(This article was published in the Century City News on April 17, 2012)
By: Kathy Bazoian Phelps and Hon. Steven Rhodes
Now Available at www.lexisnexis.com/ponzibook
Electronic versions also available
www.theponzibook.com
“The Ponzi Book is an invaluable resource for lawyers and judges enmeshed in the thicket of Ponzi scheme litigation. Clearly written and accessible, the book provides key insights into Ponzi cases and how they differ from ordinary bankruptcy litigation.”
Kenneth N. Klee
Klee, Tuchin, Bogdanoff & Stern LLP
“The Ponzi Book is one stop shopping for the facts needed to understand the complex fall-out from a collapsed Ponzi scheme as well as the legal strategies that exist and are required to unravel it.”
Irving H. Picard
Trustee of Bernard L. Madoff
Investment Securities, LLC
Sign up for The Ponzi Blog at www.theponzibook.blogspot.com
“There’s little doubt that Charles Ponzi would be proud of how his infamous brainchild has grown and developed over the years, becoming more complex in execution and breadth. Indeed, the perpetuators of his schemes have grown ever more sophisticated in their efforts, making Mr. Ponzi’s modest beginning look almost quaint in retrospect. With the multi-billion dollar Ponzi schemes that have become unearthed since the capital market meltdown of mid-2008, the legal and financial complexities in their unwinding have become a specialty unto themselves in the law.
“Fortunately for the professional faced with the daunting task of unwinding (or defending) the Ponzi scheme, help has finally arrived! The Ponzi Book: A Legal Resource For Unraveling Ponzi Schemes by Kathy Bazoian Phelps, Esq. and Judge Steven Rhodes is a unique, and the definitive, resource in this area. The book is well organized, exhaustively researched, and covers areas well beyond the obvious in such matters, such as privilege issues, litigating against foreign nationals and obtaining discovery from abroad (as we now know, fraud knows no national boundaries), and the tax issues that come with such schemes. It is in all respects the ‘go to source’ in these matters, and my law firm will have copies in all offices where we have bankruptcy professionals. Frankly, I wish I had written it!”
Thomas J. Salerno
Partner, Co-Chair International Insolvency Practice Group,
Squire Sanders
Showing posts with label CENTURY CITY. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CENTURY CITY. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 8, 2014
Century City Real Estate Report
(This article originally appeared in the May 1, 2012 edition of the Century City News)
New Projects Planned For Century City Could Impact You
By Bess Hochman
With the resurgence of real estate development, active members of our community are monitoring projects in Century City that are in various stages of development. There has been particular concern about how these projects could negatively impact our infrastructure including our streets and flow of traffic.
Chicago based developer and Landlord JMB has scrapped its plans to build luxury residential high rise units for a high rise office tower instead. It plans to take advantage of the high rents that Century City commands along with vacancy rate stabilization across the office sector.
JMB had received approvals earlier to build 2 high rise towers and one 12 story loft condo building at Constellation and Avenue of the Stars, formerly the site of City National Bank and the Constellation Club. Now JMB is planning a 37 story office tower called “Century City Center.” Given its scale and intensive commercial use, the new project raises significant traffic impact issues.
There is still uncertainty and controversy over the proposed Constellation Boulevard site of the subway line under development. This location for the subway stop in the heart of Century City
is just steps away from the JMB project and from the Westfield Shopping Mall.
There has been a contentious dispute between those who support the Century City subway stop site and the Beverly Hills Unified School District because the location of the proposed Constellation site requires tunneling under the Beverly Hills High School. The school district would prefer the subway stop to be located at Santa Monica Blvd.
Both JMB Realty and Westfield Corporation own real estate properties in Century City which would benefit greatly from the Constellation stop as the Westside extension of the new subway line. The school district is fighting this location raising safety and construction issues like the sinkhole created in Hollywood related to subway tunneling there. There is also the methane gas risk arising out of the oil fields under the high school.
Another developer changing course is the owner of the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel, a landmark site. He has backed down from his original proposal to demolish the Hotel and is instead planning a high rise development next to it.
A third project located at the eastern border of Century City where it adjoins Beverly Hills is progressing. Plans are being finalized with the City for construction of about a 39 story residential 1, 2 and 3 bedroom condo project. The units will range from 1600 to 2000 square feet and start at an average of 1.5 Million Dollars.
To find Luxury homes and condos, including short pays and foreclosures in your area or for a free consultation, contact Bess at 310.291.4111. Bess Hochman is a Real Estate Broker & top producer for more than 15 years. Bess is also distinguished by holding a law degree. Her high-end clientele include celebrities, attorneys, and other professionals that understand the value of a real estate broker with legal expertise and experience. A native of Beverly Hills, Bess credits her success to repeat referrals by her satisfied clients.
Contact Bess:310.291.4111.E-mail: Bess.CenturyCityNews@yahoo.com
* The sources of information may or may not have been based on information from the combined /Westside Multiple Listing Service as of 4-27-12. Some listings may not be available as of publication.
c. 2012 Bess Hochman
---------------------------
“Bess is a master negotiator!” says Michael Donaldson, attorney & author of Negotiating For Dummies
New Projects Planned For Century City Could Impact You
By Bess Hochman
With the resurgence of real estate development, active members of our community are monitoring projects in Century City that are in various stages of development. There has been particular concern about how these projects could negatively impact our infrastructure including our streets and flow of traffic.
Chicago based developer and Landlord JMB has scrapped its plans to build luxury residential high rise units for a high rise office tower instead. It plans to take advantage of the high rents that Century City commands along with vacancy rate stabilization across the office sector.
JMB had received approvals earlier to build 2 high rise towers and one 12 story loft condo building at Constellation and Avenue of the Stars, formerly the site of City National Bank and the Constellation Club. Now JMB is planning a 37 story office tower called “Century City Center.” Given its scale and intensive commercial use, the new project raises significant traffic impact issues.
There is still uncertainty and controversy over the proposed Constellation Boulevard site of the subway line under development. This location for the subway stop in the heart of Century City
is just steps away from the JMB project and from the Westfield Shopping Mall.
There has been a contentious dispute between those who support the Century City subway stop site and the Beverly Hills Unified School District because the location of the proposed Constellation site requires tunneling under the Beverly Hills High School. The school district would prefer the subway stop to be located at Santa Monica Blvd.
Both JMB Realty and Westfield Corporation own real estate properties in Century City which would benefit greatly from the Constellation stop as the Westside extension of the new subway line. The school district is fighting this location raising safety and construction issues like the sinkhole created in Hollywood related to subway tunneling there. There is also the methane gas risk arising out of the oil fields under the high school.
Another developer changing course is the owner of the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel, a landmark site. He has backed down from his original proposal to demolish the Hotel and is instead planning a high rise development next to it.
A third project located at the eastern border of Century City where it adjoins Beverly Hills is progressing. Plans are being finalized with the City for construction of about a 39 story residential 1, 2 and 3 bedroom condo project. The units will range from 1600 to 2000 square feet and start at an average of 1.5 Million Dollars.
To find Luxury homes and condos, including short pays and foreclosures in your area or for a free consultation, contact Bess at 310.291.4111. Bess Hochman is a Real Estate Broker & top producer for more than 15 years. Bess is also distinguished by holding a law degree. Her high-end clientele include celebrities, attorneys, and other professionals that understand the value of a real estate broker with legal expertise and experience. A native of Beverly Hills, Bess credits her success to repeat referrals by her satisfied clients.
Contact Bess:310.291.4111.E-mail: Bess.CenturyCityNews@yahoo.com
* The sources of information may or may not have been based on information from the combined /Westside Multiple Listing Service as of 4-27-12. Some listings may not be available as of publication.
c. 2012 Bess Hochman
---------------------------
“Bess is a master negotiator!” says Michael Donaldson, attorney & author of Negotiating For Dummies
Social City News by Marci Weiner
(This article originally appeared in the May 1, 2012 edition of the Century City News)
ODYSSEY BALL & AMERICAN SPIRIT AWARDS
Dancing With the Stars was well represented at the Odyssey Ball benefiting the John Wayne Cancer Institute. The ballroom of the Beverly Hilton was transformed into Club Disco, and Tony Dovolani, the talented pro from the hit TV series, served as Host, The opening act was a slew of fabulous flash mob dancers from the Calabasas High School Dance Team, which got the SRO audience into a dance frenzy. Later in the show, Grammy Award winning songwriter, producer and singer David Foster, performed with several of his friends, including opera star Katherine Jenkins, arguably the best dancer on DWTS. The blond beauty will no doubt receive the coveted mirror ball trophy. And to add to the mix, her partner, Mark Ballas was on hand to support her, as well as the irrepressible Judge Gino Tonioli, and former contestants Martina Navratilova and Marlee Matlin.
But undeniably the star of the evening was boyishly handsome Dr Lawrence Piro, who received the Duke Award (named in honor ofJohn Wayne) for his outstanding work in cancer research and treatment. Director Wolfgang Petersen (Das Boot – Air Force One) presented the award to Dr. Piro, who is regularly listed as one of the “ Best Doctors in America”. As Patrick Wayne, Chairman of the Board of the Institute stated, “We are privileged to have Dr. Piro as a member of our JWCI family, and publicly recognize his dedication to developing new cancer treatments.
Among the star-studded audience were actor Ryan O’Neil (who is currently battling cancer himself), his daughter Tatum, andAlana Stewart – who was the bff of his late partner, Farrah Fawcett, who died from cancer a few years ago. Unfortunately, like many of us, this dread disease has touched his family. Let’s pray that with the support of organizations like the John Wayne Cancer Institute, all forms of cancer will be eradicated.
The Caucus for Producers, Writers and Director Eight Annual American Spirit Awards were held in the Rodeo Room of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Honored guests included Congressmen Darrell Issa of San Diego, and Howard Berman of the San Fernando Valley, philanthropist Bob Barker and Larry Auerbach, Associate Dean of the USC School of Cinematic Arts.
Each speaker and honoree addressed what the American Spirit means – personally and to the world. The entertainment industry puts an image of America out to the world that is important to the safety and security of our country. It was particularly exciting to meet legendary game show host, Bob Barker, who is also a noted animal activist. He is as handsome and erudite at 89, as he was when he was the host of The Price Is Right from 1972 to 2007. We love what Syd Vinnedge, former Producer of the show said about Barker: “He has done more for animals than anyone since Noah.”
Kudos to Event Chair, Producer Chuck Fries, Chairman Norman Powell, and their hard working committee for a most interesting and inspiring evening.
ODYSSEY BALL & AMERICAN SPIRIT AWARDS
Dancing With the Stars was well represented at the Odyssey Ball benefiting the John Wayne Cancer Institute. The ballroom of the Beverly Hilton was transformed into Club Disco, and Tony Dovolani, the talented pro from the hit TV series, served as Host, The opening act was a slew of fabulous flash mob dancers from the Calabasas High School Dance Team, which got the SRO audience into a dance frenzy. Later in the show, Grammy Award winning songwriter, producer and singer David Foster, performed with several of his friends, including opera star Katherine Jenkins, arguably the best dancer on DWTS. The blond beauty will no doubt receive the coveted mirror ball trophy. And to add to the mix, her partner, Mark Ballas was on hand to support her, as well as the irrepressible Judge Gino Tonioli, and former contestants Martina Navratilova and Marlee Matlin.
But undeniably the star of the evening was boyishly handsome Dr Lawrence Piro, who received the Duke Award (named in honor ofJohn Wayne) for his outstanding work in cancer research and treatment. Director Wolfgang Petersen (Das Boot – Air Force One) presented the award to Dr. Piro, who is regularly listed as one of the “ Best Doctors in America”. As Patrick Wayne, Chairman of the Board of the Institute stated, “We are privileged to have Dr. Piro as a member of our JWCI family, and publicly recognize his dedication to developing new cancer treatments.
Among the star-studded audience were actor Ryan O’Neil (who is currently battling cancer himself), his daughter Tatum, andAlana Stewart – who was the bff of his late partner, Farrah Fawcett, who died from cancer a few years ago. Unfortunately, like many of us, this dread disease has touched his family. Let’s pray that with the support of organizations like the John Wayne Cancer Institute, all forms of cancer will be eradicated.
The Caucus for Producers, Writers and Director Eight Annual American Spirit Awards were held in the Rodeo Room of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Honored guests included Congressmen Darrell Issa of San Diego, and Howard Berman of the San Fernando Valley, philanthropist Bob Barker and Larry Auerbach, Associate Dean of the USC School of Cinematic Arts.
Each speaker and honoree addressed what the American Spirit means – personally and to the world. The entertainment industry puts an image of America out to the world that is important to the safety and security of our country. It was particularly exciting to meet legendary game show host, Bob Barker, who is also a noted animal activist. He is as handsome and erudite at 89, as he was when he was the host of The Price Is Right from 1972 to 2007. We love what Syd Vinnedge, former Producer of the show said about Barker: “He has done more for animals than anyone since Noah.”
LOVE BUZZ - SOUL MATE WHOLENESS
(This article originally appeared in the May 1, 2012 edition of the Century City News)
By Anita De Francesco, MA
Relationship Specialist
Some of us are still wondering when that true soul mate will enter our lives and help complete the wholeness that we so desire. It can take a lifetime and going through many failed relationships to finally connect with the right one. I often wonder how people even know what a true soul mate is. I hear some folk talking about their relationship they are still in which began at age 16. And how so many of us wanted to stay with the sweet sixteen lover forever. What makes a soul mate so special and how do we attract this person? Yes it has been a long journey for some of us and so long that we’ve forgotten what it was like to be desired, wanted, to have a man pull the sweater over your shoulder and have a woman look you in the eyes and say she loves you and means it. Some are in relationships because they have stopped growing and basically just exist with someone. After being married for so many years you may wake up one day and find yourself wanting a new relationship.
One thing about love is that you have to be ready or you will attract temporary and sometimes trouble. Soul mates are all around you, your best friend, your parents, your co-workers and so on but romantic soul mate is deeper and more of a yearning. I believe romantic soul mate requires us to go deep inside and face ourselves with love and understanding before we can attract our true mate. It is important to have healthy, bonding loving relationships with those around you. This is a pre-requisite for the soul mate to enter your life. The quest for love and happiness is really a yearning for wholeness. Having a soul mate can help you open up to a new exploration of the heart and find real true love that is beyond the ordinary. Sounds like the fairy tale but why do some of us get it and others continue to suffer.
The law of attraction is the new way to get what you want from love to career and so on. So how do we attract this power? One thing first is to identify your patterns in your last relationships. When we break patterns all kinds of possibilities show up. Let’s start by changing the places we go. Explore new territory and make new friends. Invite yourself in to connect with others. Go to different meet-up groups and try different types of dance places like ballroom or salsa. All of these things are to help you break patterns and make change, so we have begun. Sex sails with a partner when you have things in common. If you like to golf then go to those places, do things that you like to do and connect to people this way. If you like drama then join a theatre group. Start doing things that turn you on, stop following what your friends like.
Next let’s identify our challenges, insecurities and fears; begin to make a list. It is important to be honest with your challenges and facing them so that you don’t get into the habit of projecting onto your partner. Look at why your last few relationships have failed. Also make a list of what you past lover found irritating about you. Focus on the things you don’t like so that they don’t outweigh the things you do like in a mate. There should be some sort of balance.
Next let us focus on communication, openness and honesty. Begin with trusting yourself and cultivating this within and you will in turn begin to trust your mate. Learn to accept criticism and truth. Be upfront and communicate just what you need and want and where you are in your life. Be adaptable and open until you mesh as one with your mate. Be open to try new things your mate introduces to you.
Know your preferences such as what you want in a mate. If you want a non-smoker than put that out there. Make a list of what you will put up with. If you like to travel, best to find someone who does as well or you will be alone. Know what you like and find that in your mate. If you get someone who matches you at 40 percent it could work with some adjustments.
Let go of the past lovers that you still think about. Remove those energetic hooks that keep you connected. Energetic hooks in you or in someone else can prevent you from meeting someone. Before you can attract your soul mate you need to be ready on an emotional and physical level. You need to have your home ready as if this soul mate is already living in there. I suggest clearing the bedroom and make this area nice and ready. Get some real nice sheets and fancy curtains and rugs. Adorn it with flowers and candles and talk as if this person was in the room there with you. Write him/her poems about your feelings and how you can’t wait to be together one day. Use your imagination to create what you want, that is what it is for. Oh and go out and buy a new bed and fancy it up, and keep it sacred and pure for that soul mate to arrive.
