Rolling US Economy Into The Shitbin Thread

so much for GEITHNER BOUNCE!

Thanks for that, guy.

It is amusing to think of what institutional capital managers moved all this money out of equities today on the BRAKIENGEN NWEWS that the US has been in a recession all year.

like, I'm imagining some pension fund for cargo cults or something.

http://calculatedrisk.blogspot.com/2008/11/sad-news-tanta-passes-away.html

You were awesome.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/01/tanta-has-died/

^^^ comments are amazing. I need to learn how to be eloquent one of these days. I suppose I could start by not trying to be all RIP on a thread with "shitbin" in the title.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/01/business/01tanta.html?_r=1

The blog quickly drew a lively and informed group of commentators, few livelier and none more informed than someone who called herself Tanta. She began by correcting some of Mr. McBride’s posts. “She would tell me either I was wrong or the article I was quoting was wrong,” he said Sunday. “It was clear she really knew her stuff. And she was funny about it.”

Tanta soon graduated from merely commenting to being a full-scale partner. Her first post, in December 2006, took issue with an optimistic Citigroup report that maintained that the mortgage industry would “rationalize” in 2007, to the benefit of larger players like, well, Citigroup.

“Bear with me while I ask some stupid questions,” Tanta wrote, and proceeded to assert that the industry was less likely to “rationalize” than fall apart, which it did. Citigroup was bailed out by the government last month.

She loved the intricacies of mortgage financing and would joke about being not just a nerd on the subject but a nerd’s nerd. She eventually wrote, for the Calculated Risk site, “The Compleat ÜberNerd,” 13 lengthy articles on mortgage origination channels, mortgage-backed securities and foreclosures that constituted a definitive word on the subject.

The rest of the time, Tanta liked to chew on the follies of regulators, the idiocies of lenders and — a particular favorite — clueless reporters, which according to her was just about all of them. She did not approve, she once wrote, of “parading one’s ignorance about mortgages in an article full of high-minded tut-tutting over ignorance about mortgages.”

In March 2006, Ms. Dungey was diagnosed with late-stage ovarian cancer.

Ms. Dungey was raised in Bloomington-Normal, Ill., had a graduate degree in English, and worked as a writer and trainer for a variety of lenders, including Champion Federal and AmerUs Mortgage.

One of Tanta’s last posts was written as the $700 billion bailout was first being debated in mid-September, and it seemed that the Treasury Department might buy bad assets directly from troubled banks.

Tanta argued that for every asset that banks unloaded on the government, the chief executives should be required to explain “why they acquired or originated this asset to begin with, what’s really wrong with it in detail, what they have learned from this experience, and what steps they are taking to make sure it never happens again.”

English postgraduates are what this world needs more of, it would appear.

"tanta" is yiddish/german for "grandma"! my mom sometimes talks about her tanta yetta.

what they have learned from this experience, and what steps they are taking to make sure it never happens again.

hah awesome

and after that they should be spanked

The Big Three Should Become the Medium Two:

http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/12/bankruptcy-and.html

this seems much more amenable to me.
balloon juice and others are continuing to make tipsy mothra's point, or points similar to his, but I still wasn't seeing any progress to it unless the executives came back with some more concrete ideas about restructuring. They're all still fucked and I still think any bailout is most likely going to wind up paying off the last generation of UAW's retirements instead of this generations' wages, but it's a game of compromises innit.

fuckin' baby boomers god dammit

^^yup

There are good pieces by Roubini and Martin Wolf in today's ft but I can't link to them as we still have no internet in my office.

here you go Ed

how to avoid stagflation (Roubini/FT)
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0fe65a48-c0a9-11dd-b0a8-000077b07658.html

Interesting contrast between the two, Roubini advocating central banks lending to business to combat stagdeflation and wolf arguing that goverments should be borrowing in the absense of quality borrowers out there.

krugman:

will it, in fact, even be possible to pull the economy out of its nosedive before unemployment goes into double digits? I’m starting to wonder.

UAW rep dude half crying on fox news talkin bout some auto workers asking him if they'll have a house and money to feed their family next week... I dunno could you play the piano before the accident?

Yeah what a jackal

even be possible to pull the economy out of its nosedive

Is anything possible without the great benevolence of our imperial government and its shining stars in Congress? Creating a massive cushion with massive deficit spending...and that artifice changes the fundamental issues how?

I didn't know that 68% of Ford is institutionally owned

http://clusterstock.alleyinsider.com/2008/12/chrylser-and-the-war-against-private-equity

yeah that's who i want looking out for me some hysterical lightweight... pffft.

Surely most S&P500 companies' stockholders are institutions, pension funds, banks, insurers etc.

yr mom...

oh ... my ... god ... Hadn't caught up on this thread in a while ... Doris Dungey was my first English Composition teacher my Freshman year at ISU - She was SO intelligent and lively and inspired me to write well and often. Her dad was an auto mechanic in town and fixed my clunker Malibu Classic often. DFW and Doris Dungey in one year - ouch.

Condolences, BlackIronPrison -- she really does sound like she was a good character through and through (and hey, any current or former English comp teacher's a friend of mine).

