| Fukushima Cover Up Unravels: Too Much Radiation to Cover Up Posted: 23 Jan 2012 05:00 PM PST "The Government Can No Longer Pull the Wool Over the Public's Eyes" As I've pointed out since day one, the Japanese government and Tepco have covered up the extent of the radiation released by Fukushima and its health effects on the Japanese and others. See this and this. The New York Times notes: The government inspectors declared Onami's rice safe for consumption after testing just two of its 154 rice farms. Then … more than a dozen [farmers] found unsafe levels of cesium. An ensuing panic forced the Japanese government to intervene, with promises to test more than 25,000 rice farms in eastern Fukushima Prefecture, where the plant is located. *** The repeated failures have done more than raise concerns that some Japanese may have been exposed to unsafe levels of radiation in their food, as regrettable as that is. They have also had a corrosive effect on public confidence in the food-monitoring efforts, with a growing segment of the public and even many experts coming to believe that officials have understated or even covered up the true extent of the public health risk in order to limit both the economic damage and the size of potential compensation payments. Critics say … the government can no longer pull the wool over the public's eyes, as they contend it has done routinely in the past. "Since the accident, the government has tried to continue its business-as-usual approach of understating the severity of the accident and insisting that it knows best," said Mitsuhiro Fukao, an economics professor at Keio University in Tokyo who has written about the loss of trust in government. "But the people are learning from the blogs, Twitter and Facebook that the government's food-monitoring system is simply not credible." *** "No one trusts the national government's safety standards," said Ichio Muto, 59, who farms organic mushrooms in Nihonmatsu, 25 miles northwest of the Fukushima Daiichi plant.
The Japan Times reports: The government buried a worst-case scenario for the Fukushima nuclear crisis that was drafted last March and kept it under wraps until the end of last year, sources in the administration said Saturday. After the document was shown to a small, select group of senior government officials at the prime minister's office in late March, the administration of then Prime Minister Naoto Kan decided to quietly bury it, the sources said. "When the document was presented (in March), a discussion ensued about keeping its existence secret," a government source said. In order to deny its existence, the government treated it as a personal document of Japan Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Shunsuke Kondo, who authored it, until the end of December, the sources said. It was only then that it was actually recognized as an official government document, they said. "The content was so shocking that we decided to treat it as if it didn't exist," a senior government official said.
Major Japanese broadcaster NHK purportedly stopped a reporter in mid-sentence on March 12th as he was discussing the exposure of the nuclear fuel rods above the cooling pool, telling him: They say you mustn't read this draft.
Finally, the Economist and Boing Boing note that a Canadian journalist was grilled about who he spoke with at Fukushima, and: Held, threatened, and shaken down for bribes before being detained without counsel or a phone call. He says he was eventually deported, though not before being ordered to sign a falsified confession and being threatened by an official at gunpoint.
(Many journalists and nuclear experts are alleged to have been monitored, harassed or blocked by the Japanese government.)  |
| Granville: DJIA to Fall 4,000 Points in 2012 Posted: 23 Jan 2012 04:36 PM PST 89 Year Old Joe Granville has had some huge winners, but he was also bearish right into the teeth of 1p82 Bull market:  |
| 10 Monday PM Reads Posted: 23 Jan 2012 01:30 PM PST My afternoon train reading: • Behavioral Pricing: A consumer's worst nightmare, a merchant's dream (The Next Web)
• Can a monkey pick a hedge fund? (Market Watch) see also NYC retains crown as Hedge Fund Hub of the World (Hedge Tracker)
• Financial Crisis Narrative Flunks Reality Check (Bloomberg)
• Greenspan’s ’63 Essay Foretold Subprime Inaction (Bloomberg)
• How unrealistic optimism is maintained in the face of reality (Nature)
• Goldman: Data May Look Better Than They Are (Bloomberg)
• How Auto Shows Sparked a Color Revolution (Bloomberg)
• The Obama Memos (New Yorker)
• L.A. Woman Was the Doors’ Bluesy Masterpiece, and Jim Morrison’s Kiss-Off to L.A. (LA Weekly)
• Nine Things You Didn't Know About Twitter (NYT) see also How To Get Twitter Followers (Twiends)
What are you reading?