Do you feel stuck and in a rut, depressed or anxious or overall sluggish? I practice Reichian, Gestalt, somatic movement, and counseling/bodywork integrative therapies which involves focused breathing to help stimulate the emotions thus re-patterning the nervous system. I help you to focus on the negative voices and thoughts that create the stress and to resolve those unwanted interruptions that get in the way of your life process. Those stiff armored muscles that block sensation and energy flow will eventually soften.
The rage sitting in the muscles will unfold allowing more feelings of pleasure, more creativeness, freeing blocked energies and sexual dysfunction. Modern society has forced the human character to live in unnatural ways holding back basic needs and instincts. This process of breathing deeply sends messages to the brain which is an effective way to release anger, to let go of baggage, and to feel more alive and trusting thus living in a higher self esteem.
Anita De Francesco, M.A.
www.tantrawisdom.com
info@tantrawisdom.com
310-210-1464
By Anita De Francesco, MA
Relationship Specialist
Some of us are still wondering when that true soul mate will enter our lives and help complete the wholeness that we so desire. It can take a lifetime and going through many failed relationships to finally connect with the right one. I often wonder how people even know what a true soul mate is. I hear some folk talking about their relationship they are still in which began at age 16. And how so many of us wanted to stay with the sweet sixteen lover forever. What makes a soul mate so special and how do we attract this person? Yes it has been a long journey for some of us and so long that we’ve forgotten what it was like to be desired, wanted, to have a man pull the sweater over your shoulder and have a woman look you in the eyes and say she loves you and means it. Some are in relationships because they have stopped growing and basically just exist with someone. After being married for so many years you may wake up one day and find yourself wanting a new relationship.
One thing about love is that you have to be ready or you will attract temporary and sometimes trouble. Soul mates are all around you, your best friend, your parents, your co-workers and so on but romantic soul mate is deeper and more of a yearning. I believe romantic soul mate requires us to go deep inside and face ourselves with love and understanding before we can attract our true mate. It is important to have healthy, bonding loving relationships with those around you. This is a pre-requisite for the soul mate to enter your life. The quest for love and happiness is really a yearning for wholeness. Having a soul mate can help you open up to a new exploration of the heart and find real true love that is beyond the ordinary. Sounds like the fairy tale but why do some of us get it and others continue to suffer.
The law of attraction is the new way to get what you want from love to career and so on. So how do we attract this power? One thing first is to identify your patterns in your last relationships. When we break patterns all kinds of possibilities show up. Let’s start by changing the places we go. Explore new territory and make new friends. Invite yourself in to connect with others. Go to different meet-up groups and try different types of dance places like ballroom or salsa. All of these things are to help you break patterns and make change, so we have begun. Sex sails with a partner when you have things in common. If you like to golf then go to those places, do things that you like to do and connect to people this way. If you like drama then join a theatre group. Start doing things that turn you on, stop following what your friends like.
Next let’s identify our challenges, insecurities and fears; begin to make a list. It is important to be honest with your challenges and facing them so that you don’t get into the habit of projecting onto your partner. Look at why your last few relationships have failed. Also make a list of what you past lover found irritating about you. Focus on the things you don’t like so that they don’t outweigh the things you do like in a mate. There should be some sort of balance.
Next let us focus on communication, openness and honesty. Begin with trusting yourself and cultivating this within and you will in turn begin to trust your mate. Learn to accept criticism and truth. Be upfront and communicate just what you need and want and where you are in your life. Be adaptable and open until you mesh as one with your mate. Be open to try new things your mate introduces to you.
Know your preferences such as what you want in a mate. If you want a non-smoker than put that out there. Make a list of what you will put up with. If you like to travel, best to find someone who does as well or you will be alone. Know what you like and find that in your mate. If you get someone who matches you at 40 percent it could work with some adjustments.
Let go of the past lovers that you still think about. Remove those energetic hooks that keep you connected. Energetic hooks in you or in someone else can prevent you from meeting someone. Before you can attract your soul mate you need to be ready on an emotional and physical level. You need to have your home ready as if this soul mate is already living in there. I suggest clearing the bedroom and make this area nice and ready. Get some real nice sheets and fancy curtains and rugs. Adorn it with flowers and candles and talk as if this person was in the room there with you. Write him/her poems about your feelings and how you can’t wait to be together one day. Use your imagination to create what you want, that is what it is for. Oh and go out and buy a new bed and fancy it up, and keep it sacred and pure for that soul mate to arrive.
Do you feel stuck and in a rut, depressed or anxious or overall sluggish? I practice Reichian, Gestalt, somatic movement, and counseling/bodywork integrative therapies which involves focused breathing to help stimulate the emotions thus re-patterning the nervous system. I help you to focus on the negative voices and thoughts that create the stress and to resolve those unwanted interruptions that get in the way of your life process. Those stiff armored muscles that block sensation and energy flow will eventually soften.
The rage sitting in the muscles will unfold allowing more feelings of pleasure, more creativeness, freeing blocked energies and sexual dysfunction. Modern society has forced the human character to live in unnatural ways holding back basic needs and instincts. This process of breathing deeply sends messages to the brain which is an effective way to release anger, to let go of baggage, and to feel more alive and trusting thus living in a higher self esteem.
Anita De Francesco, M.A.
www.tantrawisdom.com
info@tantrawisdom.com
310-210-1464
A Piece Of My Mind
(This article originally appeared in the May 1, 2012 edition of the Century City News)
By Jim Grant
My friends and neighbors, I thank you for this opportunity. You know, we are friends and neighbors. Grant’s makes its offices on Wall Street, overlooking Broadway, a 10-minute stroll from your imposing headquarters. For a spectacular vantage point on the next ticker-tape parade up Broadway, please drop by. We’ll have the windows washed.
You say you would like to hear my complaints, and, on the one hand, I do have a few, while on the other, I can’t help but feel slightly hypocritical in dressing you down. What passes for sound doctrine in 21st-century central banking—so-called financial repression, interest-rate manipulation, stock-price levitation and money printing under the frosted-glass term “quantitative easing”—presents us at Grant’s with a nearly endless supply of good copy. Our symbiotic relationship with the Fed resembles that of Fox News with the Obama administration, or—in an earlier era—that of the Chicago Tribune with the Purple Gang. Grant’s needs the Fed even if the Fed doesn’t need Grant’s.
In the not quite 100 years since the founding of your institution, America has exchanged central banking for a kind of central planning and the gold standard for what I will call the Ph.D. standard. I regret the changes and will propose reforms, or, I suppose, re-reforms, as my program is very much in accord with that of the founders of this institution. Have you ever read the Federal Reserve Act? The authorizing legislation projected a body “to provide for the establishment of the Federal Reserve banks, to furnish an elastic currency, to afford means of rediscounting commercial paper and to establish a more effective supervision of banking in the United States, and for other purposes.” By now can we identify the operative phrase? Of course: “for other purposes.”
You are lucky, if I may say so, that I’m the one who’s standing here and not the ghost of Sen. Carter Glass. One hesitates to speak for the dead, but I am reasonably sure that the Virginia Democrat, who regarded himself as the father of the Fed, would skewer you. He had an abhorrence of paper money and government debt. He didn’t like Wall Street, either, and I’m going to guess that he wouldn’t much care for the Fed raising up stock prices under the theory of the “portfolio balance channel.”
It enflamed him that during congressional debate over the Federal Reserve Act, Elihu Root, Republican senator from New York, impugned the anticipated Federal Reserve notes as “fiat” currency. Fiat, indeed! Glass snorted. The nation was on the gold standard. It would remain on the gold standard, Glass had no reason to doubt. The projected notes of the Federal Reserve would—of course—be convertible into gold on demand at the fixed statutory rate of $20.67 per ounce. But more stood behind the notes than gold. They would be collateralized, as well, by sound commercial assets, by the issuing member bank and—a point to which I will return— by the so-called double liability of the issuing bank’s stockholders.
If Glass had the stronger argument, Root had the clearer vision. One can think of the original Federal Reserve note as a kind of derivative. It derived its value chiefly from gold, into which it was lawfully exchangeable. Now that the Federal Reserve note is exchangeable into nothing except small change, it is a derivative without an underlier. Or, at a stretch, one might say it is a derivative that secures its value from the wisdom of Congress and the foresight and judgment of the monetary scholars at the Federal Reserve. Either way, we would seem to be in dangerous, uncharted waters.
As you prepare to mark the Fed’s centenary, may I urge you to reflect on just how far you have wandered from the intentions of the founders? The institution they envisioned would operate passively, through the discount window. It would not create credit but rather liquefy the existing stock of credit by turning good-quality commercial bills into cash— temporarily. This it would do according to the demands of the seasons and the cycle. The Fed would respond to the community, not try to anticipate or lead it. It would not override the price mechanism— as today’s Fed seems to do at every available opportunity—but yield to it.
My favorite exposition of the sound, original doctrines is a book entitled, “The Theory and Practice of Central Banking,” by H. Parker Willis, first secretary of the Federal Reserve Board and Glass’s right-hand man in the House of Representatives.
Writing in the mid-1930s, Willis pointed out that the Fed fell into sin almost immediately after it opened for business in 1914. In 1917, after the United States entered the Great War, the Fed set about monetizing the Treasury’s debt and suppressing the Treasury’s borrowing costs. In the 1920s, after the recovery from the short but ugly depression of 1920-21, the Fed started to implement open-market operations to sterilize gold flows and steer a desired macroeconomic course.
“Central banks,” wrote Willis, glaring at the innovators, “…will do wisely to lay aside their inexpert ventures in half-baked monetary theory, meretricious statistical measures of trade, and hasty grinding of the axes of speculative interests with their suggestion that by doing so they are achieving some sort of vague ‘stabilization’ that will, in the long run, be for the greater good.”
Willis, who died in 1937, perhaps of a broken heart, would be no happier with you today than Glass would be—or I am. The search for “some sort of vague stabilization” in the 1930s has become a Federal Reserve obsession at the millennium.
Ladies and gentlemen, such stability as might be imposed on a dynamic capitalist economy is the kind that eventually comes around to bite the stabilizer.
“Price stability” is a case in point. It is your mandate, or half of your mandate, I realize, but it does grievous harm, as defined. For reasons you never exactly spell out, you pledge to resist “deflation.” You won’t put up with it, you keep on saying—something about Japan’s lost decade or the Great Depression. But you never say what deflation really is. Let me attempt a definition. Deflation is a derangement of debt, a symptom of which is falling prices. In a credit crisis, when inventories become unfinanceable, merchandise is thrown on the market and prices fall. That’s deflation.
What deflation is not is a drop in prices caused by a technology-enhanced decline in the costs of production. That’s called progress. Between 1875 and 1896, according to Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz, the American price level subsided at the average rate of 1.7% a year. And why not? As technology was advancing, costs were tumbling. Long before Joseph Schumpeter coined the phrase “creative destruction,” the American economist David A. Wells, writing in 1889, was explaining the consequences of disruptive innovation.
“In the last analysis,” Wells proposes, “it will appear that there is no such thing as fixed capital; there is nothing useful that is very old except the precious metals, and life consists in the conversion of forces. The only capital which is of permanent value is immaterial—the experience of generations and the development of science.”
Much the same sentiments, and much the same circumstances, apply today, but with a difference. Digital technology and a globalized labor force have brought down production costs. But, the central bankers declare, prices must not fall. On the contrary, they must rise by 2% a year. To engineer this up-creep, the Bernankes, the Kings, the Draghis—and yes, sadly, even the Dudleys—of the world monetize assets and push down interest rates. They do this to conquer deflation.
But note, please, that the suppression of interest rates and the conjuring of liquidity set in motion waves of speculative lending and borrowing. This artificially induced activity serves to lift the prices of a favored class of asset—houses, for instance, or Mitt Romney’s portfolio of leveraged companies. And when the central bank-financed bubble bursts, credit contracts, leveraged businesses teeter, inventories are liquidated and prices weaken. In short, a process is set in motion resembling a real deflation, which then calls forth a new bout of monetary intervention. By trying to forestall an imagined deflation, the Federal Reserve comes perilously close to instigating the real thing.
The economist Hyman Minsky laid down the paradox that stability is itself destabilizing. I say that the pledge of a stable funds rate through the fourth quarter of 2014 is hugely destabilizing. Interest rates are prices. They convey information, or ought to. But the only information conveyed in a manipulated yield curve is what the Fed wants. Opportunists don’t have to be told twice how to respond. They buy oil or gold or foreign exchange, not incidentally pushing the price of a gallon of gasoline at the pump to $4 and beyond. Another set of opportunists borrow short and lend long in the credit markets. Not especially caring about the risk of inflation over the long run, this speculative cohort will fund mortgages, junk bonds, Treasurys, what-have-you at zero percent in the short run. The opportunists, a.k.a. the 1 percent, will do fine. But what about the uncomprehending others?
I commend to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Financial History Book Club (if it doesn’t exist, please organize it at once) a volume by the British scholar and central banker, Charles Goodhart. Its title is “The New York Money Market and the Finance of Trade, 1900-1913.” In the pre-Fed days with which the history deals, the call money rate dove and soared. There was no stability—and a good thing, Goodhart reasons. In a society predisposed to speculate, as America was and is, he writes, unpredictable spikes in borrowing rates kept the players more or less honest. “On the basis of its record,” he writes of the Second Federal Reserve District before there was a Federal Reserve, “the financial system as constituted in the years 1900-1913 must be considered successful to an extent rarely equaled in the United States.” And that not withstanding the Panic of 1907.
My reading of history accords with Goodhart’s, though not with that of the Fed’s front office. If Chairman Bernanke were in the room, I would respectfully ask him why this persistent harking back to the Great Depression? It is one cyclical episode, but there are many others. I myself draw more instruction from the depression of 1920-21, a slump as ugly and steep in its way as that of 1929-33, but with the simple and interesting difference that it ended. Top to bottom, spring 1920 to summer 1921, nominal GDP fell by 23.9%, wholesale prices by 40.8% and the CPI by 8.3%. Unemployment, as it was inexactly measured, topped out at about 14% from a pre-bust low of as little as 2%. And how did the administration of Warren G. Harding meet this macroeconomic calamity? Why, it balanced the budget, the president declaring in 1921, as the economy seemed to be falling apart, “There is not a menace in the world today like that of growing public indebtedness and mounting public expenditures.” And the fledgling Fed, face to face with its first big slump, what did it do? Why, it tightened, pushing up short rates in mid-depression to as high as 8.13% from a business cycle peak of 6%. It was the one and only time in the history of this institution that money rates at the trough of a cycle were higher than rates at the peak, according to Allan Meltzer.
But then something wonderful happened: Markets cleared, and a vibrant recovery began. There were plenty of bankruptcies and no few brickbats launched in the direction of the governor of the New York Fed, Benjamin Strong, for the deflation that cut an especially wide and devastating swath through the American farm economy. But in 1922, the first full year of recovery, the Fed’s index of industrial production leapt by 27.3%. By 1923, the unemployment rate was back to 3.2%. The 1920s began to roar.
And do you know that the biggest nationally chartered bank to fail during this deflationary collapse was the First National Bank of Cleburne, Texas, with not quite $2.8 million of deposits? Even the forerunner to today’s Citigroup remained solvent (though for Citi, even then it was a close-run thing, on account of an oversize exposure to deflating Cuban sugar values). No TARP, no starving the savers with zero-percent interest rates, no QE, no jimmying up the stock market, no federal “stimulus” of any kind. Yet—I repeat—the depression ended. To those today who demand ever more intervention to cure what ails us, I ask: Why did the depression of 1920-21 ever end? Given the policies with which the authorities treated it, why are we still not ensnared?
If you object to using the template of 1920-21 as a guide to 21st-century policy because, well, 1920 was a long time ago, I reply that 1929 was a long time ago, too. And if you persist in objecting because the lessons to be derived from the Harding depression are unthinkably at odds with the lessons so familiarly mined from the Hoover and Roosevelt depression, I reply that Harding’s approach worked. The price mechanism is truer and enterprise hardier than the promoters of radical 21st-century intervention seem prepared to acknowledge.
In notable contrast to the Harding method, today’s policies seem not to be working. We legislate and regulate and intervene, but still the patient languishes. It’s a worldwide failure of the institutions of money and credit. I see in the papers that Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena is in the toils of a debt crisis. For the first time in over 500 years, the foundation that controls this ancient Italian institution may be forced to sell shares. We’ve all heard of hundred-year floods. We seem to be in a kind of 500-year debt flood.
