Euro Watch: European Commission Offers Grim Forecast for Economy

BRUSSELS — A top E.U. official warned Friday that the economy of the euro area would shrink for the second year in a row and that countries like France and Spain would miss fiscal targets meant to ensure the stability of the common currency.

Olli Rehn, the European commissioner for economic and monetary affairs, forecast growth across the 27-nation European Union of just 0.1 percent this year and a contraction of 0.3 percent among the 17 countries in the euro zone.

Mr. Rehn’s presentation signaled “another year of falling output and rising unemployment in store in 2013,” said Tom Rogers, a senior economic adviser at Ernst & Young.

Prospects for growth in many parts of the Union were “very disappointing,” Mr. Rehn acknowledged at a news conference, where he presented a so-called winter economic forecast prepared by his department at the European Commission, the Union’s administrative arm.

“The ongoing rebalancing of the European economy is continuing to weigh on growth in the short term,” Mr. Rehn said.

Just three months ago, the commission forecast that the euro area economy would grow by 0.1 percent this year.

Mr. Rehn said the European economy should resume expanding in 2014, with growth reaching 1.6 percent across the Union and 1.4 percent in the euro area.

But the downbeat forecast, coming a day after data showed that a slump in business activity in the euro area worsened unexpectedly this month, added to perceptions that Europe continues to struggle to stimulate growth while cutting spending to pare deficits.

The commission also forecast that unemployment would continue to rise in the euro area this year, to 12.2 percent, up from 11.4 percent in 2012.

In Spain, the commission said it expected joblessness to hit 26.9 percent, up from 25 percent last year. In Greece, the forecast was for unemployment to leap to 27 percent from 24.7 percent a year earlier.

Even in buoyant Germany, which is expected to grow this year by 0.5 percent, unemployment was seen nudging up slightly this year to 5.7 percent from 5.5 percent in 2012.

The litany of grim figures will add fuel to a furious debate over whether an insistence on austerity is creating a self-perpetuating cycle where cuts to state spending to meet E.U. targets diminish demand, weakening tax revenue and further straining government finances.

Yet blaming the effects of belt-tightening for Europe’s continued economic woes, particularly in the case of Spain, is too simplistic, said Guntram B. Wolff, the deputy director of Bruegel, a research organization.

“Perhaps the real reason for the deterioration in the economic situation in Europe was the massive drop in confidence of international investors in the ability of the euro area to overcome its more systemic problems,” Mr. Wolff wrote in a blog posting shortly after Mr. Rehn’s news conference.

The commission said Spain’s deficit was expected to fall to 6.7 percent of gross domestic product this year, down from 10.2 percent in 2012, partly because of tax increases and a sharp reduction in year-end bonuses for public-sector workers. But that still fell wide of the official target of 4.5 percent, and the commission warned that Spain’s deficit could rise to 7.2 percent in 2014.

In the case of France, the commission attributed economic stagnation to declining household spending linked to rising unemployment — which the report said was expected to reach 10.7 percent in 2013, then climb to 11 percent in 2014, up from an estimated 10.3 percent in 2012. In addition, the report cited a drop in confidence among French entrepreneurs.

The report forecast that the French budget deficit for 2013 would be 3.7 percent of G.D.P., down from an estimated 4.6 percent in 2012, but well above the government’s official target of 3 percent. The commission also warned that the deficit could rise to 3.9 percent in 2014.

In a sign of flexibility, Mr. Rehn said deadlines for meeting budgetary targets could be extended in the cases of France and Spain, assuming their governments could demonstrate progress in implementing fiscal reforms despite the unexpectedly tough economic environment.

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Bulgari shows off Liz Taylor's gems

It isn't easy sometimes to be an ordinary person in Los Angeles, so near to and yet so far from the city's glamorous events.

You hear about the grand Oscar parties, but you will never be invited. The award ceremony may be taking place minutes from where you live, but you watch it at home, on TV, in your sweat pants — and you might as well be in Dubuque.

Rodeo Drive too can make you feel like a scrap on the cutting room floor. As you stroll the wide and immaculate sidewalks of Beverly Hills' iconic shopping street, you pass by boutiques you'd feel self-conscious walking into. In the windows are baubles and trinkets you could never in three lifetimes afford.

Which is why it is rather nice to be invited to make a private appointment at the house of Bulgari, the fine Italian jeweler that opened its doors in 1884.

