That makes 115

The FDIC has now taken over 115 banks this year to date. Will we see a new record set this year? The current record is 181 in 1992, the days of the S&L scandal.

"It's not our war. It is your war"

That's a quote from a Pakistani journalist who went on to say to Hillary Clinton, "You had one 9-11. We are having daily 9-11s in Pakistan."

True, it's only one person's comment. But Clinton heard many similar comments from Pakistanis this past week. Whether it was provincial leaders, students or journalists, the message was the same - we don't think that the U.S. actions are helping Pakistanis. And, of course, the more frequent use of drones does not help our position, no matter how many bad guys we kill.

The French Do It Differently

They apparently don't have a problem bringing to trial a former President, his ministers, or people with last names like DeGaulle and Mitterand. The charges are primarily about money and come long after some of the alleged crimes took place, but they demonstrate that the French either have a greater need to settle scores than we do or believe that justice should eventually prevail. I wonder what they would do if the president had tortured people.

Two Helpings Are Not Enough

GMAC needs more of our money. It's looking for between $2.8 and $5.6 billion. This is on top of the $12.5 billion we've given them via TARP and the FDIC's guarantee of $7.4 billion of GMAC's debt and a waiving of rules by the Fed and an agreement by us that GMAC is now a bank (and thus can borrow from the Fed). In exchange for all this we own 35.4% of the company.

We are the lenders of last resort for GMAC, because no one wants to lend to them. Shouldn't banks be doing much of the lending to the auto industry? Would they? They haven't been exactly passing out money for home loans.

It's Not The Pentagon Papers

But Matthew Hoh's resignation from the State Department has the potential of having the same impact. I've never seen so many comments to a Post article.

Hoh is an ex-Marine who served in Iraq twice. In March he went to Afghanistan as a Foreign Service Officer. It seems that whether he was a marine or foreign service officer he did an outstanding job. Read his resignation letter and you may understand why I feel this way.

Here are some excerpts from Hoh's resignation letter:

I fail to see the value or the worth in continued U.S. casualties or expenditure of resources in support of the Afghan government in what is, truly, a 35-year-old civil war.

Like the Soviets, we continue to secure and bolster a failing state, while encouraging and ideology and system of government unknown and unwanted by its people.

the bulk of the insurgency fights not for the white banner of the Taliban, but rather against the presence of foreign soldiers and taxes imposed by an unrepresentative government in Kabul.

The United States military presence in Afghanistan greatly contributes to the legitimacy and strategic message of the Pashtun insurgency.

I find specious the reasons we ask for bloodshed and sacrifice from our young men and women in Afghanistan.

Finally, if our concern is for a failed state... then we must reevaluate and increase our commitment to and involvement in Mexico.

The Case for Withdrawal

The Nation's current issue is primarily centered on the reasons why staying in Afghanistan in a mistake. As the following introduction from the periodical shows, the articles cover just about all of the reasons for disengagement.

Much like the debate surrounding the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the discussion on the best course of US policy in Afghanistan is distorted by a number of faulty assumptions, if not outright myths. The essays in this forum call into question many of those assumptions and offer a different way of looking at the crisis in Afghanistan and Pakistan and what is at stake for the people of the region and for the United States.

The principal rationale for America's expanding military commitment in Afghanistan is that a Taliban takeover there would directly threaten US security because it would again become a safe haven for Al Qaeda to plot attacks against the United States. But the essays by Stephen Walt and John Mueller strongly refute that assumption, pointing out that a Taliban victory would not necessarily mean a return of Al Qaeda to Afghanistan, and that in any case the strategic value of Afghanistan and Pakistan as base camps for Al Qaeda is greatly exaggerated and can be easily countered.

Similarly, proponents of sending more troops to Afghanistan argue that Taliban success would embolden global jihadists everywhere and destabilize Pakistan in particular. Yet, as the essays by Selig Harrison and Priya Satia show, this narrative does not fit the realities. While American policy-makers and Al Qaeda may think of this as a grand meta-struggle between the United States and global jihadism, many Taliban fighters are motivated by other factors: by traditional Pashtun resistance to foreign occupation; by internal ethnic politics, such as rebellion against the Tajik-dominated government of Hamid Karzai; or by anger over the loss of life resulting from American/NATO aerial attacks that have gone awry.

