'Unlucky' rare black fox spotted in Britain

The black fox is so rare that wildlife experts believe there are only a handful of the breed left in the country Photo: MEN

Kevin Hehir, 48, was astonished when he spotted the fox while out walking.

The black fox is so rare that wildlife experts believe there are only a handful of the breed left in the country.

In medieval times, the black fox was considered a bad omen by superstitious villagers.

Mr Hehir, from Preston, Lancashire, was walking in a cemetery with a friend, when he spotted the animal among the gravestones.

"It was on the outskirts of Chorley, I don't want to give the exact location out as it's a very rare fox and I don't want people to go and try and catch it," he said.

"We were walking along looking at gravestones and I spotted it. I thought: "It's a myth, there's no such thing".

The black fox is in fact a red fox which is going through a phase where the colour of its fur is particularly dark.

The unusual colouring is normally seen on growing cubs before the fox develops its dark chestnut coat, however some red foxes remain black due to a rare genetic flaw, which dates back hundreds of years.

In the footage, the black fox is seen darting across the graveyard.

Country villagers traditionally told stories of how the fox was as "black as night, so that it could live in a man's shadow and never be seen".

Mr Hehir said: "I took some photos and videoed it. It's only a cub but I managed to get right up to it."

David Dunlop, Lancashire Wildlife Trust conservation officer, said: "Only one black fox has been seen and, as far as I know, it's the only one to be seen in this country before," he said "In North America, I think it's about one in five red foxes are black but that's because they were introduced from Europe."

They exist in much greater numbers in America there because they were not hunted as widely, whereas in Britain their pelts were highly prized in the fur trade and making the genetic strain became much scarcer.

Is the 'Good Life' as America Knows It Over?

Introduction by Tom Engelhardt: Among the many media spectacles of the moment, the most unnerving is undoubtedly the crisis on Wall Street that has already essentially toppled Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Merrill Lynch, and -- probably not last and certainly not least -- the gigantic insurance company AIG, which has just been given $85 billion in taxpayer moneys to liquidate itself. Before we're done, that hoary old oxymoron of the Left, "late capitalism," may gain new life.

Elsewhere on the planet, it turns out, it was more obvious that the U.S. was in crisis. One small sign of the changing state of the globe's "sole superpower" is that, even before banking institutions started to tumble off walls like so many Humpty Dumpties, the International Monetary Fund, that dominatrix of global capital, was planning to pay Washington a working visit. This is the sort of thing you expect, with great trepidation, if you're Haiti, or Pakistan, or Malawi, or Argentina on the brink of financial meltdown -- but the United States? Nonetheless, according to NPR's David Kestenbaum, "The U.S. Treasury says America has now agreed to get a stability assessment from the IMF. The announcement didn't get much attention, but officials at the IMF expect to start examining U.S. finances in the next couple [of] months."

Welcome to the Third World, America. Now, hold your hats while the whirlwind blows and the stock market goes into heart-attack mode. Steve Fraser, an expert on Gilded Ages (and how they end), as well as the author of a superb new book on our financial "masters of the universe" from the eighteenth century to the present, Wall Street: America's Dream Palace, brought up the dreaded "D" word (for depression) this April at TomDispatch when, in the mainstream, pundits were still wondering whether we might possibly, actually, really be edging toward, or near, a recession. He wrote at the time: "The current breakdown of the financial system is portentous. It threatens a general economic implosion more serious than anyone has witnessed for many decades.

Depression, if that is what it turns out to be, together with the agonies of a misbegotten and lost war no one believes in any longer, could undermine whatever is left of the threadbare credibility of our Gilded Age elite." Now he's being quoted on the front page of the New York Times. How times (of every sort) have changed in just the space of a few months... Drawing on his knowledge of the history of Wall Street and Washington, now let him offer you now a little perspective for the months to come. -- Tom Engelhardt

What is Washington to do as the financial system collapses? Clearly, stark differences in approach as well as in public policy have already emerged. Bail-out Bear Stearns and pump up the brokerage and investment business with new lines of credit. Nationalize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on the backs of the taxpayer -- but let Lehman drown. Tell the financial community to save itself, after which Bank of America salutes and buys Merrill Lynch. Then, the Fed gets cold feet and decides it can't let an institution the size of the insurance giant AIG go under as well. Washington is left staring into the abyss. The old rules no longer apply.