Many now call for more regulation—more such institutions as the Treasury’s brand-new Office of Financial Research, for instance. In the March 8 Financial Times, the columnist Gillian Tett appealed for more resources for the overwhelmed regulators. Inundated with information, she lamented, they can’t keep up with the institutions they are supposed to be safeguarding. To me, the trouble is not that the regulators are ignorant. It’s rather that the owners and managers are unaccountable.
Once upon a time—specifically, between the National Banking Act of 1863 and the Banking Act of 1935—the impairment or bankruptcy of a nationally chartered bank triggered a capital call. Not on the taxpayers, but on the stockholders. It was their bank, after all. Individual accountability in banking was the rule in the advanced economies. Hartley Withers, the editor of The Economist in the early 20th century, shook his head at the micromanagement of American banks by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency—25% of their deposits had to be kept in cash, i.e., gold or money lawfully convertible into gold. The rules held. Yet New York had panics, London had none. Adjured Withers: “Good banking is produced not by good laws but by good bankers.”
Well said, Withers! And what makes a good banker is more than skill. It is also the fear of God, or, more specifically, accountability for the solvency of the institution that he or she owns or manages. To stay out of trouble, the general partners of Brown Brothers Harriman, Wall Street’s oldest surviving general partnership, need no regulatory pep talk. Each partner is liable for the debts of the firm to the full extent of his or her net worth. My colleague Paul Isaac, who is with me today—he doubles as my food and beverage taster— has an intriguing suggestion for instilling the credit culture more deeply in our semi-socialized banking institutions.
We can’t turn limited liability corporations into general partnerships. Nor could we easily reinstate the so-called double liability law on bank stockholders. But what we could and should do, Paul urges, is to claw back that portion of the compensation paid out by a failed bank in excess of 10 times the average wage in manufacturing for the seven full calendar years before the ruined bank hit the wall. Such a clawback would not be subject to averaging or offset one year to the next. And it would be payable in cash.
The idea, Paul explains, is twofold. First, to remove the government from the business of determining what is, or is not, risky—really, the government doesn’t know. Second, to increase the personal risk of failure for senior management, but stopping short of the sword of Damocles of unlimited personal liability. If bankers are venal, why not harness that venality in the public interest? For the better part of 100 years, and especially in the past five, we have socialized the risks of high finance. All too often, the bankers who take risks don’t themselves bear them. By all means, let the capitalists keep the upside. But let them bear their full share of the downside.
In March 2009, the Financial Times published a letter to the editor concerning the then novel subject of QE. “I can now understand the term ‘quantitative easing,’ wrote Gerald B. Hill of Stourbridge, West Midlands, “but . . . realize I can no longer understand the meaning of the word ‘money.’”
There isn’t time, in these brief remarks, to persuade you of the necessity of a return to the classical gold standard. I would need another 10 minutes, at least. But I anticipate some skepticism. Very well then, consider this fact: On March 27, 1973, not quite 39 years ago, the forerunner to today’s G-20 solemnly agreed that the special drawing right, a.k.a. SDR, “will become the principal reserve asset and the role of gold and reserve currencies will be reduced.” That was the establishment— i.e., you—talking. If a worldwide accord on the efficacy of the SDR is possible, all things are possible, including a return to the least imperfect international monetary standard that has ever worked.
Notice, I do not say the perfect monetary system or best monetary system ever dreamt up by a theoretical economist. The classical gold standard, 1879-1914, “with all its anomalies and exceptions . . . ‘worked.’” The quoted words I draw from a book entitled, “The Rules of the Game: Reform and Evolution in the International Monetary System,” by Kenneth W. Dam, a law professor and former provost of the University of Chicago. Dam’s was a grudging admiration, a little like that of the New York Fed’s own Arthur Bloomfield, whose 1959 monograph, “Monetary Policy under the International Gold Standard,” was published by yourselves. No, Bloomfield points out, as does Dam, the classical gold standard was not quite automatic. But it was synchronous, it was self-correcting and it did deliver both national solvency and, over the long run, uncanny price stability. The banks were solvent, too, even the central banks, which, as Bloomfield noted, monetized no government debt.
The visible hallmark of the classical gold standard was, of course, gold—to every currency holder was given the option of exchanging metal for paper, or paper for metal, at a fixed, statutory rate. Exchange rates were fixed, and I mean fixed. “It is quite remarkable,” Dam writes, “that from 1879 to 1914, in a period considerably longer than from 1945 to the demise of Bretton Woods in 1971, there were no changes of parities between the United States, Britain, France, Germany—not to speak of a number of smaller European countries.” The fruits of this fixedness were many and sweet. Among them, again to quote Dam, “a flow of private foreign investment on a scale the world had never seen, and, relative to other economic aggregates, was never to see again.”
Incidentally, the source of my purchased copy of “Rules of the Game” was the library of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Apparently, President Lockhart isn’t preparing, as I am—as, may I suggest, as you should be—for the coming of classical gold standard, Part II. By way of preparation, I commend to you a new book by my friend Lew Lehrman, “The True Gold Standard: A Monetary Reform Plan without Official Reserve Currencies: How We Get from Here to There.”
It’s a little rich, my extolling gold to an institution that sits on 216 million troy ounces of the stuff. Valued at $42.222 per ounce, the hoard in your basement is worth $9.1 billion. Incidentally, the official price was quoted in SDRs, $35 to the ounce—now there’s a quixotic choice for you. In 2008, when your in-house publication, “The Key to the Gold Vault,” was published, the market value was $194 billion. Today, the market value is $359 billion, which is encouraging only if you personally happen to be long gold bullion. Otherwise, it strikes me as a pretty severe condemnation of modern central banking.
And what would I do if, following the inauguration of Ron Paul, I were sitting in the chairman’s office? I would do what I could to begin the normalization of interest rates. I would invite the Wall Street Journal’s Jon Hilsenrath to lunch to let him know that the Fed is now well over its deflation phobia and has put aside its Atlas complex. “It’s capitalism for us, Jon,” I would say. Next I would call President Dudley. “Bill,” I would say, pleasantly, “we’re not exactly leading from the front in the regulatory drive to reduce the ratio of assets to equity at the big American financial institutions. Do you have to be leveraged 89:1?” Finally, I would redirect the efforts of the brainiacs at the Federal Reserve Board research division. “Ladies and gentlemen,” I would say, “enough with ‘Bayesian Analysis of Stochastic Volatility Models with Levy Jumps: Application to Risk Analysis.’ How much better it would please me if you wrote to the subject, ‘Command and Control No More: A Gold Standard for the 21st Century.’” Finally, my pièce de résistance, I would commission, staff and ceremonially open the Fed’s first Office of Unintended Consequences.
Let me thank you once more for the honor that your invitation does me. Concerning little Grant’s and the big Fed, I will quote in parting the opening sentences of an editorial that appeared in a provincial Irish newspaper in the fateful year 1914. It read: “We give this solemn warning to Kaiser Wilhelm: The Skibbereen Eagle has its eye on you.”
By Jim Grant
My friends and neighbors, I thank you for this opportunity. You know, we are friends and neighbors. Grant’s makes its offices on Wall Street, overlooking Broadway, a 10-minute stroll from your imposing headquarters. For a spectacular vantage point on the next ticker-tape parade up Broadway, please drop by. We’ll have the windows washed.
You say you would like to hear my complaints, and, on the one hand, I do have a few, while on the other, I can’t help but feel slightly hypocritical in dressing you down. What passes for sound doctrine in 21st-century central banking—so-called financial repression, interest-rate manipulation, stock-price levitation and money printing under the frosted-glass term “quantitative easing”—presents us at Grant’s with a nearly endless supply of good copy. Our symbiotic relationship with the Fed resembles that of Fox News with the Obama administration, or—in an earlier era—that of the Chicago Tribune with the Purple Gang. Grant’s needs the Fed even if the Fed doesn’t need Grant’s.
In the not quite 100 years since the founding of your institution, America has exchanged central banking for a kind of central planning and the gold standard for what I will call the Ph.D. standard. I regret the changes and will propose reforms, or, I suppose, re-reforms, as my program is very much in accord with that of the founders of this institution. Have you ever read the Federal Reserve Act? The authorizing legislation projected a body “to provide for the establishment of the Federal Reserve banks, to furnish an elastic currency, to afford means of rediscounting commercial paper and to establish a more effective supervision of banking in the United States, and for other purposes.” By now can we identify the operative phrase? Of course: “for other purposes.”
You are lucky, if I may say so, that I’m the one who’s standing here and not the ghost of Sen. Carter Glass. One hesitates to speak for the dead, but I am reasonably sure that the Virginia Democrat, who regarded himself as the father of the Fed, would skewer you. He had an abhorrence of paper money and government debt. He didn’t like Wall Street, either, and I’m going to guess that he wouldn’t much care for the Fed raising up stock prices under the theory of the “portfolio balance channel.”
It enflamed him that during congressional debate over the Federal Reserve Act, Elihu Root, Republican senator from New York, impugned the anticipated Federal Reserve notes as “fiat” currency. Fiat, indeed! Glass snorted. The nation was on the gold standard. It would remain on the gold standard, Glass had no reason to doubt. The projected notes of the Federal Reserve would—of course—be convertible into gold on demand at the fixed statutory rate of $20.67 per ounce. But more stood behind the notes than gold. They would be collateralized, as well, by sound commercial assets, by the issuing member bank and—a point to which I will return— by the so-called double liability of the issuing bank’s stockholders.
If Glass had the stronger argument, Root had the clearer vision. One can think of the original Federal Reserve note as a kind of derivative. It derived its value chiefly from gold, into which it was lawfully exchangeable. Now that the Federal Reserve note is exchangeable into nothing except small change, it is a derivative without an underlier. Or, at a stretch, one might say it is a derivative that secures its value from the wisdom of Congress and the foresight and judgment of the monetary scholars at the Federal Reserve. Either way, we would seem to be in dangerous, uncharted waters.
As you prepare to mark the Fed’s centenary, may I urge you to reflect on just how far you have wandered from the intentions of the founders? The institution they envisioned would operate passively, through the discount window. It would not create credit but rather liquefy the existing stock of credit by turning good-quality commercial bills into cash— temporarily. This it would do according to the demands of the seasons and the cycle. The Fed would respond to the community, not try to anticipate or lead it. It would not override the price mechanism— as today’s Fed seems to do at every available opportunity—but yield to it.
My favorite exposition of the sound, original doctrines is a book entitled, “The Theory and Practice of Central Banking,” by H. Parker Willis, first secretary of the Federal Reserve Board and Glass’s right-hand man in the House of Representatives.
Writing in the mid-1930s, Willis pointed out that the Fed fell into sin almost immediately after it opened for business in 1914. In 1917, after the United States entered the Great War, the Fed set about monetizing the Treasury’s debt and suppressing the Treasury’s borrowing costs. In the 1920s, after the recovery from the short but ugly depression of 1920-21, the Fed started to implement open-market operations to sterilize gold flows and steer a desired macroeconomic course.
“Central banks,” wrote Willis, glaring at the innovators, “…will do wisely to lay aside their inexpert ventures in half-baked monetary theory, meretricious statistical measures of trade, and hasty grinding of the axes of speculative interests with their suggestion that by doing so they are achieving some sort of vague ‘stabilization’ that will, in the long run, be for the greater good.”
Willis, who died in 1937, perhaps of a broken heart, would be no happier with you today than Glass would be—or I am. The search for “some sort of vague stabilization” in the 1930s has become a Federal Reserve obsession at the millennium.
Ladies and gentlemen, such stability as might be imposed on a dynamic capitalist economy is the kind that eventually comes around to bite the stabilizer.
“Price stability” is a case in point. It is your mandate, or half of your mandate, I realize, but it does grievous harm, as defined. For reasons you never exactly spell out, you pledge to resist “deflation.” You won’t put up with it, you keep on saying—something about Japan’s lost decade or the Great Depression. But you never say what deflation really is. Let me attempt a definition. Deflation is a derangement of debt, a symptom of which is falling prices. In a credit crisis, when inventories become unfinanceable, merchandise is thrown on the market and prices fall. That’s deflation.
What deflation is not is a drop in prices caused by a technology-enhanced decline in the costs of production. That’s called progress. Between 1875 and 1896, according to Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz, the American price level subsided at the average rate of 1.7% a year. And why not? As technology was advancing, costs were tumbling. Long before Joseph Schumpeter coined the phrase “creative destruction,” the American economist David A. Wells, writing in 1889, was explaining the consequences of disruptive innovation.
“In the last analysis,” Wells proposes, “it will appear that there is no such thing as fixed capital; there is nothing useful that is very old except the precious metals, and life consists in the conversion of forces. The only capital which is of permanent value is immaterial—the experience of generations and the development of science.”
Much the same sentiments, and much the same circumstances, apply today, but with a difference. Digital technology and a globalized labor force have brought down production costs. But, the central bankers declare, prices must not fall. On the contrary, they must rise by 2% a year. To engineer this up-creep, the Bernankes, the Kings, the Draghis—and yes, sadly, even the Dudleys—of the world monetize assets and push down interest rates. They do this to conquer deflation.
But note, please, that the suppression of interest rates and the conjuring of liquidity set in motion waves of speculative lending and borrowing. This artificially induced activity serves to lift the prices of a favored class of asset—houses, for instance, or Mitt Romney’s portfolio of leveraged companies. And when the central bank-financed bubble bursts, credit contracts, leveraged businesses teeter, inventories are liquidated and prices weaken. In short, a process is set in motion resembling a real deflation, which then calls forth a new bout of monetary intervention. By trying to forestall an imagined deflation, the Federal Reserve comes perilously close to instigating the real thing.
The economist Hyman Minsky laid down the paradox that stability is itself destabilizing. I say that the pledge of a stable funds rate through the fourth quarter of 2014 is hugely destabilizing. Interest rates are prices. They convey information, or ought to. But the only information conveyed in a manipulated yield curve is what the Fed wants. Opportunists don’t have to be told twice how to respond. They buy oil or gold or foreign exchange, not incidentally pushing the price of a gallon of gasoline at the pump to $4 and beyond. Another set of opportunists borrow short and lend long in the credit markets. Not especially caring about the risk of inflation over the long run, this speculative cohort will fund mortgages, junk bonds, Treasurys, what-have-you at zero percent in the short run. The opportunists, a.k.a. the 1 percent, will do fine. But what about the uncomprehending others?
I commend to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Financial History Book Club (if it doesn’t exist, please organize it at once) a volume by the British scholar and central banker, Charles Goodhart. Its title is “The New York Money Market and the Finance of Trade, 1900-1913.” In the pre-Fed days with which the history deals, the call money rate dove and soared. There was no stability—and a good thing, Goodhart reasons. In a society predisposed to speculate, as America was and is, he writes, unpredictable spikes in borrowing rates kept the players more or less honest. “On the basis of its record,” he writes of the Second Federal Reserve District before there was a Federal Reserve, “the financial system as constituted in the years 1900-1913 must be considered successful to an extent rarely equaled in the United States.” And that not withstanding the Panic of 1907.
My reading of history accords with Goodhart’s, though not with that of the Fed’s front office. If Chairman Bernanke were in the room, I would respectfully ask him why this persistent harking back to the Great Depression? It is one cyclical episode, but there are many others. I myself draw more instruction from the depression of 1920-21, a slump as ugly and steep in its way as that of 1929-33, but with the simple and interesting difference that it ended. Top to bottom, spring 1920 to summer 1921, nominal GDP fell by 23.9%, wholesale prices by 40.8% and the CPI by 8.3%. Unemployment, as it was inexactly measured, topped out at about 14% from a pre-bust low of as little as 2%. And how did the administration of Warren G. Harding meet this macroeconomic calamity? Why, it balanced the budget, the president declaring in 1921, as the economy seemed to be falling apart, “There is not a menace in the world today like that of growing public indebtedness and mounting public expenditures.” And the fledgling Fed, face to face with its first big slump, what did it do? Why, it tightened, pushing up short rates in mid-depression to as high as 8.13% from a business cycle peak of 6%. It was the one and only time in the history of this institution that money rates at the trough of a cycle were higher than rates at the peak, according to Allan Meltzer.
But then something wonderful happened: Markets cleared, and a vibrant recovery began. There were plenty of bankruptcies and no few brickbats launched in the direction of the governor of the New York Fed, Benjamin Strong, for the deflation that cut an especially wide and devastating swath through the American farm economy. But in 1922, the first full year of recovery, the Fed’s index of industrial production leapt by 27.3%. By 1923, the unemployment rate was back to 3.2%. The 1920s began to roar.
