Politics

Obama Signals New Tone in Relations With Islamic World

PARIS — In an interview with one of the Middle East’s major broadcasters, President Barack Obama struck a conciliatory tone toward the Islamic world, saying he wanted to persuade Muslims that “the Americans are not your enemy.” He also said “the moment is ripe” for negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians.
The interview with Al Arabiya, an Arabic-language news channel based in Dubai, signaled a shift — in style and manner at least — from the Bush administration, offering what he depicted as a new readiness to listen rather than dictate.
It was Mr. Obama’s first televised interview from the White House and the first with any foreign news outlet.
In a transcript published on Al Arabiya’s English language Web site, Mr. Obama said it is his job “to communicate to the Muslim world that the Americans are not your enemy.”
He added that “we sometimes make mistakes,” but said that America was not born as a colonial power and that he hoped for a restoration of “the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago.”
Mr. Obama spoke as his special Middle East envoy, George J. Mitchell, arrived in Egypt to begin an eight-day tour that will include stops in Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, France and Britain. In Egypt, Mr. Mitchell planned to meet President Hosni Mubarak.

In discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Mr. Obama told Al Arabiya that “the most important thing is for the United States to get engaged right away.” He said that he told Mr. Mitchell to “start by listening, because all too often the United States starts by dictating.”
“Ultimately, we cannot tell either the Israelis or the Palestinians what’s best for them. They’re going to have to make some decisions,” Mr. Obama said. “But I do believe that the moment is ripe for both sides to realize that the path that they are on is not going to result in prosperity and security for their people. And that, instead, it’s time to return to the negotiating table.”
Several hours after he spoke on Monday night, an explosion on the Israel-Gaza border killed an Israeli soldier and threatened new violence. The war in Gaza, which lasted three weeks, had stopped 10 days ago when both sides declared unilateral cease fires.
Mr. Obama said Israel “will not stop being a strong ally of the United States and I will continue to believe that Israel’s security is paramount. But I also believe that there are Israelis who recognize that it is important to achieve peace. They will be willing to make sacrifices if the time is appropriate and if there is serious partnership on the other side.”
He also said that although he would not put a time frame on it, he believed it was “possible for us to see a Palestinian state.” He described the state as one “that allows freedom of movement for its people, that allows for trade with other countries, that allows the creation of businesses and commerce so that people have a better life.”
But he also said the Israel-Palestine conflict should not be seen in isolation. “I do think it is impossible for us to think only in terms of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and not think in terms of what’s happening with Syria or Iran or Lebanon or Afghanistan and Pakistan,” Mr. Obama said.
He spoke at length about America’s future relationship with the Muslim world, saying his “job is to communicate to the American people that the Muslim world is filled with extraordinary people who simply want to live their lives and see their children live better lives.”
He drew a distinction between “extremist organizations” committed to violence and “people who may disagree with my administration and certain actions, or may have a particular viewpoint in terms of how their countries should develop.”
“We can have legitimate disagreements but still be respectful. I cannot respect terrorist organizations that would kill innocent civilians and we will hunt them down,” he said. “But to the broader Muslim world what we are going to be offering is a hand of friendship.”
He also said it was “important for us to be willing to talk to Iran, to express very clearly where our differences are, but where there are potential avenues for progress.”
“As I said during my inauguration speech, if countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us,” he said.
He was not asked whether he would continue the policy of former President George Bush in refusing to exclude military action in the dispute over Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/people/o/barack_obama/index.html

http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/people/o/barack_obama/index.html

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama

Sports

Dan Rooney, top, after the Steelers won the A.F.C. championship. At 76, he walks to work. Rooney, above left in 1966 with his father, Art, who founded the team.
Son of Art Rooney Sr., who secured a football franchise here in 1933 and founded the team that came to be called the Steelers, Dan grew up on the city’s blighted North Side, on a street that had already seen better days when his parents moved there in 1939. Now 76 and the Steelers’ chairman, he bought the house from his brothers after their father’s death and with his wife, Patricia, moved back into the neighborhood. Judging from the parking lot directly opposite and the Wendy’s on the corner, it seems safe to say that Rooney is the only millionaire living on what used to be known as Millionaire’s Row. His house — red brick, two stories, with a small front porch — is a third the size of your average suburban McMansion.
The oldest of five brothers, Dan was a talented quarterback for North Catholic High School. When the city’s all-Catholic team was announced at the end of the 1949 season, he was disappointed to find his name on the second team. The first-team slot had gone to Johnny Unitas.

