If that doesn’t make sense to you, let me help.

You can’t just lose money like that. You first have to pretend that it exists, claim your company is worth that much, drive the stock price up, sell your shares while the value is artificially high, and THEN claim to have lost $60 billion.

The next step, after grabbing a pitchfork: find out which insiders sold early. I shall conclude with a single word: guillotine.

RTFA: http://www.cnbc.com/id/29353282

American Insurance Group, the insurance giant that is 80-percent owned by the US government, is in discussions with the government to secure additional funds so it can keep operating after next Monday, when it will report the largest loss in U.S. corporate history, CNBC has learned.

Sources close to the company said the loss will be near $60 billion due to writedowns on a variety of assets including commercial real estate.

That massive loss is likely to spur downgrades in its insurance and credit ratings that will force AIG to raise collateral that it doesn’t have.

In addition, if AIG’s book value falls below a certain level, as it seems certain to do, it will trigger default in certain of its debt instruments, say people familiar with the situation.

All of this adds up to a huge headache for the Federal Reserve and Treasury, which have already provided over $150 billion of assistance to AIG.

RTFA: http://glassbooth.org/

Although many Americans already know who they will vote for, it never hurts to check yo’ self before you wreck yo’ self, n’est-ce pas? So, I decided to see how closely my views matched with the 2008 presidential candidates. This sparked a quest to find the best candidate-matching websites/quizzes available for the U.S. 2008 Presidential Election.

First a few notes about my selection criteria and general process. I evaluated websites that asked the visitors for their opinions on at least a few current issues and then attempted to match visitors with a like-minded candidate. I evaluated every website that appeared on the first page of Google search results for the following 3 keyword phrases: “candidate matcher,” “who should I vote for?,” and “choose a candidate” (14 unique websites). I wanted to test the veracity of results provided by each site, so I actually completed the survey at each site THREE TIMES: 1) According to my true views (I tend to span the political spectrum in my stances on specific issues); 2) In line with a prototypical democrat; and, 3) In line with a prototypical republican. As you can imagine, I received much more variance in candidate recommendations when I filled the surveys out according to my personal beliefs, because I almost always got Obama when I went mainline-democrat and McCain when I went mainline-republican, with one notable and downright scandalous exception. Below, I list the best sites as well as those that elicited rage, and elaborate on the features which made or broke each site.

Who Rules

1. GlassBooth Election 2008
   
   • Strengths – GlassBooth had the most novel and interesting model of the sites I evaluated: The first page asked you to weight the issues you cared most about, and the second page only asked you questions regarding those issues. The issues were the most current of any of the other quizzes I tried, including questions about the bailouts of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and AIG. The questions were set up such that you indicated your agreement or disagreement with a particular policy instead of forcing you to choose from a limited set of proposed solutions to a politicized issue. They also allowed you to skip questions that you felt were irrelevant. Your responses were compared with non-major party candidates (so, it went beyond the McCain/Obama binary choice set). The results also showed how much you matched your recommended candidate through percentage agreement on the issues you said you cared about in the first page.
   • Weakness – The only downside to GlassBooth.org is that they only displayed your results for one candidate.

(more…)

RTFA: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and…

Edmonds had told this newspaper that members of the Turkish political and diplomatic community in the US had been actively acquiring nuclear secrets. They often acted as a conduit, she said, for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s spy agency, because they attracted less suspicion.

She claimed corrupt government officials helped the network, and venues such as the American-Turkish Council (ATC) in Washington were used as drop-off points.

The anonymous letter names a high-level government official who was allegedly secretly recorded speaking to an official at the Turkish embassy between August and December 2001.

It claims the government official warned a Turkish member of the network that they should not deal with a company called Brewster Jennings because it was a CIA front company investigating the nuclear black market. The official’s warning came two years before Brewster Jennings was publicly outed when one of its staff, Valerie Plame, was revealed to be a CIA agent in a case that became a cause célèbre in the US.

The letter also makes reference to wiretaps of Turkish “targets” talking to ISI intelligence agents at the Pakistani embassy in Washington and recordings of “operatives” at the ATC.

Edmonds is the subject of a number of state secret gags preventing her from talking further about the investigation she witnessed.

…the “blowback” from outsourcing your intelligence to third-party translators. The number of buzz-words involved in the span of a few paragraphs is absolutely shocking.