watching the x-files in reruns

Anna's watching through the first season of The X-Files, having received it as a gift, and I'm looking at it, and remembering how - intentionally - paranoid it was at the time, and I'm sitting here being struck by how naive it actually was. I mean, the idea that Congress - much less individual Senators and Representatives - would matter, would not be massively derelict in their duties, would actually oppose gross conspiracy against law, and Constitution, and even their own power as a branch of the government is just kind of astounding to me now.

I mean, honestly - Agent Mulder first season is being protected in his work from groups like the NSA and other secretive governmental groups by his patrons on a Congressional subcommittee. It's just so... laughable.

Which is, I suppose, horrifying in an entirely different way than originally intended.

briefly

It's been a bad day, so here's only two bits of economics to throw at you before I go to bed. Well, three, I guess:

1. Third quarter 2007 jobs data - the real data - is finally out. Instead of the jobs gains manufactured by the birth/death model and other black-box devices, the actual, best count on the ground shows outright job losses of 100,000 per month in the private sector. Fourth quarter will probably be a similar ratchet downwards.

2. The new H3 report is out, showing bank reserves to have set a new round of, um, insolvency, higher even (in preliminary numbers) than the April 9 report; bank non-borrowed reserves are at US$-111B against US$42B required, indicating that without loans from the Fed, the banking system as a whole would be failing to meet reserve requirements by US$152B, or Billion. (The numbers aren't straight adds due to rounding.) There had been a couple of steps of improvement in the previous four weeks; this is a new negative record. There are rumours of possible FDIC actions this weekend, but even if something does happen, it'll be hard to know too much immediately because the FDIC website is being taken partially down for maintenance over the long weekend. Here's a MarketWatch story talking about some of the banks under particular pressure. Relatedly, Mish updates his coverage of one particular Washington Mutual mortgage pool, in the context of several others.

3. On the other hand, bond and stock markets behaved normally today; the stock selloff was not paralleled by a bond selloff; people bought treasuries as you'd expect. Again, one day is not meaningful, but I mention it because I've been mentioning the atypical days. Until we have May's overall treasury flow data, the clock remains started.

PS: Okay, fine, a bonus round: over at RGE Monitor, you have a look at Asian country fuel subsidies, and what kind of changes - if any - are forthcoming in those subsidy regimes. Controlled consumer prices mean no demand changes in response to higher crude costs, and you know what that means...

on the other hand

I love parrots. This one (named Yosuke) got lost, and told the vet he was handed to his name and the address where he lived, and they took him home. Ah, isn't that better?