Category: The Correction

The market collapse

When I was so small I was practically transparent, my father first spoke to me about short selling.  It’s about how you take a bet, preferably with somebody else’s money, that a stock price is going to drop.  The first time pOp explained it to me I thought it was the stupidest thing I had ever heard, expecially since he was explaining it in the context of the 1929 stock market crash.

So this short film by Judd Bagley is a fair commitment of your time at almost half an hour, but I think it’s well done and it helped me understand just what triggered the first round of the collapse.  Mario, a former coworker, forwarded it to me.  Please note it’s Vimeo, which some people have trouble running.

From Bloomberg today

more China stuff…  Good luck with that!

China, the U.S. government’s largest creditor, is asking “the U.S. to maintain its good credit, to honor its promises and to guarantee the safety of China’s assets,” Wen said today in Beijing at a press briefing after the annual meeting of the legislature.

“China should be concerned, in that they hold roughly a third of their almost $2 trillion in FX reserves in U.S. Treasuries,” said Michael Pond, an interest-rate strategist in New York at Barclays Capital Inc. one of 16 primary dealers that trade with the Federal Reserve, in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “As a Chinese official put it a couple weeks ago, and I’ll paraphrase, he said, where else will we go?”

China held $696 billion of U.S. government securities at the end of last year, 46 percent more than 12 months earlier.

Money-market rates show short-term borrowing costs are still increasing as banks hoard cash after almost $1.2 trillion of writedowns and losses since the start of 2007.

Snowpocalypse? Snowmageddon? S’no-joke? Snowtastrophe?

Yeah, well I got stuck at Mike’s (big surprise) with a foot of newfallen snow (okay, maybe six inches).  I have no clean clothes, the buses are only marginally running, and the streets are full of morons.  Seeing as how the invite was to watch True Blood and drink beer, I guess that this will continue, although I’m not up for beer at this time of the morning.

Mike doesn’t think there’s going to be a big depression multi years long.  His line of thinking is that the Chinese are holding so much American paper that they will do everything they can to slow things down.  Imagine, the poor people of China get to carry me and my lifestyle a while longer….

The snow removal in the GVRD sucks.  If we get weather like this during the Olympics, we will be the laughingstock of the world. Just another thing to look forward to – it’s only a year away now.

Tom messaged me and told me I have a ride to Conflikt.  If you get this sentence phonetically instead of realizing that it’s about a Filk con, that would be a pretty funny message.  We ALL have a ride to Conflict, know what I mean?

I love Mike’s apartment.  He has a temperfoam topper on his Murphy bed (he slept in the living room like the gentleman he is) with adjustable air settings so I am slavering to get over to where he bought it from and get one for my bed… it’s SO comfy.  I slept better last night than I have in ages, although that might have something to do with the 45 minutes of body work I got last night.  This is the perfect bachelor pad -a room JUST for massage, a room just for eating, a room just for TV and a room just for sleeping, and tons of closet space.  I’ll post pics when I get home, whenever the hell that is.

THERE IS SO MUCH SNOW.

Jeff called, he’s doing snow removal right now.

Too Long; Didn’t Read

One of the many useful internet acronyms is TL;DR.  That’s when your truncated attention span decides to step out for a soda.

Continue reading Too Long; Didn’t Read

astonishment!

Keith spent the night.  Today, the dentist and the running around which accrues with Thanksgiving meals.  I’m just waiting for Keith to get back from 7-11 and then…. waffles with strawberries, and cream for our coffee.  Keith arrived, realized he’d forgotten the eggs, and then departed again.  That’s what 4 hours of Assassin’s Creed into the small hours can do to your brain, folks!

Eddie is trying to sleep on my bed again; I left my door propped open last night so he could.  Oh, that’s odd – Eddie just whacked Gizmo over the nose for no reason I can see.  Lightly, with no malice, but Gizmo jumped down from his usual perch on the back deck.

For four years or more I’ve been talking, on and off, about the collapse of civilization.  I guess the thing I keep forgetting is that a collapse generates heat and no light.  People will HATE.  They will hate the wrong things, for the wrong reasons; they will hate and kill.  Watching what people are saying during McCain Palin rallies makes me ill, but Canada’s no different in any meaningful way, we just don’t have a focal point for it yet.

I hope that we can ride out the global economic storm without all migrating back to the ranches of our prairie ancestors; I’m a city girl, and I don’t want to leave.  But human migrations have a merciless logic, and the time has come to start making back up plans, and I am just too citified and lazy to face it.