And do you know that the biggest nationally chartered bank to fail during this deflationary collapse was the First National Bank of Cleburne, Texas, with not quite $2.8 million of deposits? Even the forerunner to today’s Citigroup remained solvent (though for Citi, even then it was a close-run thing, on account of an oversize exposure to deflating Cuban sugar values). No TARP, no starving the savers with zero-percent interest rates, no QE, no jimmying up the stock market, no federal “stimulus” of any kind. Yet—I repeat—the depression ended. To those today who demand ever more intervention to cure what ails us, I ask: Why did the depression of 1920-21 ever end? Given the policies with which the authorities treated it, why are we still not ensnared?
If you object to using the template of 1920-21 as a guide to 21st-century policy because, well, 1920 was a long time ago, I reply that 1929 was a long time ago, too. And if you persist in objecting because the lessons to be derived from the Harding depression are unthinkably at odds with the lessons so familiarly mined from the Hoover and Roosevelt depression, I reply that Harding’s approach worked. The price mechanism is truer and enterprise hardier than the promoters of radical 21st-century intervention seem prepared to acknowledge.
In notable contrast to the Harding method, today’s policies seem not to be working. We legislate and regulate and intervene, but still the patient languishes. It’s a worldwide failure of the institutions of money and credit. I see in the papers that Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena is in the toils of a debt crisis. For the first time in over 500 years, the foundation that controls this ancient Italian institution may be forced to sell shares. We’ve all heard of hundred-year floods. We seem to be in a kind of 500-year debt flood.
Many now call for more regulation—more such institutions as the Treasury’s brand-new Office of Financial Research, for instance. In the March 8 Financial Times, the columnist Gillian Tett appealed for more resources for the overwhelmed regulators. Inundated with information, she lamented, they can’t keep up with the institutions they are supposed to be safeguarding. To me, the trouble is not that the regulators are ignorant. It’s rather that the owners and managers are unaccountable.
Once upon a time—specifically, between the National Banking Act of 1863 and the Banking Act of 1935—the impairment or bankruptcy of a nationally chartered bank triggered a capital call. Not on the taxpayers, but on the stockholders. It was their bank, after all. Individual accountability in banking was the rule in the advanced economies. Hartley Withers, the editor of The Economist in the early 20th century, shook his head at the micromanagement of American banks by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency—25% of their deposits had to be kept in cash, i.e., gold or money lawfully convertible into gold. The rules held. Yet New York had panics, London had none. Adjured Withers: “Good banking is produced not by good laws but by good bankers.”
Well said, Withers! And what makes a good banker is more than skill. It is also the fear of God, or, more specifically, accountability for the solvency of the institution that he or she owns or manages. To stay out of trouble, the general partners of Brown Brothers Harriman, Wall Street’s oldest surviving general partnership, need no regulatory pep talk. Each partner is liable for the debts of the firm to the full extent of his or her net worth. My colleague Paul Isaac, who is with me today—he doubles as my food and beverage taster— has an intriguing suggestion for instilling the credit culture more deeply in our semi-socialized banking institutions.
We can’t turn limited liability corporations into general partnerships. Nor could we easily reinstate the so-called double liability law on bank stockholders. But what we could and should do, Paul urges, is to claw back that portion of the compensation paid out by a failed bank in excess of 10 times the average wage in manufacturing for the seven full calendar years before the ruined bank hit the wall. Such a clawback would not be subject to averaging or offset one year to the next. And it would be payable in cash.
The idea, Paul explains, is twofold. First, to remove the government from the business of determining what is, or is not, risky—really, the government doesn’t know. Second, to increase the personal risk of failure for senior management, but stopping short of the sword of Damocles of unlimited personal liability. If bankers are venal, why not harness that venality in the public interest? For the better part of 100 years, and especially in the past five, we have socialized the risks of high finance. All too often, the bankers who take risks don’t themselves bear them. By all means, let the capitalists keep the upside. But let them bear their full share of the downside.
In March 2009, the Financial Times published a letter to the editor concerning the then novel subject of QE. “I can now understand the term ‘quantitative easing,’ wrote Gerald B. Hill of Stourbridge, West Midlands, “but . . . realize I can no longer understand the meaning of the word ‘money.’”
There isn’t time, in these brief remarks, to persuade you of the necessity of a return to the classical gold standard. I would need another 10 minutes, at least. But I anticipate some skepticism. Very well then, consider this fact: On March 27, 1973, not quite 39 years ago, the forerunner to today’s G-20 solemnly agreed that the special drawing right, a.k.a. SDR, “will become the principal reserve asset and the role of gold and reserve currencies will be reduced.” That was the establishment— i.e., you—talking. If a worldwide accord on the efficacy of the SDR is possible, all things are possible, including a return to the least imperfect international monetary standard that has ever worked.
Notice, I do not say the perfect monetary system or best monetary system ever dreamt up by a theoretical economist. The classical gold standard, 1879-1914, “with all its anomalies and exceptions . . . ‘worked.’” The quoted words I draw from a book entitled, “The Rules of the Game: Reform and Evolution in the International Monetary System,” by Kenneth W. Dam, a law professor and former provost of the University of Chicago. Dam’s was a grudging admiration, a little like that of the New York Fed’s own Arthur Bloomfield, whose 1959 monograph, “Monetary Policy under the International Gold Standard,” was published by yourselves. No, Bloomfield points out, as does Dam, the classical gold standard was not quite automatic. But it was synchronous, it was self-correcting and it did deliver both national solvency and, over the long run, uncanny price stability. The banks were solvent, too, even the central banks, which, as Bloomfield noted, monetized no government debt.
The visible hallmark of the classical gold standard was, of course, gold—to every currency holder was given the option of exchanging metal for paper, or paper for metal, at a fixed, statutory rate. Exchange rates were fixed, and I mean fixed. “It is quite remarkable,” Dam writes, “that from 1879 to 1914, in a period considerably longer than from 1945 to the demise of Bretton Woods in 1971, there were no changes of parities between the United States, Britain, France, Germany—not to speak of a number of smaller European countries.” The fruits of this fixedness were many and sweet. Among them, again to quote Dam, “a flow of private foreign investment on a scale the world had never seen, and, relative to other economic aggregates, was never to see again.”
Incidentally, the source of my purchased copy of “Rules of the Game” was the library of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Apparently, President Lockhart isn’t preparing, as I am—as, may I suggest, as you should be—for the coming of classical gold standard, Part II. By way of preparation, I commend to you a new book by my friend Lew Lehrman, “The True Gold Standard: A Monetary Reform Plan without Official Reserve Currencies: How We Get from Here to There.”
It’s a little rich, my extolling gold to an institution that sits on 216 million troy ounces of the stuff. Valued at $42.222 per ounce, the hoard in your basement is worth $9.1 billion. Incidentally, the official price was quoted in SDRs, $35 to the ounce—now there’s a quixotic choice for you. In 2008, when your in-house publication, “The Key to the Gold Vault,” was published, the market value was $194 billion. Today, the market value is $359 billion, which is encouraging only if you personally happen to be long gold bullion. Otherwise, it strikes me as a pretty severe condemnation of modern central banking.
And what would I do if, following the inauguration of Ron Paul, I were sitting in the chairman’s office? I would do what I could to begin the normalization of interest rates. I would invite the Wall Street Journal’s Jon Hilsenrath to lunch to let him know that the Fed is now well over its deflation phobia and has put aside its Atlas complex. “It’s capitalism for us, Jon,” I would say. Next I would call President Dudley. “Bill,” I would say, pleasantly, “we’re not exactly leading from the front in the regulatory drive to reduce the ratio of assets to equity at the big American financial institutions. Do you have to be leveraged 89:1?” Finally, I would redirect the efforts of the brainiacs at the Federal Reserve Board research division. “Ladies and gentlemen,” I would say, “enough with ‘Bayesian Analysis of Stochastic Volatility Models with Levy Jumps: Application to Risk Analysis.’ How much better it would please me if you wrote to the subject, ‘Command and Control No More: A Gold Standard for the 21st Century.’” Finally, my pièce de résistance, I would commission, staff and ceremonially open the Fed’s first Office of Unintended Consequences.
Let me thank you once more for the honor that your invitation does me. Concerning little Grant’s and the big Fed, I will quote in parting the opening sentences of an editorial that appeared in a provincial Irish newspaper in the fateful year 1914. It read: “We give this solemn warning to Kaiser Wilhelm: The Skibbereen Eagle has its eye on you.”
Constellation Station or No Station in Century City
(This article originally appeared in the May 1, 2012 edition of the Century City News)
By Michael Douglas Carlin
I attended the board meeting of Metro this past week. I was in awe of our democratic process. The mayor presided with a presidential flare. He made us laugh and he kept the process moving. In the face of very sharp criticism he kept his cool. Whatever you might think of the mayor he is heading on to higher offices and more important roles… this is clear.
The City of Beverly Hills was in full force attempting to stop the subway from tunneling under the high school. Their mayor, city council, and city attorney all spoke during the public comment periods. Their argument was chiefly “it isn’t safe to tunnel under a school.” That didn’t stop the casting of aspersions; “Rich developers are conspiring to place the stop in the heart of Century City.”
This fight isn’t new. Beverly Hills and all incorporated cities within Los Angeles County have been building within their city’s limits at alarming rates. They get tax revenues from these developments. The city of Los Angeles has lagged in approving these buildings and all of the incorporated cities have capitalized on what has been a weakness in Los Angeles. All of this development does spill over onto the streets of Los Angeles that has inadequate infrastructure to handle the traffic as people commute to jobs in these buildings. Beverly Hills has been one of the most prolific cities in capitalizing on the bureaucracy of Los Angeles.
When Century City (The City of the Future) was formed, over 50 years ago, there was supposed to be a freeway to get traffic into and out of this new business hub. The city of Beverly Hills organized to kill this important route that was called the “Beverly Hills Freeway.” This caused developments to slow because Century City was miles away from current freeways and getting to and from the hub proved difficult at rush hour. This subway would make Century City more relevant. Killing the stop at Constellation and Avenue of the Stars would essentially kill the subway for Century City and allow the City of Beverly Hills to continue their development pattern with less competition from Century City.
How many of you remember when Creative Artists Agency moved to Century City? How much revenue did the City of Beverly Hills lose? This isn’t a fight with a rich developer on one side and the people on the other side… this is a fight with rich people on both sides. Isn’t it odd that officials in Beverly Hills would be treating this like they were economically challenged in calling out the Century City developers?
The scientists have spoken and proclaimed that Santa Monica and Moreno isn’t a safe site for a subway stop because of two faults that intersect there. They have said that Constellation and Avenue of the Stars is safe. This includes Lucy Jones of the USGS, who was an unpaid volunteer.
So let’s take the rich developer interests out of the equation from both sides of this argument. What is in the best interests of the people? More ridership will embrace the subway at a stop in the heart of Century City. More workers (average people like you and me) will get on the subway and commute. Building on Santa Monica Blvd. isn’t safe. How many high school students could find themselves in that subway station during an earthquake? Let’s not put kids at risk. Experts have weighed in on building a subway under the high school and concluded that it is safe. Perhaps during the actual tunneling process no kids should be in the school. Perhaps the tunneling could be done during Spring Break.
Los Angeles has lagged in the development windfall that has struck our city. They shoulder an inordinate amount of the costs of the infrastructure to support the development of the incorporated cities. The tax base of Los Angeles has also lagged. This has created pressure on the budget of the city. Today we sit at a critical juncture to get it right for Los Angeles by getting it right for the workers in Century City. The subway is an important asset for the most important business hub on the West Coast. Let’s defer to the experts and scientists by building something safe and meaningful for the future… in the city of the future.
Our democratic process is awesome. Everybody gets to be heard, file lawsuits, or stop progress… for a time and when the people rally together to shirk the bullies the right thing gets done. I would hope that all of us get involved to see this issue through to a successful result for Century City and Los Angeles. Century City needs a subway… Los Angeles needs Century City. They majority of the public comments were in favor of the Constellation Station and they all seemed to be making logical appeals instead of emotional pleas. The Metro board approved the subway through La Cienega and Wilshire. There will be a hearing about the Beverly Hills findings and based upon this “new information” the Metro Board will plot the next step.
By Michael Douglas Carlin
I attended the board meeting of Metro this past week. I was in awe of our democratic process. The mayor presided with a presidential flare. He made us laugh and he kept the process moving. In the face of very sharp criticism he kept his cool. Whatever you might think of the mayor he is heading on to higher offices and more important roles… this is clear.
The City of Beverly Hills was in full force attempting to stop the subway from tunneling under the high school. Their mayor, city council, and city attorney all spoke during the public comment periods. Their argument was chiefly “it isn’t safe to tunnel under a school.” That didn’t stop the casting of aspersions; “Rich developers are conspiring to place the stop in the heart of Century City.”
This fight isn’t new. Beverly Hills and all incorporated cities within Los Angeles County have been building within their city’s limits at alarming rates. They get tax revenues from these developments. The city of Los Angeles has lagged in approving these buildings and all of the incorporated cities have capitalized on what has been a weakness in Los Angeles. All of this development does spill over onto the streets of Los Angeles that has inadequate infrastructure to handle the traffic as people commute to jobs in these buildings. Beverly Hills has been one of the most prolific cities in capitalizing on the bureaucracy of Los Angeles.
When Century City (The City of the Future) was formed, over 50 years ago, there was supposed to be a freeway to get traffic into and out of this new business hub. The city of Beverly Hills organized to kill this important route that was called the “Beverly Hills Freeway.” This caused developments to slow because Century City was miles away from current freeways and getting to and from the hub proved difficult at rush hour. This subway would make Century City more relevant. Killing the stop at Constellation and Avenue of the Stars would essentially kill the subway for Century City and allow the City of Beverly Hills to continue their development pattern with less competition from Century City.
How many of you remember when Creative Artists Agency moved to Century City? How much revenue did the City of Beverly Hills lose? This isn’t a fight with a rich developer on one side and the people on the other side… this is a fight with rich people on both sides. Isn’t it odd that officials in Beverly Hills would be treating this like they were economically challenged in calling out the Century City developers?
The scientists have spoken and proclaimed that Santa Monica and Moreno isn’t a safe site for a subway stop because of two faults that intersect there. They have said that Constellation and Avenue of the Stars is safe. This includes Lucy Jones of the USGS, who was an unpaid volunteer.
So let’s take the rich developer interests out of the equation from both sides of this argument. What is in the best interests of the people? More ridership will embrace the subway at a stop in the heart of Century City. More workers (average people like you and me) will get on the subway and commute. Building on Santa Monica Blvd. isn’t safe. How many high school students could find themselves in that subway station during an earthquake? Let’s not put kids at risk. Experts have weighed in on building a subway under the high school and concluded that it is safe. Perhaps during the actual tunneling process no kids should be in the school. Perhaps the tunneling could be done during Spring Break.
Los Angeles has lagged in the development windfall that has struck our city. They shoulder an inordinate amount of the costs of the infrastructure to support the development of the incorporated cities. The tax base of Los Angeles has also lagged. This has created pressure on the budget of the city. Today we sit at a critical juncture to get it right for Los Angeles by getting it right for the workers in Century City. The subway is an important asset for the most important business hub on the West Coast. Let’s defer to the experts and scientists by building something safe and meaningful for the future… in the city of the future.
Our democratic process is awesome. Everybody gets to be heard, file lawsuits, or stop progress… for a time and when the people rally together to shirk the bullies the right thing gets done. I would hope that all of us get involved to see this issue through to a successful result for Century City and Los Angeles. Century City needs a subway… Los Angeles needs Century City. They majority of the public comments were in favor of the Constellation Station and they all seemed to be making logical appeals instead of emotional pleas. The Metro board approved the subway through La Cienega and Wilshire. There will be a hearing about the Beverly Hills findings and based upon this “new information” the Metro Board will plot the next step.
PARK GRILL AT INTERCONTINENTAL LOS ANGELES PRESENTS THE MAD HATTER’S MOTHER’S DAY BRUNCH
(This article originally appeared in the May 1, 2012 edition of the Century City News)
Park Grill will be hosting a spectacular Mad Hatter’s Mother’s Day Brunch in the garden at InterContinental Los Angeles from 11am to 3pm on Sunday 13th May. Mothers are asked to please wear their best hats and the lady with the most fabulous hat (as chosen by our General Manager, Mr Steve Choe) will win a weekend stay in one of the hotel’s fabulous Luxury Suites!