Elizabeth Taylor loved Bulgari jewels. Richard Burton, whose torrid affair with her began during the filming of "Cleopatra" in Rome, accompanied her often to the flagship shop on the Via Condotti. He liked to joke that the name Bulgari was all the Italian she knew.

So it is fitting that starting Oscar week, the jeweler is celebrating the Oscar-winning star with an exhibit of eight of her most treasured Bulgari pieces.

They are heavy on diamonds and emeralds — of rare size, gleam and value.

And Bulgari knows their value well.

After Taylor's death, it reacquired some of the gems at a Christie's auction. One piece, an emerald-and-diamond brooch that also can be worn as a pendant, sold for $6,578,500 — breaking records both for sales price of an emerald and for emerald price per carat ($280,000).

That brooch, whose centerpiece is an octagonal step-cut emerald weighing 23.44 carats, was Burton's engagement present to Taylor. He followed it upon their marriage (his second, her fifth) with a matching necklace whose 16 Colombian emeralds weigh in at 60.5 carats. Bulgari bought the necklace back too, for $6,130,500.

They are in the exhibit, along with Burton's engagement ring to Taylor and a delicate brooch — given to her by husband No. 4, Eddie Fisher — whose emerald and diamond flowers were set en tremblant so that they gently fluttered as Taylor moved.

The jewels are not for sale.

On Tuesday night, actress Julianne Moore wore the Burton necklace, with pendant attached, at a gala for Bulgari's top clients. At the dinner hour, guests were escorted along a lavender-colored carpet to a nearby rooftop that had been transformed into a Roman terrace.

Those honored guests, of course, got private viewings of Taylor's jewels.

But so did Amanda Perry, a healer from West Hollywood who arrived the next morning for one of the first appointments available to the public.

Someone had emailed news of the collection to the 35-year-old Taylor fan. She walked in off the street Tuesday, when the exhibit was open only to press — and Sabina Pelli, Bulgari's glamorous executive vice president, fresh from Rome, was taking sips of San Pellegrino brought to her on a silver tray between back-to-back interviews that started at 5 a.m.

The camera crews were long gone when Perry came back Wednesday. She had the exhibit, and handsome sales associate Timothy Morzenti of Milan, entirely to herself.

In a black suit, still wearing on his left hand the black glove he dons to handle fine jewels, Morzenti whisked Perry off via a private elevator to the exhibit on the second floor. The jewels stood in vitrines mounted high off the ground. Behind them were photos and a slide show of Taylor, bejeweled.

"Which piece would you like to see first?" Morzenti asked her as a security guard stood by. "I personally love the emerald ring."

Then he proceeded at leisure to explain Bulgari-signature sugar-loaf cuts and trombino ring settings, while tossing in occasional Taylor stories.

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RIAA Says Google's Anti-Piracy Search Algorithm Is Bogus

The Recording Industry Association of American said Thursday that Google’s algorithm change to lower rankings of sites with “high numbers” of copyright-infringing removal notices has had no “demonstrable impact on demoting sites with large amounts of piracy.”

“The sites we analyzed, all of which were serial infringers per Google’s Copyright Transparency Report, were not demoted in any significant way in the search results and still managed to appear on page 1 of the search results over 98 percent of the time in the searches conducted,” the RIAA’s report said. (.pdf)

The report concluded that pirate sites are much more likely to appear in top search rankings than are legitimate music sites.

“Whatever Google has done, it doesn’t appear to be working,” the report said.

Google, which did not immediately respond for comment, announced the algorithm, or “signal,” changeover in August.

At the time, a Google spokesman told Wired that a primary reason for the move was to better the “user experience” in Google search to direct internet surfers to “high-quality” sites. The plan was not a result of any “deal” with the content industry, the spokesman said.

Google receives millions of notices a month under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to remove infringing content from its search results.

Sites like 4shared.com, audiko.com, beemp3.com, downloads.nl, mp3chief.com, mp3juices.com, mp3skull.com and zippyshare.com repeatedly showed in the top 10 search results, despite Google receiving more than 100,000 removal notices for each site, the RIAA report said.

“There does not appear to be any meaningful decrease in ranking of these sites since the demotion signal was implemented,” the report said.

Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, search engines must remove links upon request by rights holders who tell the company the links lead to infringing content. If Google doesn’t remove the link, Google itself may be liable for infringement.