And that's the point. At moments of crisis since the mid-1980s, the relationship between Washington and Wall Street has changed fundamentally, at least when compared to anything that would have been recognizable in the previous century. As a result, the road ahead is dark and unknown.

During the nineteenth century, Washington was generally happy to do favors for Wall Street financiers. Railroad tycoons, who often used those railroads as vehicles of extravagant speculation, enjoyed subsidies, tax exemptions, loans, and a whole smorgasbord of financial fringe benefits supplied by pliable Congressmen and Senators (not to mention armadas of state and local officials).

Since the political establishment was committed to laissez-faire, legerdemain by greedy bankers was immune from public scrutiny, which was also useful (for them). But when panic struck, the mighty, as well as the meek, went down with the ship. Washington felt no obligation to rush to the rescue of the reckless. The bracing, if merciless, discipline of the free market did its work and there was blood on the floor.

By early in the twentieth century, however, the savage anarchy of the financial marketplace had been at least partially domesticated under the reign of the greatest financier of them all, J.P. Morgan. Ever since the panic of 1907, the legend of Morgan's heroics in single-handedly stopping a meltdown that threatened to become worldwide, the iron discipline he imposed on more timorous bankers, has been told and re-told each time an analogous implosion looms.

Indeed, last week's news carried its fair share of 1907-Morgan stories, trailing in their wake an implicit wistfulness. They all asked, in effect: Where is the old boy when we need him?

Back then, with Morgan performing his role as the nation's unofficial private central banker, Teddy Roosevelt's administration continued to keep its distance from Wall Street, still unready to offer salvation to desperate financial oligarchs. Not normally chummy with Morgan and his crowd, Roosevelt did cheer from the sidelines as the über-banker performed his rescue operation.

As it turned out, though, the days of Washington agnosticism about Wall Street were numbered. The economy had become too complex and delicate a mechanism and, in 1907, had come far too close to meltdown -- even Morgan's efforts couldn't prevent several years of recession -- to leave financial matters entirely in the hands of the private sector.

First came the Federal Reserve. It was established in 1913 under President Woodrow Wilson as a quasi-public authority meant to regulate the country's credit markets -- albeit one heavily influenced by the viewpoints and interests of the country's principal bankers. That worked well enough until the Great Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed and lasted until World War II. The depth of the country's trauma in those long years vastly expanded the scope of Washington's involvement in the financial marketplace.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal did, as a start, engage in some bail-out operations. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation, actually created by President Herbert Hoover, continued to rescue major railroads and other key businesses, while some of the New Deal's efforts to help homeowners also rewarded real estate interests. The main emphasis, however, now switched to regulation. The Glass-Steagall Banking Act, the two laws of 1933 and 1934 regulating the stock exchange, the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and other similar measures subjected the financial sector to fairly rigorous public supervision.

This lasted for at least two political generations. Wall Street, after all, had been convicted in the court of public opinion of reckless, incompetent, self-interested, even felonious behavior with consequences so devastating for the rest of the country that government was licensed to make sure it didn't happen again.

The undoing of that New Deal regulatory regime, and its replacement, largely under Republican administrations (although Glass-Steagall was repealed on Clinton's watch), with what some have called the "socialization of risk" has contributed in a major way to the mess we're in today. Beginning most emphatically with the massive bail-out of the savings and loan industry in the late 1980s, Washington committed itself, at least under conditions of acute crisis, to off-loading the risks taken by major financial institutions, no matter how irrationally speculative and wasteful, onto the backs of the American taxpaying public.

Despite free market/anti-big-government rhetoric, real-life Washington has tacitly acknowledged the degree to which our national economy has become dependent on the financial sector (Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate -- or FIRE). It will do whatever it takes to keep it afloat.

