Number 1 buys bankrupt Number 2, and Wall Street is pleased!
It will be very interesting to see, given the massive oversupply in the commercial real estate market, whether this was a good buy, or the first step towards good bye, by Simon, the nation’s biggest owner of retail property space.
Gorilla thinks: “The spoons may be found in the outlet mall at a deep discount!”
It’s a good day for Operation Moshtarak with the capture of the Taliban’s Number 2!
But the contradictory and underlying problems in Afghanistan are far harder and not susceptible to military solution.
There’s no effective central government.
There’s no alternative to drugs for economic development.
There’s no functioning Afghan army or police force to consolidate gains made by NATO in defeating the Taliban.
The Pakistanis, while more helpful now, are still not interested in getting either the Taliban or al-Qaeda out of their country; they too are playing the long game.
So, what’s in it for America? Pretty much nothing.
We’ll have to depend on Afghanistan and Pakistan, along with our very middling intelligence services, to keep the terrorist threat at bay.
This can and should be done, but it doesn’t require billions of dollars and thousands of needless deaths.
We need to start pissing away money on things that matter: health care reform, unemployment, and infrastructure.
Gorilla says: “Terrorism is a marginal problem, while America’s increasing ungovernability is a far more serious threat to national security!”
With Iran, that is, they don’t think sanctions or a military strike are very good ideas.
And they want to avoid a nuclear arms race in the region.
So, the ball’s back in Hillary’s court. There’s little support for sanctions, which haven’t had much impact on Iran. There’s even less support for a US or Israeli strike on Tehran’s nuclear facilities, assuming we even know where they all are.
What everyone other than Washington would get behind is a bilateral US-Iranian deal, followed by a wider regional agreement to limit nuclear proliferation.
The outlines are in place: a security guarantee and civilian nuclear power for Iran in exchange for IAEA inspections, no nuclear weapons and the resumption of US-Iranian diplomatic relations.
It’s difficult to understand what America’s national security goals are in the Middle East and Central Asia. Terrorism isn’t much more than a minor irritation. Oil is flowing and it’s in the interest of nearly all the bad actors to keep it flowing. Palestinian-Israeli peace is not achievable, but time and demographics will eventually force both sides to get serious.
Successive Administrations have gotten bogged down in fear and loathing. We won’t be staying in Afghanistan for decades, and that’s the only way the country will be peaceful. We can’t get into Pakistan as we would like, so we’ll have to keep trying to convince Islamabad to crack down on the nutters. Iraq may well return to civil war, but there’s not much we can do about it. We’re not serious about removing our dependence on fossil fuels, so we keep having to play policeman for the Seven Sisters in a very dangerous neighborhood.
Ten years have been wasted on a region that we would treat like Africa if the oil disappeared, and we haven’t learned a thing.
Gorilla thinks: “We’ll get grown ups when we start acting like grown ups!”
The Fed will stop buying mortgage backed securities soon, and so the guessing game begins as to how much mortgage interest rates will increase.
35, 50, 100, 200 basis points? No one can say, but it’s clear that there won’t be many buyers for whatever junk remains in the market.
Foreigners are being courted to buy, particularly sovereign wealth funds.
So far, there’s not been a stampede…
Gorilla says: “Don’t go throwing good money after bad: it works in dozens of languages!”