Children are welcome and there will be some exciting games and activities just for them including a face painter and Mad Hatter themed arts and crafts! There will also be live music from the fabulou Des Afinados featuring Jessica Vautor (Bossa Nova with Caribbean flavor).
Park Grill will be serving all of your brunch favorites plus small bites such as Mini Maine Lobster Rolls, Mini Philly Cheesesteaks and Crispy Rice with Spicy Tuna. There will be a carving station with Prime Rib of Beef, Barolo Reduction and Horseradish Cream and a fabulous raw bar serving Snow Crab Claws, Peel and Eat Shrimp, West Coast Oysters in the Half Shell and Peruvian Style Mahi Mahi Ceviche.
Pastry Chef Orlando will provide a delightful selection of his hand crafted miniature desserts to round off this springtime feast!
Please call Park Grill at 310 284 6536 to make your reservations. Prices are: $65 per adult; $80 for brunch and unlimited Mimosas, Bloody Marys and Bellinis; $29 for children 4-12 years and free for children under 4 (tax and gratuity not included).
For full menu and further information, please visit our website www.intercontinentallosangeles.com
About InterContinental Los Angeles
An urban oasis on Avenue of the Stars - The renowned landmark of the InterContinental Los Angeles Hotel is just minutes away from Beverly Hills, major entertainment studios and sun-drenched beaches. The hotel features 361 spacious and stylish guestrooms including 148 suites, all of which offer inspiring panoramic views of Hollywood, Beverly Hills and the Pacific Ocean. Guests can dine in either the Park Grill Restaurant or in the elegant Lobby Lounge which offers tapas style shared plates, including the award winning sushi creations of Bar- Hayama. InterContinental Los Angeles offers 16,650 square feet of meeting space, including the newly renovated Grand Salon with more than 4,000 square feet of divisible space. Additional hotel amenities include
SPA InterContinental featuring Zen-inspired villas, a 24 hour fitness center, rooftop yoga and Zumba, sauna and steam room, as well as an outdoor heated infinity swimming pool. The InterContinental brand is located in more than 60 countries, operating 138 hotels worldwide and 48 hotels in the Americas region.
For more information and to make a reservation please visit www.intercontinentallosangeles.com or call 310.284.6500
Park Grill will be hosting a spectacular Mad Hatter’s Mother’s Day Brunch in the garden at InterContinental Los Angeles from 11am to 3pm on Sunday 13th May. Mothers are asked to please wear their best hats and the lady with the most fabulous hat (as chosen by our General Manager, Mr Steve Choe) will win a weekend stay in one of the hotel’s fabulous Luxury Suites!
Children are welcome and there will be some exciting games and activities just for them including a face painter and Mad Hatter themed arts and crafts! There will also be live music from the fabulou Des Afinados featuring Jessica Vautor (Bossa Nova with Caribbean flavor).
Park Grill will be serving all of your brunch favorites plus small bites such as Mini Maine Lobster Rolls, Mini Philly Cheesesteaks and Crispy Rice with Spicy Tuna. There will be a carving station with Prime Rib of Beef, Barolo Reduction and Horseradish Cream and a fabulous raw bar serving Snow Crab Claws, Peel and Eat Shrimp, West Coast Oysters in the Half Shell and Peruvian Style Mahi Mahi Ceviche.
Pastry Chef Orlando will provide a delightful selection of his hand crafted miniature desserts to round off this springtime feast!
Please call Park Grill at 310 284 6536 to make your reservations. Prices are: $65 per adult; $80 for brunch and unlimited Mimosas, Bloody Marys and Bellinis; $29 for children 4-12 years and free for children under 4 (tax and gratuity not included).
For full menu and further information, please visit our website www.intercontinentallosangeles.com
About InterContinental Los Angeles
An urban oasis on Avenue of the Stars - The renowned landmark of the InterContinental Los Angeles Hotel is just minutes away from Beverly Hills, major entertainment studios and sun-drenched beaches. The hotel features 361 spacious and stylish guestrooms including 148 suites, all of which offer inspiring panoramic views of Hollywood, Beverly Hills and the Pacific Ocean. Guests can dine in either the Park Grill Restaurant or in the elegant Lobby Lounge which offers tapas style shared plates, including the award winning sushi creations of Bar- Hayama. InterContinental Los Angeles offers 16,650 square feet of meeting space, including the newly renovated Grand Salon with more than 4,000 square feet of divisible space. Additional hotel amenities include
SPA InterContinental featuring Zen-inspired villas, a 24 hour fitness center, rooftop yoga and Zumba, sauna and steam room, as well as an outdoor heated infinity swimming pool. The InterContinental brand is located in more than 60 countries, operating 138 hotels worldwide and 48 hotels in the Americas region.
For more information and to make a reservation please visit www.intercontinentallosangeles.com or call 310.284.6500
INTERCONTINENTAL LOS ANGELES LAUNCHES STATE OF THE ART RENOVATED GRAND SALON BALLROOM
(This article originally appeared in the May 1, 2012 edition of the Century City News)
The InterContinental Los Angeles opened its newly renovated Grand Salon Ballroom with an event for around 500 guests last week. The contemporary space with chrome, white and charcoal accents has an extended pre-function area with built-in LED lights, and state of the art technology. Music was provided by the Infusion Experience, from 11H Entertainment, and guests were treated to chair massages and manicures from Spa InterContinental.
The official ribbon cutting was performed by Ms. Susan Bursk, President and CEO Century City Chamber of Commerce, Ms. Mari Miyoshi, Hotel Owner and President Sumitomo Realty Development USA, and Mr. Steve Choe, General Manager InterContinental Los Angeles.
On April 12th 2012, InterContinental Los Angeles launched their newly renovated event space – their Grand Salon Ballroom and Foyer. With chrome, white and charcoal accents, this elegant ballroom space is an ideal backdrop for any event with a modern and sleek look and feel. With built in LED lights, and state of the art technology, the timeless Grand Salon Ballroom is the perfect choice for any wedding, meeting or event.
The hotel was able to keep the integrity of the original structure and many of its unique features including the chandeliers from the original construction in 1988. The brass from the chandeliers has been resurfaced to sparkling chrome and the crystals were preserved and revitalized to create a breathtaking centerpiece. Being situated on the back lot of 20th Century Fox studio and keeping in line with the hotel’s rich entertainment heritage, set designers from local movie and TV studios were brought in to hand paint the woodwork with their ‘scenic art’ for a spectacular and dramatic effect.
In keeping with the hotel’s mission to sustain the environment, and to enhance the design of the Ballroom, LED lighting has been introduced into the space. The lights can reflect any color from the color spectrum allowing clients an infinite number of options for their event. The versatile Grand Salon Ballroom accommodates 400 for a reception, 300 for a seated dinner and 200 classroom style. The adjoining Grand Salon Foyer has also been extended and makes a perfect break or pre-reception area. For all catering and event queries, please contact Robert Nichols, Director of Catering, at robert.nichols@ihg.com or call310 284 6500.
Says General Manager of the InterContinental, Mr. Steve Choe, “I grew up coming to this hotel for some of the most memorable and amazing events having attended the local high school of Beverly Hills. I was always wowed by this hotel and it’s truly a dream come true and an honor to be at the helm of this great property. The staff here are special and the very best I have ever worked with. Our new Grand Salon Ballroom is a wonderful compliment to our staff in assisting our legacy of delivering these memorable and amazing experiences for the generations to come.”
This project was a great experience in working closely with our Owner and President of Sumitomo Realty Development, USA. I realize that in today’s hotel world it is not common to work daily with an owner on such a project, however I have to say it truly made the process much easier than typical renovations and the outcome exceeded our expectations. So a very special ‘thank you’ to Ms. Mari Miyoshi as this entire project would have not been possible without her support.’
About InterContinental Los Angeles
An urban oasis on Avenue of the Stars - The renowned landmark of the InterContinental Los Angeles Hotel is just minutes away from Beverly Hills, major entertainment studios and sun-drenched beaches. The hotel features 361 spacious and stylish guestrooms including 148 suites, all of which offer inspiring panoramic views of Hollywood, Beverly Hills and the Pacific Ocean.
Guests can dine in either the Park Grill Restaurant or in the elegant Lobby Lounge which offers tapas style shared plates, including the award winning sushi creations of Bar-Hayama. InterContinental Los Angeles offers 16,650 square feet of meeting space, including the newly renovated Grand Salon with more than 4,000 square feet of divisible space. Additional hotel amenities include SPA InterContinental featuring Zen-inspired villas, a 24 hour fitness center, rooftop yoga and Zumba, sauna and steam room, as well as an outdoor heated infinity swimming pool. The InterContinental brand is located in more than 60 countries, operating 138 hotels worldwide and 48 hotels in the Americas region. For more information and to make a reservation please visit www.intercontinentallosangeles.com or call 310.284.6500
The InterContinental Los Angeles opened its newly renovated Grand Salon Ballroom with an event for around 500 guests last week. The contemporary space with chrome, white and charcoal accents has an extended pre-function area with built-in LED lights, and state of the art technology. Music was provided by the Infusion Experience, from 11H Entertainment, and guests were treated to chair massages and manicures from Spa InterContinental.
The official ribbon cutting was performed by Ms. Susan Bursk, President and CEO Century City Chamber of Commerce, Ms. Mari Miyoshi, Hotel Owner and President Sumitomo Realty Development USA, and Mr. Steve Choe, General Manager InterContinental Los Angeles.
On April 12th 2012, InterContinental Los Angeles launched their newly renovated event space – their Grand Salon Ballroom and Foyer. With chrome, white and charcoal accents, this elegant ballroom space is an ideal backdrop for any event with a modern and sleek look and feel. With built in LED lights, and state of the art technology, the timeless Grand Salon Ballroom is the perfect choice for any wedding, meeting or event.The hotel was able to keep the integrity of the original structure and many of its unique features including the chandeliers from the original construction in 1988. The brass from the chandeliers has been resurfaced to sparkling chrome and the crystals were preserved and revitalized to create a breathtaking centerpiece. Being situated on the back lot of 20th Century Fox studio and keeping in line with the hotel’s rich entertainment heritage, set designers from local movie and TV studios were brought in to hand paint the woodwork with their ‘scenic art’ for a spectacular and dramatic effect.
In keeping with the hotel’s mission to sustain the environment, and to enhance the design of the Ballroom, LED lighting has been introduced into the space. The lights can reflect any color from the color spectrum allowing clients an infinite number of options for their event. The versatile Grand Salon Ballroom accommodates 400 for a reception, 300 for a seated dinner and 200 classroom style. The adjoining Grand Salon Foyer has also been extended and makes a perfect break or pre-reception area. For all catering and event queries, please contact Robert Nichols, Director of Catering, at robert.nichols@ihg.com or call310 284 6500.
Says General Manager of the InterContinental, Mr. Steve Choe, “I grew up coming to this hotel for some of the most memorable and amazing events having attended the local high school of Beverly Hills. I was always wowed by this hotel and it’s truly a dream come true and an honor to be at the helm of this great property. The staff here are special and the very best I have ever worked with. Our new Grand Salon Ballroom is a wonderful compliment to our staff in assisting our legacy of delivering these memorable and amazing experiences for the generations to come.”
This project was a great experience in working closely with our Owner and President of Sumitomo Realty Development, USA. I realize that in today’s hotel world it is not common to work daily with an owner on such a project, however I have to say it truly made the process much easier than typical renovations and the outcome exceeded our expectations. So a very special ‘thank you’ to Ms. Mari Miyoshi as this entire project would have not been possible without her support.’
About InterContinental Los Angeles
An urban oasis on Avenue of the Stars - The renowned landmark of the InterContinental Los Angeles Hotel is just minutes away from Beverly Hills, major entertainment studios and sun-drenched beaches. The hotel features 361 spacious and stylish guestrooms including 148 suites, all of which offer inspiring panoramic views of Hollywood, Beverly Hills and the Pacific Ocean.
Guests can dine in either the Park Grill Restaurant or in the elegant Lobby Lounge which offers tapas style shared plates, including the award winning sushi creations of Bar-Hayama. InterContinental Los Angeles offers 16,650 square feet of meeting space, including the newly renovated Grand Salon with more than 4,000 square feet of divisible space. Additional hotel amenities include SPA InterContinental featuring Zen-inspired villas, a 24 hour fitness center, rooftop yoga and Zumba, sauna and steam room, as well as an outdoor heated infinity swimming pool. The InterContinental brand is located in more than 60 countries, operating 138 hotels worldwide and 48 hotels in the Americas region. For more information and to make a reservation please visit www.intercontinentallosangeles.com or call 310.284.6500
Friday, March 28, 2014
Love Buzz - When Love Fails
(This article originally appeared in the Feb 8th, 2011 edition of the Century City News)
By Anita De Francesco, MA
Relationship Specialist
So you’re looking for the love of your life and you want it to last forever! Now that you’re in this mess for the last year and you discover this relationship is going nowhere and nowhere soon for that matter. It is as if you exist for each other’s time here on earth. Wasting time as some may call it and others may call it growing in time. Well you know that is exactly what we are all doing but sometimes we like to carve out the differences and make each part of our life have meaning, a concern and purpose. Imagine we are all just zombies roaming the earth like a pack of animals and finding and identifying ourselves through the relationships we make.
So now you may have to end this relationship because it doesn’t meet your expectations. You are about to face pain, sorrow, regret, sadness and more. So what do you do now? End it and find someone else or take the time to understand your choices and patterns that you are webbed into. I have been in so many relationships and have grown and learned from every one of them. Some were just for fun and others had more meaning and others I wanted to keep forever. The number one thing to know before going into a relationship is that they do end. Love is a wandering willow, as easy as we get it that is how easy it can get lost. The idea with love is to keep it focused. To keep it focused you must be clear of your insecurities and go beyond all that to find the true meaning of yourself and then love will become more focused. Connecting with someone is to teach you about yourself so that when the right one comes along you are ready. I meet people who dated one or two people and got married and have no real social relationship or sex skills at all and need to be taught. With dating one should put a time on where, when and who you spend it with, because you don’t want to find yourself going past what your clock may be. In other words taking the time to choose the right person. Having the determination that you want to be with this partner then it could never fail. This takes commitment. Pain, sacrifices and disappointments are always going to be a part of love but we need to learn bravery of the heart.
Going a little deeper here with love and relationships; who says that they have to go anywhere. Enjoying each other for who you are and the time that you are given together is also a choice. It is now a time to let go of the expectations and enjoy the moments for what they are. Relationships teach us growth of the soul and spirit.
Love fails for many reasons but a big one is communication. Love dies because we haven’t yet learned how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness, illness and wounds. It fails because of weariness, struggle, and withering. Saying what you wanted to say but couldn’t and saying it from your full being rather than halfway. When you get into the relationship open your eyes and see if it is two or one sided. This is one of the first things to look for. Think about why and what attracted you to this person in the first place. If it was physical in nature then that is what you get and that is not a bad thing but rather an honest thing. But if you looked beyond the physical then there may be something there. You need to establish this territory and you need to be patient. Being patient can mean not rushing into the bedroom, taking the moments and breathing and spacing each other’s interactions. Relationships should involve looking after the interactions of each other about caring and sharing and about affection. There is a certain amount of satisfaction and gratification that go with all this. If you want to sustain and hold onto the relationship here are some tips:
• Take a relationship inventory every 4 weeks. This means assess what you have done and where you think it is going. Make a list of all the good and bad things you like so far.
• Imagine for a moment where you would be if you and this partner lasted and would you like that place. Now be honest with yourself here.
• Every 3 weeks take out the time with your partner for a night of communication about each other. Discuss things and find out where each other is.
• Notice any red flags. Even if you don’t want to see them then write them down on a piece of paper and put them in a drawer for later. Just writing them will help your emotions to acknowledge this later.
• Before going in know what it is that you want, and know how much time you have for this investment.
• Take dating steps and structure and strategize every relationship. There are the sex ones, the casual ones and then the ones to bring home to mom. But mostly honor and love each and every one of them for what they bring you today even if it is the booty call. The honoring and respecting everyone will bring you integrity and pureness and true love. Honor your sluts.
• Understand the misleading moments and arguing. Have the confidence to hail the moment.
• Carve out the time to learn your partner. Pick the date nights that are for fun and sex and then pick those other nights that are for learning more about each other’s mind and then when you get home make some written notes about what you learned
• Another cool thing to do is to share a journal together. For example when you go places you each write a page about how the evening went and you close the book and don’t read it until later. One of you will have to take the responsibility of holding and bringing the journal out on the meeting times. This writing together can teach you so much about yourself.
