From ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ (Yeats) Mendicus Moldbug
Coral reefs may start dissolving when atmospheric CO2 doubles PhysOrg
Robot Love Gone Awry Oign
Public Transit Ridership Highest In 52 Years Consumerist
New Fears as Credit Markets Tighten Up Wall Street Journal and Fresh pessimism sweeps over credit sector Financial Times. For once, the Journal beat the FT on a credit markets story, but the FT is more detailed.
Drug Investors Lose Patience New York Times. Proving out the saying of a buddy of mine, “What’s the difference between high tech and biotech? How long it takes you to find out you’ve lost all your money.” She also described horses as “dog food futures”.
The Great Multiplier Debate, New Keynesian Edition Menzie Chinn, Econbrowser
Credit Cards Are the Next Credit Crunch Meredith Whitney, Wall Street Journal. Whitney warned of this in an FT comment (and I would suspect in her research) late last year; this is updated and amplified. Her estimates also show that even if the TALF works, it will only alleviate the crunch, not offset it (and other reports are showing that TALF uptake is modest).
Tent City Economist’s View
Antidote du jour (hat tip reader Counselor AMJ, note his too):
Goofy Newfies cleaning their teeth the natural way:
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The rise of veritable Bushvilles should focus the minds of policymakers. We need across the board face value reduction in mortgage debt to reduce the number of underwater borrowers, and target stimulus money at regions with exceptionally high unemployment.
http://hedgedbet.blogspot.com/2009/03/shanty-towns.html
Yves, I would like you to stop your romance with depressive realism (or is it realistic depressivism?). This is a dangerous kind of philosophy, which lit the fuse for fascism in 20th century Europe after the First World War. Of Yeats, for example, George Orwell said “translated into political terms, Yeats’s tendency is Fascist”. And I haven’t even mentioned Nietsche, Schopenhauer and so on… All these men were great minds and produced remarkable literature. But great minds can make great mistakes.
Yves, I would like you to stop your romance with depressive realism (or is it realistic depressivism?). This is a dangerous kind of philosophy, which lit the fuse for fascism in 20th century Europe after the First World War. Of Yeats, for example, George Orwell said “translated into political terms, Yeats’s tendency is Fascist”. And I haven’t even mentioned Nietsche, Schopenhauer and so on… All these men were great minds and produced remarkable literature. But great minds can make great mistakes.
ROBOT STORY
“As a result, Dr. Takahashi feels that Kenji will have to be decommissioned permanently….”
Oops. Dr. Takahashi died before he could decommission Kenji….
And how is Dr. Yamata doing over at the bioresearch lab?
Prevention of Bushville Shantytowns
Dean Baker has suggested a law providing that homeowers [not a typo] who are foreclosed on have the right to stay in the house if they pay market rent. The downside for the former lender/current owner – they can’t sell it to someone else. But the upside is they get its fair value as a rental property. The upside for the neighborhood and for society in general is obvious.
@mft – If you don’t like the Yeats poems Yves links to, don’t read them. Look at the cute animal pictures instead – they are here for a good reason.
On the other hand, those who don’t mind a little more contact with artistically-presented reality of an economically relevant nature might enjoy the photos illustrating
http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com
[their name comes from a line in Paul Simon’s song “The Boy in the Bubble”]
My word verification for this comment is forks – I’m reminded of Yogi Berra’s saying, “If you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
I know it’s off-topic, but the way those tents have been put up leaves something to be desired. This way, they’ll start leaking as soon as it starts to rain.
The Meredith Whitney article is a gas! What will happen if “able” borrowers are strapped for excess credit? Without the sacred right of the glorious American consumer to overspend, what will become of us all? It’s a sure road to ruin!
Er, Meredith, it’s called a pay-check, and you and your BFFs might not have noticed it, but, for the average Jane or Joe, they’ve been shrinking for years and are starting now to vanish altogether. And BTW consumption isn’t 2/3 of U.S. GDP; it’ been +70% of GDP.
Does anyone wonder where such neo-classical tripe like the “income smoothing hypothesis” comes from?
Gizmodo is saying a tipster told them the robot story is a fake. Google News it and the stories all seem to trace back to nowhere. But still pretty hilarious.
http://i.gizmodo.com/5164841/robot-programmed-to-love-traps-woman-in-lab-hugs-her-repeatedly
Accurate words are necessary for an honest debate over solutions for government sponsored homeowner evictions.