In August, when the change was announced, we speculated that the move looked like it was designed to head off potential legislation giving the Justice Department the power to seek court orders requiring search engines like Google to remove from search results websites the government declares to be rogue. Such a feature was included in the Stop Online Piracy Act, which was defeated for altogether different reasons more than a year ago because the package also included tinkering with the (DNS) domain name system.

At the time, we assumed the new algorithm would work better than how the RIAA portrayed it Thursday.

That said, it makes no sense for Google for Google to highly rank pirate sites to the detriment if its own business model, which is more than just online search. Google is a giant media company, and its marketplace called Google Play sells music, books, magazines, movies and TV shows from the world’s biggest content producers.

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Living With Cancer: Arrivals and Departures

After being nursed and handed over, the baby’s wails rise to a tremolo, but I am determined to give my exhausted daughter and son-in-law a respite on this wintry evening. Commiserating with the little guy’s discomfort — gas, indigestion, colic, ontological insecurity — I swaddle, burp, bink, then cradle him in my arms. I begin walking around the house, swinging and swaying while cooing in soothing cadences: “Yes, darling boy, another one bites the dust, another one bites the dust.”

I kid you not! How could such grim phrases spring from my lips into the newborn’s ears? Where did they come from?

I blame his mother and her best friend. They sang along as this song was played repeatedly at the skating rink to which I took them every other Saturday in their tweens. Why would an infatuated grandma croon a mordant lullaby, even if the adorable one happily can’t understand a single word? He’s still whimpering, twisting away from me, and understandably so.

Previously that day, I had called a woman in my cancer support group. I believe that she is dying. I do not know her very well. She has attended only two or three of our get-togethers where she described herself as a widow and a Christian.

On the phone, I did not want to violate the sanctity of her end time, but I did want her to know that she need not be alone, that I and other members of our group can “be there” for her. Her dying seems a rehearsal of my own. We have the same disease.

“How are you doing, Kim?” I asked.

“I’m tired. I sleep all the time,” she sighed, “and I can’t keep anything down.”

“Can you drink … water?” I asked.

“A little, but I tried a smoothie and it wouldn’t set right,” she said.

“I hope you are not in pain.”

“Oh no, but I’m sleeping all the time. And I can’t keep anything down.”

“Would you like a visit? Is there something I can do or bring?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t think so, no thanks.”

“Well,” I paused before saying goodbye, “be well.”

Be well? I didn’t even add something like, “Be as well as you can be.” I was tongue-tied. This was the failure that troubles me tonight.

Why couldn’t I say that we will miss her, that I am sorry she is dying, that she has coped so well for so long, and that I hope she will now find peace? I could inform an infant in my arms of our inexorable mortality, but I could not speak or even intimate the “D” word to someone on her deathbed.

Although I have tried to communicate to my family how I feel about end-of-life care, can we always know what we will want? Perhaps at the end of my life I will not welcome visitors, either. For departing may require as much concentration as arriving. As I look down at the vulnerable bundle I am holding, I marvel that each and every one of us has managed to come in and will also have to manage to go out. The baby nestles, pursing his mouth around the pacifier. He gazes intently at my face with a sly gaze that drifts toward a lamp, turning speculative before lids lower in tremulous increments.

Slowing my jiggling to his faint sucking, I think that the philosopher Jacques Derrida’s meditation on death pertains to birth as well. Each of these events “names the very irreplaceability of absolute singularity.” Just as “no one can die in my place or in the place of the other,” no one can be born in this particular infant’s place. He embodies his irreplaceable and absolute singularity.

Perhaps we should gestate during endings, as we do during beginnings. Like hatchings, the dispatchings caused by cancer give people like Kim and me a final trimester, more or less, in which we can labor to forgive and be forgiven, to speak and hear vows of devotion from our intimates, to visit or not be visited by acquaintances.

Maybe we need a doula for dying, I reflect as melodious words surface, telling me what I have to do with the life left to be lived: “To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.”

“Oh little baby,” I then whisper: “Though I cannot tell who you will become and where I will be — you, dear heart, deliver me.”

---

Susan Gubar is a distinguished emerita professor of English at Indiana University and the author of “Memoir of a Debulked Woman,” which explores her experience with ovarian cancer.

