When I first looked this up last year, no good explanation came about, so let me explain in my own words.
(Read the article)

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So finally, the Fed is taking home loans onto its balance sheet, a tool Bernanke proposed years ago to combat deflation. (Interesting, the list of reflationary tools proposed were: drop short-term interest rate, cap long-term rate, buy private debt, buy foreign debt, tax cut, and government purchases; so there are just a few more options left.)

Fed Easing Liquidity in Funding Markets

By Jeannine Aversa, AP Economics Writer

The Fed announced the creation of a new tool, called the Term Securities Lending Facility (TSLF), geared to provide primary dealers — big Wall Street investment firms and banks that trade directly with the Fed — with 28-day loans of Treasury securities, rather than overnight loans. They would pledge other securities — including federal agency residential-mortgage-backed securities, such as those of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — as collateral for the loans of Treasury securities. Fed officials said that’s the first time they’ll be accepting mortgage-backed securities through this type of lending program.

Unfortunately, that does tend to make the Fed less credit-worthy, say if the banks were unable to repay their 28-day debts. And since the Fed is where the government keeps its money:

U.S. Treasuries Riskier Than German Debt, Default Swaps Show

By Abigail Moses

March 11 (Bloomberg) — The risk of losses on U.S. Treasury notes exceeded German bunds for the first time ever amid investor concern the subprime mortgage crisis is sapping government reserves, credit-default swaps prices show.

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all over the news today.

Scientists have built the first synthetic genome by stringing together 147 pages of letters representing the building blocks of DNA.

The researchers used yeast to stitch together four long strands of DNA into the genome of a bacterium called Mycoplasma genitalium. They said it’s more than an order of magnitude longer than any previous synthetic DNA creation. Leading synthetic biologists said with the new work, published Thursday in the journal Science, the first synthetic life could be just months away — if it hasn’t been created already.

“We consider this the second in our three-step process to create the first synthetic organism,” said J. Craig Venter, president of the J. Craig Venter Institute where scientists performed the study, on Thursday during a teleconference. “What remains now that we have this complete synthetic chromosome … is to boot this up in a cell.”

This is what they actually did. Looks like an interesting application of TAR cloning in yeast (another link) — normally used for sequence selection — which itself is a significant extension of the YAC toolset.

I guess small artificial genomes are a practical reality now, but TAR cloning is really the key here, allowing a less restrictive abstraction of the join operation to be implemented. Nice.

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