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Diana Nyad makes a second attempt to swim from Cuba to Florida. This is her second attempt, the last one in 1978. After the 1978 attempt she settled into a career as a radio and television journalist. She is now 61. One day when she was driving in Los Angles the thought went through her mind about what she felt she wanted to do most- and this was to make the effort one more time to cross the distance between Cuba and Florida. In August 1978 her effort failed because of high winds and eight foot waves. After 49 hours and 41 minutes she found herself way offcourse closer to Brownsville, Texas, as the nearest land point. Here Sally Jenkins documents that first swim and the preparation for the second one, coming long after the first at the age of 61. Last summer Nyad swam for 24 hours on the coast of Florida as part of the training. Nyad will have the help of scientific advance in the three decades since 1978. Jennifer Clark, a satellite oceanographer based in Annapolis and her husband Dan, a meteorologist, are experts on Gulf stream water conditions. They will look for a three day period when waves are calmer and water conditions are warmer. Another advance is the use of kayakers with devices that create electric waves who will paddle alongside her to ward off sharks. And Nyad has Dr Broder, a clinical professor at the UCLA School of Medicine, to help monitor her physical condition and fluid loss. Still as Broder says, its 98% about Nyad's focussed effort. And about age, Nyad says, she forgets, as she trains by swimming from island to island in the Caribbean. For oceanographic expert Jennifer who is 65, there is something vicarious about Nyad's effort, as it is for the others who are helping with the expedition....

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A major shift in foreign investment may be taking place as the 2014 St. Petersburg International Economic Forum takes place in May 2014. Russian policy in Ukraine and tensions with the U.S. and Germany could lead to a shift in investment to other emerging market countries. China's tensions with Japan could lead to a similiar shift of Japanese foreign investment. At the same time India has elected a new government with an absolute majority and an overwhelming mandate from young people to accelerate development. The new government under the BJP party's Modi has a decade of experience attracting foreign investment in western India. Indonesia, Vietnam, Africa and other emerging market countries, could benefit from the shift in investment. Investment could also return to the home countries with lower labor costs in Southern Europe, lower labor/energy/transport costs in North America. For Russia the debate at the St Petersburg Economic Forum was about pursuing one of three policy paths with some riskier than others, or some combination also risky and uncertain- depending on state banks and oil windfall funds, increasing ties with Asian countries, continuing on the current path with lower foreign investment and continued capital outflows. The failure to use the time wisely to diversify the oil based economy which could have been better accomplished in an economy not overly dependent on crony capitalism and centralized economy, both current characteristics, will affect future progress. A key weakness for Russia compared to China is the centralization under one person Putin, more so in the third term. In China the two man team Keqiang and Jinping is part of a larger team chosen by consensus and negotiation and part of a rotational scheme. It has senior leaders who initiated the changes to a market driven economy in the nineties determined to see China on track....

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Under Governor Edmund Brown of California the state's public university system became a model for the whole nation in the 1960's- state spending on higher education doubled, statewide enrollment doubled, and seven new campuses were opened. California's community colleges, Californa State University and the University of California helped educate a new generation of Californians and powered its rise as a tech savy state. Increasing tution is putting higher education increasingly out of reach for struggling middle class families. Edmund Brown's son Jerry Brown, the current governor of California, tells Californians his mother studied basically "for free," and a whole generation that followed her paid modest tution fees. Jerry Brown is a trustee on the boards of Cal State and UC, attends meetings regularly, asks questions about the conditions at the university systems, and is determined to make the higher education system a part of his own legacy. He persuaded voters to approve a tax increase to support the higher education system. Half of the $250 million increase in funding for the university system is contingent on a tution freeze. Brown is also pushing for faculty to teach more undergraduate courses, increase the number of online courses, and reduce administrator pay. His proposals are meeting resistance from academia. Other issues facing the university system are the lack of resources to meet increasing enrollment, issues about reducing out of state enrollment to meet in state demand because out of state students pay higher tution fees, and the general resistance to teaching more undergraduate classes from faculty. To do this Brown is having to engage in a discussion about education and "quality" with academia. In a recent interview Brown pointed out that words like "quality" have different meanings, and are defined in academia to meet internal needs that often conflict with basic societal objectives....