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Via Video, a Front-Row Seat to a Fashion Show

As the Belstaff runway show began in New York City last week, buyers, designers and bloggers crowded into their seats, jotted notes and took smartphone photos as the models strutted by.

But it was another crowd, outside the tents, that Belstaff executives were particularly interested in this season. For the second time, it was live streaming its fashion show. And the Web viewers were not just potential fans, they were data sources to help Belstaff predict which of the runway items might be hits in stores this summer.

“If you can have a bit of information that helps you beat the market and pick more winners,” said Damian Mould, Belstaff’s chief marketing officer, “you’d be stupid not to take it.”

Fashion Week, which wrapped up last week in New York and moved on to London and Milan this week, used to be an insular industry event. Buyers and editors attended and made calls as to what their customers would want months from now.

But that has changed. Fashion houses in recent years started to sidestep the middleman by giving the public a front-row seat via webcam video. While that was more of a marketing tool at first, live streaming — and other ways to give consumers digital access to runway fashion — is now being seen as a research opportunity.

As more brands offer live videos of the shows, regular viewers see exactly what the buyers and editors are seeing, and influence what will be made by pausing on an outfit or posting Twitter messages about a particular style.

On retail fashion Web sites like Lyst and Moda Operandi, designers are allowed to track consumers’ early orders to gauge demand before they make clothes. And a handful of brands, like Burberry, are allowing regular customers to order runway clothes as the shows are live streamed.

Increasingly, the public is weighing in on fashion — and designers are listening. “It’s creating a commercial opportunity around an event that was previously an industry event,” said Aslaug Magnusdottir, the chief executive of Moda Operandi.

Mass-market apparel has long embraced the Web, but high fashion brands were wary of even having e-commerce sites a few years ago, fearing that would cheapen their brands. Now, the embrace of the Twitter-using public is causing some tension in the high-fashion world, where buyers’ tastes used to reign supreme.

“Of course the buyer knows their customer,” said Mortimer Singer, chief executive of the retail consulting firm Marvin Traub Associates, “but I think it’s hard to ignore when someone turns around to you and says, by the way, we got 50 preorders of this style.”

Live streams are an important way of measuring customer interest. They became popular a few years ago and are now regularly syndicated on fashion blogs and style sites.

“It’s not only what consumers are watching, but the devices they’re on, the geographies that they’re in, the engagement — what part of the video stream was of most interest, where did they abandon the video,” said Jay Fulcher, chief executive of Ooyala, which makes a video player that streamed Fashion Week shows, including those for DKNY, Marc Jacobs, Oscar de la Renta, Belstaff and Tory Burch.

According to B Productions, which produced the video for those shows, brands’ live-stream viewership has grown by about 20 to 40 percent every year, and the data is becoming more precise.

“It’s not just that they stopped watching five minutes in,” said Russell Quy, president of BLive by B Productions, “but we’re able to attach that to an actual outfit.”

Belstaff, a British brand known for its outerwear, gathered data via the live stream of its recent women’s show in a few ways. It syndicated the live streams on a number of fashion sites.

By looking at Twitter mentions timed to the live stream, the company saw that the first five looks — new twists on classic jackets — drew enthusiastic responses.

“I’ve informed the buying team of that interest, so I know they’re going to buy big and deep in that category when the product comes in,” Mr. Mould said.

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Interstate 5 reopens through the Grapevine

From Times Staff

February 20, 2013, 9:44 a.m.

The California Highway Patrol has reopened a stretch of Interstate 5 through the Grapevine that was closed earlier today because of ice.

The highway was opened to vehicles with escorts at about 9:15 a.m., said CHP Officer Ed Jacobs. The freeway was closed between Castaic and Grapevine Road about 6:35 a.m., Jacobs said.

Comments are filtered for language and registration is required. The Times makes no guarantee of comments' factual accuracy. Readers may report inappropriate comments by clicking the Report Abuse link next to a comment. Here are the full legal terms you agree to by using this comment form.

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Homebrew Hardware Intersects With Sweet Sounds at Music Hack Day San Francisco

Music Hack Day San Francisco took over the offices of tokbox this past weekend for two days of getting creative with digital music. The results, as always with Music Hack Days, were a mix of the practical and the absurd.

