Jason Hartman interviews author, former Wall Street senior banker, and best-selling investigative journalist, William (Bill) D. Cohan on the events that led up to the current economic crisis. Bill explains the choices that the big firms, such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, etc, made regarding what type of institution they were going to be, the path of these firms that led up to the current crisis, and how they used the bailout money gifted to them. He said it was one big party on Wall Street, during which brokers were to bring in revenue using a lot of whacky products, until everything came crashing down. Huge bonuses were paid out from the revenue collected from unsuspecting clients. For more details, listen at: www.JasonHartman.com. Bill and Jason also discuss the Occupy Wall Street Movement. Bill expressed disappointment in the message of the movement, saying it isn't clear and they need to learn how Wall Street really works so that they can be more effective in bringing about reform. Wall Street has been influencing what goes on in Washington and paying lobbyists and donating to congressional coffers so that they can get the regulations, or lack thereof, that they want, i.e. the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Con-sumer Protection Act. Bill talks about how the expansion of Wall Street into Middle Class Amer-ica was not an accident, using the example of Merrill Lynch being a public company. This ulti-mately led to broken trust between Wall Street and Main Street, as people have now shied away from risk taking.
To solve the problems, Bill suggests changing the incentive system on Wall Street, in that it can no longer be okay to take huge risks with people's money or get paid big bonuses whether they lose money for the firms or not, as well as going back to having to use their partner's capital to operate. William D. Cohan offers audiences a unique, close-up perspective of the greatest finan-cial crisis since the Great Depression. He combines deep knowledge of the investment banking world with the fine storytelling skills of an award-winning investigative journalist. Bill's new book is titled Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came To Rule The World, a revelatory history of Goldman Sachs. His previous book, House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street, lays out in gory detail how the financial crisis began with the collapses of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co. won the 2007 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award for its candid revelations about how Wall Street works. He should know; he spent six years at the firm. Bill Cohan has a long-time insider's in-depth knowledge of investment banking—he was a Wall Street banker for 17 years. In addition to his years as Associate and then Vice President at Lazard Frères, he was a Director in the Mergers & Acquisitions Group at Merrill Lynch and a Managing Director at JPMorgan Chase. He left JPMorgan to write The Last Tycoons, which appeared on the bestseller lists of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today. It edged out Alan Greenspan's Age of Turbulence to win the FT/Goldman Sachs award. Bloomberg.com and The Evening Standard named it Book of the Year. William D. Cohan writes regularly for The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Fortune, The Daily Beast, ArtNews, and The Financial Times. His columns have also appeared in The Washington Post. He is a contributing editor for Bloomberg TV and is a contributor to Bloomberg View. His series of articles on the controversy of the 'recently discovered' Degas plaster casts in ARTNews won the Silurians 2011 Excellence in Journalism Award.
Introduction: Welcome to Creating Wealth with Jason Hartman. During this programJason is going to tell you some really exciting things that you probably haven't thought of before and a new slant on investing. Fresh new approaches to Americas best investment that will enable you to create more wealth and happiness than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine self-made mul-timillionaire who not only talks the talk, but walks the walk. He's been a successful investor for 20 years and currently owns properties in 11 states and 17 cities. This program will help you follow in Jason's footsteps on the road to financial freedom. You really can do it. And now, here is your host, Jason Hartman, with the complete solution for real estate investors.
Jason Hartman: Welcome to the Creating Wealth Show. This is your host, Jason Hartman, and thisis episode number 243. Thanks for joining me today as we talk about the house of cards. Our guest today will be talking about some very intrusting staff when it comes to our financial system and you know we kind of go back and forth on the Creating Wealth Show where sometimes we talk about really practical things that are very much relevant to what you specifi-cally as an investor want to do. For example, I think it will be our nest epi-sode, number 244, where we're going to have a case study from one of our clients and hear first hand what our clients are doing and we got a few of those interviews recorded.
So thank you so much, those of you listeners out here who stepped forward when I asked if you would be interested in being on the show and we appre-ciate you and we appreciate your willingness to give and share your advice and your experiences with other investors so they can hear it really from the person who is out there actually doing it, not from a person who is recom-mending it like myself or a person who has anything at stake. You're just a totally neutral person who just wants to share there experience and that's just really great that you are doing that.So we have some of those showscoming up but we also have some more educational shows like today's show where we will talk about with a guest expert and author on the house of cards that is are modern financial system.
So we get into that here in just a moment but few things before that,someinteresting news, articles, quotes, things I have received in my email box that I thought I would share with you and so forth. First of all, a couple of quotes, a couple of good quotes.You know I love quotes. Do you like quotes? I think the reason quotes are so great is that they sum up in such a short sentence or two. They embody alot of philosophy in the.So two quotes that I just want to share with you today. One is this one and it goes, success means having the courage, the determination, and the will to become the person you believe you are meant to be George Sheehan. Now, that oneis great, and I got another one that's just for memory here that I lived by for many many years and I remember it came out of Robert Allen's old old creating wealth book where he had 52 quotes on the back, one quote for every week of the year and it goes somethinglike this just for memory here.Successful people make decisions quickly as soon as all the facts are available and change them very slowly if ever unsuccessful people on the other hand make decisions quickly and change them often. And isn't that the truth though you know people out there in your life who are constantly fleet-ing from one deal to another? They're doing this, they'redoing that and fla-vor of the month and that just doesn't buildalot of credibility among one's sphere of influence, same as true in our own lives and with ourselves.
We need to have the determination to make a decision as soon as we see an opportunity, we evaluate it, we gather the facts, and then we actually exe-cute on it and we do something about it, becausesuccess in life is not really ever, so far that I know, except a few lottery winners and things like that.But usually actually, you read those studies about lottery winners.They usually end up broke just a couple of years later even if they win a zillion dollars. So you never seemed to hear any of those lottery winners parlaying their winnings into big fortunes and becoming the next Donald Trump or Sam Zell or – Sam Zell is a big real estate investor or the next Snow Gates or anything like that and turning them into something big, you know? They usually just blow their money. So life doesn't come in those sudden brakes.It comes in the daily effort of doing things well and making good prudent decisions every single day we go along and sticking with thosedecisions and following them and seeing them through.
You know one of the best things my mother ever said to me when I was growing up and I used to hate it when she said this to me. As a kid,it used to really annoy me but she always said, "Jason finish the job".Finish the job, because you know how kids are.Kids will start something and you know, they just – they will follow through for about 5 to 10 minutes and then they get bored.If you have the children or if you ever were a kid yourself, which ofcourse everybody was, you know you might remember may be the exam-ple of getting a pet or getting a pet for your kids and the common pet thing goes something like this.You know, I don't have kids but I know how it works as far as this goes. The kid says, "Oh you know, please get me a dog, get me a dog, I want a dog" right? "I'll talk care of the dog.I promise, I'll do everything.I'll walk the dog I'll feed the dog.I'll give the dog baths and everything right". And that happens for about two weeks and then suddenly the parents are ending up taking care of the dog right?Typical thing.Finish the job, okay?So that's a great quote about what it really takes to be success-ful.It's the simple daily progression towards a worthy goal and it's showing up every day and just doing the thing.
Earl Nightingale – I love Earl Nightingale, such a classic. He passed away back in 1989 but he was really one of my big mentors in life, Dennis Whaley, Earl Nightingale, Jim Rhon, ZigZiglar, all of those sort of old mo-tivational speakers that were really famous in their day but have sense.They're not as well-known nowadays. And what I love about those speakers is that they were about philosophy, embodying a set of ideas. Where is nowadays, most of the stuff you hear out there in the market place, it's a very specific and technical.And on show number 150, I interviewed, you know, one of my big mentors, Dennis Whaley, on episode number 150 of this show, the Create Wealth Show, go back and listen to that if you wish. I said that to him.You know, most of the education out there nowadays is very specific and technical in nature rather than philosophical and I believe you need a balance of the two. But regardless of it, if you get all of the technical knowledge, if you don't have the philosophy which is the foundation, the belief system, which is the foundation over the context in which the content of that philosophy of that technical knowledge would be the content. The philosophy or the belief system would be the context.You put all the greatest content in the world into something and if the context is not supportive of the content, the content will not flourish or it will just completely die.So that's what's so important about philosophyIn Earl Nightingale. If you don't know who he is, go look him up. Nightingale Conan has a great website.You can buy all his old audio recordings. I mean he is before my time okay?But I just think he was awesome and Jim Rhon and Dennis Whaley, ZigZiglar too. So just a thought there, arandom thought there, that quote we started out with.
So technically speaking, on more of the technical side here today,interest rates. Wow. Wow, wow, wow. I recorded an interview with DanHammer-man. We're going to have him back on the show here soon. I recorded that this morning and we were talking about how valuable the mortgage asset is, it's just, just incredibly valuable.And you look at this associated press article out.It says, "Mortgage buyer Freddy Mac said Thursday, that the rate on the 30-year home loan was unchanged at 3.87%". 3.87%, that's the lowest level since long-term mortgages began back in the 1950's. I mean folks, if you don't stock up on long term fix rate investment grade that right now, you are missing the boat, so make sure you do that.
