mostly economics, but not all

cedarseed is blogging about the Hez uprising in Beruit, her home town. Wish her luck.

As everyone knows, there are lots and lots and lots of houses in various stages of foreclosure, particularly in places like California. In California, a lot of those houses have swimming pools, which are now neglected, which is to say, stagnant, which is to say terrifying West Nile virus-carrying mosquito breeding pits.

See credit use. See credit use soar in March. Soar, credit use, soar! Well, at least we know how consumer spending was less down than expected. At least the reserves failure has stopped getting actively worse, with the banking system only at -US$127B or so in reserves default, which is actually an improvement.

But CMBX spreads have started spiking up again in all categories, and the ABX markets are uniformly down. (All that is bad.) Professor Roubini says that things are not fundamentally improving, and the Fed is getting desperate. His track record as of late has been unfortunately very good, so pay attention. He also has a piece on car loans and car loan funds going south, which, you'll note, the Fed is now taking as collateral! Yay! By which I mean ARG OMG DIAF.

In completely unrelated but better news, impressive data recovery lets a physics experiment lost on Columbia be analysed and published, and EA has backed off from the worst of of their latest round of hating their customers "anti-priracy" protections, but I'm still amused by the comic.

Surprisingly coherent

This weeks This American Life (Chicago Public Radio / Public Radio International) spends this week talking about the subprime -> mortgage -> CDO -> credit crisis in an hour-long segment, and it's the best coverage I've heard of it in any formal news media. They let the ratings agencies off way too easy - that bullshit was fraud outright - but even given that, it's not bad. If it hasn't aired in your area yet, or if it's going to repeat, it's worth catching, or recommending to people who still don't understand how we got here.

More on the papers relased on the Pentagon psyop

Glennwald's column today is largely the words of the Director of DoD Press Operations, evaluating the results in 2005 of one of their more recent domestic propaganda operations.

If you didn't read yesterday's round of quoted excerpts from these papers, please, please do. This isn't at all interpretive. This is entirely in the source material. The source material talks very explicitly about the goals, intents, and methods. This is entirely about the administration, DoD, and pentagon setting up hundreds of supposedly "independent" analysts as propaganda distributors. They are the ones using the term "echo chamber," they are the ones talking about how to eliminate off-message voices from the air, they are the ones telling people what to write, and in some cases even doing the editing.

And I remind you again that covert domestic propaganda operations by the US government exactly like this one are illegal, but this one was massive.