Every Music Hack Day — part of an ongoing series of events around the world — offers participants 24 hours to conjure up inventive new ways of interacting with music with the aid of technology. Last year’s San Francisco event saw engineer Robb Böhnke recreate Winamp within Spotify as an app. Here are some of our favourites from this year’s event:

LSD
Taking the idea of the collaborative playlist and applying it to visualisations, LSD “allows people in the audience to control the visuals projected on stage at concerts and festivals, all using their smartphones,” explains creator Tyler F. Each visualization acts as a kind of room — people can log onto the site, join in, and take control of visual effects. Even better, they can add in visuals that they’ve recorded on their phones and add them to the mix.

Tweet Concrète
This jokingly pretentious offering from Ryan Fitzgerald generates short sonic collages based on randomly selected tweets from your account. Think of them as tweet soundtracks that last as long as each tweet takes to read. Or, if that doesn’t take your fancy, then why not try…

Nightingale
Apparently, Nightingale ”crawls through your Twitter stream and matches keywords and phrases to song lyrics by utilising text processing and sentiment analysis” to deliver an “amazing playlist” that matches the mood of your tweets. While the bar for “amazing” is set at an unclear height (and every playlist seemed to have a Black Eyed Peas song in it on our tests), it’s pretty good at picking stuff on Spotify that goes with the taste of each tweeter.

The Bonhamizer
If you’ve ever found yourself wondering what a song might sound like if it had been recorded with John Bonham on drums, look no further — Paul Lemere’s Bonhamizer is just the ticket. Lets you upload a song and choose from four types of Bonham — “Basic Bonham,” “Hammer of the Gods,” “Double Time Shuffle,” and “Bonham Shuffle.”

Code Music
This site, from Daniel Imrie-Situnayake and Ryan Brown, turns valid JavaScript into music by mapping the “structure, nesting and errors contained within” onto a compositional waveform.

Soundvine
Matt Montag’s Soundvine lets you pair up your Vines with a track of your choosing, control the playback speed, and generally “remix” the looping video/audio format. Lots of the Music Hack Day projects focus on Spotify and Twitter, but it’s likely that Vine will become equally important over time as the format grows in popularity.

LazyListen
If you’ve ever wanted to be able to listen to Pandora without having the stress of having to use your hands to say you love certain tracks, Peter Watts’ LazyListen will help with just that. Using your computer’s webcam, the radio will stop playing if you get up and leave — and if you “rock out” to a track, it’ll automatically give it a thumbs-up.

Tweedio
Possibly perfect for parties, Tweedio (from Justin Mahon and Sean Po) lets people text or tweet to add songs to a collaborative playlist. Not only can new songs be added, but songs already on the playlist can be pushed up so they come on sooner.

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Oscar “losers” to go home with $45,000 gift bags

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Oscar nominees who don’t end up with a coveted gold statuette at the Academy Awards on Sunday won’t go home empty handed after all.

Los Angeles-based marketing firm Distinctive Assets will be handing out its annual “Everyone Wins at the Oscars Nominee Gift Bag”, valued at more than $ 45,000, to the talented and well-dressed “losers,” the company said on Tuesday.

Among the items in the gift bags, known as swag bags, are trips to Australia, Hawaii and Mexico, personal training sessions, condoms, a bottle of tequila, hand-illustrated tennis shoes, appointments for injectable fillers and ‘portion-controlled’ dinnerware for those watching their figure, Distinctive Assets said in a statement.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which hands out the Oscars, stopped its practice of giving gift baskets to presenters and performers in 2007 after the practice came under closer scrutiny from U.S. tax authorities.

Celebrities who receive gifts and free trips at awards shows are expected to declare them to the Inland Revenue Service as income and pay the appropriate taxes.

The Distinctive Assets gift bag is not endorsed by the Academy but has been creating consolation goodie bags for 11 years now. The bags are delivered to the losing nominees to their homes directly or through their agents or publicists.

This year’s “Not Everyone Wins….” swag bag also includes an under-the-counter water filtration system, acupuncture and aromatherapy sessions, a one-week stay at a fitness and weight-loss retreat, and a one-year membership to London’s Heathrow Airport’s private VIP service.

Nominees’ children also benefit: they get to enroll in professional all-kid circus classes.

The Academy Awards, the highest honors in the movie business, will be handed out a ceremony on Sunday in Hollywood.