Rooney walks to the Steelers’ home games, on a broken sidewalk, past an abandoned gas station and underneath the overpass for Route 65.
For away games, he travels with the players. “I wasn’t used to the owner flying on the plane,” said the backup quarterback Charlie Batch, recalling his surprise when he arrived to play for the Steelers after leaving the Detroit Lions. “And not only was he on the plane, he was sitting in the seat that doesn’t recline, in front of the bathroom.”
Rooney goes to Mass every morning, then commutes to the Steelers’ training facility on the South Side. He drives a Buick. In the office by 8:15, he checks in with the coaches, the players and his son Art II, the oldest of his nine children and the team’s president. He watches practice. He eats lunch in the cafeteria with the players and the staff.
“Some owners treat you like a rental property,” said defensive end Nick Eason, who has played in Denver and in Cleveland. “They have some maintenance guy to take care of it, they just come by to check on it, they look and they leave. Mr. Rooney comes around, he always sticks his hand out to you. ‘Hey, Nick’— and I’m like, he knows my name?”
Nose tackle Casey Hampton said: “A lot of owners, this is a hobby, but for him, this is his business, what he does. He’s here, shakes your hand, talks to you every day. Every day.”
With defensive end Aaron Smith, Rooney talks about flying. With Batch, a Pittsburgh native, the subject is high school football. “With me, it’s usually my hair,” the platinum-blond kicker Jeff Reed said. Rooney asks about their wives, their girlfriends, their children. He asks about punter Mitch Berger’s dad, who grew up a Steelers fan and came to opening day. Strong safety Troy Polamalu said he treats all the players as his equal, “from Hines Ward to a free-agent rookie.” Some players have his cellphone number. One day a couple of years ago, cornerback Ike Taylor was exhausted and, at Rooney’s invitation, took a two-hour nap on the couch in his office while Rooney worked elsewhere.
Ward, a receiver, said it was Rooney’s example that taught him the importance of a handshake. “I never used to shake hands. It was always just, ‘Hi, how ya doing?’ But something about him made me realize it’s all in the handshake, and every time I meet somebody now, I shake their hand.”
Embracing the Past
The night before home games, Dan and his wife turn out for the team dinners at a local hotel.
“Every team says it’s a family, but it’s bull a lot of the time,” Berger said. In a 13-year career in which he has worn 10 uniforms, he said there had been times when he played mostly for himself. His five months with the Steelers have been different. “I’m glad I got a chance to experience the way it should be before everything’s said and done.”


http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/sports/football/27rooney.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=rooney&st=cse

International News

Economy

The one who saw it coming(Economy)

Robert Shiller forecast the credit crisis for the right reasons, and has a novel idea for how to fix it.

Zachary KarabellNEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Jan 19, 2009
Robert Shiller is one of a handful of economists who have been feted for foreseeing the credit crisis, but he is the only one who predicted it for the right reasons. New York University's Nouriel Roubini, now known as "Dr. Doom," warned as early as 2006 of an imminent housing crash that would stop America's consumer-spending spree and lead to severe recession. Another über-bear, Morgan Stanley's Stephen Roach, had warned for years that the weakening dollar and the U.S. trade deficit with China were signs of a dangerously imbalanced global economy, doomed to fall. While both deserve credit for highlighting weaknesses that others ignored, neither had much to say about the real reasons for the current state of affairs, namely the vast amount of speculation that took place in the financial world linked to home mortgages.
Shiller did. Long before the extent of the subprime-mortgage crisis was evident, Shiller predicted that home prices would fall more rapidly than any models had predicted and that financial markets globally would be upended as a result. A specialist in the management of risk, he recognized that the real-estate bubble in the United States and parts of Europe represented, above all, a failure to manage risk. Now Shiller, a Yale professor who first made his name by accurately forecasting the stock-market collapse of 2001, is alone again, this time in his prescription for what needs to be done to stabilize credit markets in the future.
Most experts will tell you that Barack Obama needs to move quickly to contain the multitrillion-dollar market that turned low-quality mortgages into high-priced derivatives, the Wall Street innovation now widely blamed for the credit crisis. Shiller says the opposite. He argues that unless the central issue of risk is addressed, all the money that governments are pouring into financial rescues won't prevent another, potentially worse financial crisis down the line. In Shiller's view, derivatives "are a risk management tool much the same way insurance is. You pay a premium and if an event happens, you get a payment." His radical answer to our problems is that trying to leash financial innovation is hopeless, and that we should instead push forward into a brave new world where derivatives become as common as cash.

