The facepalm is strong...

...concerning a recent interview statement given by "Maestro" Greenspan.

"I've made lots of mistakes in the 18½ years that I was at the Fed. I don't think that that (read: lowering rates) one was one and I don't think that we were as an organization significantly involved in what was happening in the global markets."

A new age...

...of corporate espionage.  Of course in this case, public and private interests are a bit comingled.

Full article here.

In 2010, as Westinghouse and China began talking about building more plants, the hackers intercepted internal discussions between Westinghouse's former CEO Aris Candris and about a half dozen other top-level decision makers, the indictment claimed. The correspondence dealt with strategy for negotiating a deal and concerns that the Chinese might one day become a competitor to Westinghouse in nuclear technology.

Over the next two years, the indictment said, Westinghouse had at least 1.4 gigabytes of information stolen from its computers. That's roughly equivalent to 700,000 pages of e-mails and attachments.

More on collateral shortages...

The engine is stalling...but what will the reversal bring?

Excluding those held by the Federal Reserve, Treasuries due in 10 years or more account for just 5 percent of the $12.1 trillion market for U.S. debt. New rules designed to plug shortfalls at pension funds may now triple their purchases of longer-dated Treasuries, creating $300 billion in extra demand over the next two years that would equal almost half the $642 billion outstanding, Bank ofNova Scotia estimates.

Fewer available bonds, along with a lack of inflation and increased foreign buying, help to explain why longer-term Treasuries are surging this year even as the Fed pares its own bond purchases. The demand has pushed down yields on 30-year government debt by more than a half-percentage point to 3.37 percent, the most since 2000, data compiled by Bloomberg show.