Yearly Archives: 2008

Links 8/14/08

Scientists to study synthetic telepathy PhysOrg. Now if you want to read about the US military’s forays into telepathy of the non-synthetic sort, read The Men Who Stare At Goats. You cannot make this sort of thing up. Police Turn to Secret Weapon: GPS Device Washington Post. Without warrants, too. Merrill May Cut Dividend for […]

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Lehman Negotiating Sale of Commercial Real Estate Holdings to BlackRock

Bloomberg reports that Lehman is in talks with BlackRock to spruce up its balance sheet by disposing of a big chunk of its commercial real estate portfolio. The article indicates that the firm intends to sell slightly less than half of its $40 billion holdings. Ladenburg Thalmann’s analyst Richard Bove anticipates the losses (presumably from […]

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Links 8/13/08 (and Antidote du Jour)

Clumsy young ‘face obesity risk’ BBC Cooking and Cognition: How Humans Got So Smart LiveScience Olympic ceremony singer faked performance Financial Times The Reagan Myth: Conservatives and Greed ataxingmatter Securities Market Remains Jammed, a Year Later Vikas Bajaj, New York Times. An update on the securitization market. China’s slowdown to continue Asia Times but keep […]

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Credit Crunch Damage to Banks So Far = $500 Billion

This Bloomberg piece, “Banks’ Subprime Losses Top $500 Billion on Writedowns” has some sloppy writing, but I am featuring it nevertheless because it presents some useful data and its headline factoid will no doubt be misconstrued. The headline refers to subprime when in fact the article tallies total creidt crund losses and writedowns, not just […]

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Freddie to New York: Drop Dead

The Wall Street Journal tells us “Freddie Mac Will Stop Buying New York Subprime Mortgages.” The reason? The state has implemented a new category of subprime mortgages, and, horrors, made them subject to “assignee liability”. In simple terms, if you are in the food chain that sold dodgy paper to an end investor, they can […]

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The last crisis…..

This post is by Jim Fitch of Some Assembly Required. Cheer up, this may be the last crisis of the oil age. Does This Dress Make Me Look Fat? The Fed needs to raise rates to combat inflation… while lowering rates to encourage economic growth. Congress needs to exercise fiscal responsibility… while bolstering the economy. […]

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Links 8/12/08 (and Antidote du Jour)

Eat kangaroo to ‘save the planet’ BBC Mixed fortunes for world’s whales BBC New evidence implicates humans in prehistoric animal extinctions PhysOrg Property market grinds to a halt amid mortgage drought Times Online MBIA DESERVES to Go Belly Up Barry Ritholtz Whispers of a Watergate for Bush Clive Crook, Financial Times Fed Watch: The Rapid […]

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Reader Notices

Dear readers, Am back from Alaska. Despite part of the trip being a fiasco, I recommend you go if you haven’t already. The people are very nice (it’s one of the few places in the US where communities still matter) and the sights really are spectacular. For instance, in one afternoon I had 68 humpback […]

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Rinse and repeat

I’ve been watching and reading about events in Georgia and Ossetia with some interest. I didn’t post over the weekend because there really didn’t seem much left to say. Earnings season is tapering off with no real shocks, just a bunch of financial write-downs and a sense of general foreboding in all but the export […]

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The current crisis is near the end….

This post is by Jim Fitch of Some Assembly Required. When someone tells you the current crisis is“near the end”, ask them which end. Resiliency : Proving once again their resourcefulness, American consumers ran up twice as much credit card debt in June as economists thought possible, increasing their total Visa bill to $2.59 trillion. […]

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