… While these advantages are measured in milliseconds rather than minutes, both high-frequency trading and flash orders enable certain investors to chisel a profit between bid and offer — the same abuse of inside market information and access that the S.E.C. tried to eliminate four decades ago. Now, traders have simply found different ways to tilt the playing field, … – David Silver, a former senior staff lawyer at the SEC, NYT¹

Next week I’m workshopping "Aleynikov Blues" at Halifax’s Dublin St. Poetry Club.  The above should help my colleagues figure out what I’m talking about.

——————

[1]: "A Short History of Fast Times on Wall Street", by David Silver, New York Times, September 17, 2009. (& today’s, 18th, print edition)

Under the glaze of transient empire
      earth goes on as before
      colouring summer,
sea, sky a concordant azure.
(90)

Aiken Drum. by Peter Sanger, Kentville: Gaspereau Press, 2006.

Sanger’s sixth poetry collection obviously required, for him, thousands of hours of silence.  The lines move slowly and many of the words were unfamiliar, like bent knives or Ike’s hand-made spokeshaves that Alice’s Dave took back to Montreal over the weekend.

It felt weird just touching this book.  Fifty years from now you’d need a pile of documentation and white cotton gloves just to handle it.  The little presses capable of turning out such an object are dying in the present economic downturn while our politicians cheer on the process.

…
and still driving books to market

takes a stick to prod and a string
tied fast to the shank of each colophon.
(46)

The heart of the collection is a sequence that explores the life of a man who may or may not have been Moon, anti-hero of "the first Canadian best-seller." (125) This character blows through New Brunswick like a trickster god, ruffling the people but not overturning them.

The rest of the poems mostly celebrate rootedness.  I think Sanger settled down not too far from Great Village.  It’s perhaps appropriate that somebody would.

We’ve almost built
this room of light

unanchored for now,
adrift and too new

for us to be sure
where even our

pictures have to be
hung. …
(41)

.

.

.

.

.

      What                Duhigg’s
                     chart
                 was telling us
          is                           that Serge’s
                                                         tarball
                                   (inadvertently)
                             threatened
             to illuminate                the
                                                                         churning
                                                                high-
                                                frequency
                            flash trading
             colocated                                          liquidity
                             providers      stocking
                                                            exchanges
                                                                                    with
nanopiraña
                nibbling
                           bips
                                  from naked
                                                  thighs
                                                            of pensioners
                           turning
     microseconds                  of   flesh
                         into
                                                                   bonus
                                                                                 cheques
which is Why
F.B.I.
must Deploy
in July
in Defence
of Corrupt
regimes.

  # chroot dewey/819.1<cr><lf>
ha!

…

This thread began with John’s statement that "interaction of the static typing and dynamic loading was not easy". Any dynamic type check by all means would reduce efficiency of a statically typed language. But maybe it’s possible to do dynamic type checking optional and make it available if explicitly requested. At least if would make dynamic code loading less complicated.

BR,
Serge

We and our housing blogger colleagues have had some luck recently playing at being minor Prophets of Housing Doom, but our efforts are nothing in comparison to earlier masters like the poet W. H. Auden (1907-1973).  In 1967 he wrote one masterpiece titled "City Without Walls" [1] that reads more clearly now than it ever did 42 years ago:

…

‘A key to the street each convict has,
but the Asphalt Lands are lawless marches
where gangs clash and cops turn
robber-barons: reckless he
who walks after dark in that wilderness.

…

‘The week-end comes that once was holy,
free still, but a feast no longer,
just time out, idiorhythmic,
when no one cares what his neighbor does:
now newsprint and network are needed most.

‘What they view may be vulgar rubbish,
what they listen to whitless noise,
but it gives shelter, …

…

‘Quite soon computers may expel from the world
all but the top intelligent few,
the egos they leisure be left to dig
value and virtue from an invisible realm
of hobbies, sex, consumption, vague

‘tussles with ghosts. Against Whom
shall the Sons band to rebel there,
where Troll-Father, Tusked-Mother,
are dream-monsters like dinosaurs
with a built-in obsolescence?

