SAR #12300

When the president kills you with a drone strike, it proves you were a terrorist.

Austerity Works: One out of four Spaniards is unemployed, and in eight regions the unemployment rates are higher – much higher. Nearly 2 million homes have no one employed and loan delinquencies are surging. Austerity in action.

The Gold Standard: Hand-marked, hand-counted paper ballots, publicly counted at every polling place, with the physical ballots securely and publicly warehoused until the end of the longest term on the ballet. Then, and only then, can the public be sure the election was not stolen. Wonder why anyone would want it any other way...

Speaking Softly: Rather quietly, this week BP capped and plugged the latest leak from the Macondo (Deepwater Horizon) site. The company was quietly modest about the accomplishment.

Place Your Bets: US GDP for 3Q2012 increased at an annualized 2.0% rate, mostly due to a surge in government defense spending – which accounted for 0.64% of the total. This is the first guesstimate, it will be revised (downward) two more times before it reaches reality. 2Q2012 reached 1.7% at and ended up at 1.25%. Without the guns and after revisions, figure another 1.3% or less.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: On windy days the power grids in central and eastern Europe disconnect from Germany's network because the country's windmills generate too much power, and that has to go somewhere, threatening to collapse grids where-ever it surges. At times, the utilities pay consumers to take the power and get rid of it. Calm days present the opposite problem; an effective storage and retrieval system has yet to appear.

A Little Off The Top: UBS is cutting 10,000 from its payroll – one out of six of its current staff. This is after cutting 3,500 last year.

Along Came Mary: A report from Capital Economics says that Canada may be catching the sub-prime disease and that Canadian house prices will 'correct' by 25%, as “falling sales and rising new listings have already begun to cast doubt over the rose-colored consensus outlook."

Quoted: “We have made good progress on strengthening fiscal discipline with the fiscal pact but we are of the opinion, and I speak for the whole German government on this, that we could go a step further by giving Europe 'real rights of intervention in national budgets'. Frau Merkel, who went on to praise democracy. Not.

Porn O'Graph: Troika budgetary overseer.

The Parting Shot:

Undecided.