JPMorgan Chase is to pay a revised $2.1bn (£1.05bn) for Bear Stearns after sweetening the terms of the deal to make it almost impossible for a rival to make a counter offer amid growing concern among other banks over the original $236m transaction…

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Still, it’s only $10 a share, which is some consolation, given what BS was once ‘worth’. On that subject, incidentally, John Lanchester recently said some pertinent things, viz:

Companies, even huge financial companies like Bear Stearns, have personalities, and the personality of Bear, the fifth-largest US investment bank, was bullish, chest-out, cigar-chomping, macho, and unlovable. In 1998, the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management – which would better have been named Short Term Crazy Betting – blew up. It had available cash of $500m but had borrowed and leveraged so extensively that it was holding contracts worth an apocalyptic $1.25tn. The president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, William McDonough, got together the heads of the big US banks at his offices, and essentially demanded that they rescue LTCM.

This was a moment for the fat cats and Wall Street oligarchs to demonstrate their public-spiritedness by risking their own money to rescue LTCM from its own mistakes, and in the process avert the risk of a global meltdown. The first banker to speak was James Cayne the (literally) cigar-chomping head of Bear Stearns. He was in a good position to know the gory details about LTCM’s derivative holdings, because Bear Stearns cleared LTCM’s trades. Cayne said no. He refused to help LTCM.

The other bankers went berserk. But Cayne didn’t budge, and in the process uttered a magnificently menacing line: “Don’t go alphabetically if you want this to work.” So the other banks bailed LTCM out, and did not love Bear Stearns for not doing so, and at least one person in the meeting openly vowed revenge…

Intriguing video exchange about Obama’s character between Jacob Weisberg of Slate and David Frum of the National Review. Frum’s opinion is that Obama is “either going to be Lincoln or he’s going to be a disaster”. He also thinks Obama is the most inward-looking candidate since Richard Nixon!

Interesting piece by Mark WIlliams in Technology Review…

To prevent rain over the roofless 91,000-seat Olympic stadium that Beijing natives have nicknamed the Bird’s Nest, the city’s branch of the national Weather Modification Office–itself a department of the larger China Meteorological Administration–has prepared a three-stage program for the 2008 Olympics this August.

First, Beijing’s Weather Modification Office will track the region’s weather via satellites, planes, radar, and an IBM p575 supercomputer, purchased from Big Blue last year, that executes 9.8 trillion floating point operations per second. It models an area of 44,000 square kilometers (17,000 square miles) accurately enough to generate hourly forecasts for each kilometer.

Then, using their two aircraft and an array of twenty artillery and rocket-launch sites around Beijing, the city’s weather engineers will shoot and spray silver iodide and dry ice into incoming clouds that are still far enough away that their rain can be flushed out before they reach the stadium.

Finally, any rain-heavy clouds that near the Bird’s Nest will be seeded with chemicals to shrink droplets so that rain won’t fall until those clouds have passed over. Zhang Qian, head of Beijing’s Weather Modification Office, explains, “We use a coolant made from liquid nitrogen to increase the number of droplets while decreasing their average size. As a result, the smaller droplets are less likely to fall, and precipitation can be reduced.” August is part of Northeast Asia’s rainy season; chances of precipitation over Beijing on any day that month will approach 50 percent. Still, while tests with clouds bearing heavy rain loads haven’t always been successful, Qian claims that “the results with light rain have been satisfactory.”

Remind me again — what follows hubris…?