…

‘if all has gone phut in the future we paint,
where, vast and vacant, venomous areas
surround the small sporadic patches
of fen or forest that give food and shelter,
such home as they have, to a human remnant,

’stunted in stature, strangely deformed,
numbering by fives, with no zero,
worshipping a ju-ju General Mo,
in groups ruled by grandmothers,
…

…

‘Still monied, immune, stands Megalopolis:
happy he who hopes for better,
what awaits Her may well be worse. . . .’

________________________

Notes and References

[1]: W. H. Auden: Collected Poems. ed Edward Mendelson. Franklin Center, Pennsylvania: The Franklin Library, 1976. pp. 562-565

Bonds of debt unfold to equity.
A pensioned worker sees his pension end.
The German saps a new car’s warranty.

Sailors patrol, defending Liberty
of dark Tibris and
Whiskey floods the banks with clarity.

Red ink stained ad starved print fraternity
warns, for every Citizen
a network saps their news until it’s free.

What value Jim’s effective guaranty
when treasuries lie farther up the chain
and stress tests flood the banks with clarity.

One drunk fell down December ‘91,
leaving his buddy staring at the ground;
a German saps our new ontology,
the stress tests flood the banks with clarity.

This is classic Americana.  The New Thought Movement came out of Emerson, the early days of the Unitarian Church and a whole lot of other stuff generally rooted in that 19th Transcendentalist wave that hit Concord MA and caused a whole lot of pretty good literature you probably had inflicted on you in High School if you’re old enough to be pre-Politically Correct.  Your Grandad would have known it as The Power of Positive Thinking.  More recently, important parts of New Thought ended up under the aegis of Emotional Intelligence (aka "EQ").  I suspect that at the root of this phenomenon is an important issue in the theory of aesthetics that says something critical about ontology.

Ah New Year’s Eve and heavy snow in the Maritimes. This fragment goes out to all the high-priced bureaucrats (you know who you are ) who will be waiting by the loading dock far into the evening today.

                  First Hymn

…

Buying is the biggest burden,
    Licences the heaviest care;
And the paperwork must finish
    By the close of fiscal year.

Each year’s order — bulging pallets –
    Yields its secrets to our search;
And the smallest cord or cable,
    Counted! ere the End of March.

…

                                Postlude

Her avatar’s hand cradles the dark
triple-bank-shot metonym
which somehow goes unbadly

with this high dusty space. "Oh say,
can you sew?" dance the tutu-clad mice
scampering

in the linoleum dust
as all the while North Ender ghosts
unpretentiously haunt the hallway.

My voice coach (every poet needs
one) asks me to sense buzz
on my lips, lift cheeks,

front a projector,
just like the ones back at
9 Grove Street,

only now waves wash south
across Chebucto
from studio 8A.

Remember where you were
that time you phoned me
at the lab? A chocolate

scientist sits there now,
listening to fats, and once
I asked a mellonist

to send him some exotic
acid, but she declined, being
busy. I’m not dismayed, for success

could have placed an irresistibly high price
on the head of every harbour porpoise
still swimming in this world.

12/6 2007

AND NOW, A WORD FROM THE ECONOMY HERSELF

"I didn’t flaunt.
I didn’t quant.
I have no mansion whose
expansion was just branchin’
out to flaunt."

OK, so is this one a little less obscure now?

———————————-

[1]: "No Dough in the Do-Re-Mi: Songwriters Take On the Recession — Instead of ‘Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?’ It’s ‘Buddy, Can You Spare a Trillion Dollars?’". by Robert Tomsho, Wall Street Journal, February 6, 2009.

… Heads turned as the alarmed captain looked on in stunned disbelief. Bent on vengeance, the two lobsters scuttled swiftly after Madoff. They reached his table in an instant, and Silverman went for his ankle. Moscowitz, summoning the strength of a madman, leaped from the floor and with one giant pincer took firm hold of Madoff’s nose. Screaming with pain, the gray-haired con artist hopped from the chair as Silverman strangled his instep with both claws. Patrons could not believe their eyes as they recognized Madoff, and began to cheer the lobsters. [1]

Somebody’d better tell Woody before it’s too late.  You never put tomatoes in Lobster Stock.[2]  Anyway, this request goes out to Doomer V and #21.