Isn’t that what it’s all about; the learning of the self. So then how could love fail, it could only get better.
Do you feel stuck and in a rut, depressed or anxious or overall sluggish? I practice Reichian, Gestalt, somatic movement, and counseling/bodywork integrative therapies which involves focused breathing to help stimulate the emotions thus re-patterning the nervous system. I help you to focus on the negative voices and thoughts that create the stress and to resolve those unwanted interruptions that get in the way of your life process. Those stiff armored muscles that block sensation and energy flow will eventually soften.
The rage sitting in the muscles will unfold allowing more feelings of pleasure, more creativeness, freeing blocked energies and sexual dysfunction. Modern society has forced the human character to live in unnatural ways holding back basic needs and instincts. This process of breathing deeply sends messages to the brain which is an effective way to release anger, to let go of baggage, and to feel more alive and trusting thus living in a higher self esteem.
Anita De Francesco, M.A.
www.tantrawisdom.com
info@tantrawisdom.com
310-210-1464
By Anita De Francesco, MA
Relationship Specialist
So you’re looking for the love of your life and you want it to last forever! Now that you’re in this mess for the last year and you discover this relationship is going nowhere and nowhere soon for that matter. It is as if you exist for each other’s time here on earth. Wasting time as some may call it and others may call it growing in time. Well you know that is exactly what we are all doing but sometimes we like to carve out the differences and make each part of our life have meaning, a concern and purpose. Imagine we are all just zombies roaming the earth like a pack of animals and finding and identifying ourselves through the relationships we make.
So now you may have to end this relationship because it doesn’t meet your expectations. You are about to face pain, sorrow, regret, sadness and more. So what do you do now? End it and find someone else or take the time to understand your choices and patterns that you are webbed into. I have been in so many relationships and have grown and learned from every one of them. Some were just for fun and others had more meaning and others I wanted to keep forever. The number one thing to know before going into a relationship is that they do end. Love is a wandering willow, as easy as we get it that is how easy it can get lost. The idea with love is to keep it focused. To keep it focused you must be clear of your insecurities and go beyond all that to find the true meaning of yourself and then love will become more focused. Connecting with someone is to teach you about yourself so that when the right one comes along you are ready. I meet people who dated one or two people and got married and have no real social relationship or sex skills at all and need to be taught. With dating one should put a time on where, when and who you spend it with, because you don’t want to find yourself going past what your clock may be. In other words taking the time to choose the right person. Having the determination that you want to be with this partner then it could never fail. This takes commitment. Pain, sacrifices and disappointments are always going to be a part of love but we need to learn bravery of the heart.
Going a little deeper here with love and relationships; who says that they have to go anywhere. Enjoying each other for who you are and the time that you are given together is also a choice. It is now a time to let go of the expectations and enjoy the moments for what they are. Relationships teach us growth of the soul and spirit.
Love fails for many reasons but a big one is communication. Love dies because we haven’t yet learned how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness, illness and wounds. It fails because of weariness, struggle, and withering. Saying what you wanted to say but couldn’t and saying it from your full being rather than halfway. When you get into the relationship open your eyes and see if it is two or one sided. This is one of the first things to look for. Think about why and what attracted you to this person in the first place. If it was physical in nature then that is what you get and that is not a bad thing but rather an honest thing. But if you looked beyond the physical then there may be something there. You need to establish this territory and you need to be patient. Being patient can mean not rushing into the bedroom, taking the moments and breathing and spacing each other’s interactions. Relationships should involve looking after the interactions of each other about caring and sharing and about affection. There is a certain amount of satisfaction and gratification that go with all this. If you want to sustain and hold onto the relationship here are some tips:
• Take a relationship inventory every 4 weeks. This means assess what you have done and where you think it is going. Make a list of all the good and bad things you like so far.
• Imagine for a moment where you would be if you and this partner lasted and would you like that place. Now be honest with yourself here.
• Every 3 weeks take out the time with your partner for a night of communication about each other. Discuss things and find out where each other is.
• Notice any red flags. Even if you don’t want to see them then write them down on a piece of paper and put them in a drawer for later. Just writing them will help your emotions to acknowledge this later.
• Before going in know what it is that you want, and know how much time you have for this investment.
• Take dating steps and structure and strategize every relationship. There are the sex ones, the casual ones and then the ones to bring home to mom. But mostly honor and love each and every one of them for what they bring you today even if it is the booty call. The honoring and respecting everyone will bring you integrity and pureness and true love. Honor your sluts.
• Understand the misleading moments and arguing. Have the confidence to hail the moment.
• Carve out the time to learn your partner. Pick the date nights that are for fun and sex and then pick those other nights that are for learning more about each other’s mind and then when you get home make some written notes about what you learned
• Another cool thing to do is to share a journal together. For example when you go places you each write a page about how the evening went and you close the book and don’t read it until later. One of you will have to take the responsibility of holding and bringing the journal out on the meeting times. This writing together can teach you so much about yourself.
Isn’t that what it’s all about; the learning of the self. So then how could love fail, it could only get better.
Do you feel stuck and in a rut, depressed or anxious or overall sluggish? I practice Reichian, Gestalt, somatic movement, and counseling/bodywork integrative therapies which involves focused breathing to help stimulate the emotions thus re-patterning the nervous system. I help you to focus on the negative voices and thoughts that create the stress and to resolve those unwanted interruptions that get in the way of your life process. Those stiff armored muscles that block sensation and energy flow will eventually soften.
The rage sitting in the muscles will unfold allowing more feelings of pleasure, more creativeness, freeing blocked energies and sexual dysfunction. Modern society has forced the human character to live in unnatural ways holding back basic needs and instincts. This process of breathing deeply sends messages to the brain which is an effective way to release anger, to let go of baggage, and to feel more alive and trusting thus living in a higher self esteem.
Anita De Francesco, M.A.
www.tantrawisdom.com
info@tantrawisdom.com
310-210-1464
Century City Real Estate - Opportunities In 2011
(This article originally appeared in the Feb 8th, 2011 edition of the Century City News)
According to the recent recap of the 2010 California housing market by the California Association of Realtors (“C.A.R.”) , the year ahead should bring stability and opportunities. The C.A.R. report looked at median price, unsold inventory and sales as prognosticators for the market.
The analysis found that the 21% gain in median price above the February 2009 trough could be a good indication of the beginning of stability in the housing market. The C.A.R expects annual sales and median price in California to rise by 2% this year.
The report explains that the “unsold inventory index” is a good indicator of home prices. When the amount of housing inventory is below a 7 month supply, it usually leads to price appreciation. The November unsold inventory index was 6.2 months. This reflects the amount of time it would take to sell the entire current housing inventory. This number is 13% below the long-run average of 7.1 months and 63% below the recent January 2008 peak of 16.6 months.
It is a positive sign that the unsold inventory index has stayed at a healthy range throughout 2010 between 4.6 and 6.6 months. This is another indication
of the beginning of stability.
Further, sales are also doing fairly well taking historical data into consideration. Year over year sales declined almost 10% but the seasonally adjusted sales in November of last year were up 93% from the trough 3 years ago. This is 19% above the long run annual average over the last 39 years.
In addition, the percentage of distressed sales as compared to total sales declined to 41% from 46% in 2009. Although there is still a heavy volume of distressed properties, the decline supports the forecast that the housing market is heading up.
The California Association of Realtors’ outlook is consistent with the report by the UCLA Anderson School of Business which sees 2011 as a transition year of stabilization. However, there are still uncertainties in the market including shadow inventory which could impact the length of time it takes for sellers to sell their properties.
With so many instances of inflation recently from the price of gas to coffee to hamburgers (the price of the BK Whopper Junior has risen from $1 to $1.49 over the past year or so), when will housing show the same inflation? Now may be a good time to review your options.
With interest rates still at historically low rates, there are opportunities for investors, owner-users and international buyers.
To find short pays and foreclosures in your area or for a free consultation to assess your real estate options, contact Bess at 310.291.4111. Bess Hochman is a Real Estate Broker & top producer for more than 15 years. Bess is also distinguished by holding a law degree. Her high-end clientele include celebrities, attorneys, and other professionals that understand the value of a real estate broker with legal expertise and experience. A native of Beverly Hills, Bess credits her success to repeat referrals by her satisfied clients
Bess won’t let you guess. E-mail: Bess.CenturyCitynews@yahoo.com. Bess may be reached at 310.291.4111.
* The sources of information may or may not have been based on information from the combined A/Westside Multiple Listing Service as of 2-04-11. Some listings may not be available as of publication.
c. 2011 Bess Hochman
---------------------------
“Bess is a master negotiator!” says Michael Donaldson, attorney & author of Negotiating For Dummies
Michael Douglas Carlin is the director of the movies Luvicide and American Federale. Recently he completed a ten-year stint as the Publisher and Editor of the Century City News. Here his articles turned into three books: Rise a Knight, A Prescription for Peace, and Peaceful Protests.
According to the recent recap of the 2010 California housing market by the California Association of Realtors (“C.A.R.”) , the year ahead should bring stability and opportunities. The C.A.R. report looked at median price, unsold inventory and sales as prognosticators for the market.
The analysis found that the 21% gain in median price above the February 2009 trough could be a good indication of the beginning of stability in the housing market. The C.A.R expects annual sales and median price in California to rise by 2% this year.
The report explains that the “unsold inventory index” is a good indicator of home prices. When the amount of housing inventory is below a 7 month supply, it usually leads to price appreciation. The November unsold inventory index was 6.2 months. This reflects the amount of time it would take to sell the entire current housing inventory. This number is 13% below the long-run average of 7.1 months and 63% below the recent January 2008 peak of 16.6 months.
It is a positive sign that the unsold inventory index has stayed at a healthy range throughout 2010 between 4.6 and 6.6 months. This is another indication
of the beginning of stability.
Further, sales are also doing fairly well taking historical data into consideration. Year over year sales declined almost 10% but the seasonally adjusted sales in November of last year were up 93% from the trough 3 years ago. This is 19% above the long run annual average over the last 39 years.
In addition, the percentage of distressed sales as compared to total sales declined to 41% from 46% in 2009. Although there is still a heavy volume of distressed properties, the decline supports the forecast that the housing market is heading up.
The California Association of Realtors’ outlook is consistent with the report by the UCLA Anderson School of Business which sees 2011 as a transition year of stabilization. However, there are still uncertainties in the market including shadow inventory which could impact the length of time it takes for sellers to sell their properties.
With so many instances of inflation recently from the price of gas to coffee to hamburgers (the price of the BK Whopper Junior has risen from $1 to $1.49 over the past year or so), when will housing show the same inflation? Now may be a good time to review your options.
With interest rates still at historically low rates, there are opportunities for investors, owner-users and international buyers.
To find short pays and foreclosures in your area or for a free consultation to assess your real estate options, contact Bess at 310.291.4111. Bess Hochman is a Real Estate Broker & top producer for more than 15 years. Bess is also distinguished by holding a law degree. Her high-end clientele include celebrities, attorneys, and other professionals that understand the value of a real estate broker with legal expertise and experience. A native of Beverly Hills, Bess credits her success to repeat referrals by her satisfied clients
Bess won’t let you guess. E-mail: Bess.CenturyCitynews@yahoo.com. Bess may be reached at 310.291.4111.
* The sources of information may or may not have been based on information from the combined A/Westside Multiple Listing Service as of 2-04-11. Some listings may not be available as of publication.
c. 2011 Bess Hochman
---------------------------
“Bess is a master negotiator!” says Michael Donaldson, attorney & author of Negotiating For Dummies
Michael Douglas Carlin is the director of the movies Luvicide and American Federale. Recently he completed a ten-year stint as the Publisher and Editor of the Century City News. Here his articles turned into three books: Rise a Knight, A Prescription for Peace, and Peaceful Protests.
Love Buzz - Why Do We Hurt The One We Love
(This originally appeared in the July 26th, 2011 edition of the Century City News)
By Anita De Francesco, MA
Relationship Specialist
I generally don’t hurt anyone I love or anyone I don’t love. I don’t hurt human beings but rather I honor them, love them, show compassion and empathy as often as I can. This tells me my heart is working and is being exercised in the most stimulating way I know. I am writing this because I have been hurt so much with love and I often wonder why they love me and then they don’t. I feel that we are put into relationships to learn how to love ourselves even more and so the hate weighs out the love of the person we channeled it to and possibly this is why we go on to hate a former lover just so to get the love back to ourselves. It does make sense to me because to love someone deeply we must first love ourselves and take the love from the heart source and share it with another. We begin to be mean and hateful when it comes to breaking up in an effort to get the love of the self back. Why does it have to be this way? We lend out our love to mates and sometimes we don’t get back what we put out. We need to be more objective with romance because relationships these days are all about sharing the love with everybody and women have yet to learn to come to this maturity in accepting a man in this way.
Romantic relationships continually harness the sense of our self, propelling us to grow. Within every relationship there is growth that we must see. The big question today is why is it so difficult to stay together for a period of time and give each other the fulfillment that we deserve in the relationship. I think we have lost value of what a relationship means. These short half on end relationships are not even worthy anymore. Why get into them for six months to just get out of them which can take longer. It can get so tiring. It’s a wonder our world is so dysfunctional. Then there are those who get married and have that containment and have side affairs which end as well and promises, promises are made and people get hurt. Humans are hurting each other every day in many ways not only in relationships. But relationships are where it all begins and are suppose to teach us.
So just how can we heal the hurt pain? Relationships teach growth and each and every one is a stepping stone to improving yourself. But some stay victim and build defenses and just can’t seem to find the love of life after a bad romance. A study revealed that the mental health of men is more affected by the strains of romance than women. It also revealed that men benefit from support more than women. I believe this is true because men need the attention; they have baby needs that always need fulfillment and women go overboard in being the mommy the nurturer and so on. For women just simply having the relationship matters most whether it provides stress or support. Professor Robin W. Simon quoted in the New York Times; “even though there’s been so much social change in this area, women’s self-worth is still so much tied up with having a boyfriend. My feeling on that is in this day and age yes we should be because men have so many women on strings that just having a boyfriend is the American dream anymore and holding onto him. Look at the stars, Aniston, Madonna and Cher all have a challenge holding onto the relationship.
It seems as though women know how to do relationships and men still need to learn and this could explain the strains of hurt. Although it always looks and feels as though women hurt more and they probably do. I think that women show more emotion and manifest expressive behaviors a lot more than a man simply because they just wanted the relationship. We know it comes with strain and pain. Men learned to stay composed and in control but they have feelings to and they do hurt. They teach themselves to close off the heart because their sexual side comes first whereas women’s hearts are first. We need a little more harmony in these areas. Women tend to find creative outlets for emotional channeling than men and is probably why they look more emotionally stimulated. We want to see the feminine vulnerable spiritual side of a man. Men rely solely on a girlfriend for all the emotional needs. It’s a wonder us women are strong yet some becoming needy that really aren’t. Men actually put the pressure on a woman with their undiffused emotional self. Of course men are more in the moment when it comes to romance where women always look long term and probably so because of the reproductive clock thing. I will leave you with one thought here as Oscar Wilde said: “ each man kills the thing he loves”; however hurting one’s beloved is frequent. Since the beloved is a major source of happiness, this person is also a major threat to our happiness; more than anyone else, the beloved can ruin it. To me this says that on some level we are not deserving of the fulfillment that love brings.
Do you feel stuck and in a rut, depressed or anxious or overall sluggish? I practice Reichian, Gestalt, somatic movement, and counseling/bodywork integrative therapies which involves focused breathing to help stimulate the emotions thus re-patterning the nervous system. I help you to focus on the negative voices and thoughts that create the stress and to resolve those unwanted interruptions that get in the way of your life process. Those stiff armored muscles that block sensation and energy flow will eventually soften.
The rage sitting in the muscles will unfold allowing more feelings of pleasure, more creativeness, freeing blocked energies and sexual dysfunction. Modern society has forced the human character to live in unnatural ways holding back basic needs and instincts. This process of breathing deeply sends messages to the brain which is an effective way to release anger, to let go of baggage, and to feel more alive and trusting thus living in a higher self esteem.
Anita De Francesco, M.A.
www.tantrawisdom.com
info@tantrawisdom.com
310-210-1464
Michael Douglas Carlin is the director of the movies Luvicide and American Federale. Recently he completed a ten-year stint as the Publisher and Editor of the Century City News. Here his articles turned into three books: Rise a Knight, A Prescription for Peace, and Peaceful Protests.