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iTDu0_1uS4AJHEN10aFE75hDSZFQD94TS8KO4

Nobel Prize Laureate in Economics Paul Krugman of the U.S signs a chair

...after explaining that the US auto industry will likely disappear due to economic forces that extend far beyond its present weakness.

also american office workers will all be replaced by indian telecommuters

I think it's important to note that the "american auto industry" does not consist entirely of ford and gm

http://www.autoobserver.com/2008/11/sen-shelby-how-sweet-is-the-auto-business-in-alabama-not-very.html

yeah that is good you found an article about how people don't buy SUVs anymore because gas prices are high. I think it is cool that somebody took the time to write that down in november of 2008 so you could bring it to my attention. At that rate I expect an article about hybrid/ev startups and shai agassi setting up shop in hawaii by this time in 2011

krugman sez he was misquoted, takes issue with the grammar of his misquotation
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/08/me-misreported/

Interesting stuff in the FT today about how to achieve negative interest rates.

I like how Dandy pretends to have no idea about the basic economic theory behind deficit spending during recessions.

i am going into work in two hours fully expecting them to come in and shut our office down completely. at the very least, the majority of people will be let go, but certain things (like asking for the "route passwords".. "uh, you mean root passwords?" "I guess so" .. of the linux servers my team administrates) seems like a pretty clear sign that we're all on the street. I've been told six weeks notice, but no severances. Happy New Year! Our office existed completely to support WaMu so it's not like this has been unexpected, but it did seem stable in 2003 (plus we had a contract they were supposed to honor for the next three years. apparently failing and being sold invalidates that).

I like how Dandy pretends to have no idea about the basic economic theory behind deficit spending during recessions.

I'm happy to invoke the unimpeachable genius that is Keynes as much as the next liberal is; my problem lies in the details of the trillion dollar devil.

Any opinion on Backwardation and what it means for $?

Tribune bankrupt.

Some hoohah:

The Chicago-based company had roughly $300 million cash on hand, more than enough to make a $70-million payment due today. But executives reportedly were unable to persuade lenders to undertake a broader restructuring of the debt.

Among other obligations, a $512-million principal payment related to Zell's leveraged buyout is due in June.

Money for that payment was to come from asset sales, particularly the sale of the Chicago Cubs baseball franchise. That sale, originally expected to take place earlier this year, has been delayed in part because of the credit crisis and is now expected to take place in 2009.

Some analysts had previously set the value of the Cubs at more than $1 billion.

xxxpost sorry to hear that akm.

For sure -- hoping for the best.

http://bp3.blogger.com/_ucHLXiVwMEQ/R5EyOpriGYI/AAAAAAAAARw/9C_wVLIrXoA/s400/art_bailing_water_from_boat_hg_clr.gif

Don I'm pretty sure the point of deficit spending by the government during a recession is that the details don't matter. What matters is that spending occurs at all. Citizens aren't spending, so the government has to step in. The idea that this spending might well be on things that will have a useful life into the future - like the health of the nation's citizens, long-term technological research, infrastructure - i.e. things private industry is usually too focused on this quarter's profits to sit up and do - is awesome, but not the point. The point is to get money moving. As far as I can make out.

I'm pretty sure the point of deficit spending by the government during a recession is that the details don't matter.

O_O

It is always nice if you get a decent multiplier effect for your gov expenditure - something that giving billions to insolvent banks is not noted for, btw. And it helps to choose recipients who will be motivated to turn around and spend the money they get asap on locally provided goods and services. Boosting imports would be generally unhelpful, which is one reason why those $600 checks were a rather willy-nilly idea.

Lamp, think of it this way - in a non-recessionary time, like say, the late 90s, what do consumers in an affluent society spend their money on? Take-out dinners, third cars, fourth TVs, charms for your mobile phone. Are you suggesting the government spend its fiscal stimulus like this? Since that's what a "healthy" pattern of production and consumption looks like?

I mean, even if the government spent every last dime of its $600 billion fiscal stimulus on Sanrio models, glitter toothpaste, and Head-On, it would still be money moving through the economy. Spending has to take place. As long as the spending is reasonably spread out over different industrial sectors the details honestly don't matter for the purpose it's set up to accomplish. Which is to be the spending of last resort.

hosted by the still-barely-in-business nytimes

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/08/business/media/08carr.html?_r=1&ref=business

The other day, I got in a cab and there was a news report on the back seat television about soaring unemployment in New York. An info-screen on an ascending elevator ride in Manhattan suggested that we were all only going one way — down. The news zippers in Times Square were full of reports of crumbling consumer confidence even as people streamed in to the stores beneath them.

Once I made it to my office, it got worse. An RSS feed from Reuters was waiting on my desktop saying, “U.S. employers axed 533,000 jobs from payrolls in November, the most in 34 years.” My e-mail inbox not only included a note from a friend that she had been laid off, but it was flanked by contextual ads from Google labeled “Unemployed?”

lol wtf we are living in gibson's sprawl
where are the lo-teks

btw while I share some of the increasing concern about obama's economic "team" thus far, I am also becoming less and less convinced that they will have much say in any of the policies that the coming administration is going to put forth to get us out of this mess in the next few years, e.g. it's all going to be about how to dole out the new infrapork, and the rates are going to be set to serve that interest, in which case somebody like geithner seems perfectly acceptable. we're totally going to have free wifi for almost the whole country in a few years, I'm really starting to believe that.

i wish i were.