Cardboard Spaceship

Bad News for German Manhood

The Germans are the world's worst lovers, beating the English in second place, as it were.  

Working, as I do, in a German company full of computer programmers, I find this hard to believe. 

The Swiss seem to be as discreet as ever, not really appearing on the list.  If we are to take language as a guide, then probably you'll get a duff ride in Zürich, a not bad one in Geneva, and a really quite good one down in Lugano.  

Smallest Space Cadet of Them All, Chess and Supermodels

Sunday I had the same dreaded bug that that had kept the SSCOTA from school for the last two days of the week.  Nothing terrible, just a heavy cold, so I decided to stay in bed. 

The SSCOTA went to see a friend of his in neighbouring France, and played happily there for the afternoon.  Mrs Spaceship went to pick him up, and the hostess had her cousin staying, who interestingly enough was in Geneva for a chess tournament, as he is a chess grand master. 

Remarkable enough, but his girlfriend was with him, who is also a keen chess player, and also a national champion.  She is also the internationally famous Estonian supermodel, Carmen Kass. 

So, I was lying in bed feeling miserable, and the SSCOTA is being taught chess by a grandmaster and his chess playing supermodel girlfriend.   (Who according to Mrs Spaceship were both nice people, and funny.)

Sometimes life in Geneva just gets a bit surreal. 

Wedding in the Bernese Oberland

Weekend before last, Mrs Spaceship and I went up to help celebrate the wedding of two of our local friends.  They had not been in too much of a rush getting married, what with having three kids together and all, but a nice thing to celebrate all the same.  

The celebration was over a weekend in the lovely Swiss town of Brienz, in the Bernese Oberland.  I had never been there before, but I will be going again, stunningly lovely part of the world. 

The amount of work that goes into the average Swiss wedding is amazing.  Not necessarily in the sense of flowers, dresses and so on, but the work that the friends do, with songs and slide shows, jokes and so on. 

Here the groom, who used to be part of an active ice climbing fraternity, is given a helmet made out of collander, in recollection of a time when he did apparently do some climbing with one on his head, as he had forgotten his helmet. 

As you can see he is rather enjoying this. 

I got socially drunk, and sang a rumbustious version of "Hey Big Spender" as my contribution to the Karaoke event, having decided that my Anglophone rendering of "Je Ne Regrette Rein" might be a bit much for a French speaking audience to tolerate.

Next morning we wandered over to a local lakeside restaurant, and had an agreeable lunch before driving back down to Geneva. 

Here is a glimpse of Mrs Spaceship looking at the lovely scenery.

And more of the same.

We will definitely go back there. 

Mortaged Not Backed Securities

Hooly-Dooly.  It appears that the inevitable lawyer based cluster fuck that was bound to happen as soon as someone lost money on Mortgage Backed Securities may be just about to take another turn. 

Reading Ellen Brown in the Huffington Post, she talks about the Kansas Surpeme Court refusing an operation called MERS to act as a foreclosure agent.  

"Small earthquake in Bolivia no-one dead," you might think.

"A landmark ruling in a recent Kansas Supreme Court case may have given millions of distressed homeowners the legal wedge they need to avoid foreclosure. In Landmark National Bank v. Kesler, 2009 Kan. LEXIS 834, the Kansas Supreme Court held that a nominee company called MERS has no right or standing to bring an action for foreclosure. MERS is an acronym for Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, a private company that registers mortgages electronically and tracks changes in ownership. The significance of the holding is that if MERS has no standing to foreclose, then nobody has standing to foreclose -- on 60 million mortgages"

Now that is interesting, and some of the consequences are really terrifying.  For example, what about the mortgage backed securities that were made out of these unenforceable mortgages?

"Following the Boyko decision, in December 2007 attorney Sean Olender suggested in an article in The San Francisco Chronicle that the real reason for the bailout schemes being proposed by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was not to keep strapped borrowers in their homes so much as to stave off a spate of lawsuits against the banks. Olender wrote:

The sole goal of the [bailout schemes] is to prevent owners of mortgage-backed securities, many of them foreigners, from suing U.S. banks and forcing them to buy back worthless mortgage securities at face value -- right now almost 10 times their market worth. The ticking time bomb in the U.S. banking system is not resetting subprime mortgage rates. The real problem is the contractual ability of investors in mortgage bonds to require banks to buy back the loans at face value if there was fraud in the origination process.

