YouTube - Peter Schiff Was Right 2006 - 2007 (2nd Edition). For some reason, I’m always prefer the voice of the bears. It’s great to see that he got laughed at by those two housing douchebags.

a busy day in canada

Lots of news today for the Canadian economy…

“September employment soars unexpectedly“. The headline is that we added 107,000 new jobs which is 10 times what was expected. The part I think is kinda shocking: only 10,000 were full-time jobs. The rest are part-time.

“Ottawa buying $25 billion in mortgage pools“. I’m somewhat confused why this was their move to add liquidity. Why not guarantee 100% of retail deposits like Ireland just did? That’s also big news as basically every other EU nation will have to do the same.

“Loonie continues its decline“. It’s at $1.17 on the greenback. This is the best news I’ve heard in weeks.

buying airline routes and putting money under the mattress

I have to point out this morning’s NPR Planet Money podcast. It was just too good. There’s three segments and the last two are awesome.

The second piece has some guy trying to explain why we can’t just take all the crappy mortgages out of these big CDOs and call it a day. Well, it turns out that a lot of these CDOs have a collection of utterly disconnected things such as “income from a specific Friday night flight on Korean Airlines between Tokyo and Seoul” and “royalties from David Bowie’s songs” but more importantly things like “the mortgage for your office building” and “the mortgage for the cell phone tower your phone used this morning”. That’s one of the reasons why this toxic subprime debt is effecting things completely unrelated, like friday night flights out of Tokyo.

The last piece is talking with some bond and paper traders. The guy mentions how he has a client who had to buy treasury notes that day and ended up only getting 1 basis point for his trouble. That’s 1/100th of 1%. That’s a 1 cent return for $100. He also mentioned that some notes cleared this week for 0, the equivalent of hiding it under your mattress.

The Reckoning - Taking Hard New Look at a Greenspan Legacy - NYTimes.com. it seems derivatives might undo that too. the infographic showing the half quintillion dollar derivates market is also pretty enlightening.

Cold Comfort -Times Online. if you haven’t heard, Iceland might be declaring bankruptcy (yes, the whole country). I haven’t found any really good articles explaining wtf happened but this one is a good start.

house rejects bailout


From this graph, I’ll let you guess when the U.S House of Representatives rejected the Wall Street bailout.

Government Seizes WaMu and Sells Some Assets - NYTimes.com. Glad I didn’t move my banking over to Wasington Mutual. This might finally put a sag in Seattle housing prices.

The end of Wall Street may mean less profit for Goldman, Morgan - MarketWatch. both applied to be banks on Sunday. So there’s literally no major brokerages left.

Goldman Sachs set to cut 1,500 jobs. say what? they made $11 billion last year.

French Bank Says Rogue Trader Lost $7 Billion - New York Times. “This month Risk Magazine, a British publication, named SocGen “equity derivatives house of the year,” praising its ability to manage its risks.” This guy puts Nick Leeson to shame