"Soverign debt is not like personal debt!"

As Dick Cheney famously said on the eve of the Iraq War, "Deficits don't matter".

He said that because sovereign debt really isn't like personal debt when the sovereign debt is in a convertible fiat currency. Because the difference between you and a nation is the power to issue currency. Do you know how many countries have ever actually paid off their debt? Take a guess.

The IMF is like a loan shark. They don't want countries to pay off their debts. They want countries to service their debts until such time as they can burn it down for the insurance (CDO) money.

One more thing: The colluding traders making these outsized profits for the banks actually named their online chat rooms, "The Cartel", "The Cabal" and "Mafia".

Here's the link to the "Cabal" story:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05...

Remember, it's the shareholders that pay these fines. And no one in the bank corporation is held accountable.

I just learned that the fines for illegal activity paid by banks since the economic collapse have totaled more than a quarter trillion dollars which is more than the entire economy of Greece. And that number is from 2014, before the $13 billion from Citi and the recent $5 billion for the banks involved in the price-fixing scandal.

Coincidence?

One of the traders for those banks, who was part of a collusion group that called itself (I'm not making this up), "The Cabal", said, in an email to the group, "If you're not cheating, you're not trying." That's $5 billion in fines for activity that made them hundreds of billions of dollars and bonuses.

And so far, not one of the members of "The Cabal" have been charged with a crime, and they'll be keeping their record bonuses. In fact, no one from those banks will be facing criminal charges of any kind.

So if you want me to be mad at Greece for letting the IMF dangle, I'm sorry. There are much bigger fish to fry.

There's so much more to this Greece story than just, "Oh those lazy Greeks with their big pensions." The IMF and the biggest banks were basically doing what those sketchy "payday loan" places in the strip mall do. They were basically doing what the home-lending institutions were doing in the 2000s. They were giving big bonuses to loan brokers for making loans - any loans - to people because they knew they could flip them on the secondary and CDO market. Investors were chasing yield so the word went out to mortgage lenders to "just get it done" and they basically defrauded as many people as possible. That's what the IMF does in countries like Greece and many South American companies. I think we're going to start seeing more of these countries deciding to just tell the IMF to go eff itself and take their monetary policy medicine and just be done with it. Then you'll start seeing the CIA-backed and German-backed and UK-backed coups start to happen.

Gentleman (and I use the term loosely) - the information you seek is in the fucking summary.

"Nasty 1" is my rap name.

This new development will be great for my career, but not so good for my street cred.

It may be worth clicking the Jobs link at the bottom of the page.

I was unable to find a study that supported that side though I knew that I had read the opposite (like the one you linked) view in the past. I also think that I followed the link from a comment here. The one you link is not the same though but reaches similar conclusions. My guess is the data can be interpreted either way depending on how you choose to view it.

I rate our existential risks, in descending order:

1. Space alien invasion
2. Zombies
3. Giant monsters summoned by radioactivity
4. Unusually intelligent apes
5. Artificial Intelligence run wild
6. Dinosaurs recreated from DNA in mosquitoes

Indeed. With all of the stuff that we have no clue about there in our solar system, why spend so much time on the second-best studied body on the solar system? I'd take a single Titan-exploring tiltrotor VTOL craft over a hundred new lunar rovers.

I thought that too and recall a study (from a comment on this site - I am near certain of this being the source of the link and I am certain about the study's conclusion in the abstract) but I decided to verify this and do some searching. I can not find the original study that I read but I did find this and a number of other studies that support that economics and education are insignificant. Link/citation: www.uvm.edu/~wgibson/PDF/kruger_mal.pdf

Needless to say, I am surprised with this (and others) study's conclusion but I can not argue with their definitions, methodology, or conclusions. I concede the point as I am unable to find the original study that I read the abstract from. The study itself was behind a paywall so I would likely still concede, even if I could find it, as I am unable to see the full study and at least check the methods and data source(s).

"Love" is the nice way to put it. "Largess at the expense of all other solar system exploration" would be more accurate. Here's a graph. And it's always the same stupid justifications - how many times can we pretend to be excited about "revelations" that Mars was once in its past a wet place? Or that we're going to stumble into life any time soon in its perchlorate-rich, destroys-organics-on-contact regolith?

And it's not just huge amounts of money that they're wasting - they're also throwing away most of the remainder of our plutonium supply. At least there's money to start making it again, but it'll take time. Plutonium is precious, and it's needed for outer planet missions.

And see post http://news.slashdot.org/comme... where I decided to actually research this and learned something new. My sincere apologies. In my defense I know, for a fact, that I read a study that stated otherwise but I am unable to find it thus will concede the point and consider the benefit as having learned something new.

I opted to school myself on quickly via the mighty Google. I learned something today and it is surprising.

Citation: http://www.uvm.edu/~wgibson/PD... (Note: PDF)

I hate to be the one to tell you but academia generally pays poorly outside of the US. More so in a country like Russia that is still clawing its way back up from the economic collapse that occurred during the transition from communism to capitalism.

Perhaps if most of the country's wealth wasn't concentrated in the hands of a handful of corrupt oligarchs who live like a modern version of Roman emperors they'd be able to pay researchers a living wage.