What separates Shiller from the majority of economists is his lack of faith in the "efficient-market hypothesis." That belief, which also guides the hand of most money managers, holds that the market will price assets according to their fundamental value and that those prices reflect all pertinent information. Shiller instead follows those, like John Kenneth Galbraith, who hold that market prices reflect "animal spirits" and popular passions, not perfect information.
That is why bubbles form, and that, for Shiller, is why financial innovation and government regulation are imperative. Pressure has been building in Washington to crack down on the complex derivatives that were structured on toxic mortgages, especially given the scale of global capital flows and trillions of transactions facilitated by computer models and electronic communications. Barney Frank, the powerful chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, has talked of finding ways to force financial companies to become more risk-averse. Similar measures are being considered in Europe and Asia.
The reaction is understandable. Each financial crisis results in a backlash against what caused it. The Securities and Exchange Commission was established in 1934 after the perceived excesses of markets in the 1920s, and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was passed in 2002 after the spectacular frauds of Enron and WorldCom. While he is in general support of more regulation, Shiller is convinced that the move to restrict derivatives and risk is misguided. In "The Subprime Solution," which he wrote just as the system was beginning to implode, he says that what is needed now is the next stage of financial innovation, not constriction. "Risk management is not the prevention of risky behavior," he told me. "It is carrying it through to its logical end in order to actually make it happen."
He also sees government intervention as vital to channel animal spirits and innovation. And where innovation is most needed now is in real estate and for the individual homeowner.
For all the trillions in derivative trading, there were very few traders. Almost all the subprime mortgages that were bundled and turned into derivatives were sold by a handful of Wall Street institutions, working with a small number of large institutional buyers, ranging from the Bank of China to HSBC to sovereign wealth funds. And as we now know, these derivatives were black boxes whose contents were known by neither the sellers nor the buyers. It was a huge but illiquid and opaque market.

The solution, says Shiller, is to use derivatives to allow home-owners—and, by extension, lenders—to insure themselves against falling prices. In the United States alone, housing is a $20 trillion market, in there are few ways to unlock profit when the market falls. But for stocks, because of the use of derivatives and options, money can be made when markets fall, which significantly increases the potential number of buyers and sellers at any given point. And more buyers and sellers—according not just to Shiller but to most finance scholars and traders—means that markets stay liquid and functional even under pressure.
Shiller has been exploring ways to create homeowner insurance against falling prices for nearly 20 years, and most of the papers he has written on the subject are written for other academics. Even his recent "Derivates Markets for Home Prices," a working paper published last March at Yale, is more jargon-filled than most laypeople could handle. While he has been both adept at sounding his warnings about bubbles and fortunate in his timing (he published a book, "Irrational Exuberance," on a bursting stock-market bubble just as the burst arrived in March 2000, and another on the subprime meltdown just as the meltdown went global), his call for derivatives as homeowner insurance have not received nearly as much attention.
It's not as if he hasn't tried to put his money where his mouth is. With business partners he created a home-price index, the Case-Shiller Index, which in turn can be traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. But that is limited mostly to gamblers and speculators who want to take bets on whether the index and underlying average home prices are going to go up or down. That is a far cry from someone buying a home in a suburb of Las Vegas or Phoenix being able to use some sort of financial instrument to hedge himself against home-price declines. As Shiller freely admits, it's a long way from where we are to where he thinks we ought to be.
Though he's acutely aware of how rarely academics get the real world right, Shiller's critics accuse him of much the same thing. Several traders I know dismissed Shiller's basic premise that more derivatives would make the housing market more liquid and more stable. They point out that futures contracts haven't made equity markets or commodity markets any less immune from massive moves up and down, and may have made such moves steeper, sharper and more rapid. They also scoff that Shiller, his experience with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange notwithstanding, has never had to manage a portfolio or a trader's book, and that a ballooning world of home-based derivatives wouldn't lead to homeowners' insurance: it would lead to a new playground for speculators. To the contrary, says Shiller, by enabling people to hedge against price declines, "derivatives could make it more difficult for bubbles to form."
Given that these ideas are untested in the real world, it's impossible to know who's right. But Shiller's radical ideas have a parallel in the thinking of the influential Peruvian-born economist Hernando de Soto. De Soto's pathbreaking observation was that the Western world began to outstrip the rest of the world when its legal and banking systems allowed people to turn land into cash. The contemporary system of using property as collateral for loans is the result, and it has given the Western world a huge advantage.
In many ways, Shiller is saying that too much potential wealth is still locked up in land and real estate. Because the owner of a property can sell that property easily only when conditions are good, the asset is risky and illiquid, and there is no way to offset those problems. Expanding the world of derivatives and giving homeowners the ability to "short" their own property could potentially make real estate as easy to buy, sell and hedge as stocks, bonds and some commodities are now. The effects, predicts Shiller, would be to unleash much more potential wealth while simultaneously decreasing the systemic risks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_crisis

http://www.moolanomy.com/866/what-caused-the-financial-crisis-of-2008/