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New York Appeals Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor, is President Obama's pick for the Supreme Court. Saying that Stomayor had arigorous intellect and a mastery of the law, President Obama went on to say at an announcement ceremony, that the judge's inspiring story was crucial in his decision. One that was made with deep reflection and careful deliberation. Obama quoted Justice Oliver Wendell Homes- "the life of the law has not beenlogic, it has been experience." And added his own words to those of Holmes- its vital that ajustice know "how the world works, and how ordinary people live." Sotomayor is from the Bronx part of New York City. Her parents immigrated from Puerto Rico and lived in a poor neighborhood. Her mother worked six day weeks to earn enough money to send her and a brother to Catholic school. From there she got into Princeton University, where she once felt like "a vistor landing in an alien country," but graduated summa cum laude. She went on to Yale law school, where she was editor of the Yale Law Journal, workwed for Robert Morgenthau in the district attorney's office in New York and later went into private practice. She was nominated by the first President Bush in 1991 to the federal appeals court on the advice of Senator Patrick Moynihan, and then by Bill Clinton to the appeals court in 1997. Judge Sotomayor takes pride in her ethnicity, gender and growing up in the poor part of the Bronx, and said in a2002 lecture- " I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who has'nt lived that life."...

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Instead of "ring fencing" bad loans one bank at a time, which is what is being done for Bank of America and Citigroup by the government , Bair, Bernanke and others favor something like the Resolution Trust Corporation, which would contain all bad assets of banks. Bair in an interview said she would like to see them priced at what they would get in today's market, meaning that the steep discounts issue would be faced squarely. What this will need is a lot of government money to restore confidence so that investors are willing to put their private money in the banks. And Senator Schumer says he is hearing the number of $1 trillion or more. This would let banks take these bad assets off their balance sheets, like they did with the Brady bonds for bad Latin American assets and with the Resolution Trust Corporation for bad assets in the savings and loan crisis. It was the original intent of TARP but two things happened, first the pricing of these assets was in limbo, with nobody willing to say how steep the discount should be. The auction process proposed was a vague and shaky one. Second, things deteriorated so quickly that it became urgent to instead do bank recapitalizations for $250 billion. Now the same issue has to be addressed directly by another administration with control of Congress, so that the big bucks funding of $1 trillion can be possible to do. Something like a separate institution that holds all bad bank assets. And the government taking on a big part of the burden, and with it some ownership of the banks that hopefully could payback some of this $ 1 trillion....

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Over 9% of Countrywide's loans are past due by 30 days and the situation will continue to deteriorate through 2008 and 2009. For those loans that had weak credit checks like the Fast and Easy program the about 36% are 30days overdue on payments. During one conference call Countrywide showed a chart that indicated that loans with poor documentation were 50% more likely to go delinquent. And Federal investigators and the FBI are looking into Countrywide's Fast and Easy mortage program which turned a blind eye to inflated income figures did not bother to check pay stubs and employment information and in other ways left the program open to abuse. this may be at the heart of how the housing subprime morgage crisis got started in the last couple of years between 2003 and 2008. And the packaging of these Fast and easy mortgages as Fannie recently announced that it will no longer buy any mortgages that are in the Fast and Easy program. Its significant that in recent years about one third of all Countrywide prime mortgages eligible for sale to Fannie Mae were Fast and Easy. Its significant also that Fannie Mae did not require verification of employment on all loans and relied on Countrywide to verify the employment on a sampling of loans and still continued to buy these Fast and Easy program mortgages right down to the present day in April 2008. So Fannie Mae and others who purchased these mortgages and investors in these mortgage securities did not due the basic due diligence or ask the simplest of questions. Amazing and also the kind of thing that is at the heart of the crisis and about which a lot will be coming out as federal investigators get to the bottom of this mess. ...