Since it’s the weekend, the B52’s came out of Georgia and everyone’s underwater anyway, we might as well have some fun

UPDATE: Igor remembers that beach party.  It was on August 15, 1971 at Jekyll Island.

…………..

Today my children laugh
At the unflattering fashions people wore in the 70’s
Like the criss-crossing top you wore that day
They can’t believe
People wearing clothes like that
Could talk themselves seriously

…………..

—————

[1]: "Tails of Manhattan", by Woody Allen, New Yorker, March 30, 2009 edition.

[2]: "Making Lobster Stock", by Jimmy, Eat It Atlanta, February 26, 2009. [you just can't make these things up!]

     in Sunday’s wet snow
          Freedom for … last time singing
     one — two & —

I promise.

UPDATE:

Allen Roy Wayte (1952-2008)

!! HOUSING DOOM ADVERTISEMENT !!

In Anything But Hank! Rachel Lebowitz and Zachariah Wells combine the whimsical humour of Lewis Carroll with the adventure-narrative balladeering of Robert Service to spin an unforgettable tale of a baby — and a pig! — in search of a name. Their quest takes them from the city to the mountains, as they seek an audience with the Wizard and his baby-naming Mexican beaded lizard. The story, accompanied by the gorgeously lush paintings of Eric Orchard, is a delight for readers of all ages.

more details below …

Here’s the full version.

A. Z. Wells

to
date Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 5:01 PM
subject Official release of Anything But Hank!
mailed-by gmail.com

Dear friends, family and colleagues:

Tomorrow is the official release of Anything But Hank!, a chiIdren’s story in verse written by yours truly and Rachel Lebowitz, with illustrations by Eric Orchard.

This is the publisher’s description of the book:

In Anything But Hank! Rachel Lebowitz and Zachariah Wells combine the whimsical humour of Lewis Carroll with the adventure-narrative balladeering of Robert Service to spin an unforgettable tale of a baby — and a pig! — in search of a name. Their quest takes them from the city to the mountains, as they seek an audience with the Wizard and his baby-naming Mexican beaded lizard. The story, accompanied by the gorgeously lush paintings of Eric Orchard, is a delight for readers of all ages.

If you would like to purchase a copy of Anything But Hank!, you have several options:

1) You can order it directly from us, with payment by cheque or pay pal. ($20 including tax and shipping, if you’re ordering within Canada)

2)Your local bookstore

3)Directly from the publisher.

4)From various online retailers, including Amazon.ca, Amazon.com and McNally Robinson

There are launches scheduled for Vancouver on October 11, Winnipeg on October 14 and Toronto on December 6. If you are interested in attending either one of these events, there is more infomation here.

Rachel and I will also be in Montreal, Halifax and Charlottetown in December, but as yet have no events scheduled. If you know of anyone who might like to host a signing and/or reading, please drop me a line.

All good things,

Zach

–
http://www.zachariahwells.com
http://www.zachariahwells.blogspot.com

Sue MacLeod, Brian Bartlett & the gang are going to totally freak over this.

Posters on Fark were discussing this Sun Sentinel article entitiled "What does $700 billion actually buy?"  today. You might want to check out this Fark thread- there are some funny comments.  Here’s some of the things the Sun Sentinel says $700 billion will get you:

• You could buy 21 new Marlin’s stadiums for EACH COUNTY in Florida
  

• You could buy braces for everyone in Great Britain…..and France!
  

• You could buy all 32 NFL teams – 27 times
  

• 2 cups of Starbucks everyday for everyone in Brazil for a year
  

• Gasoline for a year for every adult in America. (175 billion gallons of gas)
  

• You could literally buy the world a Coke. One 2-liter bottle per week for a year.
  

• You could buy a 60-inch HDTV for every man, woman and child in the U.S.
  