(Reporting by Zorianna Kit, editing by Jill Serjeant and Philip Barbara)

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Global Update: New Polio Strains That Protect Vaccine Factory Workers

Scientists have created new strains of polio intended to protect workers in factories that make polio vaccine. The new strains have the same ability to invoke an immune reaction as the live viruses now used to make vaccine do, but there is virtually no risk anyone will get polio if one of the new strains somehow escapes.

The research team, at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is led by Eckard A. F. Wimmer, a molecular geneticist who made headlines in 1991 when he synthesized polio virus in the lab from its chemical components, the first time a virus had been made outside of living cells.

The world is very close to eliminating polio, which is now endemic to only three countries: Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan. But to be sure the disease is gone, children will have to be vaccinated for several years after the last detected case.

Currently, factories making the injectable Salk vaccine used in the United States and Europe start with the dangerous wild-type viruses known as Types 1, 2 and 3. After growing a large batch, vaccine makers “kill” the virus with formaldehyde and prepare it for syringes. The finished product is safe, but if the growing live viruses ever escaped “because of a leak, an explosion, an earthquake, a tsunami, a flood,” Dr. Wimmer said, “the spill could spread like wildfire.”

Right now, polio eradication depends on large sweeps by volunteers putting drops of the oral Sabin vaccine into children’s mouths. It is easy to give, and it produces better immunity because it reaches the intestines, which are lined with receptors for the virus.

The Sabin vaccine has drawbacks, however: it contains a still-live virus that was mutated long ago so that it is usually too weak to produce disease. In rare cases, it can mutate back into a dangerous form that paralyzes or kills. And the vaccine is risky in children with immune-system problems. For those reasons, the World Health Organization plans to eventually phase it out.

Once that happens, factories around the world will have to make millions more doses of the injectable version, so five years ago, the W.H.O. began looking for safer seed strains of virus.

Dr. Wimmer and colleagues took a part of the virus’s RNA that is crucial for growth, mutated it to weaken it, and inserted it in another stretch of RNA that controls how virulent the virus is. That renders the virus less lethal. “If it were to get into the brain, it doesn’t do any harm,” he said.

And, he explained, even if the virus evolved to defeat that virulence-lowering mutation, it would simultaneously cripple its own ability to reproduce.

Now Dr. Wimmer’s team is working with the Crucell vaccine company to prove that the safer strains grow well in Crucell’s proprietary human cell line. Ideally, he said, the new vaccine will eventually be mixed with others like those for measles and diphtheria, and all will be delivered together in one painless shot by a jet injector.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 20, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the location of a university. It is in Stony Brook, not Stonybrook.

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DealBook: A Revolving Door in Washington That Gets Less Notice

Obsess all you’d like about President Obama’s nomination of Mary Jo White to head the Securities and Exchange Commission. Who heads the agency is vital, but important fights in Washington are happening in quiet rooms, away from the media gaze.

After a widely praised stint as a tough United States attorney, Ms. White spent the last decade serving so many large banks and investment houses that by the time she finishes recusing herself from regulatory matters, she may be down to overseeing First Wauwatosa Securities.

Ms. White maintains she can run the S.E.C. without fear or favor. But the focus shouldn’t be limited to whether she can be effective. For lobbyists, the real targets are regulators and staff members for lawmakers.

Ms. White, at least, will have to sit for Congressional testimony, answer occasional questions from the media and fill out disclosure forms. Staff members, however, work in untroubled anonymity for the most part. So, while everyone knows there’s a revolving door — so naïve to even bring it up! — few realize just how fluidly it spins.

Take what happened late last month as Washington geared up for more fights about the taxing, spending and the deficit. The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, decided to bolster his staff’s expertise on taxes.

So on Jan. 25, Mr. Reid’s office announced that he had appointed Cathy Koch as chief adviser to the majority leader for tax and economic policy. The news release lists Ms. Koch’s admirable and formidable experience in the public sector. “Prior to joining Senator Reid’s office,” the release says, “Koch served as tax chief at the Senate Finance Committee.”

It’s funny, though. The notice left something out. Because immediately before joining Mr. Reid’s office, Ms. Koch wasn’t in government. She was working for a large corporation.

Not just any corporation, but quite possibly the most influential company in America, and one that arguably stands to lose the most if there were any serious tax reform that closed corporate loopholes. Ms. Koch arrives at the senator’s office by way of General Electric.