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The port of Long Beach which takes in 20% of the container shipping of the USA,, and is next only to Los Angeles port in container shipping, is becoming a story of two economies, the American and the Chinese. Thousands of cars from Toyota, Nissan and Mercedes are piling on port property turning it into one huge parking lot, as dealers across the country say they have no need for them, and piles of paper and metal baled together to be shipped back on these ships to China to be recycled into cardboard for export boxes are also piling up as China no longer needs them. The drivers who drive the trucks are also being laid offf and looking for new jobs, which are signs that a deeper economic downturn is underway and the the Detroit automakers GM and Ford CEO's who told the Banking committee that they are making their estimates for 2009 on the basis of a 13- 14 million vehicle sales year may be in for another rude shock. The figure for the last quarter may be running at 10 million, and if this continues into 2009 as its expected to do, even the producton of cars after accelerated plant closures may have nowhere to go in 2009. Which is why there are so many questions about what is going on in the auto industry and so much need for candour and frank discussion that was missing in the evasiveness apparent in the Senate hearings on November 18, 2008, as CEO and union president skirted around the issues and senators failed to ask many other questions like these on what is happening on demand as well as many others....

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Dudley Althaus looks at Mexico's 2018 election from a working class suburb of Mexico City called Valle de Chalco. Once a squatter settlement outside Mexico City this area was courted by the ruling PRI Institutional Revolutionary party for 3 decades with a social investing program building sewers, water and power lines. Today this area like others in the state of Mexico have turned to a new party Morena led by Manuel Lopez Obrador, to find a way out of the corruption, violence and failure of the rule of law under the PRI. Obrador left the socialist PRD party to form Morena in 2014 after running for president on the PRD ticket twice. The thirst for change is widespread inside Mexico giving Obrador a higher vote margin in state of Mexico than the 53% he won overall in Mexico. The PRI won just 16% of the vote. The old politics of piggy bank and patronage of the PRI is now discredited in Mexico.  The reason the old politics does not work anymore is the change in places like this from a shanty town of tin shacks to a bustling city of 400,000. This place has a technical school, a state university branch, rows of well kept cinder  block homes along with malls and wealthier homes. With basic necessities being met Mexican workers are turning to larger issues of national identity and how the next chapter can be written in the social contract. Obrador's nationalist message and criticism of the globalized economy struck workers and middle class as the right direction for Mexico. This came just as president Trump brought new views on immigration and NAFTA on the other side of the border challenging Mexico to find its own direction and independent position in the world economy, even building new links to other countries in Europe and Asia. ...

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This story in the WSJ on the Biden White House says it always operated with a tight inner circle. During the Covid pandemic it limited contacts for the president, yet after the pandemic eased this protective layer was not taken down says WSJ. As the president's age advanced the tight inner circe remained sheltering the president form the outside. The debate with DJT was one point that this became evident. Biden in his last year in office is 82 years- the oldest president. He had accomplished much in passing the series of bills that funded infrastructure, chips, science and protecting workers using his skills with Congress acquired over span of 50 years. Limiting Biden's one on one's and to certain parts of the day had an unexpected result. The head of Armed Services Democrat Rep. Adam Smith says this happened during the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan. He could not reach Biden so he could caution him about an overly optimistic view of the withdrawal. As the withdrawal led to loss of 13 armed forces men the disarray was a topic for Republicans. Only after the withdrawal issues Biden called Smith. In 4 years Smith says he had this one call with the president when he had spoken to Obama several times. Simtih's view is that Biden White House was "more insulated than most." Senator Manchin says he had less contact with Biden than his closest advisers.  This WSJ report also says the contacts of cabinet members with Biden were limited and tightly controlled. This report says Yellen at Treasury had few one one's with the president and dealt with adviers. Austin at Defense in the last 2 years during the Ukraine and Gaza crisis had only rare direct contact with Biden. During the campaign this story says close adviser Donilon kept access limited for polling experts to the president to the point where Senator Schumer and others felt Biden was falling behind but the president was not aware of this. ...