As for Pakistan, the essays by Manan Ahmed and Mosharraf Zaidi explain why the Taliban threat to Pakistan is not as serious as many assume, and why a newly democratic Pakistan has turned increasingly against Islamist extremists. As Ahmed and Zaidi suggest, Pakistanis are quite capable of defending their country--not for American interests but for their own reasons--and Pakistani stability is more likely to be threatened than enhanced by military escalation in Afghanistan.

And finally, Robert Dreyfuss offers an exit strategy: as it winds down its counterinsurgency, Washington should encourage an international Bonn II conference that would lead to a new national compact in Afghanistan. --The Editors

A special kind of chair

This is a specially-equipped lounge chair that Dennis Anderson drove around the streets of Proctor, Mn. It has a stereo, a nitrous oxide booster, a parachute and headlights. It can get up to 20 mph. I'm not sure how fast Mr. Anderson was driving when he crashed into a parked car. He probably doesn't know as he was drunk when the accident occurred.

He's serving two years probation and has had his chair impounded by the police. Look for it on E-bay, as it will be auctioned off.

Chickens Coming Home

Now that our gigantic embassy in Baghdad has been in operation for 18 months, the problems written about two years ago are coming to light once more - failure to build according to specifications, shoddy fire protection systems, substandard wiring, cracking roads and walks, poor connection to water supplies. It's only another $132,000,000 to fix it.

One too many calories

Paul Mason eats about 20,000 calories a day. You read that right - 20,000 each day. He costs the British health system $165,000 a year.

Correcting the Credit Rating Agency Problem

Kevin Hall continues his reports on the credit rating agencies with an analysis of the Accountability and Transparency in Rating Agencies Act, which is being proposed for approval by the House Financial Services Committee. This analysis is not as deep as Hall's previous work. He cites three deficiencies with the p

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roposed legislation:

• there is no independent due diligence with regard to a proposed offering
• the position of compliance officer needs to be strengthened considerably
• the SEC should work with the compliance officer.

My question is - does the legislation ensure that the agencies do their job or does it enable them to continue their pursuit of money?

Bring Back Glass-Steagall

That's what Volcker is saying. Separate commercial banks from investment banks. In Volcker's view combining the two creates risks and " if you try to control the risks with supervision, that just creates friction and difficulties” and ultimately fails. Volcker, who is 82, acknowledges that some think him old-fashioned and in denial of the new world where both commercial and investment banks can function well as a single entity. His response - “That argument brought us to where we are today.”

Listen up, Geithner

Mervyn King of the Bank of England says that the 'too big' banks should be broken up for "The sheer creative imagination of the financial sector to think up new ways of taking risk will in the end, I believe, force us to confront the 'too important to fail' question. The belief that appropriate regulation can ensure that speculative activities do not result in failures is a delusion."

Obama needs a Plan B

That's what Stephen Walt thinks because the current foreign policy is just not working. And, of course, Walt has the beginnings of such a plan. And it's not a bad start!

So what's Plan B? I'm still wrestling with that issue myself, but here's a quick sketch of some of the fundamental ideas. Plan B begins by recognizing that the United States remains the most secure great power in modern history and that most of damage we have suffered recently has come from scaring ourselves into foolish foreign adventures. It means rejecting the belief -- common to both neoconservatives and liberal internationalists -- that virtually every global problem requires an American solution and "American leadership." It acknowledges that social engineering in complex traditional societies is something we don't know how to do and probably can't learn, but it takes comfort from the fact that it is also a task that we don't have to do. It accepts that there are a few bad guys out there that do need to be confronted, captured, and sometimes killed, but understands that the more force we use and the heavier our footprint is, the more resistance we will ultimately face. And yes, Plan B understands that sometimes bad things will happen to Americans, and there is nothing we can do to completely eliminate all foreign dangers. Get used to it.