• You could buy 7 Mac laptops for every school-age child in U.S.
  

• You could buy every adult in Miami-Dade County an average priced house
  

• You could buy everyone in America 2200 McDonalds apple pies.
  

• Disney tickets – 18 (3-day) passes to Disney for the entire U.S. population

Our admin and I were discussing the question, "If we HAD to spend $700 billion on something, what would we spend it on?" We pretty much came to the conclusion that there really wasn’t a cause out there from "Save the whales" to "Buying the world a Coke" that we didn’t like better than the current plan.

It’s late and we’ve heard enough foolishness from the politicians for one day- how about a little for ourselves.  If we can’t be fiscally responsible and we have to blow $700 billion on something- what should it be?

So far this year, the federal government has put up nearly $30 billion to avert a major financial default by the investment bank Bear Stearns; committed to investing up to as much as $200 billion in preferred stock of the loss-plagued finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and at least $5 billion in their mortgage securities; and agreed to provide an emergency loan of $85 billion to American International Group Inc. in return for an ownership stake of as much as 80 percent in the stricken insurance giant.

Tuesday’s helping hand to AIG bailed out not only that company, which was contemplating a bankruptcy filing as early as Wednesday, but also countless trading partners of the company, including investment banks that had failed to raise the massive loans themselves.

This year’s bailouts add up to an unprecedented surge of direct financial intervention by the government in the nation’s private sector — a cornucopia of handouts and guarantees dwarfing the rescue of the savings and loan industry in the 1980s, which ended up costing taxpayers $124 billion.

This does not look to be the end either.  Hiltzik points out that Congress is considering a loan program between $25B and $50B for auto makers as well.

Lest we think that the government is passing out money to just anyone however, remember one corporation was turned down: [Gee guys, thanks for SOME restraint.]

Investment bank Lehman Bros. Holdings Inc., which was refused a bailout by Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson last weekend and filed for bankruptcy protection Monday.

Hiltzik quotes John Lapp, a professor of economics at North Carolina State University as saying, "They’re essentially saying they’re going to put a floor under the market."

The government may find that the floor has a trap door- and billions are about to be poured down it.

Arizona’s economy may seem ugly right now but when you look at it from a historical context, it looks pretty good, an Arizona State University economics expert said Tuesday.

Home building is back to normal, the weaker dollar is boosting exports, high gas prices encourage conservation, unemployment is fairly low, and medical and government jobs are growing more than 1,000 a month, said Lee McPheters, director of ASU’s JPMorgan Chase Economic Outlook Center.

"Let’s redefine good. Good means it could be worse," he said to members of the Economic Club of Phoenix at the Arizona Biltmore Resort & Spa.

McPheters, one of three economics experts speaking to the group, wore a white hat because he got to present the good news portion of the program.

It sounds like McPheters should have worn a dunce cap instead.

Then there is today’s inflation numbers. The Reality Fairy has obviously not just left Arizona, but her influence seems to have disappeared on a national level as well.  Take for example last month’s "improvement" in gas prices:

High gasoline prices got you down? Come to the land of seasonal adjustment, where the sun is always shining and gas prices fell 2 percent last month.

What? You paid more? Well, in the real world, gasoline prices did rise by a sharp 5.6 percent in April from a month earlier, but the way that the Bureau of Labor Statistics adjusts the figures to smooth out seasonal oddities, it appeared to be down in the consumer price index released Wednesday.

Another branch of the very same U.S. government, the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration, said average retail gas prices actually shot up 9.5 percent in April from March.

The skies over the "Cuckoo’s Nest" are getting awfully crowded.

Nov. 9 (Bloomberg) — Fannie Mae, the biggest source of money for U.S. home loans, posted a wider third-quarter loss and said credit costs will increase as the housing slump deepens, sending the shares down as much as 11 percent.

The net loss more than doubled to $1.39 billion, or $1.56 a share, because of $2.24 billion in derivative-related losses, the Washington-based company said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing today. Fannie Mae released results for the first nine months of the year, bringing the company up-to-date on its earnings reports since an accounting overhaul delayed filings.