Another article that was interesting and this one, gosh, one with dsnews.com I don't know where I even got this. I think it was one of the newsletters I clicked on. Anyway, this article is kind of interesting.It says, "housing now" – What'sinteresting about this before I go into this article is that, since we know income property is a multidimensional asset class.We can play this either way. It does not matter to us asprudentincome property investorsbe-cause when we do it right, we are going to benefit regardless of how this plays out.Now this article is kind of optimistic. And optimistic or pessimis-tic either way, whether it is easier to buy a property or harder to buy a prop-erty, we'll make money, because we know how to do it, okay?We know how to adapt to the market and play the game regardless of the cards we're dealt.
Voltaire, another great quote, something like this, the English SAS a couple of centuries ago,Voltaire said, "One cannot choose the cards they'redealt, but must choose how to play the cards in order to win the game".And that's exactly what we do. I have somethingthat I talk about in the Creating Wealth seminar, in the Creating Wealth home study course called the three dimensions of real estate. And just showing how some multidimensional asset class and they're really more than threedimensions but pack three di-mensional. That sounds pretty good. It's sort of catchy and asa multidi-mensional asset class, we know how to play it either way. So what's inter-esting about this article is that it's pretty optimistic right?It says, "hous-ingcrisis to end in 2012 as banksloosen credit standards.Capital economics expects the housing crisis to end this year according to a reportreleased Thursday. One of thereasons,loosening credit. The analytic firms notes, that theaverage credit score required to attain a mortgage is 700".So that is 700 FICOscore right? Well this is higher than scores required prior to the fi-nancial crisis. It is constant. Actually,I think they meant to say consistent with requirements one year ago.
Additionally a fed senior loan officer survey found credit requirements in the fourth quarter wereconsistent with the past three quarters. However, the mortgage market indicators point not to just a stabilization of mortgage lending standards, but also aloosening of credit availability. Isn't this what we all have been waiting for?Supposedly, Ben Bernanke and TurboTax Timmy Geithner get up there and they keep saying the banks have got a loan but of course, they give them a – This is my commentary obviously. They give them a bunch of bailout money, a bunch of taxpayer money printed and created out of thin air that the government doesn't even have into the tril-lions, and they have no actualtechnical legal requirements for them to loan money.They just give it to them trillions of dollar and hope that they will do the right thing and win. It's unbelievablyridiculous. I mean who in the right mind would do a business deal that way where there is no requirement on the other party right?
Okay enough of my ramp and myfrustration, back to the article. Banks are now lending amounts up to 3.5 times borrower earnings.This is up from a low during the financial crisis of 3.2 times borrower earnings. Banks are also loosening loan to value ratios that otherwise known as LTV, loan to valu-eratio, which CapitalEconomics denotes as, "the clearest sign yet of an im-provement in mortgage credit conditions", in contrast to a law of 74% reached in the mid-2010. Banks are now lending at an 82% LTV orloan to value ratio. While credit conditions may have loosened slightly, potential home buyers are still struggling with credit requirements, my comment here folks. Tens of millions of people have seen their own credit scores, either none intentionally or completely on purpose through strategic defaults.They have seen them decline and this I say benefits us as investors big time,because while lots of people used to have credit scores above that 700 FICO score mark or 720 mark, nowadays not so man, and a lot of it was purely by choice through strategic defaults okay?
So this benefits us.Why? Because it forces more people into the renter pool. Remember, the great thing about our asset class that we love so much in-come property especially when it comes to housing related income property, single family homes, apartment complexes, the reason it's so great is because people have so few choices.You can either buy, you can rent, you can be homeless and jokingly, you can live with your parents. Okay? And so that obviously is good for us right? When it's harder to buy, rents increase.
Dan Hammerman and I talked about that this morning. By the way I rec-orded another show today you can find very interesting when we publish it, which is about the solo 401K and breaking out of 401K jail. I know a lot of you listening are in 401K jail with your company and your retirement plan, and we have a show coming up on that very subject and we are also going to talk about it at Meet the Masters in March. But anyway, just finish this arti-cle of, it's almost done. While, credit conditions may have loosened slight-ly,somepotential home buyers are still struggling with credit requirements.In fact,Capital Economics points out that in November, 8% of contractcancel-lations okay?In other words, where the property went under contract, went into escrow when it was sold, were cancelled, were a result of the potential buyer not qualifying for a loan. Additionally, Capital Economics says,"Any improvement in credit conditions won't be significant enough to generate actual house price gains". Well hey, fine with us as investors, nobody is motivated to buy because they don't think the prizes are going up. They can rent from us. Either way, we understand that's amultidimensional asset class, we know how to play the game. So any way, that's enough from that article.
Another thing I got interesting and this is actually a friend's company a friend of mine that I have known for many years back in Orange County. I will not say the name of his company because I don't think his deal was very good, you know? He has been pitching me for a while to recommend his hard money loans or his private lending deals. And listen to this deal, okay? This compared to the private lending or hard money that I can introduce you to. I think it's a terrible deal compared to our deals okay?So I will just tell you about this. This is a new second trusty, meaning you're in second posi-tion as the lender and you know what? When it comes to being a lien holder and mortgage holder, I do not like being in second position. I've done it many times. I lost money one time on it as a lender that's why I'm not, nuts about being a lender. But you know,I didn't really understand it as well then as I do now, and I think my lending now, I really like the lending that I'm doing. And you know,a lot of you clients, I know a lot of you listening are doing lending through the introductions that I have made for you and many many of you have expressed interest in it. And by the way in a moment, I'm going to talk about some do diligence and somerequirements I want you to put in your private lending just to reduce your risk. But let me tell you about this deal first and why I think it's a lame deal.
So this is a second trusty. I don't like being in second position.It only pays 10.875%, which is not very good frankly. I mean of course,that's far better than anything you are probably going to get on Wall Street, far better than the bank for sure.It's a lot better than the bank by a multitude of thousands but it's still not that good and here is why. This property is a single family home in Beverly Hills.It's 14 million dollars and they want you to loan a se-cond loan, a second trust deed on this property of $980,000. So this is the big league folks, this is big money we are talking about right? There is the first on the property of $5,345,000,bringing the loan to value ratio to 45.18%. Now that is a good LTV.It's very good but on a property, on a big property like this, a single family home, these are highly risky deals okay? Plus you are in second position.
So here is what happens when you are in second position. If they default on the first loan,you don't have the right to foreclose.To gain that right, to buy that right and again, I'm not a total export in this okay, and I'm not a lawyer. So this can vary from to state to state but justgenerally speak-ing,conceptually speaking, you've got to manage the default on the first loan.So you've got to pay the payments on the first loan to keep the first lender from foreclosing first,because if they foreclose first, you could be to-tally wiped out and get nothing.That's why being in second position can be very very risky. And in second position for a borrower with they say good or fair credit on this 18-month long loan, you get 10.875% and folks, I think that deal stinks.It's not nearly as good as the twelve and an eighth that you can earn through our group on much smaller loans. So even if an investor came to us and said, "Hey I got a million bucks I'd like to loan", I would ra-ther see them diversify to different providers and different properties and differentgeographies, which is what we can do for you by referring you our vendors and they're much smaller, much more salable properties than one big property in Beverly Hills. I mean folks, that deal it may be fine but I wouldn'ttouch it with a 10-foot pole. So there you go.
Now, a couple of things I want you to know about hard money lending and this will be a short thing here, but if you ever do hard money or private lend-ing, I want to give you a few tips on that as a do diligence check list and somerequirements you want to make of the borrower. Number one, always use an escrow company or an attorney depending on the geography.Some places use attorneys,some places use escrowcompanies. So use one of those as a neutral third party.Number two, get and evaluate comparable sales info or inactualappraisal so you are comfortable with the loan to value ratio or the LTV, so that you feel you got a good margin of safety in there. If possible, and by the way, I want to say this is not necessarily always possible to this next one, but if you can, it doesn't hurt to do it and that is get a prelimi-narytitle report. Why is it not always possible?Becausea lotof our vendors are buying these properties at foreclosure auctions and they need to be fund-ed almost instantly, so you can't, there is not time to get a preliminarytitle report sometimes. But if you can get it, get it.Try to get it alright? Number four, require a closing protection letter or a lender's escrow instruction showing you the lender in the first lien position.Again,I don't like being se-cond place in this mortgage lending. I want to be first lien but you need a closing protection letter, and a lot of people don't know what that is. So just call it a lender's escrow instruction and that should be signed by the attorney or the escrow officer, showing you the lien holder in first position okay?And require a lender's title policy. So that's a title insurance policy that protects you, the lender, so that you know there are nootherliens on the property. And then finally, only wire money to the attorney, the escrow, or the title company who is doing the transaction. Donot wire the money to the bor-rower directly okay?So a couple of things there that can protect you and re-duce your risk when doing private lending or hard money lending.
But folks, the returns are phenomenal.It's simpler thanowning the real estate. I do like owning the real estate myself much better. I think income property is much better than being a lender, but for a quick easy simple scalable things, if you want to deploy a lot of money and you want to deploy it quickly, and you want it to be simple, the lending is great for that,especially the short term lending. But even if it's longer term lending, it can still be pretty good. You're going to do a lot better than you're going to do in the bank for sure and you'll probably do a lot better than you do pretty much anywhere else except owning the property directly.
