Two years after receiving its first deposits, a “doomsday” seed vault on an Arctic island has amassed half a million seed samples, making it the world’s most diverse repository of crop seeds, the vault’s operators announced Thursday.
Cary Fowler — who heads the trust that oversees the seed collection, which is 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) from [...]

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China’s hidden borrowing may push government debt to 96 percent of gross domestic product next year, increasing the risk of a financial crisis in the world’s third-biggest economy, Professor Victor Shih said.
“The worst case is a pretty large-scale financial crisis around 2012,” said Shih, a political economist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who spent [...]

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The euro is being “severely tested” and “may not survive” the Greek deficit crisis, billionaire investor George Soros said.
The European currency’s construction is “flawed” because there is “a common central bank, but you don’t have a common treasury,” Soros said on CNN’s “Fareed Zacharia GPS” program.
Euro ‘May Not Survive’ Deficit Crisis, Soros Says (Update1) – [...]

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I view Chinese comments like this to mean that we should get more hostile with China. And why exactly are we trading with a hostile country like China with nuclear weapons pointed at us?
“The responsibility for the current difficulties in China- U.S. relations goes completely to the U.S. side,” Foreign Ministry Spokesman Qin Gang [...]

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Saudi Arabia would obtain nuclear weapons within a “few months” as part of a broader Middle East arms race if Iran develops nuclear weapons, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said today.
A nuclear-armed Iran would result in “an intensive nuclear wave in the Middle East,” Barak said on CNN’s “Amanpour” program. Turkey and Egypt would probably [...]

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Modern quantitative finance is based on flawed assumptions:
1. People are rational.
2. Markets are in equilibrium
3. Trading does not influence the price of something.
4. The normal distribution is appropriate to use in finance.
All of the above assumptions are incorrect. That means quantitative finance models work most of the time, but blow up regularly.
Scott Patterson’s The Quants [...]

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Much of China’s stimulus money was spent on skyscrapers, spurring fears of a real estate bust
Much of the $1.4 trillion in loans made by Chinese banks last year—with considerable encouragement from officials aiming to boost growth—was spent on skyscrapers and other commercial property. Now empty buildings are sprouting across the mainland. Beijing had an office [...]

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China is still bound for an asset bubble after policy markers ordered banks last week to set aside more deposits as reserves for a second time in a month, CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets said.
China Still Set for Asset Bubble After Reserve Rise, CLSA Says – BusinessWeek

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Real estate, stocks, credit. China sure has its share of bubbles. Oddly, little attention is paid to the biggest one of all.
China’s currency reserves grew by more than the gross domestic product of Norway in 2009. Its $2.4 trillion of reserves is a bubble all its own, one growing before our eyes with nary a [...]

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The joint Air Force-Navy plan would combine the strengths of each service to conduct long-range strikes that could utilize a new generation of bombers, a new cruise missile and drones launched from aircraft carriers. The Navy also is increasing funding to develop an unmanned underwater vehicle, according to the report.
China, Iran Prompt U.S. Air-Sea Battle [...]

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