This applies not only to particular institutions like Bear Stearns, or even to mortgage mega-firms like Fannie and Freddie, but to finance in general. When it seemed necessary, public monies were indeed funneled in the general direction of the banking/brokerage community to shore up the whole rickety structure. This allowed one burst bubble -- the dot-com debacle -- to be replaced by another, namely our late, lamented mortgage/collaterized-debt-obligation bonanza, just now dramatically going down the tubes.

Backstopping the present bail-out is the ever-credulous, put-upon American public with its presumably inexhaustible resources. Even while Washington was instituting the periodic "socialization" of bad debts, it was systematically abandoning the New Deal's commitment to regulation. That, of course, was in the very period when financial markets became ever more arcane, ever less comprehensible even to their Frankenstein-ian inventors, and ever more in need of monitoring. So the "socialization of risk" was accompanied by the "privatization of reward," which now is likely to prove a truly deadly combination.

That the crisis has now reached a newly terrifying stage is suggested by Washington's sudden willingness to depart from the new orthodoxy and let the huge investment bank, Lehman Brothers, go under. Some may see in this a steely return to a laissez-faire faith. More likely, it represents wholesale confusion on the part of Bush administration and Federal Reserve policymakers about what to do, even as all endangered businesses have come to take it for granted that Washington will toss them a life-preserver when they need it.

The times call for a new departure. The next administration, which will surely enter office under the greatest economic pressure in memory, must confront reality. The financial system is out of control and has led the economy into a wildly turbulent sea of heavily leveraged speculation.

It's time for a reversal of course. Stringent re-regulation of FIRE is not enough anymore. Washington's mission may, at this late date, be an even greater one than Roosevelt's New Deal faced. The government must figure out how to deploy its power to shift the flow of investment capital out of the mine-fields of speculative paper transactions and back into productive channels that will help meet the material needs of American society. Real value must be created in place of chimeras. In the meantime, we all have ringside seats -- in fact, far too close to the action for comfort -- as another gilded age is ending. What comes after is, in part, up to us.

How Financial Madness Overtook Wall Street

By Andy Serwer and Allan Sloan

If you're having a little trouble coping with what seems to be the complete unraveling of the world's financial system, you needn't feel bad about yourself. It's horribly confusing, not to say terrifying; even people like us, with a combined 65 years of writing about business, have never seen anything like what's going on. Some of the smartest, savviest people we know — like the folks running the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve Board — find themselves reacting to problems rather than getting ahead of them. It's terra incognita, a place no one expected to visit.

Every day brings another financial horror show, as if Stephen King were channeling Alan Greenspan to produce scary stories full of negative numbers. One weekend, the Federal Government swallows two gigantic mortgage companies and dumps more than $5 trillion — yes, with a t — of the firms' debt onto taxpayers, nearly doubling the amount Uncle Sam owes to his lenders. While we're trying to get our heads around what amounts to the biggest debt transfer since money was created, Lehman Brothers goes broke, and Merrill Lynch feels compelled to shack up with Bank of America to avoid a similar fate. Then, having sworn off bailouts by letting Lehman fail and wiping out its shareholders, the Treasury and the Fed reverse course for an $85 billion rescue of creditors and policyholders of American International Group (AIG), a $1 trillion insurance company. Other once impregnable institutions may disappear or be gobbled up.

The scariest thing to average folk: one of the nation's biggest money-market mutual funds, the Reserve Primary, announced that it's going to give investors less than 100 cent on each dollar invested because it got stuck with Lehman securities it now considers worthless. If you can't trust your money fund, what can you trust? To use a technical term to describe this turmoil: yechhh!

There are two ways to look at this. There's Wall Street's way, which features theories and numbers and equations and gobbledygook and, ultimately, rationalization (as in, "How were we supposed to know that people who lied about their income and assets would walk away from mortgages on houses in which they had no equity? That wasn't in our computer model. It's not our fault"). Then there's the right way, which involves asking the questions that really matter: How did we get here? How do we get out of it? And what does all this mean for the average joe? So take a deep breath and bear with us as we try to explain how financial madness overtook not only Wall Street but also Main Street. And why, in the end, almost all of us, collectively, are going to pay for the consequences.