Okay, a little sign here that the economy may be recovering. I don't that it really is. I don't sort of hard or really address that issue, and you know, we sort of do that overall on the show with all the guestsI talk to, so I'm not go-ing to doveinto that right now. But one sign that there is money slashing around out there again I think, is the fact that you've got all these sort of somewhathokey deals out there and that's where you hear thesecompanies again. I didn't hearthem for years and now, they're all back, they'reon the radio selling like ranch lamb and lakefront property in theseobscure are-as.You know, I got one here. They came in my email box.It's called Ten-nessee Land and Lake. And again, you know, I've never seen these proper-ties. I've never cheeked them out. They may be a great deal. I doubt it but they are calling this the initial public offer rating okay?And they say you can buy lakefront properties starting at $99,900 and they say this property is sold from 2005 to 2008 upwards of $1,000,000.
Now here is the scam on that sometimes okay? It's not this exact property, it's some property,somewhere near it, might have sold for that.It could have been a different size of parcel, adifferent location, etcetera, et cetera. So you can buy this dockable lake front properties starting at $999,900, you can buy the private wooded locations starting at $24,900.Folks, I've looked at some of theseproperties like this. Groups have asked us to sell them.Again, I'm not referring to this specific property which may be fine. I really have no idea.This is called like Legacy Shoresorsomething but I've been out to de-velopments that appear to be like this, and let me tell you something. They buy these lots.They're in theboonies.They buy theselots for nothing.People will go in there and they will buy these lots in mass for $1000 each and resell them for $25,000. Again, you want to buy a rental property, you don't want to buy crap in Belize. I know, one of my competitors sells this staff but look, listen. I went to Belizelast year and I looked at these properties.There is no rental market in Belize.If you liked this sort ofCaribbean-kind of lifestyle where it's sunny and you got beaches, I mean frankly, I think it's a third world country okay? I'm not a fan of places like that. But to reach a zone, if you want to kick back on the beach and check out a civilization that might be okay, but there is no rental market for these properties. These are not investments, this lakefront property in Tennessee. Show me where the employment is, show me who my renter is okay? I want property that rents to people, that produces income. If it does not produce income, it is not an investment. Remember my rule about that.It must produce income or it is only a speculation, gold, silver, platinum, palladium, raw land, properties in Belize, theseproperties in Costa Rica, whatever the heck it is, these proper-ties do not produce income.We are not about investing in real estate.We are about investing in income property.Note the distinction in the language. It's called income property,because it produces income, it's not speculative. You buy it on a cash flow basis. And remember, our Meet the Masters of Incom-ecoming up. The theme is revenge of the cash flow investor.And let me tell you something.This past few years or this financial crisis, the cash flowinvestor has won the day for at least, at the very least, they've been in a sustainable position where they can weather the storm, so you got to invest for cash flow.
Two more things before our guest here.I got a commercial property in my email box. This one from the well-known company, Marcus and Millichap, and Marcus and Millichap set up this property, and this thing looks like a to-tal piece of crap okay?Not that I have an opinion about this or anything. And so it says Mucus and Millichap is pleased to offer the following, exclu-sive limited investment property opportunity, a single tenant office building in Little Rock, Arkansas. Now, this is an office building that looks like a house, okay?There area lot of properties like this around the country that are just like basically little houses that happen to zoned commercial, so they're"office building". It's not the steel and glass, beautiful modern high rise building and I think of it as an office building or even a garden style.This is a crummy little one-story, basically a house that is zoned office, it looks like okay?Now here is what it says and I just want – this is educa-tional,because look at how crappy this deal is right? A single-tenant office building, it's 7544 square feet, Little Rock, Arkansas, the prize is $1,425,000.
Now,yourfirst thing you should do is just without yourcalculator and say what's the cost per square foot? Is it below the cost of the construction? Is it at par with the cost of the construction?Or is it way above the cost of con-struction, which is the case here.Remember, we've got a 7544 square foot, and you know, I just noticed this.They don't say that's the building that could be the lot size.Itjust says size, hmmm size of what?The loft or the building? I'm assuming it's the building. If it's the size of the lot,this deal is much worse than I thought okay?But you are just doing the division here. 7500 square feet, you know, you take 1.4, 1,425,000 and divide, that's $189 per square foot for a little crummy house-type structure. You could build that for probably $90 a square foot in Little Rock.And it says long term 18- year leaseguaranteedby United Mexican States. I don't know what that is. It must be some kind of company or maybe it's a charitable organization, I don't know.So this, you got one tenant in there and if that tenant defaults, you are out of business. You got annual CPI rent increases, in other words, the rent increases are indexed to the consumer prize index, which we all know because we listen to the show, woefully underestimates the true rate of inflation. So you are going to get burned there.It's located directly across from the main entrance to theUniversity of Arkansas, Little Rock.Well that's probably good, okay. There is the deal. I wouldn't touch that with a 10 foot pole. And oh, I didn't even mention the cap rate. The cap rate on this deal, listen to how crummy this is. You go to jasonhartman.com, you look at the cap rates of our properties and you'reprobably not going to see anything be-low 8.5%. You'll see a bunch of cap rates in the 10% range, the 12% range, some even better than that. This cap rate, 6.59%. Folks, people buy that kind of stuff every single day.Why, why do they do it?You got me. I guess they're just too sophisticated to know any better.
Okay, last thing before we get to our guest, Ben Bernanke. You've proba-bly seen this things floating around on the social media.There is a bunch of them out there. They all have the same format. It's pretty cute, it's like a poster. And this is from Silver Circle, silvercirclemovie.com. I don't know what that is. But they are probably selling precious metals. That's probably what it is. But it's a funny sort of collage about Ben Bernanke and it's got six pictures on it and it says, you know,the first picture is what congress things I do, and it's got a picture of Ben Bernanke walking a tight rope. In other words, he's trying to balance the economy out and make sure that the stock market is okay,and the money supply is okay, and employment is good, and inflation is in check, what a bogus thing that is.He doesn't do it at all. No central bank does. The next cell says what Keynesianeconomists think I do, and there is a picture of Mr. SpockfromStar Trek, the very logical Mr. Spock who evaluates everything, is very prudent and careful.And buy the way, the Keynesian economist think, you know,remember John Maynard Keynes, his philosophy was prime the pump right? Put a bunch of fake money into the money supply. I'm not a Keynesian at all, okay? I think Keynesianism is a bad thing generally. And then, the next cell says what Austrian economist think I do, and there is a picture of Ben and there is a bunch of dollar bills floating around his head and he's smiling. And the Austrian economist of course, they are unlike the Keynesians, they are your diametrically oppose the Keynesians. You know, I agree with the Austrian school.And what they think is they think the government should get out of the way free market should rule the day okay? The next cell says, what I tell people I do, and there is a picture of Ben and he is captaining a ship and he's got his captain's hat on and he is going off into the sunset, and like the brave man he is whose taking care of the economy and he's got all our best inter-ests at heart. Okay, that's what he tells people. He does. And then, the next picture is what I actually do, and there's a picture of Ben flipping a coin be-cause his guess is about as good as anybody's. And if you listento that arti-cle thatI shared on the last show,episodenumber 242, it's really telling about that transcript at a privateFederal Reserve meeting that was released. They talked about how completelyidiotic this people are. They really know noth-ing. Their guess is as good as ours and that's why they should justminimize their level of inference, and let the market correct itself. That would be the best thing.And the last image says how history willremember me, and there is picture of the Hindenburg blimp crashing into the docking tower and it has got a huge picture of the dollar bill on the side as it's going up in flames, and that is how history will remember Ben Bernankeand Alan Greenspan.In my opinion,I agree with that.They are the people who destroyed the value of the dollar.
But as a prudentincome property investor, you know that as the dollar is de-stroyed, so as the value of your mortgages be de-stroyed.Remember,inflationattacks our savings, our stock portfolios, our mutual funds, our bonds, even our equity in real estate. But thankfully, it al-so attacks our debt. So it destroys the wealth of all the people who did this supposedly right thing who saved money, who paid off their home, who did all of that stuff, those people get hurt the most,while the people who have long term fix rate investment grade debt outsource to somebodyelse called the tenant, and attach to a package of commodities that are not indexed to the dollar because they are traded globally,and those are the construction material, the ingredients of a house, the ingredients of apartment building, those are indexed to inflation, those people win the game on every single level and that's what we do as prudentincomeproperty investors and that's what we talk about here on the Creating Wealth Show.
So, lets go to today's guest, joining us forMeet the Masters in March, that would be next month, it'scoming right up fast folks.Get in on the early bird prizing, go to jasohartman.com to register.Also while you are there, look at the properties and the blog on our website,a lot of great stuff there and we look forward to seeing you atMeet the Masters in March and we will back with today's very very interesting guest in just a moment.
Female: Jason provides an extremely unique service, deal evaluator. Are you inter-ested in the property outside of our network, need a second opinion? No problem.Let our experts evaluate the deal.Find out more about it at jason-hartman.com.
Jason: My pleasure to welcome William Cohan to the show. He is the author of several books including House of Cards:A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Ex-cesses on Wall Street. William how are you?