By Anita De Francesco, MA
Relationship Specialist
I generally don’t hurt anyone I love or anyone I don’t love. I don’t hurt human beings but rather I honor them, love them, show compassion and empathy as often as I can. This tells me my heart is working and is being exercised in the most stimulating way I know. I am writing this because I have been hurt so much with love and I often wonder why they love me and then they don’t. I feel that we are put into relationships to learn how to love ourselves even more and so the hate weighs out the love of the person we channeled it to and possibly this is why we go on to hate a former lover just so to get the love back to ourselves. It does make sense to me because to love someone deeply we must first love ourselves and take the love from the heart source and share it with another. We begin to be mean and hateful when it comes to breaking up in an effort to get the love of the self back. Why does it have to be this way? We lend out our love to mates and sometimes we don’t get back what we put out. We need to be more objective with romance because relationships these days are all about sharing the love with everybody and women have yet to learn to come to this maturity in accepting a man in this way.
Romantic relationships continually harness the sense of our self, propelling us to grow. Within every relationship there is growth that we must see. The big question today is why is it so difficult to stay together for a period of time and give each other the fulfillment that we deserve in the relationship. I think we have lost value of what a relationship means. These short half on end relationships are not even worthy anymore. Why get into them for six months to just get out of them which can take longer. It can get so tiring. It’s a wonder our world is so dysfunctional. Then there are those who get married and have that containment and have side affairs which end as well and promises, promises are made and people get hurt. Humans are hurting each other every day in many ways not only in relationships. But relationships are where it all begins and are suppose to teach us.
So just how can we heal the hurt pain? Relationships teach growth and each and every one is a stepping stone to improving yourself. But some stay victim and build defenses and just can’t seem to find the love of life after a bad romance. A study revealed that the mental health of men is more affected by the strains of romance than women. It also revealed that men benefit from support more than women. I believe this is true because men need the attention; they have baby needs that always need fulfillment and women go overboard in being the mommy the nurturer and so on. For women just simply having the relationship matters most whether it provides stress or support. Professor Robin W. Simon quoted in the New York Times; “even though there’s been so much social change in this area, women’s self-worth is still so much tied up with having a boyfriend. My feeling on that is in this day and age yes we should be because men have so many women on strings that just having a boyfriend is the American dream anymore and holding onto him. Look at the stars, Aniston, Madonna and Cher all have a challenge holding onto the relationship.
It seems as though women know how to do relationships and men still need to learn and this could explain the strains of hurt. Although it always looks and feels as though women hurt more and they probably do. I think that women show more emotion and manifest expressive behaviors a lot more than a man simply because they just wanted the relationship. We know it comes with strain and pain. Men learned to stay composed and in control but they have feelings to and they do hurt. They teach themselves to close off the heart because their sexual side comes first whereas women’s hearts are first. We need a little more harmony in these areas. Women tend to find creative outlets for emotional channeling than men and is probably why they look more emotionally stimulated. We want to see the feminine vulnerable spiritual side of a man. Men rely solely on a girlfriend for all the emotional needs. It’s a wonder us women are strong yet some becoming needy that really aren’t. Men actually put the pressure on a woman with their undiffused emotional self. Of course men are more in the moment when it comes to romance where women always look long term and probably so because of the reproductive clock thing. I will leave you with one thought here as Oscar Wilde said: “ each man kills the thing he loves”; however hurting one’s beloved is frequent. Since the beloved is a major source of happiness, this person is also a major threat to our happiness; more than anyone else, the beloved can ruin it. To me this says that on some level we are not deserving of the fulfillment that love brings.
Do you feel stuck and in a rut, depressed or anxious or overall sluggish? I practice Reichian, Gestalt, somatic movement, and counseling/bodywork integrative therapies which involves focused breathing to help stimulate the emotions thus re-patterning the nervous system. I help you to focus on the negative voices and thoughts that create the stress and to resolve those unwanted interruptions that get in the way of your life process. Those stiff armored muscles that block sensation and energy flow will eventually soften.
The rage sitting in the muscles will unfold allowing more feelings of pleasure, more creativeness, freeing blocked energies and sexual dysfunction. Modern society has forced the human character to live in unnatural ways holding back basic needs and instincts. This process of breathing deeply sends messages to the brain which is an effective way to release anger, to let go of baggage, and to feel more alive and trusting thus living in a higher self esteem.
Anita De Francesco, M.A.
www.tantrawisdom.com
info@tantrawisdom.com
310-210-1464
Michael Douglas Carlin is the director of the movies Luvicide and American Federale. Recently he completed a ten-year stint as the Publisher and Editor of the Century City News. Here his articles turned into three books: Rise a Knight, A Prescription for Peace, and Peaceful Protests.
Social City News by Marci Weiner - SPAGO GOES ROYAL, LITERARY LUNCH & THE A GALA
(This article originally appeared in the July 26, 2011 edition of the Century City News)
SPAGO GOES ROYAL, LITERARY LUNCH & THE A GALA
The Legendary Spago Restaurant prepared a Royal Luncheon in Honor of Prince Wiliam andKate’s arrival in Los Angeles. Along with prima ballerina, Dame Nayda Koscuik of the Masterpiece Dance Theatre, renowned realtor, Rachel Shabti, and TV Reporter, Tamara Henry, we were invited to sample the Royal Menu with co-owner Barbara Lazaroff and Chef Tetsu. Some of the tasty items included: Sweet English Pea Soup, “Toad in Hole” with summer truffle, and Devon Crab Cakes.
We were photographed and interviewed by news outlets, worldwide, including Channel 7, 11, 13 and Fox News, and are seen pictured here with Anchor Rick Lozano. A tasty intro to the whirlwind tour of the Royal Couple!
Master Chef Wolfgang Puck, the aforementioned Barbara Lazaroff and Sherry Lansing will gather LA’s top restaurateurs and vintners for California Spirit XXVII on August 7th at the Pacific Design Center to benefit American Cancer Society. Tickets are $350 and can be purchased at the event website www.calspirit.org. You are invited to partake in this gourmet food experience, with live entertainment and a humongous silent auction – and help fight this dread disease at the same time.
At another fundraiser, the “A Gala” benefiting the Aviva Family and Children’s Services, we were treated to a fabulous fashion show to preview
Monique Lhuiller’s Fall Ready to Wear Collection, and an exclusive viewing of prominent jewel Martin Katz’s private collection. This gala evening at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel was reminiscent of a chic supper club, complete with martini bars, fab hors d’ oeuvres, gourmet menu and dancing.
Among those honored for the support of the Aviva were Kelly Fisher Katz, whose philanthropic efforts include the Rape Treatment Center, and the United Friends of the Children; and Lhuiller, one of the most revered designers of our time, who is very active in a variety of philanthropic endeavors. Beautiful Susan Casden and Nancy Jane Goldstone chaired the elegant evening, which supports at-risk children. Also honored was retiring President, Andrew R. Diamond, who in his 23 years of service, helped Aviva become one of the most respected programs of its kind in the nation.
Michael Douglas Carlin is the director of the movies Luvicide and American Federale. Recently he completed a ten-year stint as the Publisher and Editor of the Century City News. Here his articles turned into three books: Rise a Knight, A Prescription for Peace, and Peaceful Protests.
SPAGO GOES ROYAL, LITERARY LUNCH & THE A GALA
The Legendary Spago Restaurant prepared a Royal Luncheon in Honor of Prince Wiliam andKate’s arrival in Los Angeles. Along with prima ballerina, Dame Nayda Koscuik of the Masterpiece Dance Theatre, renowned realtor, Rachel Shabti, and TV Reporter, Tamara Henry, we were invited to sample the Royal Menu with co-owner Barbara Lazaroff and Chef Tetsu. Some of the tasty items included: Sweet English Pea Soup, “Toad in Hole” with summer truffle, and Devon Crab Cakes.
We were photographed and interviewed by news outlets, worldwide, including Channel 7, 11, 13 and Fox News, and are seen pictured here with Anchor Rick Lozano. A tasty intro to the whirlwind tour of the Royal Couple!
Master Chef Wolfgang Puck, the aforementioned Barbara Lazaroff and Sherry Lansing will gather LA’s top restaurateurs and vintners for California Spirit XXVII on August 7th at the Pacific Design Center to benefit American Cancer Society. Tickets are $350 and can be purchased at the event website www.calspirit.org. You are invited to partake in this gourmet food experience, with live entertainment and a humongous silent auction – and help fight this dread disease at the same time.
At another fundraiser, the “A Gala” benefiting the Aviva Family and Children’s Services, we were treated to a fabulous fashion show to preview
Monique Lhuiller’s Fall Ready to Wear Collection, and an exclusive viewing of prominent jewel Martin Katz’s private collection. This gala evening at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel was reminiscent of a chic supper club, complete with martini bars, fab hors d’ oeuvres, gourmet menu and dancing.
Among those honored for the support of the Aviva were Kelly Fisher Katz, whose philanthropic efforts include the Rape Treatment Center, and the United Friends of the Children; and Lhuiller, one of the most revered designers of our time, who is very active in a variety of philanthropic endeavors. Beautiful Susan Casden and Nancy Jane Goldstone chaired the elegant evening, which supports at-risk children. Also honored was retiring President, Andrew R. Diamond, who in his 23 years of service, helped Aviva become one of the most respected programs of its kind in the nation.
Michael Douglas Carlin is the director of the movies Luvicide and American Federale. Recently he completed a ten-year stint as the Publisher and Editor of the Century City News. Here his articles turned into three books: Rise a Knight, A Prescription for Peace, and Peaceful Protests.
The Six Pillars of Health Management Residential Indoor Air Quality Part 3: Methods of Conditioning the Air
(This article originally appeared in the July 26th, 2011 edition of the Century City News)
By Herman Kelting PhD
rciaq@verizon.net
Scope of three-part series about residential indoor air quality
In Part One of the series on residential indoor air quality (RIAQ), we discussed the effect of climate on indoor air quality and found that both outdoor temperature and humidity influence RIAQ, Part Two described source contaminants from the building structure, fixtures, and personal property, and the importance of air flow within and between the home, attached garage, and attic on RIAQ. We provided 14 guidelines for the management of personal property to improve RIAQ, described the effect of water damage to mold, and noted that mold must be eliminated, not killed, to improve RIAQ.
Now, in Part Three, I’d like to discuss the importance of conditioning the air and maintenance of the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning system (“HVAC system”) on RIAQ,
“Conditioning the air” defined
In order to improve residential air quality after particles and VOCs from the source contaminants listed in Part Two of this series have been minimized, it is necessary to condition the air. “Conditioning the air” or “conditioned air” refers to any air movement, air exchange, or air processing that improves indoor air quality and energizes the occupants. “Improves air quality” refers to reducing particles and volatile organic chemicals (VOCs). Energizing the occupants is important as an RIAQ standard because I have witnessed conditioned air that leaves a residual fragrance from filters that reduce occupant energy. And it is crucial for commercial establishments that conditioned air contributes to maximum work output,
“Conditioning the air” includes two types of processing, One of these is natural ventilation from open windows and doors, infiltration from leakage within the building structure, and makeup air taken in through the HVAC system in the absence of air conditioning (A/C) or other filtration, But open-window natural ventilation is distinguishable from infiltration or makeup air in the HVAC system because natural air exchange from open windows will duplicate outdoor air indoors, while infiltration or makeup air induced through the HVAC system may add contaminants from the building structure or from within the HVAC system; thus, it is crucial, for example, to assure the evaporator coils and HVAC filters are clean and are free of fragrances,
The second type of “conditioning the air” is physical air processing intended to reduce contaminants, This includes air conditioning in which contaminants are dissolved in the moisture on the evaporator coils or other types of filters such as electronic air cleaners, High Energy Particulate Arrest (HEPA) filters, impregnated carbon, etc. that remove particulates or VOCs.
Air conditioning to reduce temperature and humidity
Air conditioning (A/C) to reduce temperature and humidity during warm weather is one of the best types of conditioned air because the moisture on the evaporator coils absorbs many contaminants, It is helpful to utilize UVC lights (254 nm wave length) in the air flow system a few inches from the A/C evaporator coils to remove bacteria which collect on the A/C coils, and to clean the coils periodically to eliminate contaminate buildup.
Dehumidification
Dehumidification is useful to reduce humidity when the relative humidity (RH) is greater than about 50 percent (e.g., along the coast) and it is too cool to use air conditioning. Like air conditioning, it conditions the air by absorbing contaminants as air passes over moist coils; these coils must be cleaned with the same periodicity as A/C evaporator coils assuming no UVC lights in the HVAC system,
If you purchase a portable dehumidifier, be sure the coils are accessible for cleaning before you purchase; measure the electromagnetic field (EMF) with a three-axis EMF detector because some dehumidifiers create very strong EMFs. To avoid contact with the EMF, place the dehumidifier in a place that is outside the normal walking area. Portable dehumidifiers may also be used to provide heat in the winter because the output air temperature is about 84 degrees F, I provide about 95 percent of the heat in my housing unit with a dehumidifier.
Make-up air in the HVAC system
As a general rule, home HVAC systems do not have make-up air capability (i.e., fresh air drawn in from outdoors). Thus, engaging the HVAC system with only the fan on will not condition the air unless there are filters in the HVAC system (e.g., electronic air cleaners), If there is make-up air provision in the HVAC system, “fan-on” becomes an additional method of conditioning the air subject to our comments in the opening paragraphs,
Air filtering systems
There is a vast array of different air filters that are either portable or an integral part of the HVAC system. These systems are designed to capture particles and VOCs each of which requires separate systems to operate efficiently. Particle capture systems include HEPA filters, electronic air cleaners that operate at high voltages (e.g., 10,000 DC volts), ion generators which attract particles to surfaces, etc. VOC capture systems include impregnated carbon, potassium permanganate, zeolite, etc. to absorb VOCs. UVC lights in the air flow preceding the A/C coils also reduce bacteria on the A/C coils, Ozone oxidizes contaminants, but the oxides may be harmful and ozone should not be used with occupants present or with wood fragrances because ozone may combine with the latter to create harmful oxides.
Because there is such an array of these systems and because each manufacturer has product differentiation, it is impossible to discuss these in this article.
Open windows
Open windows are an excellent way of conditioning the air particularly if the HVAC system does not provide for make-up air and the outside air is of good quality. One measure of good outside air is the absence of sources of pollution and the density of trees, which capture pollution and add oxygen to the air. I suggest open windows for at least two periods of 15 minutes each every six hours during day-time hours with box fans in windows that draw outside air along a diagonal through the home; sleeping with an open window is also helpful, if the outside air is of good quality irrespective of make-up air in the HVAC system. Higher humidity air (e.g., 60% to 70%) contributes to better sleep; higher morning humidity over 50 percent in the home suggests dehumidification during the day.
Carpet cleaning
Carpets should be cleaned every four to six months to assure the best in RIAQ. It’s best to perform a manual cleaning with a carpet cleaner that has a dirty water return tank so that one can be assured of effective cleaning; be sure to purchase the extended warrantee. I have also found that using a good quality dish soap in the carpet cleaner assures that any residual soap is safe, particularly if children play on the carpet, If one uses a highly mechanized carpet cleaning system, it is a good idea to test clean with a manual, dirty-water return tank carpet cleaner to assure effectiveness.
Carpet cleanliness is very elusive in the sense carpets may appear to be clean when, in fact, they are quite soiled, If you haven’t cleaned your carpets for a year or two and you use a manual carpet cleaner with a dirty water return tank, the return water may be unimaginably filthy with an oil-like viscosity; several successive cleanings may be necessary before the viscosity and color of the water is normal,
Passive and active ventilation of attics
Attics may be sources of poor air quality because of construction materials or because outside humidity reacts with attic materials. The result is poor attic air quality that may enter the home from infiltration in the HVAC system or from cracks in the walls, Some combination of passive and active attic ventilation is desirable and it is important to consult with a design professional familiar with the home and the local climate. An active attic ventilation system is particularly important for a new home.
