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If you're wondering
May. 20th, 2008 10:49 pmI posted about this behind a filter, but I've been so quiet lately because I've been distracted by Anna's recurrent breast cancer. Time for another endless series of doctor visits (already in progress), plans, surgeries, and other horrors. For those who don't know, this makes the sixth straight year of major medical adventures, and it's starting to wear on me, a lot, by which I of course mean KILL EVERYONE.
I've got a lot of things sitting around in tabs, I may and may not post links to them but probably will. Anna and I are going to do a lot of Folklife this weekend, kind of as a big blowoff before her next round of surgeries, a phrase that when I type it makes me kind of shake a little. Um, I guess as a picosummary I'd say that shit is in fact going down, particularly in that oh look, a lot of those AAA ratings are suddenly discovered to be errant, including one of the bond insurers which is suddenly now rated "junk" instead of AAA.
Oh, and I don't have the link handy, but treasury flows went deeply negative last month; the previous month was barely positive, as was the month before that. This matters because if foreign governments join foreign investors in mostly not buying US treasury bonds, the US is fucked, by which I mean against the wall. The big negative report for a single month - around US$50B - isn't a big deal by itself, particularly since there were other factors involved, but if we get two or three months of that shit in a row, watch for T-bill rates to jump through the sky to try to draw investors. And that means you're looking at a bond market collapse, and suddenly the US government has to pay four or five or six times as much to finance its deficits, and everything goes to hell.
Don't panic yet - like I said, we've seen big negative spikes before, I talked about one last year that was massive, much moreso than this one - and it didn't snowball. It probably won't this time, either; that flow will probably jump back up with the April report. But Mr. Gaeta has started the clock.
I've got a lot of things sitting around in tabs, I may and may not post links to them but probably will. Anna and I are going to do a lot of Folklife this weekend, kind of as a big blowoff before her next round of surgeries, a phrase that when I type it makes me kind of shake a little. Um, I guess as a picosummary I'd say that shit is in fact going down, particularly in that oh look, a lot of those AAA ratings are suddenly discovered to be errant, including one of the bond insurers which is suddenly now rated "junk" instead of AAA.
Oh, and I don't have the link handy, but treasury flows went deeply negative last month; the previous month was barely positive, as was the month before that. This matters because if foreign governments join foreign investors in mostly not buying US treasury bonds, the US is fucked, by which I mean against the wall. The big negative report for a single month - around US$50B - isn't a big deal by itself, particularly since there were other factors involved, but if we get two or three months of that shit in a row, watch for T-bill rates to jump through the sky to try to draw investors. And that means you're looking at a bond market collapse, and suddenly the US government has to pay four or five or six times as much to finance its deficits, and everything goes to hell.
Don't panic yet - like I said, we've seen big negative spikes before, I talked about one last year that was massive, much moreso than this one - and it didn't snowball. It probably won't this time, either; that flow will probably jump back up with the April report. But Mr. Gaeta has started the clock.