William Cohan: I'm very well. Thank you for having me.
Jason Hartman: Good.Thanks for joining us. So, you are coming to us today from New York and you are right in the thick of it there When we talk about AHouse of Cards, give as someinsights as to what you cover in the book and what's going on Wall Street in general maybe?
William Cohan: Well, I think, one has to of course reflect a little bit of – Nothing comes to us sprung full born,everything has a history and decadence. And on Wall Street was a series of private partnerships that have been around for some-thing like 200 plus years and to one by onebeginning in 197. They all started going public and substituting other people's money in their capital structures for the money that was originally supplied by their partners. So for the first say 200 years of Wall Street'sexistence, it was a series of small underfunded private partnerships and the American public had very little interaction with them and basically knew very little bit about them.Beginning in the 1970's, I mentioned this one firm called Donaldson, Lufkin, and Jenrette, which was a New York private partnership decided it was going to go public. OtherWall Street firms were aghast and offended.It was against the New York stock exchange rules. But they persisted and went public, and then of course one by one, everybody else on Wall Street went public too.
So overtime, what had been partners of money that was being risked every day and therefore forced everyone at these small firms to be prudent about the risk they were taking,went from being a sort of a partnership culture to what I call a bonus culture where people were encouraged to take risks with others people's money.Their own net worth wasn't on the line anymore. They had no accountability whatsoever, and as a result, they were encour-aged to take huge risks with theirinvestors and their creditors' money. And as a result overtime, they took more and more risks, they used more and mo-releverage, they essentially became, hence the title of the book, ahouse of cards. And every firm on Wall Streetwas pretty much like this. Bear Stearns was just the first to fail in March of 2008.
Jason Hartman: And when you talk about these firms going public and so forth, are you talk-ing about investment banks specifically or just general financial services firms that serve consumers like Merrill Lynch for example or?
William Cohan: Basically, I'm trying to make a subtledistinction between securities firms and commercial banks, although now since the collapse, the ending of the Glass-Steagall Act, so you have to go back to the depression and the creation of what was called the Glass-Steagall Act in around 1934, which forced investment banks, securities firms like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. In fat, that's how Morgan Stanley got created because to separate from commercialbanks. So JP Morgan, the great JP Morgan used to have both commercial banking and investment banking in under one roof but the Glass-Steagall Act required that they separate commercial banking from in-vestment banking because investment banking was perceived as being very risky, business where people were encouraged to take risks, and commercial banking of course had depositor'smoney and so they did not want to put that money at risk, and that's what peopleexperiencedduring the great depression when so much money was lost because of bank deposits that they couldn't get out and people lost a lot of money, so they wanted to separate commercial banking from investment banking. That is how Morgan Stanley got created, because two departments from JP Morgan started an investment banking from called Morgan Stanley.And Goldman Sachsstayed as an investment bank.It didn't really have a commercial banking operation and other firms chose which way they were going to go. So, it wasn't until 1999 when Glass-Steagall was repealed, that investment banks and commercial banks could be in the some business again.
So now, you know, by the time this crisis whirls around in 2007 and 2008, it's very hard to distinguish between a commercial bank and an investment bank and a securities firm and a non-securities firm, but the fact of the mat-ter was, it hadn't been – the US government had never saved a securities firm until it decided to step in and save BearStearns. In the past, this has always led securities firms into trouble fail as opposed to commercial banks that got into trouble. They were rescued. But now you got you've got, so you had asystem where it was hard to tell onefromother. They were all interconnected and they were all too important, and you know, the failure, the risk of their failure was too great and so we had to save them.
William Cohan: No, not really. So in part it was, yes. So in September – I think it was Sep-tember 22, 2008, the two sort ofremaining big securities firms, Goldman Sachs andMorgan Stanley – When I say remaining, I say that sort of tongue and cheek in the sense that obviously Bear Stearns hadfailed in March, Lehman Brothers had gone into bankruptcy on September 15, a week earlier, and also a few days before September 22nd, Merrill Lynch which was going to go out of business and fail was bought by Bank of America.So there used to be five big securities firms in by September 22nd of 2008, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Lehman Brothers had all failed, leavingMorgan Stanley which was about to fail and Goldman Sachs which was not far behind.
So what they did is they appealed to the Fed to allow them to become "bank holding companies" which gave them basically infinite access to the federal funds at a very low cost and was basically a gift, an underappreciated gift from the American public to these two firms allowing to have all the liquidi-ty they needed to fund their business and to survive. But they became bank holding companies and in that, they joined the other big banks likeBank of America and JP Morgan and DeutschBank and things like that who were al-so bank holding companies. So therefore, what happened was on September 22, 2008 is basically securities firms, the big securities firms all went away and they became bank holding companies which has given Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley like this other banksinfiniteaccess to low-cost funds from the Federal ReserveBank, which has been a gift from the Federal Re-serveBank to these funds because thenthey can turn around and invest this money in treasurysecurities and take the spread or they can lend it out and get an even bigger spread.
Jason Hartman: Soit's below the rate of inflation, so certainly, we are getting panelized for saving.
Jason Hartman: Yeah. Saving money is about the worst deal going unfortunatelywhich this event incentivizes bad behavior in the economy and of course very specula-tive behavior, and I don't think that's good overall. But you know, you have some very interesting chapter titles in your book.One is a section, rather than a chapter, where you talk about the end of the second gilded age and then, the tenant ten strategy. Tell us about some of that if you would.
Goldman Sachs, have gone public. Goldman Sachs didn't go public until 1999. But basically, all of these firms were encouraged, the people of these firms were encouraged to make big bets with other people's money.
Jason Hartman: And they may not came home to roostering your tenure so, you know you can't just like our politicians just kick the can down the roadto the next group.
William Cohan: And even if they do came home to rooster on their tenure like they did in 2007 and 2008, what happens, there's no accountability. They get bailed out and they still get their big bonuses.
Jason Hartman: You see, it'sjustdigesting and you can really see why people are so angry about it, which actually brings me to anotherquestion, just get your com-ments. This is not in the book obviously or anything but the OccupyWall Street movement, your thoughts?
William Cohan: Well, I'll be honest with you.This is something that I have been wrestling with lately. I have written a few columns about it lately. I was on the Daily Show on April 28th, talkingabout my Goldman book and during that show, I talked about how I couldn'tbelievethat there was nobody out in the streets protesting about what Wall Street has been doing.
Jason Hartman: And here they are.
William Cohan: And so here they are.But I guess I amsaddened and disappointed with what here we are means.I wish these protesters,whoever they are, and they are re-ally are a proud section of America and Iapplaud protesting. Ibelieve it's an important part of America and what makes America great or what has made America great, and so I'm all for it but I'm really kind of disappointed that-whoever these people are,they haven't whatever taken the time or asked people like me who understand these things or other people to share with them the wayWall Street really works so that they can be clear in the chang-es that need to take place, so that we don't have this recurring boom bust cy-cle on Wall Street that'srecurringseries of crisis that really are extremelyde-bilitating to not only our economy but to our entire culture and society. And so just sort of blithering away with the usual, you know, revolutionary pabu-lum which you often see now down at the occupy Wall Street movement. Ifind itvery frustrating anddisappointing I wish they were more focused and had a better understanding of the way Wall Street really works so we could get real reform.So I'm all for the protest, was an early person wondering why people haven't protested but now I feel like there is no there there and I'm not quite sure what it's all about.
Jason Hartman: Yeah, it just seems that they need to get clear on a real message and other-wise, they're just sort of being rather childish. But another interesting point and this has been circulating around Facebook and then the social media where there are two newspaper clippings. And one is entitled ex-mortgage CEO sentenced to prison for a 3-billion dollar fraud and it talks about how he got a forty-month sentence and the other article says homeless man gets 15 years for stealing $100. The contrast here is mind bugling and it is just amazing how little account therehas been at least so farfor the crimes that have gone on in our financial system at the highest levels.
William Cohan: I know exactly what you are saying. As I wrote in the Goldman book, the crime is not what'sillegal, the crime is what's legal.You have to remember that for decades now, generations now, Wall Street has been influencing what goes on in Washington,Wall Street has been paying lobbies and donat-ing to congressional coffersso that they can get the kind of regulations or lack thereof, that they feel comfortable with. There has been the revolving door between Wall Street and Washington that's been going on for decades, so you get something like the Dodd-Frank law, which is 2200 pages long that nobody can figure out. While we are having this conversation now,Wall Street lobbyist are working away in Washington to make sure that the regulations that are still being written are ones that they can live with and they are willing to take out all the stops to make sure that that happens. As a result, you don't get – It's just shocking to me and I'm thinking house of cards, about Bear Stearns, I didn't do this intentionally but I think it's clear that there is a sort of prosecutorial road map that shows in documents and in conversations I had with people, you know, what was going on with the Bear Stearns hedge funds, which led to the collapse of Bear Stearns. The collapse of the hedge fundsled to the collapse of Bear Stearns and there was a trial. Actually, these two hedge fund managers were – The only time that anybody and all this has been brought to trial criminally, and then they were acquitted. They were acquittedbecause the government, you know, choose to go down on a prosecutorial path that totally miss the boat.