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What is the difference between South Korea and the U.S., Europe in the handling of coronavirus? It is tracking and testing.  President Trump and health adviser Dr. Fauci, see South Korea as the successful model to be followed in controlling the coronavirus. What has happened till now it is accepted with shortage of basic medical supplies and equipment, stress on hospital systems, are merely mitigation actions. South Korea was prepared for the coronavirus crisis because of the MERS and other epidemics, and failures resulting in corrective actions. Labs were centralized and better equipped for testing and tracking the infected. One of the key tools is testing. President Trump says the goal is for the U.S. to exceed and far surpass tests per capita in South Korea. Five million tests are planned by the end of April in the U.S. Where the U.S. falls short is in use of multipronged digital tracking using data from people's use of mobile phones, credit card usage, and use of apps designed to separate infected people from others. South Korea is a democracy with a population of 52 million people, about the size of France. People who were student activists in the democratization era in South Korea say the use of digital technology is a need today. We have to adapt in emergency situation they say. Ki Mo-ran, epidemiologist, and adviser to South Korean government says this is a key part lacking in the European and U.S. efforts to control coronavirus. She says in South Korea we know the patient's contacts, where he goes and stays, so we don't have to lock down everybody. Without digital tracking one cannot know which place is contaminated, which place is clean, so that there can be a lockdown of just that area and not the whole country, says Ki Mo-ran. She asks the question- is one person's privacy more important than the lives of a family or other people who are affected. Is it OK to lockdown every child in the country in a home as in Spain for over a month so that particular people's privacy is respected? These are serious questions for western society, are they exceptions or is democracy not just a western idea but equally cherished in Asian societies, people talk about Confucianism in China and the Asian culture forgetting that the biggest democracies are quite large and functioning well in India in addition to South Korea, Taiwan Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh and Japan, far larger in area and population than China. The French government has chosen the app TraceTogether as the least intrusive one adaptable to France for use there. The U.S. is having Google and Apple develop one of its own. India will be developing one of its own. The NYT raises the question will it be watered down so much in France or in the U.S. and UK to be less effective than the  dire need for an alternative to lockdowns? ...

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U.S. president Obama called Libya and the policy of not following up on helping establish a stable democratic government in Libya his biggest mistake. Kristof of the NYT says people looking back would say Syria and not establishing safe zones is Obama's biggest mistake. He describes the 470,000 deaths in Syria as a huge tragedy that could have been avoided to a large extent by setting up safe zones. In addition the UN estimates that millions of refugees on a scale similar to the partition of India in 1947 were created.There is bipartisan opinion on this. Kristof cites General Cartwright's opinion in a conversation he had with Cartwright that this should have been done. Others who agree are Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton's Secretary of State, who spoke at the Democratic Convention about how America helped change her life as a young refugee after Russia's invasion of Czechoslovakia following Prague Spring. Albright says force should be used carefully so as not to aggravate the situation but action taken where needed, something that was done successfully under Bill Clinton in the Bosnian conflict following Serbia's ethnic cleansing policy under Milosevic. Not only that, with the diplomacy of ambassador Holbrooke Clinton was able to negotiate the peace accords that hold till today- a huge achievement.  Kori Schake, director of defense strategy in the George W. Bush White House also agrees. This would have improved U.S. relations with Turkey as this was a key Turkish request. And it would have reduced the dimensions of the refugee crisis in Europe, which has hurt the European Union. The Brexit "No" vote many in Britain have attributed to ads showing refugees in endless numbers streaming across Europe's borders. Similar ads were used in Austria's elections. Kristof points out that Secretary of State Kerry's job of negotiating a peace is difficult in these conditions. Another issue raised by Kristof is the lack of Obama's leadership in helping the refugees in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, as he points out only 41% of this is funded. David Miliband former British Foreign Secretary, who heads the International Rescue Committee , says 200,000 Syrian kids are growing up in Lebanon without an education. George Washington counseled against getting involved in the wars on the European continent for a young nation, this advice was not followed in the Reagan and other administrations without showing the carefulness needed before action is taken. As Hillary Clinton has once pointed out the situation has resembled a pendulum swinging in the other direction under president Obama, and former Defense Secretary, Panetta, has expressed similar views. Hillary Clinton and Leon Panetta, Gates, Gen. Jones, served in the first term of the Obama administration, many of these mistakes were made in the second term by president Obama and his White House advisors Dennis McDonough, Valerie Jarrett who clearly lacked the deep foreign policy experience of Hillary Clinton, Leon Panetta (who served under Bill Clinton), and Gates who served under many presidents). ...

