Parrots Join Humans On The Dance Floor NPR
Lithium in water ‘curbs suicide’ BBC
Extinction has a weird appeal Christopher Caldwell, Financial Times
Banking Fortunes – From “Catastrophic!” to “Just Awful”! Satyajit Das
Public pawnbroker keeps Parisians’ secrets safe Reuters (hat tip Dimitris). Late to this, but interesting nevertheless.
Same Data, Conflicting Forecasts Joe Nocera, New York Times
SEC Chief Schapiro Wants Authority to Make Hedge-Fund Rules Bloomberg
Chrysler’s Bankruptcy Deals Blow to Affiliates Wall Street Journal. The big auto companies are big elements of a large and fragile ecosystem, We’ve worried that the consequences of a bankruptcy on the parts makers have been underestimated, If enough of them fail, it can hurt all US auto players, including the touted transplants. From the story:
“Without a clear timeline for when the [bankruptcy] situation will end and production will resume, I believe we will see massive suppliers bankruptcies that will stop Chrysler from resuming production,” Chrysler’s procurement officer, Scott Garberding, said in a statement filed with the bankruptcy court Thursday.Chrysler was preparing to shut down all of its vehicle assembly plants for 60 days on Monday. But on Friday two plants in the U.S. and two in Canada were forced to cease production because a few suppliers stopped shipping parts or materials.
On Wall Street: Chrysler saga sets dangerous precedent Financial Times
Derivatives and attempted state capture in Kazakhstan Willem Buiter (hat tip reader Olaf). He misses the fact that CDS are written on a reference entity, not on specific bond issues, but otherwise makes a good point.
The hedge fund of Foggy Bottom Economist
Antidote du jour. NPR did not give raccoons the credit they deserve (I first heard about their musical skills from an algorist):
lineup32 
Posts
We and others have hashed muchly over where the problem lies with potential BK for Chrysler, with digging out the bond rubble and CDS tsunamis as real worries. For me, though, the parts suppliers and dealer networks are the parts not really addressed by the ‘defibrilate the bastards and pray’ approach of this Admin pre-jack. There may be little but empty buildings left of the dealerships after six months of closure, and whether parts suppliers are active anywhere except in court is anything but certain. The ‘Chrysler’ part of the problem has at least minimal credibility as a continuing concern in this plan. The ‘rest of the system’ part of the problem may well be the one that blows out with the force of the impact.
I’m not saying that this is an easy problem. And I am all for getting on with it. We may wish that we had nationalized and then built down under control rather than stopped the patients heart and attempted an immediate resuscitation. If this goes badly, it is a direct consequence of ideological blinders forcing a less than optimal choice.