Here are the links:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyOWuczlJCA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrWuZQ9770c&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILW8OolM0Lo&feature=related

Listen to this:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16628918

Now go out there and vote for republicans, cheerleaders for capitalism! And don’t foget to pledge allegiance to the flag!

i wonder if they are accounting for all real estate asset secured debt or just some fraction of new home loans since 2002. for example, is commercial construction included? 2nd and 3rd home loans? construction related jobs and companies?

BECU at 4.7-4.9% CD rates is very good. The banks average only 4.4% now and its shrinking each week.

See the proof:

http://www.bankrate.com/brm/rate/deposits_home.asp

They’re down to the 4.7-4.9 ranges; seems to me they were 5+ % a few weeks ago; before the western banks started borrowing Mid East emergency money at loanshark rates too.

That’s how we bail the the subprimes out, shaft the investors. You might want to buy them 4.7% 12 month CDs now, before they plummet to 2% again in the near future.

On the otherhand, with puny interest rates for savings accounts like this again, a mattress seems safer. At least a possible run on the bank, isn’t a run on your mattress.

The index was 18.4 pct below October of last year, its third-highest year-over-year drop since 2001.

Woo-frikkin’-hoo. A 0.6% month-to-month gain.

i doubt that it could be year-to-year.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/56817-pending-home-sales-climb-unexpectedly

that wsj article ends with “There is, indeed, a possibility that the opacity of today’s mortgage securities means markets may be factoring in far larger losses than will actually occur.”

but you might just as easily say the opposite. so why come to that conclusion?

human emotion in the markets is like a fog. and it’s the change in sentiment that finally brings about both bubbles and crashes. if sentiment does finally shift to pessimistic in the US, it will be the first time since the 70’s and the downswing is likely to be a lot faster and a lot harder than it deserves to be.

the same overreactions that lead people to overvalue an asset like a tulip or kozmo.com or a house causes people to undervalue them by the time things hit bottom. i’d say a recession right now is almost a certain thing. that wouldn’t in itself be a problem. what is likely to be a problem is the overreaction to it.

It’s kind of like this: You have a big turd in the toilet, instead of flushing the turd, the central bankers are putting more clean water in the bowl. That isn’t going to get rid of the turd(s).

Look at the FED slosh report. There is plenty of liquidity floating around, but the banks are scared to death of each other’s balance sheets. There is no transparency out there right now, and no one knows just how many crappy loans are out there. There are going to be a lot more write downs to come, I’ll guarantee that.

if/when the condo shoe drops and projects are dropped during construction, more banks are going to go under. this is why the LIBOR (the bank to bank lending rate) is so high. the banks don’t trust each other to be around tomorrow to pay the loans back.

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2007/12/wave-of-bank-failures-is-coming.html