Rolling US Economy Into The Shitbin Thread

100 points in 13 seconds o my!

Let's say your bank sent you a statement saying that, contrary to the past year's worth of statements, your savings account contained substantially less money than they told you, due to a series of accounting errors that began in December 2007.

Would you consider this 'year-old information' or a nasty surprise when you opened the statement?

i have phrased myself badly. I'm suggesting that any new bad news that is exposed re: past indications of economic failing/flailing would have to have happened over a longer period than one calendar year for me to be shocked (like, say, five years...). I AM, however, always amused/annoyed by how backwards-looking the DJIA is wrt how it responds to news like this...

also, no bold-face MARKETS DOWN XXX PTS headlines today.

haha, it was the NBER's Business Cycle Dating Committee that fixed the 12/07 date. Sounds like Critical Mass for playas.

Like, for an industry whose anti-litigious slogan is that '...past results are no indication of future trends,'... past results seem to have a redic. amount of effect on the market.

dont u guys mean 600 pts

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