The increase in residential ‘market’ prices of these homes now under water are the result of fraud committed by the finance industry who were given (wrote their own laws) incentives to do so (I’ve read up to $60,000 in fees per closing). And for insider speculators the difference of hundreds of thousands of dollars over a 3-years period of time or less.
Fraud. Home prices were increased fraudulently.
Adjustments in principal need a reset to pre-fraud prices -2003 prices?
Mortgage holders are confronted with fraud. They are entitled to legal representation in court so that the court can sort out those who can qualify for pre-fraud mortgage payments and remain in their owner-occupied residences and those who who never could.
They can rent.
The Yeats poem is chillingly apt. It strikes so close to the bone, it’s painful to recognize the truth of it.
Greetings Econoblogosphere!
Not really related to links, just a recommendation: An interview by Fresh Air’s Terry Gross of Elizabeth Warren… It’s a jaw-dropper.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101611260
Cheers everybody!!
I protest mft’s liable of our writers who have helped birth brushes9, many others and whose only “mistake” is exposing the constant mediocrity of the sniveling dismissives who would hound them.
YS – The guest posts are too long – please advise the guest-posters to edit – they are not as interesting as the usual work and I am not going to invest as much time to start with new writers…Thank you!
Yes, cute dogs playing in the snow.
We too can go back to nature and enjoy life like these dogs if we can escape from the trappings of ‘progress.’
Little Johnny was given a car so he didn’t have to walk 10 miles in the snow to attend school where he learned how to design new and better cars so that his kids could go to school even faster and have more time to learn to design even better and faster cars, so that the kids’ kids could go to school to learn…
It’s vicious cycle.
Now, imagine it go in reverse.
Little Johnny has to walk 10 miles in the snow to attend school, just like his grandfather did in the Great Depression, so that he doesn’t have enough time to learn how to design cars that he won’t be needing because he is walking now and when he has kids, they too will walk 10 miles in the snow and won’t have enough time to learn to make other destructive things, like credit default swaps, etc.
That’s kind of a virtuous cycle and a possible path back to nature.
Dear Freddy el Desfibradddoro and brushes9,
I’m really sad that you don’t appreciate that great poetry can sometimes be the seed of bad ideas. Indeed, it is one of the most painful things in enjoying great art, to realize that sometimes the feelings and ideas generated through the art are carrying one to a place one does not want to go. In fact, maybe if you haven’t experienced this, you haven’t fully experienced great art at all.
Yours in mediocrity,
a snivelling dismissive.
mft,
I can only suspect that your intention is to anger others to get a sick mans’s rise in your pants.
But, if it helps, they says that books burn best at 451 F.
I think this is as good a time as any to mention what I already posted on Bill Bonner’s Daily Reckoning about the laws of Human-Dyanmics.
The First Law of Human-Dynamics (also Homo-Dynamics, after the species, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, which really should be Homo Dummies Dummies for the tendency for members of that species to self destruct).
Anyways, The First Law of Homo-Dynanmics states the conservation of idiocy. That is, if one politician doesn’t commit an idiotic act, another will.
The Second Law of Homo-Dynamics states that due to friction, that is, human friction, the amount of atrophy in a civilization always increases with time. At the end, everything is atrophied.
What the heck.
Since we are throwing poems about, and since haiku is way under-valued, I think I will throw one out for your critique:
Tomorrow is a strange guy
Every time I see him
He calls himself…Today!
And the feminist version:
Tomorrow is a weird gal
Every time I see her
She calls herself…Today!
Global warming is so yesterday…
RE:Whitney
Citizens used to have a saving account for rainy day’s then it was an HELOC and per Whitney we are down to the CC. Credit rationing will be around for sometime, best to get cracking on that saving plan.
A few comments back in the stream MyLessThanPrimeBeef concluded with this:
“It’s vicious cycle.
“Now, imagine it go in reverse.
“Little Johnny has to walk 10 miles in the snow to attend school, just like his grandfather did in the Great Depression, so that he doesn’t have enough time to learn how to design cars that he won’t be needing because he is walking now and when he has kids, they too will walk 10 miles in the snow and won’t have enough time to learn to make other destructive things, like credit default swaps, etc.
“That’s kind of a virtuous cycle and a possible path back to nature.
This is exactly why I like to refer to the current financial calamity as “The Great Regression.”