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Adam Bryant's interview with S.D. Shibulal, CEO of Infosys in April 2014.

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This exceptional article in the NYT by Emily Feng and Carlos Tejada shows the social changes taking place in China as more women and men decide to postpone marraige. For the first time there are more women than men in master's degrees programs in China. Women in China are now increasingly better educated and prefer to be independent, not dependent on their spouses as in the previous generation. A typical Chinese household has 3.1 people in 2015 compared to 4.43 people in 1982, according to the China National Bureau of Statistics. Fewer children, more people living alone, women living independently, and seniors living alone are some of the reasons.

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Only 78 years ago a 4 year old boy Eiji Kishida became in seconds a tangled burnt mass of flesh a mile away from where the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima. It is his second cousin once removed that is meeting leaders of the G7 countries in the same place. It will come as a surprise to know that this is Fumio Kishida the prime minister of Japan. Peter Landers and Chieko Tsuneoka tell this incredible story. Setsuko Thurlow 91 years now living in Canada is the aunt of the boy who saw him just before he died. She was at the army office in Hiroshima which itself was buried in rubble. Mr. Kishida represents Hiroshima in parliament and wrote a book in 2020 about the little 4 year old boy Eiji and the devastation that is seen in a town destroyed by a nuclear bomb. Lyrarc.com supports Mr. Kishida's ideas and vision. First Japan, then China and India have gone through the phase of resisting and overcoming colonial powers. During the phase the influence of Vedanta and Buddhism was eroded, but this does not have to be so, Communism will pass away now that it has done its job of securing for the Chinese people scientific advance and modernization. All three nations are united by the shared links of Vedanta and Buddhism which provide the guiding light for a world that not only turns away from nuclear weapons but away from the wars and conflicts of the period of colonial powers advances of the 18th, 19th and 20th century. To Mr. Kishida's "idealism" we say it is a reality that is within reach. And we remind the world of the Buddha's own words in the Paranibbana Sutta: "But when the blessed One came to the river Ganges, it was full to the brim, so that crows could drink from it. And some people went in search of a boat or a float, while others tied up a raft so they could get across. But the Blessed One as quickly as a strong man might stretch out his bent arm or draw in his outstretched arm vanished from this side of the Ganges, and came to stand on the yonder side." "And the Blessed One saw the people who desired to cross searching for a boat or a float while others were binding rafts. And the Blessed One seeing them thus gave this solemn utterance: They who have bridged the ocean vast.                                       Leaving the lowlands far behind       While others still their rafts bind,     Are saved by wisdom   unsurpassed."     ...

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What Buffett has that others don't. The ability to strike a deal on favorable term because of the size of the investments he makes, and the number and firepower of analysts combing through every detail of a transaction. And more importantly his investments in companies like airy Queen and see's candies and the folksyimage belie the fact that he gets an advantage through his large investments in the insurance business where he has access to the float in terms of the premiums he can use on investments. And he is good at running the insurance businesses he owns.