Jason Hartman: I mean how could the government mess that up. It seemslike it's almost in-tentional, like there is a payoff. I hate to say I'm so conspiratorial but it's funny. I mean, like another case that just bugs a heck out of me is the Bernie Madoff case.There was no trial. I mean, he just pled guilty and that was it. Italmost seemed like that was to cover things up, so we wouldn't hear about them and evidence wouldn't be made public. I don't know.That all just hap-pened far too smoothly for me I thought.
Jason Hartman: Let me take a brief pause.We'll be back in just a minute.
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And so what is your thought about the future?You know,Wall Street had its big changes in the 80's and it's interesting because that's shortly after that is when it seems to me that the stock market just expanded so much into mid-dle America,owning stocks later with theadvent of the internet and the online trading. It seems like everybody in the brother got into the stock market whereas in the old days, it was more for the wealthy and the insiders. And I don't mean insiders like insider trading but just the people at higher levels of finance. But the stock market become really really public after the big changes and maybe that's what caused even more pain into the Ameri-can middle class.
William Cohan: Of course, it wasn't by accident, right? I mean Merrill Lynch is now apubliccompany. It's got a real report quarterly profit growth all the time. So you know, it is the biggest broker.It's a global brand name. And so what does it do?It pushes relentlessly throughits advertising, encouraging people to own stocks and of course that serves them well because they get fees eve-ry time they do a trade or open a brokerage account. And so, it just became a national and international industry to encourage people to own stocks and so you're absolutely right and like when the market crashed in 1987, 24 years ago today, you know, yesterday, two days ago, you know you had the market going down 22.6% in one day and the little investor got totally screwed. I mean, just completely taken advantage and lost a lot of money.
You know basically, ever since then, it's been a complete and utter lost of trust between Wall Street and main street but a think that, you know,with a slow economy does a tremendousamount of damage to Wall Street firms. I mean they don't, they can't – It's much harder for them to make money in this slow economy and you see that in their results that came out in the third quarter.I think that you combine that, the slow economy and peoplebeing, you know, shying away from risk taking with, you know, the Dodd-Frank law, the Vocker rule and the new regulations being written even though we're not quite sure how it's all going to came out, but basically, you know, the casino used to operate as we talked about for the lust generation on Wall Street, is clearly in the process off being, if not close, then certainly its hours are being greatly demised.
And so a firm like GoldmanSachs, which prided itself from having the best trading operation which could be also be the best "gambling operation", thatgambling apparatus to a large degree I think is going to be much tougher in the future and people like Goldman and all the rest of Wall Streetwhich prided itself on making these proprietary bedsand making a lot of money from them are not going to be able to do it anymore.
So I think, either intentionally or not, I think that what is likely to happen in the future is these Wall Street firmsarenot going to make as much money as they used to make.Hopefully, they will then not pay their people as much as they've being paying thembecause they get way overpaid and thirdly, I sus-pect that they will go back to being what they used to be when the Glass-Steagall Act was in effect, where they provided the services we want them to provide, which is capital to companies around the globe whenever they need it 24/7,you know, whether that's debt financing or equity financing, providing investment advice, providing advice on mergers and acquisitions but you know, closing the casino and I think that will make the world safer for all of as cause we just can't tolerate this kind of risk taking anymore that Wall Street has being doing for the last 25 years.
Jason Hartman: Well, I very much hope you are right, however,mypessimistic side says that Americans have very short memories and when the frenzy starts again which shouldundoubtedly will,Wall Street will have theirlawyers, lobbyist, PR firms, and spin doctors and all of it out in mass, and the general public will just soak it up like theponds or suckers they are. I don't know I'm pretty pessimistic I guess.
William Cohan: Well, I think you know, again it remains to be seen. I mean we've been-taught a lesson here. There is no question about it butyou are right.We have been taught this lesson many times in the last 25 years, 10 times at least.And, you know, when the market crashed in1987, I saw grown men standing around cultural machines cryingand everybody swore this kindof thing would never happen again, and then it has only happened about 10 times since. So certainly, nothing in the Dodd-Frank Law or any of the reg-ulations that are being written is going change the way people behave on Wall Street or the change theincentives on Wall Street, so I suspect before long we will have another problem.
Jason Hartman: Yeah. And what do we do, just in closing here, you know, I mean what do people need to do built or what needs to happen I guess in government to fix it?Do we need to change Glass-Steagallback to the way it was before '99 . What would solve the problem?
One thing that was a common denominator through, you know, much of the years until 1970 which was that these firms had to operate using theirpart-ner's capital and as a result, they were much more prudent about the risks they were willing to take and they weren't rewardedto take risks, they were rewarded to create pre-tax income so that they would have something to di-vide at the end of the year. So we need to go back to something like that. I made a few proposals that you know, never of course get any traction but I think that this is something that real leaders on Wall Street.You know if Lloyd Blank find that Goldman Sachs were areal leader, he would imple-ment a program that put, you know, the top 100 people at his firm or the top 300 or 400 have real skin in the game, have their entire net worth again on the line, so that they are really cognizingevery day about the risk they were taking and are really prudent about the risk they were taking.
And I think if something like that would help even when we don't get the legislation pass, that might really do it but that kind of self-regulation, that kind of leadership would help reduce the tensions and the risk that Wall Street possess to the rest of us, and it's long overdue and that's the kind of thing that I think needs to happen.
William Cohan: Goldman used to pride itself on being long term greedy. What better way on be long term greedy than to try to take a quantumly forward in trying torestore the trust that has obviously been lost between Wall Street and the American public, clearly been lost. And one way to do that is to try to instill into the American public some level of confidence that hey, we have our own network on the line again and we are the first ones that we are going to get wiped out if we do things that are stupid or not in our own interest that really damage the American public and the world economy, and that will make them more prudent and I think change the kinds of risk they are will-ing to take. And the great thing ison Wall Street is basically a cartel at this point.And so if one firm like Goldman Sachs does it, they will all do rela-tively quickly, and we will all be safer as a result because counting on con-gress to come up with laws that make sense and to change people's behavior it is a long put on itself too.
Jason Hartman: Sure it is, sure it is. And you talked about it at the investment bank level and the Wall Street firm level. But at the corporatelevel, the companies that people are actually buying the shares in more broadly than the investment banks, wasn't Sarbanes-Oxley supposed to solve that problem? I mean did it help even or things just sort of business as usual with a lot more accounting fees than before?
William Cohan: Well, there are a lot more accounting fees than before. I mean, you know, I don't whether Sarbanes-Oxleyis worked or not but it's harder to come up with clearexamples of sort of end run, world come, typo kind of horrific corporate behavior. Again this time, it was confinedlargely to the financial sector. This was in crisis of Wall Street's own making that was entirely preventable but they couldn't. It's like theparable of the frog and the scor-pion, you know why the scorpion sting, why does Wall Street do this be-causeunfortunately, that is what they are incented to do now.
Jason Hartman: That's theirnature right?
William Cohan: That's' their nature, exactly right.
Jason Hartman: Well, very very interesting stuff. I sure hope that your vision pans out. I'm lessoptimistic but if you're vision pans out, I think everybody would be bet-ter of for it and I think Wall Street really needs to just drain in their greed a bit and set a good example. I sure hope that happens someday because I think it would inspire a lot of confidence.
William Cohan: And if doesn't happen, then I'll haveanother book I'm sure to write about, the latest crazy behavior on Wall Street.
Jason Hartman: That's for sure. Well William Cohan, author of the House of Cards and severalother books, The Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street. Thank you so much Bill for joining as today. The book is getting great reviews on Amazon. It looks very popular.Did you want to give outany other websites or any other information about where people can get them?
William Cohan: They can get them on Amazon. If there are any bookstores in existence an-ymore, I think they still have them. They are paperback versions. I'm sure Amazon sells them for 2 cents each. So the more importantthing is that people get a hold of them and read them and understand the wayWall Street really works so that they can put pressure on people, you know, congres-sional leaders and peopleon Wall Street to change the way they have been behaving.
Jason Hartman: Fantastic.William Cohan, thank you so much for joining us today.
William Cohan: Thank you.Thank you for having me.
Female: This show is produced by the HartmanMediaCompany. All rights reserved. For distribution or publication rights and media interviews, please visit www.hartmanmedia.com or email [email protected] on theshow should be consideredspecific personal or professional advice.Please consult anappropriate tax, legal, real estate, or business professional for in-dividualized advice. Opinions of guest are their own and the host is acting on behalf of Platinum Properties Investor Network Inc.exclusively.


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Reader Perks
Siegel: Dems need new messenger to avoid past foibles
By HARRY SIEGEL
The Democrats are doing it to themselves — again.
If 2016 was a lesson for America in what can finally happen after decades of letting bad deeds go unpunished, 2020 is reminding us, a year ahead of time, that learning that lesson doesn't answer the question of how to avoid repeating it.
Once again, Democrats are torn between a profoundly flawed establishment figure and rivals offering a more radical vision. And once again, Donald Trump is mostly making it up as he goes, but this time with the power of the presidency behind him.
At last Thursday's debate, Uncle Joe — a swamp patriarch cosplaying as a common man — was energetic, forceful and staggeringly incoherent.