> Goldman Sachs Thinks You Should Sell Your Treasurys
Source: WSJ  |
| Josh Brown: Everybody Chill TF Out Posted: 23 Jan 2012 12:30 PM PST |
| Can Apple “Rescue” US Education? Posted: 23 Jan 2012 11:30 AM PST |
| Marc Faber Sees Bubble in Safest Government Bonds Posted: 23 Jan 2012 09:30 AM PST Marc Faber, publisher of the Gloom, Boom & Doom report, talks about the outlook for stocks versus bonds and his investment strategy. He speaks with Sara Eisen and Erik Schatzker on Bloomberg Television’s “InsideTrack.” Jan. 20 (Bloomberg)  |
| Debt Doesn’t Matter ? Posted: 23 Jan 2012 08:30 AM PST Huge chart from Steven Rattner’s Sunday NYT Week in Review Op Ed:
> click for ginormous graphic:
 > Source:
The Dangerous Notion That Debt Doesn't Matter
STEVEN RATTNER
NYC, January 20, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/opinion/sunday/the-dangerous-notion-that-debt-doesnt-matter.html  |
| QOTD: Opinions About the Future Posted: 23 Jan 2012 07:30 AM PST I started reading The Most Important Thing: Uncommon Sense for the Thoughtful Investor by Howard Marks last weekend. Coincidentally, I come across this great quote yesterday: “I confess, I think about the future. So do my colleagues. If someone who’s spent decades investing doesn’t have an opinion about what lies ahead, there’s something wrong. I believe our clients want us to apply the benefit of our experience in gauging and reacting to the opportunities and risks that lie ahead. But I have a mantra on this subject, too: “It’s one thing to have an opinion; it’s something very different to assume it’s right and act on that assumption.” We have views on the future. And they can cause us to “lean” toward offense or defense. Just never so much that for the results to be good, our views have to be right.” -Howard Marks, Oaktree Capital Management
January 10, 2012
Hat tip Josh at Reformed Broker . . .  |
| 10 Monday AM Reads Posted: 23 Jan 2012 06:40 AM PST Some reads to start your week: • America is recovering from the debt bust faster than European countries. Why? (Economist)
• Eight Leading Economists Sound Off on Europe’s Fiscal Woes (The Daily Beast) see also A Greek Default: It’s a-Comin’ (Businessweek)
• Fed Begins an Effort to Remove All Doubt on What It's Doing (NYT)
• China: One billion workers (Economist) see also China Set for Goldilocks Landing? (The Diplomat)
• Where to put your money if the bond bull stumbles (Market Watch)
• Some See Two New Gilded Ages, Raising Global Tensions (NYT) see also In Britain, Rising Outcry Over Executive Pay That Makes 'People's Blood Boil' (NYT)
• Daniel Drew, Pioneer of the Wall Street Conspiracy: (Bloomberg)
• Economists See Ways to Aid Housing Market (WSJ) see also Why the Federal Reserve slept before the housing crisis (Washington Post)
• Euro Doomsayers Given Pause Ahead of Davos (Bloomberg)
• Wonkbook: Newt Gingrich’s elite anti-elitism (Washington Post) see also The Keys to the White House (Polly Vote)
What are you reading? > Market Capitalization as a Percentage of GDP
 via The Chart Store  |
| European stuff Posted: 23 Jan 2012 05:33 AM PST The euro rallied to 1.30 vs the US$ and futures bounced at about 5:30am after a German official said they are talking about the possibility of having the ESM, the permanent bailout facility, run alongside the temporary EFSF in times of emergency. This is more rhetoric than anything as we don’t know what will be of the EFSF after France lost its AAA rating and the ESM is not even up and running. With Greece, the head of the IIF said creditors have come up with their best offer and they now await a response from Germany and the IMF. European Finance Ministers get together again today to discuss all the issues they face and in addition to the above, will try to iron out the fiscal union issues that are supposed to be in place by months end. If only progress in Europe was measured by the amount of meetings all these European officials had over the past few years, we’d be well past this debt crisis. But, of course getting 17 countries to agree unanimously isn’t easy. Italian bond yields are falling for a 6th day with the 10 yr yield down to a 6 1/2 week low and the 2 yr yield is at the lowest since Sept. French business confidence in Jan fell 3 pts to the weakest since Feb ’10.  |
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