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Spotify is in the same position as Netflix in 2011 with its margins restricted by the fact that most of the major TV content was controlled by a few companies. It broke out of this with its own TV series "House of Cards." The gross margin at Spotify is at 24.5% but it will be hard to bring it up because Spotify is dealing with a few producers of music for licensing deals, the big 3 and Merlin controlling 87% of songs streamed.

Competitor Apple Music has the deep pockets to offer music subscriptions on plans that are minimal cost in the first year. This puts pressure on Spotify with monthly subscriptions dropping to $6.55 or 5.32 euros in 2017 from 6.84 euros in 2015. This pressure on pricing from Apple Music will only grow. Spotify meanwhile has not made profit since its founding.

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Not only have directors at companies like Washington Mutual, Countrywide Financial and Fannie Mae not taken responsibility for the crisis. They have simply moved on to other boardrooms says Gretchen Morgenson of the NYT. These direcotrs did little when these companies were leveraged and made dubious loans or risky investments. Says Paul Hodgson of the Corporate Library, "these directors have avoided the corporate limelight as far as blame is concerned." Companies like Sunoco, the oil company, Paccar, a truck manufacturer, and Tetra Tech each have directors from these failed companies. Thomas Gerrity, a professor of managemet at Wharton is one of the outside directors at Fannie Mae who is now at Sunoco. Robert Parry, a former president of the Federal reserve bank of San Francisco, was adirector at Countrywide from 2004 to 2008. Parry is on the board at Paccar. Says Frederick Rowe, president of Invesotrs for Director Accountability, a nonprofit shareholder advocacy group, the board member gets $475,000 a year, he plays golf with the CEO, he is apersonal friend, goes to nice places for board meetings, and he is just not going to one word that would jeopardize his position on the board. In the case of GM the board held together in one voice right up to the bankruptcy with a director who was a former CEO of Eastman Kodak and the lead person on the board, insisting that management had done everything right, all the way up to the end. These directors had to be fired once the government took an ownership interest in GM, and before this they survived just about everything, including tens of thousands of jobs lost in Michigan, and the devastation of communities and people around the state. Gretchen points out that the director dysfunction is because its almost impossible to have adirector fired for sleepwalking through the job or simply rubberstamping the maagement's decisions. Shareholders have to launch an expensive proxy fight to oust a director. Currently proposed changes by the SEC to allow those who have at least a stake of 1% in a big company to put up their own nomiees are not effective steps say shareholder advocates. John Gillespie, co-author of "Money for Nothing," a forthcoming book on board failures with David Zweig, says the problem lies in the culture of the boards which determines how directors behave. Solutions he suggests are instituting term limits for directors and separating the positions of board chairman and chief executive....