He said that nonviolent prisoners (he meant drug offenders but forgot to say so) should never go to prison, which must have made Bernie Madoff smile if he was watching. That Afghanistan (he meant Iraq, I think) was really "three counties."
Responding to a question about his fierce opposition in 1975 to the idea of reparations for slavery, Biden said, among other things, that poor parents should "play the radio, make sure the television — excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, make sure that kids hear words."
You can make too much of any one slip of the tongue, as Julián Castro did early on, crudely and wrongly suggesting that Biden, at 76, was having a senior moment about the particulars of his health care plan. But there were a lot of slips over one debate, let alone for a presidential frontrunner.
Let alone a frontrunner whose sole basis for running (for a third time, following his 1988 run ended by a plagiarism scandal, and his 2008 run in which he praised then Sen. Barack Obama as "the first mainstream African-American" presidential candidate "who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy") seems to be that he can beat Trump.
And pretty much the sole basis for the idea that Biden is best suited to beat Trump is his eight years under Barack Obama, who's now producing things for Netflix and chilling.
Take that away, and Biden — whose problem was less single slips than long passages where he seemed to have as little idea as the rest of us of what he was going to say next, as he skipped between ideas and talking points like, well, a scratched record — would be running neck-and-neck with Bill de Blasio, who was sadly tweeting about the debate he didn't make the cut to join.
Just behind Biden in the polls now are two candidates, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who are offering unpopular health care plans with trillion-dollar price tags that would take strong majorities in both houses of Congress to deliver, and a slew of also-rans delivering wildly pessimistic pictures of Twilight in America to Democratic voters in sour moods after seeing Obama followed by two years of complete Republican control of Washington.
When Biden, after going to the late-night circuit in 2016 to mourn the death of his son while also promoting a possible run that year, finally decided against it, he said, in part as a shot at Hillary Clinton, "I believe that we have to end the divisive partisan politics that is ripping this country apart, and I think we can.
"It's mean-spirited, it's petty, and it's gone on for much too long," he continued. "For the sake of the country, we have to work together."
He's right that there's really no alternative to building political consensus, and it's a shame that the Democratic frontrunner still committed to that idea is such a flawed messenger for it.
While the debate droned on, and on, and on, Trump counter-programmed with a speech of his own in Baltimore, where he repeated his nasty nicknames, complained about fluorescent lights making him look orange, and performed his golden oldies for the fans.
It's a toxic mix of viciousness, stupidity and entertainment value, and "the best is yet to come," he promised.
Harry Siegel writes for the New York Daily News.
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Another year, another ice out date. As in previous years, here's an update of the Nenana Ice Classic time series (raw date, and then with a small adjustment for the calendrical variations in 'spring'). One time series doesn't prove much, but this is of course part of a much larger archive of phenomenological climate-related data that I've talked about before.
This year the ice on the Tanana River went out on May 1st, oddly enough the same date as last year, after another very warm (but quite snowy) Alaskan winter.
The responses to the last post on the Rideau Canal Skateway season changes were interesting, and led to a few pointers to additional data sets that show similar trends and some rather odd counter-points from the usual suspects.
This is a thread to discuss the surface temperature records that were all released yesterday (Jan 18). There is far too much data-vizualization on this to link to, but feel free to do so in the comments. Bottom line? It's still getting warmer.
Millar et al's recent paper in Nature Geoscience has provoked a lot of lively discussion, with the authors of the original paper releasing a statement to clarify that their paper did not suggest that "action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is no longer urgent", rather that 1.5ºC (above the pre-industrial) is not "geophysically impossible".
The range of post-2014 allowable emissions for a 66% chance of not passing 1.5ºC in Millar et al of 200-240GtC implies that the planet would exceed the threshold after 2030 at current emissions levels, compared with the AR5 analysis which would imply most likely exceedance before 2020. Assuming the Millar numbers are correct changes 1.5ºC from fantasy to merely very difficult.
It's often been said that while we can only gather new data about the planet at the rate of one year per year, rescuing old data can add far more data more quickly. Data rescue is however extremely labor intensive. Nonetheless there are multiple data rescue projects and citizen science efforts ongoing, some of which we have highlighted here before. For those looking for an intro into the subject, this 2014 article is an great introduction.
Weather diary from the the Observatoire de Paris, written by Giovanni Cassini on 18th January 1789.
(If you know of any more, please add them in the comments, and I'll try and keep this list up to date).
Two recent papers help bridge a seeming gap between estimates of climate sensitivity from models and from observations of the global energy budget. Recognizing that equilibrium climate sensitivity cannot be directly observed because Earth's energy balance is a long way from equilibrium, the studies instead focus on what can be inferred about climate sensitivity from historical trends. Calculating a climate sensitivity from the simulations that is directly comparable with that observed shows both are consistent. Crucial questions remain, however, regarding how climate sensitivity will evolve in the future.


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Town Illegally Burns Office Debris
Town Receives Summons for
" Burning Prohibited Material".
Amity has a date in court on the 19 th of this month according to a summons issued by Forest Ranger Jeremiah Crockett for "burning prohibited material".
The Town Officials (scroll down to see update!!) decided to haul the remains of the twice-burned Town Office to the fields behind Joe Ledger's house and some of it to the Town Gravel Pit for a third burning. One would think that Joe, the Town Fire Warden, would know this act was illegal since he was supposed to attend some classes when appointed as Fire Warden. He was on the Board of Directors for the Katahdin Valley Waste Disposal District since its inception and is still the alternate representative for the Town. Instead of picking up the telephone and asking the best way to dispose of this material, the Selectmen decided to put the Town at risk by just piling up the debris and burning it. It took four nights to burn all the debris in the Ledger fields! State law requires someone in attendance with tools until the fire is out. Who tended it during the day as it burned and smoldered?
A nonresident called the Department of Environmental Protection with questions about possible pollution of the aquifer resulting from such an action before the burning began. Are you aware The Town Gravel Pit sits over one of the largest aquifers in the State of Maine? Your Selectmen know it! Selectman Glen Clifford has mentioned this numerous times with, what I thought, was great pride. Why ever would you want to run the risk of polluting it?
As you can see from the pictures, the original pile in the Town Pit (public property) contained plastics, siding, and computers. Everett Carson, Director of the Maine Natural Resources Council, said a main concern was possible mercury contamination from computers. Also on the pile were plastic flowerpots and materials from the cemetery. Apparently, on this occasion, the town gravel pit became the town trash pit.
After the DEP contacted the Town, two Selectmen and Tom Hall removed the computers and some of the plastics from the pile in the pit. From the pictures, you can see they did not remove all the plastics. Since the rest of the piles are on private property, they are not open to public inspection so we will never know what burned there.
The timing of the burn seems questionable since the piles sat exposed to the elements for over a week. Was it just a coincidence the local Forest Ranger was on vacation? Or that the burning started after the DEP was called and before they could come and inspect? Lou Pizzuti of the DEP confirmed that they had requested that the material not be burned. When Mr. Pizzuti contacted the forest service, Ranger Crockett told him that the town officials said that the DEP had given them the go ahead to burn. The DEP was quite surprised and unhappy that the Town ignored their request and went ahead with the burning. Between the Selectmen burning illegal materials and lying to the DEP, they have gotten the town in quite a pickle, and a pretty sour one at that! Will they ever admit the truth of their actions? If not, how much more is it going to cost the taxpayers?
According to Mr. Pizzuti, the standard procedure is to shovel the mess up into a transfer container, and then take it to one of two landfills, which are qualified to test the debris for contaminants. After testing, the DEP will make a decision on where the remains are to be sent for final disposal. At the same time, they will make a determination as to the fine assessed against the town. All this because no one would take the time to pick up a telephone and ask what the best thing to do was.
Town Manager, Darrell Williams, said on Friday (the 8 th) that the Town plans to go to court and plead not guilty. When asked who the Town lawyer is he replied that we do not have one. The plan is "to just pay the fine if it is not too much". The money for the fines will have to come from the taxpayers of this Town. Don't you think a simple phone call would have been cheaper?
At a Selectmen's meeting a couple of years ago we were told, by the then Chairman of the Board, Joe Ledger, that the laws of Maine do not apply to Amity because we are such a small town. Slamming his fist on the Municipal Officers Manual, he shouted, "We have never gone by this (obscenity) book and are never going to! We will run things here like we always have!" It is quite refreshing to see that they are really not above the law.
Check back often for updates! Once the Forest Service finishes, it will be the DEP's turn at bat!
Because of our studies in Municipal and State Laws and extensive library on these issues, citizens frequently approach your webmaster and me with questions about the Selectman's activities. If you have any questions you would like brought before the Selectmen and are either uncomfortable asking yourself or unable to attend the monthly Selectmen's meetings, please feel free to email the question to Amity Matters and we will ask the Selectmen. We will publish the question and answer from the Selectmen in Amity Matters for you to read. Your name and email address will be confidential if requested.
Amity has its day in court.
In Houlton District Court this afternoon, with all the Selectmen present, Town Manager Darrell Williams stepped forward to plead guilty to the charge of "burning prohibited material" brought against the Town of Amity by the Forest Service. Judge Bernard O'Mara levied a fine of $100 against the town. With the added 20% surcharge on fines and $10 awarded to the Victims Compensation Fund, the total cost came to $130.
