WASHINGTON — Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Sunday that the U.S. wasn't in danger of losing its triple-A bond rating, in the wake of a warning from Moody's Investors Services about the U.S.'s treasury-bond rating. – WSJ1
Meet the Treasury Department's secret weapon …
I do believe your optimism accelerator is sticking …
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Jim Flaherty can serve seal heart to his buddies all day, and Greenpeace will never know 
Plus, they'll all come back with the answer to that eternal riddle — What colour was the bear?
Astute Doomers will note that the south coast of Baffin Island is actually 2 degrees (C) warmer than Doom North this morning …
… and look where's the only place in the country above (well above 
) freezing. That's what happens when you turn governance over to the Conservative-Reform Alliance Party …
UPDATE: I just can't shake the feeling that our government is simply playing an elaborate practical joke on the rest of the world. This from a story in the Globe & Mail.1
[Canadian Finance Minister] Mr. Flaherty spoke in front of a lit gas fireplace in a hotel nightspot with a white polar bear hide on the wall behind him. Above him, caribou antler chandeliers added to the image of an informal retreat setting that Mr. Flaherty has advocated.
I've always maintained they could have done a lot better than Swinton …
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I thought Doomers might appreciate a little humor this morning. Mike Dawson, a V.P. at Freddie Mac had me in stitches over this one:
WASHINGTON, Feb 1 (Reuters) – The $5 trillion market for U.S. agency mortgage-backed securities should be able to weather the scheduled end of Federal Reserve purchases as value-seeking investors fill the void, a Freddie Mac executive said on Monday.
Those investors could include Freddie Mac, which has room to increase its $755 billion portfolio, Mike Dawson, a vice president of deal and contract management at Freddie Mac, told reporters at an American Securitization Forum conference.
"I don't see huge changes out there other than a little spread widening," he said, referring to yields on MBS relative to benchmark securities. Read the rest of this entry »
Igor and I have been digging through the archives and hereby present our Housing Doom Top Ten List of digs we're, well, not quite sure why we perpetrated on our readers
10 — Bank of America sued for gender bias over bonuses, Reuters 6/25 '09
9 — High Interest Rates Encourage Housing Speculation, Scoop (NZ), 4/24 '07
8 — Swiss Re In CHF1.3B US Life Block Sale To Berkshire, WSJ 1/18 '10
7 — Can’t Sell Your Home? Maybe It’s Priced Too Low, NYT 7/11 '07
6 — "Re-jiggered accounting methods gave Freddie Mac a boost Wednesday when investors rallied over better-than-expected losses", Forbes 5/14 '08
5 — Cooling U.S. economy good for Canadian housing market, CanWest 9/16 '06
4 — Barclays Capital to charter ships to move commodities, SmartBrief 4/26 '08
3 — Ambac Rises as Bond Insurers Try to Tap Treasury Plan, Bloomberg 10/17 '08
2 — Bank of America Says ‘Thank Goodness’ for Countrywide, Bloomberg 3/13 '09
Graupel? What's graupel? and is it just me, or did I just read "Rob McKenna's All Weather Haulage" on the side of that truck?
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Maybe we should start practicing positive thinking or something for a while, at least while we're traveling
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Twist's note:
I'm in "sunny" San Diego, and this is what the paper said we might expect today:
Besides heavy rain and thunderstorms soaking the flatlands, snow blanketing the mountains and 12- to 18-foot waves battering the beaches, today could bring waterspouts, tornadoes, hail and the rarely seen graupel, which forms when supercooled water droplets coat snowflakes.
The latest weather system also could be accompanied by the lowest barometric pressure ever measured in San Diego, signaling the potential for an intense storm.
All along the coast, winds could approach 60 mph.
I've never even heard of graupel, but thought I'd better look it up in case it melted cars or something. Here's what the stuff looks like:
It doesn't look like it will melt cars, but this Arizona girl is gonna drive SLOW today, no matter what kind of precipitation is out there!
Don't blame Igor, Karl Denninger made us do it
Just watched the new Star Trek on DVD (including the comments, heh guys, I like ASW). And one might add the CRE incoming wave to the mix …
Politicians, the mainstream media and the NAR have been telling us that for years, but now it's official.
Seems like around the time we went to the latest, greatest version of WordPress Doom lost a day. You'll note that this post is dated Friday Jan 15th, but it's really Saturday Jan 16th (Doom regrets if you read one of our earlier posts and went to work in error )
I think this is a "server" problem, so our hard-working Admin will likely have the delicate task of adjusting that. Please have patience, setting the clock on one of these beasts safely is no mean feat.
A very few Doomers may recall when, almost a quarter of a century ago, Scott M obliterated Manhattan.
Albeit as "collateral damage" (military sense, not Markit ABX.HE index sense )
So is this about the shape public emotions1 will take when a lot of taxpayer money that got laundered through the AIG bailout hits the bank accounts of some (formerly) investment banker types?
