbors are being kidnapped, killed. Fighters dressed in Iraqi Police uniforms (or are they police?) break into houses, take away the men and kill them. Usually they torture them first. A few days later, their families find their bodies in empty lots or at the morgue. "It was never like this under Saddam." Fuad spent 6 years in Saddam's jails and still thinks life was better before the invasion. Read More

What's up with Cheney?

Amory Blaine

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Sunday May 28, 2006 · 2:40 AM PDT

2006/05/28 · 02:40

What's up with Cheney? I can understand the motives of most of the other architects of our disastrous war in Iraq. Wolfowitz really did think that he could "bring democracy to the Middle East" with the barrel of a gun. Pearle and Feith thought they would make Israel safer by taking down Saddam Hussein. Rumsfeld believed a successful war would help him in his plan to create a more mobile and effective US military. Rove wanted a war to give W. more gravitas: a war Presidency plays well with the populace and would increase Republican power. Bush probably just wanted one time in his life to accomplish something his father hadn't.
Read More

The Stock Market and the Real Economy

Amory Blaine

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Friday May 26, 2006 · 7:09 AM PDT

2006/05/26 · 07:09

Last year 26 hedge fund managers took home over $110 million dollars each while median real wages actually declined. Maybe it is just a coincidence. Or maybe not. American economic history since Reagan is notable for two seemingly contradictory trends. On the one hand, growth of the real economy has been at historical lows while the growth of the financial economy has been spectacular. GDP and labor productivity growth was higher in the 1970s, now lambasted as the age of stagflation than it has been during the era of the stock market boom. Investment in productive capital goods as a percentage of GDP was considerably higher under Carter than it is today. It seems that real investment was greater under a falling market than it has been during the financial boom. Read More

afghanistan and climate change

Amory Blaine

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Wednesday May 24, 2006 · 6:49 AM PDT

2006/05/24 · 06:49

I wrote this after getting back from Northern Afghanistan in 2001. It is an incredible country, like no where else I had ever been. I felt like I had traveled deep into the past, that I could see what buildings looked like in Babylon, what agriculture was like in ancient Egypt.

After a brutal dust storm, I had a different notion: that Afghanistan was not a vision of the past but rather a harbinger of the future, if we befall an ecological disaster. Read More

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Shocking News: Rich Men Pay for Sex

Rate Cuts, the Fed, and Our Addiction to Cheap Credit

I'm to blame for the war in Iraq

To the Green Zone

Letter from Baghdad

The Age of Arbitrage

The Bunker and the Riviera

Iraq: A Modest Proposal

Letter from Baghdad

What's up with Cheney?

The Stock Market and the Real Economy

afghanistan and climate change