everyone is waiting

Good morning.

On this day before American elections, a dramatic plunge in US factory activity has not upset the equities markets overmuch - not even the plunge in automobile sales, with GM down 45%, Ford down 30%, and Toyota North America down 23%. Also, Mercedes and Porsche are off 34% and 50%, respectively. (The story is still being updated so the GM, Mercedes, and Porche numbers which curently appear only in links to it may not be in the actual article. However, they are the published numbers.) Similarly, the record low manufacturing numbers in China is being taken with a degree of serenity, for the moment, in equities.

But shipping continues to fall, with the Baltic Dry Index sliding today down to 827. At this point, I am lead to understand that the index implies that there is literally zero profit in shipping - the spot price is essentially the operations cost without markup. I can't find cost numbers this low previously (tho' my data only goes back to 2000), and the index is either at or below the trough established after the terrorist attacks in 2001. Predictably, shipbuilding interests are taking it in the teeth.

Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy are calling for a new Bretton Woods-type currency arrangement. I'm not sure how a Bretton Woods 3 would work in the original BW model. Brad Setzer is thinking BW2 may fall apart in a bang, but not the way he and Dr. Roubini thought it would (with a dryup of foreign interest in US treasury debt), but maybe he should stick to his guns - Karl Denninger points out the beginnings of exactly that failure. However, the US dollar continues to climb back out of the pit it made last Thursday. LIBOR rates and TED spread remain, however, uncomfortably high - still well down from the 4.x TED numbers we were seeing a couple of weeks ago, but still in the 2.5 range - a number typically indicative of a major credit crisis and possible collapse.

Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve continues to miss its target rate by quite a bit, failing on Friday even more than the newtype "target" of "within 75 basis points." The actual effective funds rate is one-third to one-quarter of a percent, which puts it on a par with the Bank of Japan, and all they have left is a formal ZIRP before they're done. Mish talks about the "global race" to a true ZIRP, and the European Central Bank's abandonment of any inflation-fighting mandate.

It's been a while since I've mentioned it, but the CMBX, a measure of commercial real estate lending risk, has hit new levels of bad everywhere except AAA, and AAA is near its highs. After a period of recovery, the ABX indicies a measure of performance of housing CDOs, have been exploring new lows in AAA, A, and junk, while holding on to some extremely modest recovery in the the AA tranches. The New York Times has an article on the sorts of fraud endemic to the mortgage-loan industry in the last couple of years of the boom.

Finally, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes about the hard shift to old-school leftiness in Europe. He doesn't like it.

not so much with the waiting in some cases

In personal economic news, annathepiper just got a layoff notice from the Seattle Times, along with 149 other people, effective the second week of December. Article here. annathepiper post here. And the Slog talks about it here.

Well, fuck.

bits and political pieces

I rather like this graphic summary of the campaign, called This. Fucking. Election. I know it's going around, but it's still neat.

Joe the Plumber has become a standard McCain surrogate and is going around places like Fox talking about how Senator Obama plans to betray the United States.

Faith2Action's Janet Porter says on WorldNetDaily that you can't vote for Senator Obama and still be a Christian. Yay! She also says that President Obama will cause the collapse of the US, saying, "If you willfully disobey God on life and marriage because of race or false hope for the economy, you will usher in the kind of change that brought the Soviet Union to collapse." Faith2Action is a political culture-war group which has worked with Focus on the Family, and was heavily involved with Mike Huckabee's political campaign.

Glenn Greenwald points to this column by the Washington Post's ombudsman saying that the reason newspapers (such as the Post) are losing readership is that they're "too liberal," despite the complete dereliction of reporting duties and endorsement of essentially every extremist grab of power during the past several years of GOP dominance in the Federal government, and their ever-continuing strides to be part of the conservative movement echo chamber. Good examples of this are outlined here, wherein a campaign reporter on the McCain trail talked about what bad form it is to report bad things about the candidate you are reporting - and means it:

Reston blames herself, at least in part, for the loss of friendship between McCain and his reporters. Back in July, with a couple of other reporters, she approached him at the back of his "Straight Talk Express" bus, when "as always McCain warmly motioned for us to squeeze in beside him on the couch." She then committed a terrible sin: she asked The Maverick a question -- whether he "agreed with his advisor Carly Fiorina's recent statement that it was unfair for some health insurance companies to cover Viagra but not birth control" -- which, as a long-time opponent of health insurance mandates, he was visibly uncomfortable answering and to which he was unable to provide a coherent response, resulting in a video that was widely used by "liberals and late-night comedians" and which was "embarrassing" for McCain.

What was Reston's reaction once she realized that she was the cause of McCain's embarrassment? This: "my stomach churned and my cheeks grew hot." By abusing the access granted to her to make John McCain look bad, she knew she had done wrong...

...the regular reporters who were privileged enough to follow McCain... understood the agreement on which their fun with McCain depended ("access and friendship in exchange for positive coverage") and they were petrified that new interlopers would ruin it for them. So they would warn newcomers not to rock their boat of intimacy.

...

What's vital here is that none of this is unique to the McCain campaign. McCain learned best how to exploit the craven need for approval and sense of belonging which characterizes most modern journalists, but that is the dynamic that drives most of our reporting. That's what makes these episodes -- when all of this gets unmasked -- so valuable.

You should read the whole thing, because it really does describe how the US political media works, or rather, fails to work.

I'm told this letter to the editor calling for the expulsion of all atheists from the US is from an Alaska newspaper. I do know there is a Soldotna, Alaska, so it's reasonable. eta: The letter actually did run, but the letter-writer was pranking the newspaper. See comments.

There is footage - I don't know when it's from - of Senator Obama stressing his opposition to same-sex marriage but also his opposition to Proposition 8 in California, on MTV. Andrew Sullivan has it, which is handy, since I don't know how MTV embeds work. Anybody know when this was shot and aired? I don't. It's still maddening that this is the best we'll get.

By contrast a married lesbian expatriot in British Columbia talks about how nice it is just to be, you know, normal.

Anybody know anything bad about iStockphoto?

Anybody know anything bad about working with iStockphoto? They're a stock photography company, I got pointed at this blog article about them, I have a lot of photos, we could use more money.

And the first results come in...

Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, first in:

Senator Barack Obama: 15
Senator John McCain: 6

Hart's Location, New Hampshire, second in (but claiming first):

Senator Barack Obama: 17
Senator John McCain: 10
Senator Ron Paul (write-in): 2

And, of course, there's already an Impeach Obama website.