Fannie Mae hasn’t been immune to the home-price declines and mortgage defaults that are plunging the housing industry deeper into recession. The government-chartered company is grappling with the same loan delinquencies and foreclosures that led to losses at Citigroup Inc., Washington Mutual Inc. and Countrywide Financial Corp., and it was subpoenaed by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo in an investigation into fraudulent home appraisals.

``Fannie Mae is becoming another poster child for the problem you see with Countrywide Financial, Washington Mutual and any of the firms with a good chunk of mortgage business,” said Michael Mullaney, who manages $10 billion at Fiduciary Trust Co. in Boston. “You just don’t know anymore where you’re going to get a negative surprise that comes out of the woodwork.”

I can’t help but think of the warning issued by Doom’s own John back in February of this year:

Neither Freddie nor Fannie is publishing current financials, although both have brave plans to catch up within the next several months. It would certainly seem to be prudent to get a good up-to-date picture of both companies’ financial strength before they go hog-wild (there’s that Year of the Pig thing again) adding to their portfolios subprime MBS the private label lenders can no longer handle.

The current market is risky, and needs to be priced accordingly.  The GSEs can’t afford to take on all the risky garbage issued by mortgage lenders– they can’t even afford their own.

Occasionally, Doom will draft the great masters into commenting on housing issues (sort of). There was Elizabeth Bishop on MBS (followed by an incautious invitation to Limericks), Lorna Crozier on REOs, and even Tom Donnelly and his merry band from PNAC waxing poetic on the possibilities for germ warfare.

Well, it’s that time of year again, and we’ve advanced from Writing Poetry all the way up to Writing Poetry (Advanced). As usual, serendipity comes to the rescue, and this week’s homework contributed the following biting commentary on the ABCP crisis.

… I think in the marked up annals of recorded
evolutionary history mind will turn out to have been

nova-like, say; a pressure of chance built up
nature had to take, the slide toward the slow explosion
of searching risk … [1]

Well, not if Mervyn, Ben and the gang can help it It’s Rollover Monday and N Rock’s still rock’n.  Who cares if the financial news is completely incomprehensible … Let’s Rock N Roll!

Hope the BoE can roll over that $30-odd billion of commercial paper today, because I’ve got some paper to turn over myself. There’s Yeats to figure out and the first draft of a multi-page meditation on 6 office moves in 8 years at 9 Grove Street to hand in a week from today. Looks like the sidebar’s early shift is going to be a bit skimpy over the next week.

As the datamining is going to be slower, please consider popping your finds into the Reply window. And if anyone out there has advice as to how to "respond" to Archie Ammon’s all too explicit symbolism without turning beet red in front of the rest of ENGL 4477, please submit same to my e-mail. Any help would be much appreciated

________________________

Notes and References

[1]: From S 22 st 1-2, "Hibernaculum," in A. R. Ammon, Collected Poems 1951-1971 (NY: Norton, 1972), p 358.

.

.

.

.

So many auctions in the country:
that mad roll of syllables blowing in
from all directions, the heart’s true music
plaintive and crude, … [1]

The humorous video about "stages of grief" that Jan-Martin linked to on April 12th had a serious purpose. Precious few diehards [2] are still in Denial about the widespread foreclosure crisis that has arisen out of the subprime mortgage sector over the last few months. Many more are still at the Anger stage, and the largely fruitless search for scapegoats is in full swing. Yesterday, on the other hand, may have marked an important milestone as the US Congress moved into the next stage — Negotiation.

The venue was Barney Frank’s "Possible Responses to Rising Mortgage Foreclosures" hearing at the US Congress House Committee on Financial Services. Politicians, activists, regulators, and big-time players in mortgage finance like the GSEs were all there eyeing each other, seeking a way to collectively help the untold thousands [3] [4] of Americans presently at risk of losing their homes. Unfortunately, the hearing video was only available live, although they may post a transcript eventually. There was extensive news coverage, though, plus several prepared testimony files on the hearing site. This material will serve as a start for assessing if this exercise was significant.