Going forward, there's one particularly creepy thing to keep in mind. In normal times, problems in the economy cause problems in the financial markets because hard-pressed consumers and businesses have trouble repaying their loans. But this time — for the first time since the Great Depression — problems in the financial markets are slowing the economy rather than the other way around. If the economy continues to spiral down, that could cause a second dip in the financial system — and we're having serious trouble dealing with the first one.

The Roots of the Problem
How did this happen, and why over the past 14 months have we suddenly seen so much to fear? Think of it as payback. Fear is so pervasive today because for years the financial markets — and many borrowers — showed no fear at all. Wall Streeters didn't have to worry about regulation, which was in disrepute, and they didn't worry about risk, which had supposedly been magically whisked away by all sorts of spiffy nouveau products — derivatives like credit-default swaps. (More on those later.) This lack of fear became a hothouse of greed and ignorance on Wall Street — and on Main Street as well. When greed exceeds fear, trouble follows. Wall Street has always been a greedy place and every decade or so it suffers a blow resulting in a bout of hand-wringing and regret, which always seems to be quickly forgotten.

This latest go-round featured hedge-fund operators, leveraged-buyout boys (who took to calling themselves "private-equity firms") and whiz-kid quants who devised and plugged in those new financial instruments, creating a financial Frankenstein the likes of which we had never seen. Great new fortunes were made, and with them came great new hubris. The newly minted masters of the universe even had the nerve to defend their ridiculous income tax break — much of the private-equity managers' piece of their investors' profits is taxed at the 15% capital-gains rate rather than at the normal top federal income tax rate of 35% — as being good for society. ("Hey, we're creating wealth — cut us some slack.")

The Root of the Problems
Warren Buffett, the nation's most successful investor, back in 2003 called these derivatives — which it turned out almost no one understood — "weapons of financial mass destruction." But what did he know? He was a 70-something alarmist fuddy-duddy who had cried wolf for years. No reason to worry about wolves until you hear them howling at your door, right?

Besides a few prescient financial sages, though, who could have seen this coming in the fall of 2006, when things were booming and the world was awash in cheap money? There was little fear of buying a house with nothing down, because housing prices, we were assured, only go up. And there was no fear of making mortgage loans, because what analysts call "house-price appreciation" would increase the value of the collateral if borrowers couldn't or wouldn't pay. The idea that we'd have house-price depreciation — average house prices in the top 20 markets are down 15%, according to the S&P Case-Shiller index — never entered into the equation.

As for businesses, there was money available to buy corporations or real estate or whatever an inspired dealmaker wanted to buy. It was safe too — or so Wall Street claimed — because investors worldwide were buying U.S. financial products, thus spreading risk around the globe.

Now, though, we're seeing the downside of this financial internationalization. Many of the mortgages and mortgage securities owned or guaranteed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were bought by foreign central banks, which wanted to own dollar-based securities that carried slightly higher interest rates than boring old U.S. Treasury securities. A big reason the Fed and Treasury felt compelled to bail out Fannie and Freddie was the fear that if they didn't, foreigners wouldn't continue funding our trade and federal-budget deficits.

You've heard, of course, that subprime mortgages — subprime is Wall Street's euphemism for junk — are where the problems started. That's true, but the problems have now spread way beyond them. Those predicting that the housing hiccup wouldn't be a big deal — what's a few hundred billion in crummy mortgage loans compared with a $13 trillion U.S. economy or a $54 trillion world economy? — failed to grasp that possibility. It turned out that Wall Street's greed — and by Wall Street, we mean the world of money and investments, not a geographic area in downtown Manhattan — was supplemented by ignorance. Folks in the world of finance created, bought, sold and traded securities that were too complex for them to fully understand. (Try analyzing a CDO-squared sometime. Good luck.)

For an example in our backyard, consider Lehman Brothers. Lehman was so flush, or at least felt so flush, that in May 2007 it sublet 12 prime midtown-Manhattan floors of the Time & Life Building — across the street from Lehman headquarters — from Time Inc., which publishes this magazine. Lehman signed on for $350 million over 10 years. (It's not clear what kind of hit, if any, Time Inc. will now face.)