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Lessons from the Mexican financial crisis of 1994-95 with the collapse of the Mexican peso, and a massive government bank bailout and Mexico's biggest slump since the Great Depression. Guillermo Ortiz, now central bank governor, was finance minister at the time. He discussed things with Fed Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, about the Mexican experience which could be seen as the first financial crisis of the global economy. What lessons can be learned? Ortiz says there comes a moment when something happens that leads to a general loss of confidence. Once this happens things can deteriorate fast. This happened when Mexico could not successfully manage the devaluing of the peso. For the USA this might have happened with the collapse of Lehman, which may have triggered a sequence of events leading to a general loss of confidence and banks fear of lending to each other and credit markets getting frozen. At that point Ortiz says its better to do too much than to do too little, as it takes a lot to restore confidence. "And don't be ruled by ideology, stay flexible and act decisively. Help those with mortgages they can't pay. Take stakes in troubled banks. Don't expect to turn a profit on government investment." How do you tackle mortgage workouts or modification. Vicente Corta who led Mexico's bank bailout program says "we tried fancy scemes that did not work. We ended up saying 'OK you pay half your mortgage, and we'll pick up the other half." Sounds similiar to what FDIC's Sheila Barr is doing on a small scale at IndyMac bank, basically " making mortgages affordable." And take stake of ownership in banks in exchange for injection of capital. Paul Krugman says the Bush administration earlier was reluctant to do this, thinking oh that is socialism, because they let themselves get into an ideological bind. Until Gordon Brown did just this in the UK with RBS and HBOS banks on Monday October 13, 2008. In that case because no on else came forward Britain took a majority stake. British finance Minister, Alistair Darling, stated that the British government was not in the business of running banks and that this was taking a necessary step to restore lending. The Mexican experince in this context is very instructive. It cost Mexico dearly in terms of political warfare about this, because once Banamex for example- to which the Mexican governmet gave money without any ownership stake- became healthy it was sold to Citigroup for $12 billion and the government got nothing. In Mexico Lopez Obrador and other politicians have created a running debate about this as totally unfair and it has been divisive for Mexican politics, making passing even basic legislation difficult. Ortiz now says take ownership stakes and if you don't forget about socialism you will have political fallout of a different kind when banks once healthy and profitable are on their own owing little to the government; just when the government falls short of financing the basic programs for the elderly, for children, for schools, for health care,and for collapsing bridges and roads that are falling apart, not to speak of funding shortfalls for Medicare and Social Security. So Guillermo Ortiz has some very useful advice for Ben Bernanke and the Fed and for Treasury and for the next President. Edmund Phelps of Columbia University was interviewed on Bloomberg today, October 13. He is a recent winner of the Nobel prize in Economics. He also believes capital injection into the banks- like other economist have suggested -is the key to getting the banks to lend. He thinks the auction process and buying up toxic assets is way too complicated and would take way too much time. He thinks keeping homeowners in their homes and reducing foreclosures is critical and thinks Martin Feldstein has some good ideas on this. See the links to Martin Feldstein. What if things still deteriorate? The government may have to nationalize or takeover some of the banks, he says. Gordon Brown has already taken over RBS and HBOS. What are some of the ways to improve things. One is that credit ratings firms he says have become almost oracular. Do they know what can happen in the future he asks. We have to rethink what it means to give a rating he says. And the U.S. financial institutions have to go back to doing what they should be doing in the first place, which is to finance investments in companies and business, and not homes and residential construction. ...

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People who worked with Romney in the Mormon church describe the experience of Romney who started as an "iron rodder" walking the straight path, and gradually learning of other people's experiences that led to learning and growth and showing a new openness. In contrast to his "47%" remark about people dependent on the government, here he is seen telling another church member Barlow, that what bothers him most and what he has thought a lot about is how to genuinely help the poor in his church. Over the years he learned to compromise with Mormon feminists who sought larger roles in the church and was able to make the progress from being less flexible to being open to other ideas and perceptions. In other situations he allowed unorthodox progressives in the Mormon church to play a part in the organization and teach. The outreach efforts Romney participated in actively included efforts in the inner city and working with immigrants from Haiti, some of whom were illegal immigrants. This is a detailed well researched account from talking to many people active in the church organization and in the church community by Jason Horowitz of the Washington Post. It is one of the rare glimpses of the life of Mitt Romney inside the church. Because of the public perception of Mormonism there is a distance kept with accounts of life in the church, and Romney has shown the same reticence to talk about the church. Seen as a church it is is like other churches, Catholic or Protestant, with the same challenges that face all churches- keeping up the size of the congregation, the poor, immigrants, church organization, raising contributions, getting people to donate hours of work to the church activity. It is one of the ironies of the 2012 presidential campaign that Romney as a member of a Mormon church in a predominantly Catholic and Protestant world has remained reticent about his experiences and how it shaped him. And also remained reticent -till the last months of the campaign with the demands for authenticity growing strident- about how the experiences as governor of the liberal state of Massachusetts had shaped him, this time as the number of Republican politicians in sharply liberal states were a distinct minority in the Republican party. To voters this meant not knowing who he was beyond Bain Capital, the perceptions of which doggedly pursued Romney till the reticence became unbearable in the final weeks of the campaign....