Veteran AP economics reporter Marcy Gordon (a long-time observer of Fannie Mae and the other players) weighed in [5] with a report about how the regulators were inviting the lenders to help out the borrowers, offering up liberalization of their own rules as an incentive. MarketWatch reporter Rex Nutting focused [6] on Sheila Bair, the FDIC CEO, who testified to the urgency of ARM borrowers somehow getting into fixed rate products. She is concerned that the financial arrangements backing the mortgages may make this difficult, and counsels MBS bondholders to be flexible about their contracts.

However, the stars of Tuesday’s show were the big GSEs. The media touted Fannie & Freddie as genuine saviors. Stephen Foley, reporting for Britain’s Independent, sums up [7] this picture of the cavalry riding to the rescue: "Poor Americans struggling to keep up their mortgage payments will be offered new loans with more relaxed rules, in an effort to head off a wave of repossessions." It’s not obvious that this new policy of loosening credit rules will do the trick for the at-risk borrowers. Certainly this plan will saddle Fannie and Freddie with more risk, and it will be fascinating to see how the big semi-public companies handle the additional load. One might suggest that this "We’re the GSEs and we’re here to help" episode will make more credible that pesky implicit guarantee on agency debt the Fed worries about. Again, only time will tell.

________________________

Notes and References

[1]: Whetstone (poems), by Lorna Crozier, McClelland & Stewart, 2005, p 42.

[2]: "In the Company of Chickens: Subprime Market", by George W. Mantor, Realty Times, April 17, 2007.

Well, light the incense and let’s get to meditating. And while we seek a state of deeper consciousness, why don’t we also ask the Wiz for a little backbone.

Frankly, I think both of these clucking Chicken Littles need a good smack-down.

[3]: "Foreclosure pace nears decade high: The state’s increase could soon pull down home prices and even bring a recession, some economists say", by David Streitfeld, Los Angeles Times, April 17, 2007. Links to this and related stories on the California situation, plus some discussion, is available at Ben’s.[4] Emphasis in the quotes is mine.

Nearly 900 Californians a week are losing their homes because they can’t afford to pay the mortgage — up from about 100 a week a year ago — providing fresh evidence that the housing market’s troubles are nowhere near over.

The surge is raising concerns that home prices will soon suffer as a result. The 11,033 foreclosures in the first three months of the year represent an 800% increase over the same period a year earlier.

[4]: "A New Kind Of ‘For Sale’ Sign In California", by Ben Jones, TheHousingBubbleBlog, April 17, 2007.

[5]: "Regulators Call on Lenders to Help", by Marcy Gordon, AP / Houston Chronicle, April 17, 2007.

The Federal Reserve and the five other federal agencies that regulate banks, thrifts and credit unions, in a joint statement, encouraged the financial institutions to extend flexible terms to struggling homeowners. "Prudent workout arrangements that are consistent with safe and sound lending practices are generally in the long-term best interest of both the financial institution and the borrower," the statement said. "Institutions will not face regulatory penalties if they pursue reasonable workout arrangements with borrowers."

[6]: "Subprime loans can’t be easily rewritten: FDIC – Refinancing may be best way out for troubled borrowers, officials say", Rex Nutting, MarketWatch, April 17, 2007.

Subprime borrowers threatened with foreclosure because of big increases in their monthly payments won’t find it easy to get relief from their lenders, even if the lenders are willing, a top banking regulator said Tuesday.

Refinancing into a more affordable loan may be the best option for those who can, said Sheila Bair, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

"Borrowers should explore all financing options that might be available," she said. Those with adjustable-rate loans should ask about fixed-rate mortgages. …

[7]: "Fannie and Freddie Mac act over sub-prime crisis", by Stephen Foley, Independent, April 18, 2007.

Elizabeth Bishop was born in Massachusetts, but spent much of her early childhood in Nova Scotia, at a very small community called Great Village, just east of Lower Economy. Doomers can read this two ways, but it’s really just about a place near the Bay of Fundy.