Lehman's fall shows the downside of using borrowed money. Even though Lehman has a 158-year-old name, it's actually a 14-year-old company that was spun off by American Express in 1994. AmEx had gobbled it up 10 years earlier, and it wasn't in prime shape when AmEx spat it out. To compensate for its relatively small size and skinny capital base, Lehman took risks that proved too large. To keep profits growing, Lehman borrowed huge sums relative to its size. Its debts were about 35 times its capital, far higher than its peer group's ratio. And it plunged heavily into real estate ventures that cratered.

Here's how leverage works in reverse. When things go well, as they did until last year, Lehman is immensely profitable. If you borrow 35 times your capital and those investments rise only 1%, you've made 35% on your money. If, however, things move against you — as they did with Lehman — a 1% or 2% drop in the value of your assets puts your future in doubt. The firm increasingly relied on investments in derivatives to produce profits, in essence creating a financial arms race with competitors like Goldman Sachs. Even though the Fed had set up a special borrowing program for Lehman and other investment banks after the forced sale of Bear Stearns to JPMorgan Chase in March, the market ultimately lost faith in Lehman. So out it went.

Uncle Sam Steps Back In
The market lost faith in AIG too, but the government was forced to save it. A major reason is that AIG is one of the creators of the aforementioned credit-default swaps. What are those, you ask? They're pixie-dust securities that supposedly offer insurance against a company defaulting on its obligations. If you buy $10 million of GM bonds, for instance, you might hedge your bet by buying a $10 million CDS from AIG. In return for that premium — which changes day to day — AIG agrees to give you $10 million should GM have an "event of default" on its obligations.

But as a way to make sure that swap meisters can make good on their obligations, they have to post collateral. If their credit is downgraded — as was the case with AIG — they have to post more collateral. What put AIG on the brink was that it had to post $14 billion overnight, which of course it didn't have lying around. Next week, the looming downgrades might have forced it to come up with $250 billion. (No, that's not a typographical mistake; it's a real number.) Hence the action. If AIG croaked, all the players who thought they had their bets hedged would suddenly have "unbalanced books." That could lead to firms other than AIG failing, which could lead to still more firms failing, which could lead to what economists call "systemic failure." Or, in plain terms, a financial death spiral in which firms suck one another into the abyss.

AIG, like Lehman, was ultimately done in by credit-rating agencies, of all things. The main credit raters — Moody's and Standard & Poor's — had blithely assigned top-drawer AAA and AA ratings to all sorts of hinky mortgage securities and other financial esoterica without understanding the risks involved. Would you know how to rate a collateralized loan obligation? Or commercial-mortgage-backed securities? Sophisticated investors took Moody's and S&P's word for it, and it turned out that the agencies didn't know what they were doing. Credit raters, who claim to offer only opinions, are party to Wall Street's cycles too. At the beginning, they're far too lenient with borrowers, who are the ones who pay their rating fees. Then, after a couple of embarrassments — remember Enron and WorldCom? — the raters tighten up, maybe too much. Then memory fades, and the cycle repeats.

What doomed AIG was the rating agencies' decision — they had suddenly awakened to AIG's problems — to sharply downgrade the firm's securities. That gave AIG no time to react, no time to raise more capital, no more time to do anything else but beg for help. Because AIG is in a much scarier situation than Lehman — the insurer has assets of $1 trillion, more than 70 million customers and intimate back-and-forth dealings with many of the world's biggest and most important financial firms — Uncle Sam felt that it had no choice but to intervene.

Right before the markets began to unravel last year, Lloyd Blankfein, chief executive of Goldman Sachs, presciently quipped that he hadn't "felt this good since 1998," referring to the Wall Street wipeout precipitated that year by Russia's defaulting on its ruble debt. Blankfein argued that confidence in global markets had built up to a dangerously giddy level and that investors weren't being compensated for assuming outsize risk in securities like esoteric bonds and Chinese stocks. Blankfein was right, of course, but even he wasn't paranoid enough. Though Goldman stands, along with Morgan Stanley, as one of the last two giant U.S. investment banks not to collapse (as Lehman and Bear Stearns have) or be sold (à la Merrill Lynch), Goldman too has been pummeled. The firm's quarterly profit plunged 70% — results considered to be relatively good. While analysts generally believe that Goldman and Morgan Stanley will survive the meltdown, that view is not unanimous. Says doomster New York University economics professor Nouriel Roubini: "They will be gone in a matter of months as well. It's better if Goldman or Morgan Stanley find a buyer, because their business model is fundamentally flawed." Both firms would beg to disagree, but their stock prices have been hammered.

