Items of Note

The battle is joined. The Awl covers.

"On “Alligator,” the tension and turmoil of feeling past your peak when your youth’s still unfulfilled collect into biting little everyday paranoias and aggressions lurking just below the surface. Matt and his wife, Carin, not yet married then, were breaking up and getting back together frequently, “trying to resist the person you might end up with,” as Carin puts it. Fragments of their life were feathered into lyrics. One night, Carin accused Matt of being in search of an “out–of-this-world person who’s a pure fantasy,” by telling him he was going through life “looking for astronauts,” which soon became the title of a song."

"Alternatively, a stable government debt ratio of around 60% of GDP under the given interest rate and growth rate assumptions would be achieved by a primary fiscal adjustment of close to 10% of GDP combined with a close-to-50% debt reduction in end-2010. In other words, a 50% debt reduction only would buy less than 4pp of GDP of adjustment pain; or put differently again: any reasonable haircut reduction will require a very sizable fiscal adjustment under any circumstances, as the breathing space of an incomplete write-down could be very short lived."

Tourre’s emails described the products he created as “a ‘thing’, which has no purpose, which is absolutely conceptual and highly theoretical and which nobody knows how to price”.

General Motors is thriving!

"GM got a total of $52 billion from the U.S. government and $9.5 billion from the Canadian and Ontario governments as it went through bankruptcy protection last year. At first the entire amount of U.S. aid was considered a loan as the government tried to keep GM from going under and pulling the fragile economy into a depression.

But during bankruptcy, the U.S. government reduced the loan portion to $6.7 billion and converted the rest to company stock, while the Canadian governments held $1.4 billion in loans. Those loans were repaid Tuesday, five years ahead of schedule.

The automaker hopes to repay the remaining $45.3 billion to the U.S. government and $8.1 billion to Canada via a public stock offering, perhaps later this year. The U.S. government now owns 61 percent of the company and Canada owns roughly 12 percent."

Greeks are fucking assholes.