... The catastrophic consequences of bond investors forcing originators to buy back loans at face value are beyond the current media discussion. The loans at issue dwarf the capital available at the largest U.S. banks combined, and investor lawsuits would raise stunning liability sufficient to cause even the largest U.S. banks to fail, resulting in massive taxpayer-funded bailouts of Fannie and Freddie, and even FDIC . . . ."

Luckily, there is no way that a lawyer with a client nursing millions in losses is going to pick up on this decision, and force a way through to getting the original instruments declared as invalid, and getting the money back.  No Sireeee... 

Holy crap.

Renault, Crash, Bang, Wallop!

I stopped following Formula One for precisely the reason that the Daily Mash gave in this story about the return of Michael Schumacher.

"He insisted: "No more overtaking, no more surprises, no victorious underdogs. Just a procession of tax-avoiding millionaires following each other around the track in the precise order they set off."

But what with Old Man Mosley getting a thrashing for seven hours off a bunch of hookers dressed as Nazis, and Bernie Ecclestone's antics, F1 was beginning to get interesting again.

Then we get this revelation - Nelson Piquet Jr. deliberately took a fall in last season's Singapore race, at no small personal risk.  I had dismissed it as being a far fetched story.  Not a bit of it.  Flavio Briatore and Pat Symonds have walked from Renault, who have refused to contest the charges in an FIAA meeting on Monday.

That's bonkers.  Two very senior guys in a leading team deliberately cheated.  They also took some pretty bloody cavalier risks with the lives of the drivers, marshalls and others. 

Ghost Fleet off Malaysia - Drecesspion Strikes Again

I have seen this one being linked to many times around the web, it is a story about the collapse of the international container shipping business to levels appropriate to a drecesspion.  (Is it a depression?, is it a recession?  No it's a drecesspion.)

Seems that this reflected in the Baltic Dry Index as well.  Ships are now about as valuable as a sub-prime crackhouse in Flint, Mitchigan.  

What a surprise, given that the credit conditions in America are essentially in free-fall.  No credit, no consumer, and so no recovery.  Seems obvious to me. 

Ready Conference Plus are Idiots of the First Order...

Had a conference call this morning, and so I rang the Geneva number for Ready Conference Plus, and got the following message:

"This number is no longer in service.  Please call the Zürich Number."

And what comes next?  That Zürich number in full?  You would imagine so, wouldn't you?

Nah.  Silence.  

Like I said, Idiots of the First Order.

How Much Would You Pay for Free?

This is a debate that will run and run...

If you are Rupert Murdoch, you are used to the idea that your media is sufficiently credible, that people will pay to see what you have to say.

Option One:  Correct: you have a great business

Option Two: I do not care that much about commodity journalism, its available elsewhere, I will not pay...

Result:  unknown for now...

But its clear that Murdoch, amongst others has not grokked how fundamental the change has been, and how long lasting. How much do I value the News International deliverable over and above reading the NYT; the Hindu, or the East Sasquatchan Post Herald?  Or more to the point, someone who has first hand experience of what is going on, and a blog? 

That is the question for the micropayment/microconsumer?

In other words, in whom do you trust?  Sufficient to get out that credit card, or do you simply go elsewhere?

Short of Declaring War, This is the Most Important Decision These Guys Will Ever Make"

Just when you thought we'd gone all happy clappy here in the Spaceship, back to the real world. 

Ireland is about to set up its toxic bank.  Hundred million Euro question (or more) what do you pay for an eight storey skeleton in the Canary Dwarf in Dublin?

Should they have sweaty hands?  Ohmigod yes. 

"The National Asset Management Agency, known as NAMA, will buy 18,000 loans at a discount from lenders led by Allied Irish Banks and the Bank or Ireland.  The agency will manage the loans, which amount to about half of Ireland’s gross domestic product. Should any of the 1,500 borrowers default, the agency can seize the land or other security put up.

For Lenihan [Ireland's Finance Minister], it’s a tightrope: pay too much, and he risks damaging the taxpayer, opponents of the plan say. Pay too little, and he wipes out the banks"

CRE (Commercial Real Estate) is the next one to fall.  It's going to be painful.

Screen Cleaning

Mr Gerald Miller writes from Germany, with a little housekeeping tip for the computer minded.  As he points out, many people take the precaution of cleaning the outside of the monitor screen, but how many take the time and attention to do the same for the interior? 

You can soon fix this oversight, with a strategic click here.