Plan B means playing "hard to get" more often, so that other states don't take us for granted and so that they bear a greater share of common burdens. It means exploiting balances of power and playing divide-and-conquer, instead of trying to impose a preponderance of U.S. power on every corner of the globe. It prizes the individual freedoms that are the core of American democracy -- freedoms that are threatened by a steady diet of foreign wars -- and it recognizes that other societies will have to find their own way toward more pluralist and participatory forms of government, and at their own pace. It seeks to maintain armed forces that are second to none but eschews squandering lives or money on peripheral wars that are neither vital nor winnable. It rejects "special relationships" with any other state, if by that one means relationships where we support other states even when they do foolish things that are not in our interest (or theirs).

And Plan B proceeds from the belief that other states will be more likely to follow America's lead if they look at us and like what they see. America used to dazzle the world by offering up a vision of opportunity, equality, energy and competence that was unimaginable elsewhere. The danger now is that America is increasingly seen as a land of crumbling infrastructure, mountainous debt, uninsured millions, fraying public institutions, and xenophobic media buffoons. Over the longer term, getting our house in order back home will to a lot more to shore up our global position than conducting endless foot patrols through the Afghan countryside.

Fly me to the moon

Okay, so $3,700,000 won't get you to the moon, but it got a lot of CEOs wherever they wanted to go.

The chart to the left is from the Washington Post analysis of perquisites given to the CEOs of the twenty-nine largest public financial companies that we bailed out. The bailed-out increased their perquisites by 4% in 2008; other Fortune 100 companies decreased their perquisites by 7%.

Two particularly egregious examples, as shown here, are GMAC, which gave their CEO $2,500,000 to help pay his taxes, and Comerica, which paid the boss' country club $200,000 for initiation fees and dues.

Greed

Earlier this month I wrote briefly about Moody's appearance before the House Financial Subcommittee on Capital Markets. It looked at that time that Moody's was basically not being prudent. Kevin Hall of McClatchy has looked into the situation more closely and attributes Moody's shortcomings to that old standby, greed.

Hall asserts that Moody's "purg[ed]analysts and executives who warned of trouble and promoting those who helped Wall Street plunge the country into its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression." All for the sake of increasing revenues and, ultimately, profits; revenues went from $800,700,000 in 2001 to $2.037 billion in 2006.

Systematically Timed

That's what Eliezer Fich, finance professor at Drexel, says of the practice of some companies to issue stock options to the top people just prior to the announcement of a merger. The professor and his colleagues studied mergers and acquisitions made between 1999 and 2006 and found 110 cases where, the professor claims, management was given unscheduled stock options while discussions were taking place but the public had no knowledge of such discussions. The study concluded that these companies got less of a premium from the acquirer, while the CEO averaged $5,700,000 in extra compensation via these options.

Granted it's an academic study that has yet to be published. But one should remember the furor about backdating options that was started by another WSJ article. Plus, the Journal has given some form of imprimatur by saying that it has reviewed a number of company filings and agrees with the professors.

Triple the Workload But Don't Increase the Staff

Is this a recipe for disaster or not? It's not if people were sitting around twiddling their thumbs. In FY2007 the FHA processed 1100 applications from lenders. The number of applications tripled in FY2008, but the same twenty-two people processed the applications as the FHA share of new loans went from 2% in the days of the subprime boom to 20% today.

In FY2007 I don't think the application handlers were twiddling their thumbs

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as they handled one application a week, which, to me, seems reasonable, maybe a little light but reasonable. Requiring the handlers to handle three applications a week would result in delays or errors in processing. It's the latter problem that an audit by the HUD Inspector General revealed.

The FHA did not have sufficient controls in place to ensure that regulations were being met. They did not check with other offices about their experience with the lenders. Nor did they collect all fees that were due. Or make sure that all supporting documents were obtained. Or that lender certifications were appropriate.

"If they're too big to fail, they're too big"

and the speaker goes on, “In 1911 we broke up Standard Oil -- so what happened? The individual parts became more valuable than the whole. Maybe that’s what we need to do.”

And a few more comments from a talk given last week at the Council of Foreign Relations.

“If you don’t neutralize that (i.e., the too-big-to-fail issue), you’re going to get a moribund group of obsolescent institutions which will be a big drain on the savings of the society,” he said.
“Failure is an integral part, a necessary part of a market system,” he said. “If you start focusing on those who should be shrinking, it undermines growing standards of living and can even bring them down.”

