Swiss glaciers ‘in full retreat’ BBC
Chill out, you beautiful people, the Versace beach is refrigerated Times Online
Really High Maintenance New York Post. Divorce again reveals details of the lifestyles of the rich and famous.
Option ARMs for Dummies: Why 4.5 Percent Mortgages Rates will do Absolutely Nothing for these Toxic Assets Dr. Housing Bubble
Polaroid files for bankruptcy Financial Times
Foreign Investors Trade Safe for Safest Floyd Norris, New York Times. Norris picks up on a theme that Brad Setser was on to quite a while ago, that foreign investors are NOT impressed by the less than “full faith and credit” status of agency securities.
Federal Reserve is damned either way as it battles debt and deflation Ambrose Evans-Priechard, Telegraph
The age of obligation Niall Ferguson, Financial Times (hat tip reader Don). A must read.
Fed Watch: Zero, But Not Quite Quantitative Easing Tim Duy, Economist’s View. A second must read. Some important observations about what the Fed is trying to achieve.
Antidote du jour:
Anonymous 
Posts
Niall Ferguson: “We are having war finance without the war itself.” That is a shrewd summation, which tightens up some wandering thoughts which had crossed my own mind less succintly. Our present historical parallel is to major war financial powers. I invite those interested to look how these war funding distortions invariably end. The skinny: bad down crash, but into sand-in-can bollards rather than bridge abutements. But the takeway is that ‘war funding’ interventions cannot solve our present problem matrix, only kick the true crunch down the calendar a half dozen or dozen quarters.
Duy’s points, really tea leaf readings but ones informed, are worth sorting through. . . . But in the end these ‘What the Fed intends’ discussions are secondary: The Fed has no idea how this is going to end, and we kid ourselves as well if we—I, or any of us—pretend to much certainty. (Duy doesn’t, I’m not painting with a broad brush here; he is sensibly thinking out loud.) The Fed seems obsessed with manipulations to induce lending by the banks. This is madness and delusion, to me. The banks don’t lend because they are so beyond busted they’re in another dimension. The is kicking a dead cat, and thinking that their is life in the economy because the slowly disintegrating corpus moves more or less forward. It would make FAR MORE SENSE for the Fed to take $200B and charter ten new, solvent, publically owned banks, and direct _them_ to lend as a prop to keep the real economy going. While concurrently winding down the big Busters one by one in a controlled fashion. I and others have covered this ground before, so I’m not inclined to chew over particulars. I do think that this will be the real end game, though: the public authorities launch a parallel and sound banking system. But if they kill our currency first, to lie in the tomb alongside our dead banks, we’ll be fifteen years and many more trials in the transformation, rathern than seven-ten and a merely damned bumpy ride.