mostly economics, but not all

[solarbird]

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.

Comments

[king-chiron.livejournal.com]

Wow, very interesting reading at Cedarseed's LJ, thanks for the tip.

[foibos.livejournal.com]

I did a double take when I saw you linking to cedarseed. I've been following Joumana's output since I found her on deviantArt, but I didn't really expect her to appear in the Solarbirdverse.

Cool.

[mojave-wolf.livejournal.com]

Shit. In all my focus on other things, I had missed things deteriorating there so badly *again*. One of my best friends in law school was from Lebanon; glad she decided to stay here; hope (and am pretty sure, tho we haven't been in touch for years) that she still is, and her family is okay. Hell, I want everyone to be okay. What a nightmare.

Speaking of deteriorating, can't say I'm surprised about our economy, or expect any long-term turnaround any time soon . . .

[(Anonymous)]

Re: EA, don't forget http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/5/9/

[blargh.livejournal.com]

Re: The EA thing: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/5/9/

(grumbles about LJ wanting to make him post anon... arrr grrr)