Can you guess the speaker? Alan Greenspan! If he's on the bandwagon, why can't Geithner and company move faster and smarter on the issue?

99 and counting

The San Joaquin Bank became the 99th bank to fail this year. And we still have another 2.5 months left in 2009. As of June the FDIC had 416 banks

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on their watch list. The Great Recession is over? Believe that and I'll sell you a bridge.

If you keep calling me a murderer, I'll kill you.

You really can't imagine anything weirder than what occurs in real life. For instance,

A Pakistani Taliban group is apparently worried about how the media perceives them. The group does not like to be portrayed as terrorists by the media. They sent a letter to the Lahore Press Club warning that if the media “does not stop portraying us as terrorists ... we will blow up offices of journalists and media organisations”.

The Meaning of the Cross

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Two Views of Afghanistan

Major Mehar Omar Khan of the Pakistani Army thinks we are trying to do too much there. Afghanistan has never been governable as a country, so why do we think we can change the situation. We're better off focusing on much smaller areas and making them work well and enlisting the aid of the Pashtuns to make it happen.

Helena Cobban brings up the question of China as it relates to Afghanistan. In her view China has benefited enormously from our dalliances in both Iraq and Afghanistan. She quotes from a recent article by someone fairly high up in the Chinese government. The writer thinks the UN is much better able to handle the situation than the Western coalition is.

Sharing the wealth

In this case the 'wealth' is an education. Babar Ali is a 16-year-old student in an extremely poor area of West Bengal, India. Although Ali comes from a typical, poor family in the village of Murshidabad, he is able to go to school. Many of his contemporaries cannot, as they have to work. Every day after school Ali teaches his friends and others what he has learned in school that day. He has been doing this since he was 9. Today, he has ten teachers at his 'school'. 800 students attend the classes.

Talk about changing the world by helping your fellowman! Ali is a lesson for all of us.

Changing his mind

Abbas has decided to push the UN Human Rights Council to vote on the Goldstone report which castigated both parties to the Gaza war. It sounds like he's reacting to the recent street demonstrations against his earlier decision to try to postpone a vote.

A Pivotal Moment?

Andrew Bacevich thinks that we are at such a moment. How Obama, the Nobel Peace Price Laureate, comes down on our role in Afghanistan will determine whether change will, in fact, become reality in 21st century America. If Obama buys McChrystal's argument re the need for more troops, he will be agreeing that we are essentially a war machine. We wage a war on terror. We use the military to get our way, no matter the effect of the world. In other words, Bush was right.

Stalling the Investigation into the Gaza War

Last month Richard Goldstone issued his report to the UN Human Rights Council on the war in Gaza. He accused both sides of committing war crimes and urged that the report be sent to the Security Council for action. However, when the Human Rights Council considered the report, the PLO representative urged the Council to wait six months before doing anything. Since Hamas and not Fatah was the main Palestinian culprit named by Goldstone, it's surprising that a postponement was requested by Fatah.

Helena Cobban, who is a pretty astute observer, reports on two rumors circulating in Palestine as to why Abbas and Fatah may want to go slow with any action on the Goldstone report:

• Israel has offered money to a Palestinian company that is tight with Fatah and wants to start a cell-phone service.
• There are tapes clearly showing Abbas urging Israel to continue its attack on Gaza.

Some substantiation of the above allegations can be found in the silence of Fatah spokespersons with regard to the attacks as they occurred and the suppression of anti-war demonstrations.

What if?

Stephen Walt asks us to imagine what we would do about Afghanistan if we were not already there. We'd see a government that was corrupt and had little support from its people, an insurgency gaining strength, a weak economy, etc.; basically the same situation that exists today minus our troops. Given such a situation, "would you be in favor of sending 100,000 or so American soldiers to fight and die there?" This situation is very much like that in a number of places - Sudan, Somalia, Yemen. But do we have 100,000 troops there?

Walt concludes by quoting Robert Kaplan, who, despite being in favor of staying the course, writes "history suggests that over time we can more easily preserve our standing in the world by using naval and airpower from a distance when intervening abroad. Afghanistan should be the very last place where we are a land-based meddler, caught up in internal Islamic conflict, helping the strategic ambitions of the Chinese and others."

