The Consortium News has the Gareth Porter story How Misread Cables Fed Iran Hysteria.

When Western intelligence agencies began in the early 1990s to intercept telexes from an Iranian university to foreign high technology firms, intelligence analysts believed they saw the first signs of military involvement in Iran’s nuclear program. That suspicion led to U.S. intelligence assessments over the next decade that Iran was secretly pursuing nuclear weapons.
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Iran produced voluminous evidence to support its explanation for each of the procurement efforts the IAEA had questioned. It showed that the high vacuum equipment had been requested by the Physics Department for student experiments in evaporation and vacuum techniques for producing thin coatings by providing instruction manuals on the experiments, internal communications and even the shipping documents on the procurement.

For those who are so sure that we shouldn’t negotiate with Iran because they are also so sure that Iran is building a bomb and lying about, I bring up the quote from Mark Twain again.

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

I am not claiming that I know for sure that Iran is telling the truth.  I am just doubting that people can know for sure that they aren’t.

If we start bombing people over what we think we know, we could find out that we were wrong all along, as we have found out many times before.

While you are at it, you might want to read the other Consoritum News article Where the Real ‘Iran Threat’ Lies by Lawrence Davidson

The investigative reporter and author Gareth Porter has recently published a book entitled  A Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare. An impressively written and researched work, it is also frightening in its implications. For if Porter’s allegations are accurate, it is not Iran that the American people should fear – it is their own politicians, bureaucrats and an “ally” named Israel.

According to Porter, there has never been a serious nuclear weapons program undertaken by Iran. By the way, this is a conclusion that is supported by the heads of all American intelligence agencies reporting annually to Congress. Unfortunately, this repeated determination has been scorned by the politicians and poorly reported by the media.

This still involves the reporting by Gareth Porter, so I am not claiming that there are two sources for this information (well, other than our own intelligence agencies).

The Real News Network has the interview Tapering of Quantitative Easing Is Throwing Emerging Markets into Chaos – And Big Banks Are Getting Richer.

The interview was going along very well, until Jan D’Arista said the following:

But as in every other case, the Asian crisis, etc., and the one that we’re facing today, there’s a tipping point, the tipping point when the exchange rate becomes overvalued. And that means that while imports are cheaper, exports become more expensive, and you develop a current account deficit, meaning the difference between what the country imports and exports widens and it’s exporting less. And, therefore, to make up that difference it has to start using its foreign exchange reserves.

When Jane D’Arista said “And, therefore, to make up that difference it has to start using its foreign exchange reserves” about the trade deficit of the emerging countries, she left an awful lot of the explanation to our imaginations. The main reason why this situation might cause a loss of foreign reserves would be that the countries had pegged the value of their currencies to some external factor like another country’s currency. If the emerging market economies had floating rates, then this would not be so big a problem.

But at the beginning of the paragraph she said “But as in every other case, the Asian crisis, etc., and the one that we’re facing today, there’s a tipping point, the tipping point when the exchange rate becomes overvalued.” That implies that these countries had floating exchange rates. That is also why they had a trade deficit; because their currencies became overvalued.

So why exactly do these countries have to make up for the loss of foreign reserves? Did they start borrowing denominated in foreign currencies? This would be a very dangerous thing to do, but countries or citizens of those countries do seem to do this.

Perhaps the inflow of foreign capital buying up local debt instruments led to an excess of foreign reserves which the countries hated to see diminish when it started flowing out so they thought they had to replace the diminishing foreign reserves?

In any case, it would be nice if the interviewer had caught this, and had asked her to explain.

Maybe one of you astute readers can figure out what she was trying to say.

FT Magazine has the story Welcome to Bakersfield, California: How an ordinary town became one of the home foreclosure capitals of America.

It is difficult to find an excerpt that gives you the flavor of the article, but here is my attempt.

Crisp & Cole began paying straw buyers up to $20,000 each so they would pose as home buyers on loan application documents, federal prosecutors say. The properties were then flipped from “owner” to “owner”, generating fees for the firm and profits for people with pieces of the deals. “What we found is that local people with knowledge of how the system worked were taking advantage,” says Kirk Sherriff, an assistant US attorney in Fresno, California, where the case is being prosecuted.

I hope that those who still think that Barney Frank, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and home ownership promoting politicians created the great financial collapse will read articles like this.  They will see examples of how the crisis was really started.  This is not to say that the people mentioned in the first sentence of this paragraph might have been more aware of what was going on and should have tried harder to stop it.  Of course, with deregulation fever affecting almost everyone, they might have known that they couldn’t get any enforcement actions to stop these frauds.