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What happened on Thursday, anyway?
Feb. 16th, 2008 11:28 amFirst, from the China section: Here's video of a job I'm glad I don't have. Damn. Also, Chinese workers loot factory after closure - they were owed four months back money when the ownership group went under, and weren't getting it, so took it out in... shoes, mostly.
Minyanville has some lovely graphs showing how sadly far away we still are from a housing bottom. Here's a comparison (in timeline) with the Japanese experience and the California experience, both from the article.
Meanwhile, in the Sacramento area, foreclosures almost equaled house closings in January, 1,782 vs. 1,815. And the DC area, an area "immune" to housing busts, saw a precipitous drop in home sales month-to-month and year-to-year.
And this week's WTF moment: somebody asked for over $200 billion in emergency borrowing from the Fed on Thursday. They didn't get it. I wonder who that was? Total nonborrowed reserves, btw, fell to US$-19B (again, that's a negative number) - almost US$17B less than two weeks ago. Total reserves including borrowed funds also shrank by $7B, no doubt in part due to the fall in reserve requirements - does that mean the banks are down a combined US$24B in two weeks?
In good news - because, as I noted last time I posted about this, this needs to happen - MBIA has become the first monoline insurer to agree to a breakup into two companies, one with salvageable munis and another that can burn down as quickly as possible. Now the other ones need to be shoved over, and we can start getting the muni bond markets moving again.
Minyanville has some lovely graphs showing how sadly far away we still are from a housing bottom. Here's a comparison (in timeline) with the Japanese experience and the California experience, both from the article.
Meanwhile, in the Sacramento area, foreclosures almost equaled house closings in January, 1,782 vs. 1,815. And the DC area, an area "immune" to housing busts, saw a precipitous drop in home sales month-to-month and year-to-year.
And this week's WTF moment: somebody asked for over $200 billion in emergency borrowing from the Fed on Thursday. They didn't get it. I wonder who that was? Total nonborrowed reserves, btw, fell to US$-19B (again, that's a negative number) - almost US$17B less than two weeks ago. Total reserves including borrowed funds also shrank by $7B, no doubt in part due to the fall in reserve requirements - does that mean the banks are down a combined US$24B in two weeks?
In good news - because, as I noted last time I posted about this, this needs to happen - MBIA has become the first monoline insurer to agree to a breakup into two companies, one with salvageable munis and another that can burn down as quickly as possible. Now the other ones need to be shoved over, and we can start getting the muni bond markets moving again.