Amity Triple Murder
Theft of Funds
Town Office Fire
2016 Tax Commitment Book


text:
Field Work: Community Stories Onstage
Student-created show raises consciousness in Southern Oregon's Illinois Valley.
RiverStars Performing Arts
By Eloise Holland
Public Program Grants
This December, community members in Cave Junction will gather to see the latest production by RiverStars Performing Arts, a four-year-old dance and theater group that all school-age children in the Illinois Valley can participate in for free.
RiverStars was created to fill a gap in theater opportunities for local youth and to help build community, says cofounder and lead educator Lindsey Gillette, who also serves on the Cave Junction city council.
"The performances have become cornerstone events for the community," Gillette says. "There's always a part of the Illinois Valley in each show. It's become a tradition to see who we're making fun of, who we're holding up. And we're always looking for opportunities to hear the kids' voices."
In fact, the community's youth are fundamental to creating the performances. From research to script-writing to performing, this year's comic book–themed production, Super Real, has been student-led. It's also supported by an Oregon Humanities Public Program Grant.
Starting last spring, students interviewed community members—including family and church members, as well as shoppers at the Cave Junction Farmers' Market—and invited them to help create a comic-book version of the Illinois Valley by asking questions like "Who are our local superheroes?" and "Who holds the power in our community?"
"We're trying to explore themes of social justice," Gillette says, "so the comic-book theme made sense. 'Who holds the power?' is a huge question."
The community has been receptive. "People were interested in the project and thought it was a cool thing we were doing," says seventeen-year-old Elijah Ocean, a homeschooled student in his senior year of high school who has been performing with RiverStars for the past two years. "Pretty much everyone participated."
After gathering feedback from the community, students participated in a series of workshops this past August to take the responses and transform them into a script that will be performed publicly this December.
As a result of this process, "The kids have become very interested in our community," Gillette says. "They're also becoming more vocal about what they think is right."
"We try to bring attention to things that matter in the community," Ocean says. "Theater is an art form that helps bring the community together. I hope everyone leaves feeling like everyone is a hero in their own way. Everyone is needed in their community."
Eloise Holland is a communications associate at Oregon Humanities.
Editor's Note: Chipping Away
From the Director: Guns, Tools, and Talk
Field Work: Opening the Conversation
Field Work: Bridging Divides over Dinner
Field Work: People in Motion
The Original Laws
Protecting Inequality
To Heart Mountain
Cuts and Blows
Read. Talk. Think.
Magazine Subscriber Survey


text:
Candy Chévez
Women and youth for peace building
Tiempos Nuevos Teatro
In 2016, Cándida Chévez participated in the 2nd Ibero-American Children and Youth Biennial in Manizales, Colombia. Once there, she realized that experiences from El Salvador would be presented, and decided to attend the session. It was the first time she heard about Julio Monge, the insertion projects coordinator for Tiempos Nuevos Teatro (TNT). She learned about the Orquesta de Cuerdas (String Orchestra), an innovative educational experience for young people deprived of liberty. One of the participants of the orchestra shared a testimony on the success of the project.
From that moment on, Chévez, together with James Melenge, a Colombian colleague and coordinator of the Education and Human Development Network, got involved in the process of systematization of experience, in order to make the project visible and valuable. "It was an opportunity to do some soul searching and to give meaning to all the experiences they had lived," explains Chévez.
The systematization would be the first of a series of contributions that both she and Melenge have made in this project which, from Catalonia, has received the support of Barcelona City Council and the Catalan Agency for Development Cooperation.
Currently, Chévez, with a degree in Psychology specialized in local development, is part of the TNT team. She is also a researcher at the Instituto Nacional de Formación Docente de El Salvador (INFOD). In addition, she is part of the work group on Youth and Infancy of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO), of the Research Group on "Critical Pedagogies and Popular Education" at the José Simeón Cañas Central American University (UCA), and the Network for Initial Literacy in Central America and the Caribbean (the LEI Network). She is the author of several publications and aspires to obtain a Ph.D. in Social Sciences, Childhood, and Youth at the Center for Advanced Studies in Childhood and Youth at the CINDE – University of Manizales, in Colombia.
» Entrevista
> Is violence a new phenomenon in El Salvador?
Violence is a very present topic in the history of El Salvador. Many texts address this question and, going back to the colonial era, these texts seek to explain how our village has continually been built on diverse forms of violence. We learned to see violence as a way to resolve conflicts and, in many cases, to naturalize it. In the history of El Salvador, we find a long line of struggles and protests characterized by power groups that, when threatened, create a public enemy figure against whom they will fight to preserve the stability, security, and peace for a few. Therefore, we Salvadorans carry the burden of our dead, which increases from generation to generation. We carry the 75,000 victims of a civil war that broke out in the early 1980s. After a decade of authoritarian governments, abuses of power, human rights violations and massacres, the people rose up. Twelve years of armed conflict led us to sign a peace agreement in 1992, but that peace only reached a few. The post-war period meant the rise of neoliberal policies which, added to factors such as migration and poverty, increased the level of social inequality, marginalizing and excluding a large part of the population.
> A context for the emergence of the maras.
During the first 10 years of post-conflict, maras or gangs emerged in El Salvador, and relied on young people in vulnerable social conditions to strengthen themselves. The history of gangs is undoubtedly closely linked to an unfinished peace process that disregarded the needs of the people.
> What does it mean to be young in El Salvador?
There is not only one way to be young. Like the researcher Rossana Reguillo explains, there are 2 types of youth. They are differentiated by the proximity, or not, to alternatives and access (2010). There is a precarious youth who is disconnected from institutions and security systems, and whose possibilities of choice are very limited. On the other hand, there is a connected youth, incorporated into security systems and institutions, with more options. My trajectory has allowed me to work with many young people, but in the last few years, my interest has been to understand what it means to be part of the disconnected youth in El Salvador. Within this category we can talk about different ways about being young; it is not the same to be young in a rural or urban area, nor to be a man or a woman. In this group, being young is in most cases a crime, and involves exposure to stigmatization, criminalization, and death. Young people in neighborhoods are stigmatized by the presence of gangs and have to hide or deny their neighborhood when looking for work or attending an educational center. They must watch out for the way they dress, speak, move and the music they listen to because everything can criminalize them.
> How is it to live in a territory controlled by a gang?
It is important not to generalize, we have to recognize that all territories have different dynamics. Living in a territory controlled by gangs will mean that the youth will have limited choices, and be constantly persecuted not only by the gang but also by the police, military, and society in general. I want to take up an excerpt from an article published by the national newspaper La Prensa Gráfica on July 31, 2017, titled "I want to say goodbye because I know they are going to kill me":
"For the past two weeks, the gang members in the community where I live have been pestering me to join the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) clique. The group leader told me that I have to kill someone if I want to continue living here. I've had to do favors for the gang to survive, but they want me to kill someone, and if I don't, they'll kill me. So, I've made the decision that I won't do it and that's why I want to say goodbye, because I know they're going to kill me.
I'm not a delinquent, and neither are many of the young people I have as neighbors. Those of us who live in marginal areas are the most exposed to violence. That is where the gangs are, and it is also where many young people are. We suffer the pressure to be part of gangs; because they tell us that if we live here, we are either with them or against them.
The police stopped me once, they hit me on the head with a rifle. I was caught in the street on my way back from an internet café looking for information for a science job. They handcuffed me and threw me into a pick-up. One of them told me that I had attacked a patrol car, but it was not true, because I had spent the whole afternoon in front of the computer.
They took me to the delegation and released me at three o'clock. A policewoman arrived, took off my handcuffs and told me that they had made a mistake, but not to tell anyone that I had been beaten by the other officers. Ever since that day, I've been mistreated whenever they see me.
They don't ask questions, they don't know what kind of person everyone is. Just because we live in the community, they think we're all gang members…"
This was the account of a young man who had to write an essay at school, he made use of this written assignment to describe the persecution he was experiencing. The young man died two weeks after writing it. This is what it means for many young people to live in gang territories; they struggle every day to survive and resist dying.
> What repercussions does gang violence have on youth development?
Basically, it hinders a free and full development, and it limits the possibilities of deciding their own future. However, this situation experienced by young people is not due exclusively to the phenomenon of gangs, but to a series of social conditions that make it impossible to build other futures. The state has a great responsibility and so does society in general. Why does a young person, boy or girl, join one of these groups? Gangs do not arise from nothing, there are conditions that allow their existence and people who support them.
> What differences exist between the impact of violence felt by young men and young women?
The highest number of homicide victims in this country are young men. They are the ones who suffer the most violence from political and military forces and experience more limitations and territorial displacements. A young man cannot enter any territory. In the case of women, although the homicides are less frequent, they are more linked to their status as women than to the phenomenon of gangs. Girls are sexually assaulted and are often forced to have sex without consent. They are seen as territories of conquest, over which men can exercise power.
> How do you value the public policies aimed at the youth of El Salvador?