All of us are now paying the price for Wall Street's excesses. Some of the cost is being paid by prudent people, like retirees who have saved all their life. They're now getting ridiculously low rates of 2% or so on their savings because the Federal Reserve has cut short-term rates in an attempt to goose the economy and reassure financial markets. Taxpayers are going to get stuck too. By the estimate of William Poole, former head of the St. Louis Fed, bailing out the creditors of the two big mortgage firms, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, could cost taxpayers $300 billion. Think of that as about a year and a half in Iraq.

Didn't the folks on Wall Street, who are nothing if not smart, know that someday the music would end? Sure. But they couldn't help behaving the way they did because of Wall Street's classic business model, which works like a dream for Wall Street employees (during good times) but can be a nightmare for the customers. Here's how it goes. You bet big with someone else's money. If you win, you get a huge bonus, based on the profits. If you lose, you lose someone else's money rather than your own, and you move on to the next job. If you're especially smart — like Lehman chief executive Dick Fuld — you take a lot of money off the table. During his tenure as CEO, Fuld made $490 million (before taxes) cashing in stock options and stock he received as compensation. A lot of employees, whose wealth was tied to the company's stock, were financially eviscerated when Lehman bombed. But Fuld is unlikely to show up applying for food stamps.

Fuld is done with the grueling job of trying to stave off financial crisis. Not so for regulators, of course. It's difficult to imagine the pressure and stress. Key players such as Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and New York Fed chief Tim Geithner have been working around the clock for weeks now, putting out fire after fire. Besides having to comprehend and solve the mind-bending financial woes of some of the world's biggest companies, they are also briefing and seeking counsel from CEOs of the surviving companies, never mind President George W. Bush and the two presidential candidates, plus central bankers from around the globe.

Where Do We Go from Here?
There's no question that the crisis has gone so deep that it cannot be halted by one stroke. Banks and other financial companies around the globe are struggling to pull themselves out of this mess. Rebuilding will take time, vast amounts of money and constant attention. Sooner or later, the hundreds of billions (or trillions) of dollars that the Fed and other central bankers are throwing into the markets will stabilize things. Sooner or later, housing prices will stop falling because no financial trend continues forever.

Given that this is a political year and change is the buzzword, how do Barack Obama and John McCain intend to see us out of this mess? Good question. We don't know, and it's not at all clear that they've thought about it in greater than sound-bite depth.

Obama has called for increased regulation, which seems like a no-brainer, but he hasn't articulated many specifics. Meanwhile, McCain has talked about ending "wild speculation" and railed against Wall Street greed. Well, duh. Know anyone who is in favor of naked greed? Whoever wins will face a massive job of righting the financial ship and restoring confidence that has been badly shaken. The next President will have to cast away partisan predispositions and add the just-right measure of regulation and oversight to the mix. As Treasury Secretary (and former Goldman Sachs chief executive) Paulson recently said, "Raw capitalism is dead."

Whatever the politicians do, we as a society are going to be poorer than we were. We've lost credibility with foreigners; they will be less likely than before to lend us endless amounts of cheap money. Will that ultimately lead to higher borrowing costs? It's hard to see how it won't.

Coping in this new world will require adjustments by millions of Americans. We all will have to start living within our means — or preferably below them. If you don't overborrow or overspend, you're far less vulnerable to whatever problems the financial system may have. And remember one other thing: the four most dangerous words in the world for your financial health are "This time, it's different." It's never different. It's always the same, but with bigger numbers.

(Additional photo credits -- Paulson: AP; AIG Ticker: Andrew Harrer / Bloomberg / Landov; Lehman: Getty; Federal Reserve Bank of New York: AP; Foreclosure: AP; AIP sign: Getty; Dow Jones: AP)

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