How meaningful a milestone?

The Treasury reports the attainment of a "key milestone"in the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) in that more than 500,000 trials have begun. The program is aimed at those homeowners who are behind in their mortgage payments and facing foreclosure. It lowers their payments for three months. If the homeowner can meet the payments for those months, then he can stay in the program for five years or more.

Just how meaningful in this milestone? The program started in May with 55,000 homeowners. 1,711 have completed the program. That's a little over 3%. The Congressional Oversight Panel points out that foreclosures are running at double the number of new trials. The panel also concluded "It increasingly appears that HAMP is targeted at the housing crisis as it existed six months ago, rather than as it exists right now." "The result for many homeowners could be that foreclosure is delayed, not avoided."

The companies involved in the program have not been exactly knocking it out of the park. BofA has only process 7% of the eligible loans. Citi and JP have done better at 26% and 25%, respectively.

Sure, 500,000 cases have been started. But, how many are completed? How many are needed?

1984

England is one of the - if not, the - most monitored countries in the world. There is one Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) for every 14 Britons; they are in shops, on streets, in office buildings and who knows where else.

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Tony Morgan, managing director of Internet Eyes, believes that people are just dying to watch shots from some of these cameras. His company is offering a prize of 1,000 pounds to the person who reports the most crimes for the month. He's set up a web site so that people can see what the camera sees by logging in. Morgan's customers are really the stores with cameras. He plans to charge them 20 pounds a month for his 'crime prevention' services.

While Morgan has devised rules that make this process seem like a game, he claims ""This isn't a game - it's serious. This is all about crime prevention and it could be very, very effective. At the moment people look at CCTV and think someone might or might not be watching so they commit the crimes anyway. Once this gets going and we get signs saying that the CCTV is part of our scheme, it will be an extra deterrent because people will know they are probably being watched."

Obama wins Nobel Peace prize

“for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”

This is unbelievable but it is a headline in the NY Times. What effect will this have on the deliberations going on now about Afghanistan? This will really drive the crazies up the wall.

From the citation:

“Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama’s initiative, the United States is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened.”

“Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population,” the citation said.

“For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world’s leading spokesman. The Committee endorses Obama’s appeal that ‘now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges.’”

Rules of the Road

"You need to have a dialogue with the people who are going to be driving, but you don't want them writing the new rules." A quote from Tim Geithner with regard to the new rules for financial institutions.

The question is - is he having too much of a dialogue with Goldman, JP Morgan, Citibank and Black Rock? The Wall Street Journal reports he had 80 telephone calls with the leaders of these four institutions in the first six months of his term. True, these are very important institutions and we invested a fair amount in them, but we also invested quite a bit in Bank of America, GM and Chrysler. Geithner had "far less contact" with Ken Lewis, one with Chrysler and zero with GM. Even Paulson had far fewer phone calls with these people he was supposed to be regulating. What's that expression about Caesar's wife?

It may also be that Geithner continues to need mentors, as he has had for much of his career.

Fall is the Slow Time for Congress

Or, it would be more accurate to say late Summer and Fall as the House has been meeting three days a week since early September. The claim is that they did tons of work earlier this year and are now waiting for the Senate. Do you believe the claim? Do you accept the quality of their 'work'? Would you hire any one of them?

A very rare occurence

Fifty-four years ago Gordon Moore was in a serious automobile accident that left him with a plate in his head. Recently he was operated on because of an infection in his head. The doctors were shocked to discover that his skull bone had grown back under the metal plate.

A Really Intimate Suicide Bomber

This is all that's left of Abdullah Hassan al-Asiri after a bomb planted in his arse was detonated. They counted 70 body pieces of Mr. al-Asiri, but he failed to kill anyone. He slightly injured the Saudi anti-terrorism minister.

You know the airport lines and general aggravation caused by Richard Reid's shoe bomb. Plus, you can't take a drink into the terminal waiting area. What will the authorities devise to protect us against people who really want to become literal assholes?

