As it is voting day, Nothing about NZ… but while we vote and talk about the Elton John concert last night, the world continues.

The EU has decided to limit the losses to bondholders. As a supporter of capitalism, I agree with Mish:

That’s right folks, we are going to bail out the banks and no one has to take any losses (except taxpayers of course who will “share” 100% of the risk). Otherwise there will be a “loss of confidence” in the same banks that plowed into Greek, Spanish, Irish, and Portuguese debt because supposedly there would be no losses on sovereign debt.

Now they have taken a no-loss idea that has already blown sky high, and want to expand it to the next level: “no losses on bailouts”.

This plan is so stupid only government bureaucrats could dream it up.

The only true way to restore confidence is to punish banks that make stupid lending decisions

While I am being pessimistic (and on the economy, I am: if you take risk away and make money cheap you will get bubbles, they will burst, and no politician can stop the consequences of that) then Zero Hedge has a pile of nasty facts.

- In Eurozone news, Banco de Valencia is nationalized and signals the first of many more to come in Europe. Belgium, which has not had a government for 18 months now, demands a renegotiation of the Dexia bailout. They demand that more of the weight be put on the French government. Their debt-rating is cut by S&P. A downgrade of France’s credit rating and a scrapping of the current form of the EFSF is practically inevitable. Ireland demands relief in the form of a reward for their sacrifice in bailing out investors in 2008. Greece scraps the orignal bailout with the EU and is now demanding larger haircuts. The core of Europe has officially been infected as Germany experiences a failed Bund auction. The Bundesbank had to step in and buy 65% of the planned sale due to little demand (is this monetization?). Belgian/German spreads hit new highs; Italy 10-yr yields are soundly above the 7% mark; Austria is finding itself on the edge of a banking crisis (which it will obviously bailout, thus resulting in one less AAA country); and Hungary turns hungry. European credit markets are paralyzed. The bulls plead for the ECB to print, however, If they did, then countries would need to become apostates of their sovereignties, that’s unlikely to happen. Preliminary Eurozone PMIs for manufacturing and services sectors continue to report contraction. Germany remains opposed to Eurobonds and ECB printing.

- The deficit committee finally announces the obvious and sets the stage for a feisty but futile attempt to expand the payroll tax and unemployment benefits. The fiscal contraction that would result would be the cherry on top for the recession in 2012. Furthermore another stress-test is in the cards for the banking sector. The scenarios they are using are downright ugly. This is another warning to the sound investor who “reads between the lines”.

- On the U.S. economic front, Q3 GDP is revised downward by 20% to 2.0% from 2.5%. An important leading indicator is pointing to further slowing in the coming months. Business Investment (Core Capital Goods: excluding transportation & defense) takes a sizable hit in the October Durable Good Orders report. It declined 1.8%, while last month’s reading of +2.4% is revised down to a gain of just 0.9%. From an earnings standpoint, guidance for the 4th quarter and 2012 disappoints.

- On the global economy front, China’s HSBC preliminary manufacturing gauge sinks to the lowest in 32 to months on the back of a renewed contraction in new orders. Copper is rolling over as well and is poised to take out its lows next week. These “leading-indicators” of the global recovery are flashing red. Meanwhile, Geopolitical tensions are heating up with a possible showdown in Syrian waters between the U.S. and Russia. Meanwhile, Iran/Israel’s furtive crisis keeps bubbling.

- Treasury yields are raising red flags as well. Yields are back near early October lows and dictate that equity markets have more to fall as they catch up with the asset class that has been right-on in diagnosing the Eurozone crisis. Capital floods U.S. Treasury auctions for the week, indicating a raised sense of fear. Taken together with copper prices and other poorly performing in Asian indices, it’s becoming clear that the global economy has stalled.

Now, it could all turn out OK. The sun will shine tomorrow, we will go to Church, and leave our politicians inhaling four or five espressos (it substitutes for nicotine in negotiations) while they try to put a government together. But there are signs that the global economy is sick…

But there are other forces at work. And they relate to the ways we run our families. Women have this problem. Their peak fertility years are from the late teens to mid 30s. These are precisely the years that they are investing in training for a career — which they will not do full time until their children are at school. (I am not saying these are bad choices. But the way we have things set up has consequences). Dalrock has a post up on this…

. What he is describing aren’t women who work primarily to support themselves and their family, but women who use their education and career as a way to check off the box to prove their feminist credentials before settling down into an entirely traditional role. To answer his specific questions, I think we can manage this issue without formally rolling back feminism 1.0. As I see it, to the extent that this is a problem it will generally tend to resolve itself. As I said in 40 years of ultimatums, women are and should be free to pile on whatever demands regarding marriage which they see fit. If this means demanding that their husband to be wait until they have tired of playing career woman and even assuming a significant accompanying student loan debt and expensive tastes, so be it. But this must be accompanied by the freedom for men to decide whether marriage under these terms is something they want to enter into. The problem isn’t that women are making expensive demands in an effort to prove they are feminist before demanding a traditional role as wife and mother, the problem is the Social Conservatives who are standing by insisting that men marry women under these terms.

So far the much fretted marriage strike hasn’t yet materialized. However, I do think these women are taking a significant risk. To the extent that the whole “Peter Pan” meme is accurate, the current cohort of mid to late 20s women delaying marriage until their 30s have laid the groundwork for their own potential spinsterhood. Men in their age group aren’t getting as strong a signal that working hard to become a provider will result in first a LTR and later marriage. While there may be a growing number of successful men who aren’t willing to marry a woman who waited until her late 20s or early 30s to marry, I suspect the bigger issue is that a significant percentage of men haven’t felt the incentive to prepare themselves as a provider. Even worse, these women playing career pushed out men from their slots in school and the workplace. So the men they one day hope to marry both have less incentive to do the extra work and planning to become a provider and face additional obstacles to do so.

There is a strong meme in the men’s rights movement — don’t marry, for she will leave you (which expands into Don’t live with her because that will be seen as marriage and you will get legally raped by the family courts anyway. This leads to no motivation to succeed — because there is no point in being a provider. Young women are building their careers. Middle aged women are playing the field again after their marriage ends.

But there is hope. At least in Wales, where a man managed to build a hobbit style house for around 10 000 dollars. He clearly was not dealing with the permits from my city council. His new projects are here (the site is down at present).

On a more domestic front. the servers are now running opensuse — if you use the network install you can choose not to have gnome or kde but have games, movies etc. While I’m being geeky, Susan Kare, the artist who designed the mac icons, has a profile about her in PLoS.

Finally, there is an important article in PLOS medicine on recommendations for management of neuropsychiatric disorders. They are useful for setting up services in richer countries as well… as this is what a service should be expected to do… or do better.