There was a wrong bet with insufficient efforts. There have been welfare policies, designed from a risk approach, that seek to keep young people "entertained" so they avoid getting into trouble. Public policies consider young men and women as inactive agents, not protagonists of social & economic development. In addition, policies have always been designed with very few in mind, not addressing the diversity of youth. And repressive policies have exacerbated the problem of gangs.
> How could these policies be improved to promote a culture of peace and reduce violence?
First of all, I think it is essential that these policies are built participatively and in a bottom-up manner. Secondly, there needs to be an awareness of the situation that youth find themselves in. This is one of the main shortcomings of our country, that there is no available data that allows us to analyze the situation of young people in different contexts. Thirdly, it is necessary to take the discussion on the culture of peace to a higher level of analysis: What do we mean by a culture of peace? What kind of peace are we referring to? This dialogue has been pending since the Peace Accords. Peace was often understood as the absence of conflict and, in order not to generate conflicts, it was better not to get involved, not to organize, not to participate, not to exercise one's own rights, etc. But we should rely on community organization. We should recover the knowledge and experiences that we acquired throughout our history, which seems to have been forgotten. We have to look back, acknowledge our history, take up learning again and begin to build the future.
I want to know more! (in Catalan)


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'Play to the final whistle' is a maxim that has prevailed in football for good reason.
Yeovil Town manager Darren Way.
Stevenage players and staff observe a one minut silence for remembrance day.
Fraser Franks volleys towards goal.
Matt Godden gets past Bevis Mugabi.
Henry Cowans slides in at the back post but fails to connect with the cross.
And at a sodden Lamex Stadium Stevenage felt the full impact of failing to do just that as they let their standards drop deep into injury time as Ben Whitfield fired Yeovil Town to a point.
It was almost a year to the day that Tom Pett's 88th minute equaliser down at Huish Park had earned his side a late point between these two sides, but Whitfield's goal cut much deeper.
Not just because it came after the allotted four minutes of injury time shown by the referee's assistant – hands up anyone who knows where the extra extra-time came from – but because Stevenage had come from behind following Ryan Hedges' 48th minute opener to lead through two wonderful Ben Kennedy goals.
Both had been sublime finishes from the boy wonder – the first, on 68 minutes, a low and slow curled effort into the bottom corner and the second a wonderful break the length of the field by the hosts resulting in Kennedy firing past Artur Krysiak in a sensational, jump-from-your-seat moment.
Yet his second was hardly surprising as, bizarrely, Yeovil had always looked likely to concede from their own corners.
Boro have turned the quick break – utilising the guile and youthfulness of Kennedy and Harry McKirdy along with that of Matt Godden – into an art form in recent games and it is astonishing that opposition teams are not better prepared for such a turn of attack. More fool them.
Boro had the better of the first half chances as Charlie Lee fired over, Fraser Franks forced a save from Krysiak and Matt Godden ran on to a Franks ball and volleyed home only for the whistle to blow for offside. Boro boss Darren Sarll said after the match that he'd seen the incident again, and his striker was on.
Sam Shephard also went close for the visitors only to be denied by Jamie Jones.
Hedges opened the scoring early in the second period.
The winger, who had a spell on loan at Stevenage last season, squeezed a shot past Jones as the visitors dominated the early stages of the second period. Tom Eaves, the former Bolton Wanderers striker, also went close with a deft flick which Jones saved.
Kennedy placed a neat shot in the corner for 1-1 before Godden, running onto a Jones long ball, nodded just wide when beating Krysiak to the ball.
Kennedy, though, then showed his class when Jones caught a header at a corner and sent the ball upfield. Kennedy got on his bike, and nobody was able to catch him as he curled home from 18 yards. It was a terrific move.
Kennedy almost got his hat-trick too with a similar shot, but this time Krysiak saved, but five minutes into injury-time and Yeovil turned party-poopers when Whitfield struck after Stevenage had failed to defend a throw-in.
It not only broke Boro's hearts but it also sent them tumbling, remarkably, 10 places in the league table to 20th.
Stevenage: Jones, Ntlhe, Henry, Franks, Wilkinson (Schumacher 83), Lee, Cowans (Pett 70), King, Kennedy, McKirdy (Liburd 83), Godden. Subs: Day, McAnuff, Tonge, Wells.
Yeovil Town: Krysiak, Shephard (Whitfield 88), Smith, Dolan, Mugabi, Lacey, Eaves, Khan (Zoko 76), Butcher, Hedges, Ward. Subs: Maddison, Dickson, Ezewele, Sowunmi, Campbell.


Built statements are generated via QueryBuilder's Fluent API. Use of Fluent API allows easier build of complex queries, as opposed to use of hardcoded query strings.
Note: The provided builders perform very little validation of the built query. There is no guarantee that a built query is valid, and it is definitively possible to create invalid queries.
Queries built with QueryBuilder are executed the same way as other queries–via execute or executeAsync. When a query is built with inlined values, then it doesn't differ much from a statement specified as a string. But it's also possible to build the query with bind markers inside it, and then convert it into a prepared statement.
Generation of BuiltStatement is easy–start by calling of one of the QueryBuilder's methods that represent the CQL's "verb": select, update, delete, insertInto, or truncate, provide required parameters, and then call "verb"-specific functions to form a complete CQL statement (like, where, from, etc.). The statement's target table can be specified as a simple table name (if a default keyspace has been set when creating the Session object), as a combination of keyspace name and table name, or as a TableMetadata object.
Note: The QueryBuilder doesn't provide support for the full set of CQL. For most of DDL operations (CREATE TABLE, etc.) you can use the SchemaBuilder. To perform other operations, for example, for role management, you still need to use simple statements.
Note: The call select("column1", "column2") is really a shortcut for a chain of calls select().column("column1").column("column2").
Note: When using functions, Cassandra will generate aliases for you, but you can provide explicit aliases by using as right after a given selector.
You can also cast the value of the given column to another type by using the cast function, specifying the column for which it should be performed, and to what type it should be casted.
The where function accepts the Clause object that is generated by calling QueryBuilder's functions, such as, eq, ne, lt, in, contains, notNull, etc. In most cases, these functions receive 2 arguments: the name of the column, and the value to compare, but there are also variants that receive 2 iterables for columns and values correspondingly.
Besides this, for newer versions of Cassandra it's possible to specify additional parameters, such as DEFAULT UNSET & DEFAULT NULL in the INSERT INTO ... JSON statements, by using defaultUnset & defaultNull correspondingly.
Besides the most often used set operation, there is a lot of operations for work with all types of collections (lists, maps & sets): add, discard, prepend, put, remove, setIdx, etc. For the full list of operations, see the QueryBuilder's documentation.
Setting the TTL & write timestamp is done the same way as for insert statements.
Specification of conditions is similar to the other operations described above, including conditional deletes with ifExists & onlyIf.
As in the case of regular statements, you can also set options on built statements, such as the consistency level (with setConsistencyLevel), enable/disable tracing (with enableTracing/disableTracing), specify retry policy (with setRetryPolicy), etc.
Note: the call to these functions changes the object type from BuiltStatement to Statement or RegularStatement, so you won't be able to use functions specific to BuiltStatement without explicit casting.


You may not know this, but August is National Coffee Month. Our world revolves around coffee and we're not alone. Whether it's brewed in a French press, autodrip machine, or espresso maker, your favorite brew is undeniably a centerpiece of life. Coffee brings people together, and for National Coffee Month, we wanted to bring you some recipes to make your get-togethers extra-special!
In celebration, we took it to the next level by freezing, blending, shaking, and mixing our hearts out to bring you these tasty warm weather treats. Here are our favorite concoctions, tested on our guinea pigs (aka employees) for your enjoyment.
Nothing says summer quite like ice cream, and this no-churn treat is like bringing your local creamery home.
This treat fuses a strong blast of coffee, creamy sweetened condensed milk, and a velvety vanilla finish.
A coffee cocktail with a bold, heavy body. Brew a big batch and make any occasion more festive!
Coffee is the secret ingredient in this luscious, indulgent treat.
This simple 2-ingredient summer treat keeps your taste buds guessing with blasts of creamy, cold gelato and steamy espresso.
We love a little texture in our tea! The tapioca pearls make this spicy, sweet treat one of a kind.
The refreshment of iced green tea meets sweet, juicy watermelon flavor. A sweet, tart way to cool down in the heat!
Brew up a tangy, fruity glass of this fresh, warm weather cocktail.


← Ok il Caffè se è un piacere, ma non per sostituire il sonno!
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Authors: Wu, Haixia; Hyde, Kevin D.
Authors: Largent, David L.; Bergemann, Sarah E.; Abell-Davis, Sandra E.; Kluting, Kerri L.; Cummings, Griffin A.
Authors: Moreno, G.; Khalid, A.N.; Alvarado, P.; Kreisel, H.
Authors: Davoodian, Naveed; Halling, Roy E.
Authors: Ishaq, A.; Afshan, N.S.; Khalid, A.N.
Authors: Castañeda-Ruíz, Rafael F.; Heredia, Gabriela; Arias, Rosa M.
Phylogenetic divergence of three morphologically similar truffles: Tuber sphaerosporum, T. sinosphaerosporum, and T. pseudosphaerosporum sp. nov.