Paying the Bad Guys

Mortgage servicers were one of the major causes of the current financial debacle. They were ill-equipped to deal with people and several of them have been cited and convicted in courts for a variety of offenses. Yet, many of these companies are participating in the Home Affordable Modification Program, which attempts to help people modify their current onerous mortgages. Of course, the servicers are not doing this gratis. They stand to make big bucks. And, some of them are owned by those to whom we gave money: Citicorp, Bank of America, JP Morgan.

Even beyond having to deal with these nasty people, our vaunted Treasury Department is not doing a very good job of overseeing this program. The GAO pointed to major gaps in the Treasury's oversight structure, stemming in part from a serious under-staffing situation (when will the Treasury be fully staffed? It's been almost 9 months now.) So, the servicers can still pick up their checks but do very little to earn them.

Serving Time

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Has Roman Polanski served his time? His Hollywood compatriots think so, unless, of course, they think that he should not have served any time for plying a 13-year-old with quaaludes and champagne before having sex with her. They think he should serve no time despite the fact he pled guilty to the charges.

I wonder what they would say if it were their daughter, even if the daughter had forgiven him? Should an admitted rapist go free because he is an 'artist'? The answer is obvious. He did it and should pay the price.

The Upper Hand

Dean Baker has an interesting article about the full cost of the TARP as applied to the biggest banks. His analysis is based on the cost of funds to the biggest banks and to smaller banks as published by the FDIC. Based on data since 2001 - which Baker acknowledges may not be typical in the long run - smaller banks pay .09 percentage points than do the biggest banks. True, that's a small differential. But we're dealing with very big numbers here. It adds up to a subsidy of $6.3 billion a year. Not exactly chicken feed. It's almost one-third of what the federal government spends on Temporary Assistance to Needy Families and better than 20% of what we spend on foreign aid.

It turns out that this differential is also big money when it comes to the profits of these biggest banks. On average, it amounts to 9% of profits. But for Capital One, for example, it's more than that; it's 30%.

Not a bad deal.

Semper Paratus

You never know when you will need a gas mask. Elena Bodnar and her colleagues are prepared. They have invented and patented a bra that converts to a gas mask for you and a friend. Here is a sketch of the device that helped her and her colleagues to win an Ig Nobel prize this year.

Mortgages: The Good and The Bad

You have to agree that Wall Street has imagination. They have figured out a way to unload some of their downgraded mortgage investment packages and make money doing so. And, as with so many of their scandalous schemes, Wall Street has a weird name for the transaction - re-remic, which stands for resecuritization of real-estate mortgage investment conduits.

They've been able to sell billions of this crap by waving a magic wand and dividing these downgraded bonds into two pieces - the good (which a rating agency will rate as AAA or close to it) and the bad (which will get a junk rating). How they're able to make such a division escapes me, but they claim to know people who can do this and, naturally, they pay these people well. And, of course, the new packages need a rating from the firm's friends at Moody's etal, who extract their fee.

Why does the firm want to do this? They need to put up less capital as backing for the original crap. Somehow, the wand has reduced the firm's risk although the assets after the waving are the same as those before the waving.

And these guys don't need more regulation? What planet do our leaders live on?

Negligence, Not Fraud

That's the opinion of Paul Kanjorski, head of the House Financial Subcommittee on Capital Markets, after hearing the testimony of a couple of Moody's ex-employees. He may very well be correct. But does that mean we should forget about the role Moody's and other ratings agencies played in bringing our economy to this point?

Merriam-Webster defines negligence as failure to exercise the care that a reasonably prudent person would exercise in like circumstances. One would expect that a company that purports to rate securities should be reasonably prudent. Clearly, Moody's was not. Were they being prudent in replacing their chief compliance officer with the manager responsible for rating mortgage-backed securities?

Meet Your Great, Great, Great, Great Grandmother

Scientists claim she is 4,400,000 years old, even older than Lucy, who had been recognized as our precursor. They've given the lady on the right a name, Ardi - short for Ardipithecus ramidus. She was unearthed in the 1990s and a team of scientists from all over the world have been working to reconstruct her since then. They've concluded that she was about 4 feet tall and weighed around 110 pounds. How the scientists were able to reconstruct Ardi is absolutely amazing as she was found in pieces and her bones were extremely fragile.

Some scientists think that this discovery "supports the long-held idea that we did not evolve from things that look like modern apes.’’