The Automatic Earth

Jack Delano Model airplanes decorate the ceiling of the train concourses at Union Station in Chicago, Illinois 1943 As America settles in for a three month long across-all-media screening of Dumb and Dumber, Europeans are setting up for a valiant effort to put up an even more mind-boggling spectacle. Competition is healthy, right? The world of finance hangs on ex-Goldman Sachs vice chairman and managing director Mario Draghi's lips almost as much as it sucks up to Ben Bernanke's Jackson

Image: Ilargi, The Automatic Earth Dear Angela, You know, it's sort of funny that just as I started to write this letter, I read about a plan (yours?) for a possible temporary Greece exit from the eurozone. Germany May Ask Greece To Exit The Euro 'Temporarily' Market News International is reporting that the German Finance Ministry may ask Greece to exit the euro "temporarily" while it straightens out its finances. From MNI, citing unnamed "senior eurozone officials" as sources: The

The China bulls of the last few years are finding it more and more difficult to explain away the evidence for a “hard landing” in the near future. Their only remaining argument is that the country will avoid this dismal fate if a dozen different things go right in the global economy – i.e., the Eurozone crisis doesn’t get worse, financial markets don’t become any less stable, the Chinese real estate bubble doesn’t implode, direct foreign investment doesn’t contract any

You know, we can write and read and research all we want, and till we're deep dark blue in the face, about Angela Merkel and Tim Geithner and Mario Draghi or Monti and Greek heroes Samaras and Venizelos, about what they say and do from day to day, driven by political pressure and mundane issues such as bond yields. And we will continue to write, read and research these things; that's not going to stop. But as soon as any

1909. "Mme. Diss-DeBarr," a.k.a. "the noted and notorious Ann O'Delia Dis Debar, of many aliases, a number of husbands and several prison terms," according to a 1909 article in the New York Times. The headline calls her an "ex-priestess of fake spiritualism." 8×10 glass negative, George Grantham Bain. The word "counterfeit" is defined as "an imitation intended to be passed off fraudulently or deceptively as genuine". Some counterfeits are bad and easily detectable, while others are very convincing. I would