Yes, General Electric, the company that paid almost no taxes in 2010. Just as the tax reform debate is heating up, Mr. Reid has put in place a person who is extraordinarily positioned to torpedo any tax reform that might draw a dollar out of G.E. — and, by extension, any big corporation.

Omitting her last job from the announcement must have merely been an oversight. By the way, no rules prevent Ms. Koch from meeting with G.E. or working on issues that would affect the company.

The senator’s office, which declined to make Ms. Koch available for an interview, says that she will support the majority leader in his efforts to close corporate tax loopholes. His office said in a statement that the senator considered her knowledge of the private sector to be an asset and that she complied with “all relevant Senate ethics rules and disclosures.”

In a statement, the senator’s spokesman said, “The impulse in some quarters to reflexively cast suspicion on private sector experience is part of what makes qualified individuals reluctant to enter public service.”

Over in bank regulatory land, meanwhile, January was playing out like a Beltway remake of “Freaky Friday.”

Julie Williams, chief counsel for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and a major friend of the banks for years, had been recently shown the door by Thomas J. Curry, the new head of the regulator. Banking reform advocates took that to be an omen that a new era might be dawning at the agency, which has often been a handmaiden to large banks.

Ms. Williams, of course, landed on her feet. She’s now at the Promontory Financial Group, a classic Washington creature that is a private sector mirror image of a regulatory body. Promontory is the Shadow O.C.C. The firm was founded by a former head of the agency, Eugene A. Ludwig, and if you were to walk down the halls swinging a copy of the Volcker Rule, you would be sure to hit a former O.C.C. official. Promontory says only about 5 percent of its employees comes from the O.C.C., but concedes that more than a quarter are former regulators.

Promontory, as the firm explains on its Web site, “excels at helping financial companies grapple with and resolve critical issues, particularly those with a regulatory dimension.” But it plays for the other team, too, by helping the O.C.C. put into effect regulatory reviews. The dreary normality of this is a Washington scandal in the Michael Kinsley sense: a perfectly legal one.

Promontory, which demurred on a request to talk with Ms. Williams, has a different view. The firm doesn’t lobby or help in litigation. It argues that after banks stop fighting regulators and lobbying against rules, then they come to Promontory to figure out how to fix their problems and comply.

“We are known in the industry as the tough-love doctors,” said Mr. Ludwig, the chief executive of Promontory. “I am deeply committed to financial stability, and the only way to have stability is to do the right thing in both the spirit and letter of the law.”

Hmm. Remember the Independent Foreclosure Review, the program that the O.C.C. and other federal bank regulators trumpeted as the largest effort to compensate victims of big banks’ foreclosure abuses? As my colleague at ProPublica, Paul Kiel, detailed last year, that review involved consultants like Promontory essentially letting banks decide who was victimized. How well did that work? So well that the regulators had to scuttle the program because it hadn’t given one red cent to homeowners but somehow, I don’t know how, managed to send more than $1.5 billion to consultants — including Promontory.

Promontory maintains that it complied with the conditions set out by the O.C.C. And the review was replaced by a settlement, which the regulators say will compensate victims — though the average payout is small beer.

Who, exactly, makes the rules at the O.C.C.? I mentioned “Freaky Friday.” That’s because at the agency, Ms. Williams is being replaced by Amy Friend. And where is Ms. Friend coming from? Wait for it … Promontory. In March, maybe they’ll do the switcheroo back.

The O.C.C. didn’t make Ms. Friend available but said that her “talent, integrity and commitment to public service are beyond reproach” and would be subject to the rule requiring her to recuse herself for a year on matters specifically relating to her former employer.

I spoke with people who said she was a smart and dedicated public servant, an expert on the Dodd-Frank Act who can help complete the scandalously long list of unfinished rules and expedite its adoption.

“Amy Friend is absolutely rowing in the right direction,” said a Senate staff member who worked on efforts to push for stronger financial regulation.

Let’s hope so.

But people also described Ms. Friend as pragmatic. In Washington, that’s the ultimate compliment. Sadly, that has come to mean someone who seeks compromise and never pushes for an overhaul when a quarter-measure will do.

Washington today resembles something like the end of “Animal Farm.” People move from one side of the table to the other and up and down the Acela corridor with ease. An outsider looking at a negotiating table would glance from lobbyist to staff member, from colleague to former colleague, from pig to man and from man to pig and find it impossible to say which is which.

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