Maintenance of the HVAC System
Maintenance of the HVAC system includes cleaning the indoor evaporator coils, cleaning or replacing filters, and cleaning the ducts. The indoor evaporator coils consist of one or more flat plates about 14 inches square and three inches thick with parallel aluminum plates about 1/16” apart and copper tubes with Freon connecting the plates that act as heat exchangers. It is possible to reduce the frequency of coil cleaning by installing UVC lights in the air flow several inches in front of the A/C evaporator coils,
Air conditioning results in the accumulation of bacteria on the flat-plate A/C coils where water condenses. I suggest cleaning coils with a coil cleaner about every 60 days during A/C season in the absence of UVC lights; if the unit has UVC lights, I suggest 90-day periodicity of cleaning, Always clean the coils at the end of the A/C season because bacteria may continue to build up even with the end of seasonal use, Rinse the coil cleaner from the coils preferably with steam, otherwise with a spray bottle of water, even if the coil cleaner states “No rinse;” heat from the steam provides additional cleaning power against bacteria and also reduces the amount of coil cleaner required, Be sure to follow safety instruction on the coil cleaner because it’s toxic, Electronic air cleaners should be cleaned in the same manner and frequency as the A/C coils, Dust filters should be replaced every 30 days,
Frequency of conditioning of air
“Frequency of conditioning the air” refers to the number of hours in a 24-hour day that the air in a home is subject to the “Methods of conditioning of air” described elsewhere in this article, Notably, a recent article in Indoor Air, Volume 21, Number 3, June 2011, p. 191-204 entitled “Ventilation Rates and Health: Multidisciplinary Review of the Scientific Literature” indicated that a number of studies found that higher ventilation rates improved health and reduced Sick Building Syndrome.
The suggestions I offer in this section are only the most general guidelines subject to many variables such as climate, age, design, and materials used in the home, age of furniture, attic and attached-garage ventilation, etc. Older homes may require minimum conditioning of the air, Newer homes require minimizing source contaminants or any normal conditioning of the air may not be effective, Thus, the general suggestions in this section assume (1) that all material source contaminants have minimum off gassing based upon sound commercial and human standards, and (2) mold is not present in the home.
For an older home near the ocean, no new furniture, and full-day occupancy, I suggest about 14 hours of conditioned air per day consisting of eight sleeping hours with an open bedroom window and about six hours of dehumidification to about 45-50 percent RH in cooler weather. Use of A/C in warmer weather may reduce total conditioning to 11 hours including three hours of air conditioning. For any other home category, it may be necessary to provide considerably more conditioned air including the use of a variety of filters.
Michael Douglas Carlin is the director of the movies Luvicide and American Federale. Recently he completed a ten-year stint as the Publisher and Editor of the Century City News. Here his articles turned into three books: Rise a Knight, A Prescription for Peace, and Peaceful Protests.
By Herman Kelting PhD
rciaq@verizon.net
Scope of three-part series about residential indoor air quality
In Part One of the series on residential indoor air quality (RIAQ), we discussed the effect of climate on indoor air quality and found that both outdoor temperature and humidity influence RIAQ, Part Two described source contaminants from the building structure, fixtures, and personal property, and the importance of air flow within and between the home, attached garage, and attic on RIAQ. We provided 14 guidelines for the management of personal property to improve RIAQ, described the effect of water damage to mold, and noted that mold must be eliminated, not killed, to improve RIAQ.
Now, in Part Three, I’d like to discuss the importance of conditioning the air and maintenance of the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning system (“HVAC system”) on RIAQ,
“Conditioning the air” defined
In order to improve residential air quality after particles and VOCs from the source contaminants listed in Part Two of this series have been minimized, it is necessary to condition the air. “Conditioning the air” or “conditioned air” refers to any air movement, air exchange, or air processing that improves indoor air quality and energizes the occupants. “Improves air quality” refers to reducing particles and volatile organic chemicals (VOCs). Energizing the occupants is important as an RIAQ standard because I have witnessed conditioned air that leaves a residual fragrance from filters that reduce occupant energy. And it is crucial for commercial establishments that conditioned air contributes to maximum work output,
“Conditioning the air” includes two types of processing, One of these is natural ventilation from open windows and doors, infiltration from leakage within the building structure, and makeup air taken in through the HVAC system in the absence of air conditioning (A/C) or other filtration, But open-window natural ventilation is distinguishable from infiltration or makeup air in the HVAC system because natural air exchange from open windows will duplicate outdoor air indoors, while infiltration or makeup air induced through the HVAC system may add contaminants from the building structure or from within the HVAC system; thus, it is crucial, for example, to assure the evaporator coils and HVAC filters are clean and are free of fragrances,
The second type of “conditioning the air” is physical air processing intended to reduce contaminants, This includes air conditioning in which contaminants are dissolved in the moisture on the evaporator coils or other types of filters such as electronic air cleaners, High Energy Particulate Arrest (HEPA) filters, impregnated carbon, etc. that remove particulates or VOCs.
Air conditioning to reduce temperature and humidity
Air conditioning (A/C) to reduce temperature and humidity during warm weather is one of the best types of conditioned air because the moisture on the evaporator coils absorbs many contaminants, It is helpful to utilize UVC lights (254 nm wave length) in the air flow system a few inches from the A/C evaporator coils to remove bacteria which collect on the A/C coils, and to clean the coils periodically to eliminate contaminate buildup.
Dehumidification
Dehumidification is useful to reduce humidity when the relative humidity (RH) is greater than about 50 percent (e.g., along the coast) and it is too cool to use air conditioning. Like air conditioning, it conditions the air by absorbing contaminants as air passes over moist coils; these coils must be cleaned with the same periodicity as A/C evaporator coils assuming no UVC lights in the HVAC system,
If you purchase a portable dehumidifier, be sure the coils are accessible for cleaning before you purchase; measure the electromagnetic field (EMF) with a three-axis EMF detector because some dehumidifiers create very strong EMFs. To avoid contact with the EMF, place the dehumidifier in a place that is outside the normal walking area. Portable dehumidifiers may also be used to provide heat in the winter because the output air temperature is about 84 degrees F, I provide about 95 percent of the heat in my housing unit with a dehumidifier.
Make-up air in the HVAC system
As a general rule, home HVAC systems do not have make-up air capability (i.e., fresh air drawn in from outdoors). Thus, engaging the HVAC system with only the fan on will not condition the air unless there are filters in the HVAC system (e.g., electronic air cleaners), If there is make-up air provision in the HVAC system, “fan-on” becomes an additional method of conditioning the air subject to our comments in the opening paragraphs,
Air filtering systems
There is a vast array of different air filters that are either portable or an integral part of the HVAC system. These systems are designed to capture particles and VOCs each of which requires separate systems to operate efficiently. Particle capture systems include HEPA filters, electronic air cleaners that operate at high voltages (e.g., 10,000 DC volts), ion generators which attract particles to surfaces, etc. VOC capture systems include impregnated carbon, potassium permanganate, zeolite, etc. to absorb VOCs. UVC lights in the air flow preceding the A/C coils also reduce bacteria on the A/C coils, Ozone oxidizes contaminants, but the oxides may be harmful and ozone should not be used with occupants present or with wood fragrances because ozone may combine with the latter to create harmful oxides.
Because there is such an array of these systems and because each manufacturer has product differentiation, it is impossible to discuss these in this article.
Open windows
Open windows are an excellent way of conditioning the air particularly if the HVAC system does not provide for make-up air and the outside air is of good quality. One measure of good outside air is the absence of sources of pollution and the density of trees, which capture pollution and add oxygen to the air. I suggest open windows for at least two periods of 15 minutes each every six hours during day-time hours with box fans in windows that draw outside air along a diagonal through the home; sleeping with an open window is also helpful, if the outside air is of good quality irrespective of make-up air in the HVAC system. Higher humidity air (e.g., 60% to 70%) contributes to better sleep; higher morning humidity over 50 percent in the home suggests dehumidification during the day.
Carpet cleaning
Carpets should be cleaned every four to six months to assure the best in RIAQ. It’s best to perform a manual cleaning with a carpet cleaner that has a dirty water return tank so that one can be assured of effective cleaning; be sure to purchase the extended warrantee. I have also found that using a good quality dish soap in the carpet cleaner assures that any residual soap is safe, particularly if children play on the carpet, If one uses a highly mechanized carpet cleaning system, it is a good idea to test clean with a manual, dirty-water return tank carpet cleaner to assure effectiveness.
Carpet cleanliness is very elusive in the sense carpets may appear to be clean when, in fact, they are quite soiled, If you haven’t cleaned your carpets for a year or two and you use a manual carpet cleaner with a dirty water return tank, the return water may be unimaginably filthy with an oil-like viscosity; several successive cleanings may be necessary before the viscosity and color of the water is normal,
Passive and active ventilation of attics
Attics may be sources of poor air quality because of construction materials or because outside humidity reacts with attic materials. The result is poor attic air quality that may enter the home from infiltration in the HVAC system or from cracks in the walls, Some combination of passive and active attic ventilation is desirable and it is important to consult with a design professional familiar with the home and the local climate. An active attic ventilation system is particularly important for a new home.
Maintenance of the HVAC System
Maintenance of the HVAC system includes cleaning the indoor evaporator coils, cleaning or replacing filters, and cleaning the ducts. The indoor evaporator coils consist of one or more flat plates about 14 inches square and three inches thick with parallel aluminum plates about 1/16” apart and copper tubes with Freon connecting the plates that act as heat exchangers. It is possible to reduce the frequency of coil cleaning by installing UVC lights in the air flow several inches in front of the A/C evaporator coils,
Air conditioning results in the accumulation of bacteria on the flat-plate A/C coils where water condenses. I suggest cleaning coils with a coil cleaner about every 60 days during A/C season in the absence of UVC lights; if the unit has UVC lights, I suggest 90-day periodicity of cleaning, Always clean the coils at the end of the A/C season because bacteria may continue to build up even with the end of seasonal use, Rinse the coil cleaner from the coils preferably with steam, otherwise with a spray bottle of water, even if the coil cleaner states “No rinse;” heat from the steam provides additional cleaning power against bacteria and also reduces the amount of coil cleaner required, Be sure to follow safety instruction on the coil cleaner because it’s toxic, Electronic air cleaners should be cleaned in the same manner and frequency as the A/C coils, Dust filters should be replaced every 30 days,
Frequency of conditioning of air
“Frequency of conditioning the air” refers to the number of hours in a 24-hour day that the air in a home is subject to the “Methods of conditioning of air” described elsewhere in this article, Notably, a recent article in Indoor Air, Volume 21, Number 3, June 2011, p. 191-204 entitled “Ventilation Rates and Health: Multidisciplinary Review of the Scientific Literature” indicated that a number of studies found that higher ventilation rates improved health and reduced Sick Building Syndrome.
The suggestions I offer in this section are only the most general guidelines subject to many variables such as climate, age, design, and materials used in the home, age of furniture, attic and attached-garage ventilation, etc. Older homes may require minimum conditioning of the air, Newer homes require minimizing source contaminants or any normal conditioning of the air may not be effective, Thus, the general suggestions in this section assume (1) that all material source contaminants have minimum off gassing based upon sound commercial and human standards, and (2) mold is not present in the home.
For an older home near the ocean, no new furniture, and full-day occupancy, I suggest about 14 hours of conditioned air per day consisting of eight sleeping hours with an open bedroom window and about six hours of dehumidification to about 45-50 percent RH in cooler weather. Use of A/C in warmer weather may reduce total conditioning to 11 hours including three hours of air conditioning. For any other home category, it may be necessary to provide considerably more conditioned air including the use of a variety of filters.
Michael Douglas Carlin is the director of the movies Luvicide and American Federale. Recently he completed a ten-year stint as the Publisher and Editor of the Century City News. Here his articles turned into three books: Rise a Knight, A Prescription for Peace, and Peaceful Protests.
Wednesday, August 14, 2013
SENSE OF URGENCY
by Michael Douglas Carlin
The war in Vietnam created chaos. A young combat medic arrived to find troops infected with venereal disease, a short supply of antibiotics, and mixed race children often referred to as "Amerasian" being dropped off at his camp on a regular basis. The problems seemed almost overwhelming to Sergeant Edward, but he looked for solutions that would solve every one of them at once. He placed a moratorium on the troops' extracurricular activities with the local women, while the troops were treated and cured. He then had the local women come in for examinations prior to being allowed to socialize with the troops, for which he charged them a tax that they would easily make back in their time with the troops. Everyone was cured and cleared to socialize in a clean and disease-free way.
He took the funding that came in from the examinations and treatment of the women and found families that were taking the often outcast mixed-race children into their homes and financed mini-orphanages to care for the children. This was the beginning of what turned into funding and care for hundreds of children during his tour in Vietnam.
Today, we are on the brink of chaos. America is confronted with daunting problems: unemployment, dependence on foreign oil, environmental catastrophes, soaring food prices, deflation of real estate, record amounts of manure stacking up, credit frozen and climate change. These problems all seem so disconnected. America has been the worst offender in greenhouse gas emissions, and now we are the only reliable nation that is bringing about a solution. America must now take on the entire problem for the rest of the world if climate change is going to be solved, and time is of the essence. A National Security Briefing about climate change is posted on the Century City News website that paints a grim picture of what we can expect from further emissions. Time is of the essence.
I have visited the Salton Sea with my good friend Sir Colin Finlay. He has traveled the world and sees this environmental disaster as one of the worst in the world, and it sits right in our backyard in Southern California. The New River flows in from Mexico with hazardous biological materials from the slaughter houses there. The contaminants are flowing in with no outflow, and the Salton Sea becomes worse each year. We dug down 18 inches on the shore and found nothing but fish bones and scales from all the fish that had washed ashore dead from toxins and lack of oxygen (hypoxia) in the water due to the overgrowth of algae from biotoxins. The Salton Sea is at the juncture of three different counties. The jurisdiction of permitting becomes difficult when three county seats are involved. As the Salton Sea continues to dry up, the toxins are becoming airborne and blowing into populated areas. We must solve this problem. Time is of the essence.
Iran is making progress on developing nuclear material. The Strait of Hormuz is a strategic waterway for the transport of oil. Israel has been threatened by Iran, and it wouldn’t be a stretch for Iran to attack Saudi Arabia with nuclear weapons. The supply of our oil will undoubtedly be interrupted at some point in the future. The development of alternative supplies of fuel has come to a point where time is of the essence.
Chickens, pigs and cows are being grown in increasing numbers. They are critical for the food supply of the world. Raising all of these animals is causing an enormous amount of methane gas and manure. The amount of manure far exceeds the manure produced by humans. This manure leeches into the water supply in many places and causes contamination. As the manure piles up, a solution must be found. Agribusiness needs reformation. Here again, time is of the essence.
In many countries and within the United States, food is being diverted into the production of fuel. The prices of grain and corn are skyrocketing. Food supplies are becoming scarce, and the demand to convert food into fuel will intensify if there is any shock to the oil supply.
Much of the electricity produced in the United States is produced from diesel-driven power plants. Electrification of the country has to be a major part of freedom from foreign fossil fuel dependence. Adding to the problem is that most of the power is produced by coal-fired plants, and the pollution from these plants is among the most serious in the nation, and possibly the world.
Because time is of the essence, a concentrated effort must be deployed to solve all of these problems simultaneously. There are no shortage of people who want jobs right now, and this may be an opportunity for employment.
Len Chapman of Environmental BioMass Energy has worked in the development of a process to convert manure into methane and convert manure into syngas, producing steam and electricity. Manure is also nutrient-rich and can be used as an input for growing algae. Algae comes in 3,000 strains, many of which grow in the saltiest of water. The Salton Sea might prove an incredible source of nutrient-rich water to grow algae. Algae only needs blue and red light to grow. That leaves the rest of the light spectrum to produce solar energy. Electric generation creates CO², which can be used to grow algae and be converted into oxygen. An acre of algae produces 50,000 gallons of vegetable oil.
John Jones of John D. Jones Engineering, Inc. has developed a process to convert animal fat or vegetable oil to biodiesel (no sulphur). Picture a process where manure, carbon dioxide, toxic water and sunlight are converted to methane gas, biodiesel, electricity and oxygen. This single process could create jobs, mitigate greenhouse gasses, create biodiesel fuel for the entire trucking industry/power generation, create a purpose for manure, create sequestered methane gas, and clean up one of America’s worst environmental disasters, the Salton Sea. If the process were done on a large enough scale, we could offset all of the greenhouse gasses emitted by the rest of the world and curb climate change. Let’s get started.
The story of Sir Edward is the story of how a young, wide-eyed man came to understand the human spirit through each encounter with situations that seemed unsolvable. This young man found at every juncture of his life that, by studying the problem, he was able to see the solution couched as a riddle within the very nature of what was wrong, and, with minimal effort, he was able to set it right. Sixtyfive years later, it has developed into so much more than a few threads to become the fabric and philosophy of world peace. Our solutions are always couched in our problems.
For more information please visit the Beverly Hills View
For more information please visit the Beverly Hills View
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