For M.B.S., buried in Nova Scotia
                                        by Elizabeth Bishop

          Yes, you are dead now and live
only there, in a little, slightly tip-tilted graveyard
where all of your childhood’s Christmas trees are forgathered
          with the present they meant to give,
and your childhood’s river quietly curls at your side
and breathes deep with each tide.

Please drop anything from limericks about BBB- rated subprime tranches to links for MSM news stories into Doom’s Reply box. We’re all waiting to see how the saga continues.

Then something clicked when I read Fleckenstein’s judgment [3] that "Withdrawing equity from one’s home was the economy, from essentially 2001 through sometime last year." (emphasis in original) Here was MSM support for a position I’d been trying to sell since at least late 2002.

This recently unmasked underlying weakness in America’s economy combined with escalating military costs is starting to pull the place apart like a piece of toffee. This can be easily seen from the level of offsetting cuts to social programs in that same just-released budget. I wish I’d had Fleck’s analysis long ago, when I suspected but couldn’t convincingly demonstrate that the REIC was somehow making the economy look stronger than it was. For years I held a fantastic hope that the researchers at the AEI’s GSE project would sit down with key neo-con planners like former PNAC [6] executive and AEI Fellow Tom Donnelly. Surely Wallison’s people must have had the hard numbers to convince Donnelly he’d have to rein in his schemes for world domination. Didn’t they take coffee breaks in the same cafeteria?

The world keeps turning, though, and with Rumsfeld gone the hard choices now lie mostly with Hillary and the neo-liberals. God bless us every one. Meanwhile, this week brought [4] [5] a flurry of news, some of it collected in a Tuesday Ben’s post, suggesting the beginnings of a deterioration in the outer-ring suburbs like California’s Inland Empire. That just underscores what Fleckenstein was saying about the end of the MEW extraction era. Let’s just hope the budgeteers can read the writing on the wall and slash military spending.

________________________

Notes and References

[0]: Monday’s farewell "Safety Net" was quite a going away party. Admin tells me it was a record traffic result for one of my efforts, and close to some of the best twist-post days. Thanks to Old Mike for the compliment (not to mention the gold watch!) My official "back off" day is this Friday, and even after that I hope to periodically post efforts like this, where I’m not so much presenting a mature argument as stringing some links together and groping toward a theme.

[1]: "Last Throw of the Dice", by Russ Winter, WallStreetExaminer blog, February 5, 2007.

[2]: "Bush Budget Calls for Big Boost in Defense Spending", by Ron Elving, NPR, February 5, 2007.

[3]: "How housing masked a weak economy: Since 2001, the nation’s economic growth has been powered by the real estate industry, particularly mortgage-equity withdrawals. Without housing to prop it up, the economy is in trouble", by Bill Fleckenstein, MSN Money, February 5, 2007.

[4]: "Far-flung exurbs hard hit by housing downturn", by Patrick Rucker, Reuters / Yahoo News, February 5, 2007.

[5]: "Poor Among Plenty: For the first time, poverty shifts to the U.S. suburbs", Newsweek, February 2, 2007.

[6]: As luck would have it, this week’s 3381 assignment is "found poems".

twisted smiles

Although it may take several decades
for the process of transformation to unfold,
in time, the art of warfare
on air, land, and sea
will be vastly different
than it is today,

and “combat” likely will take place
in new dimensions:
in space, “cyber-space,”
and perhaps
the world of microbes.

Air warfare may no longer be fought by pilots
manning tactical fighter aircraft
sweeping the skies of opposing fighters,
but a regime dominated
by long-range, stealthy unmanned craft.

On land, the clash
of massive, combined-arms armored forces
may be replaced by the dashes
of much lighter, stealthier
and information-intensive forces,
augmented by fleets of robots,
some small enough to fit in soldiers’
pockets.

Control of the sea
could be largely determined not by fleets
of surface combatants
and aircraft carriers,
but from land- and space-based systems,
forcing navies to maneuver and fight underwater.

Space itself will become a theater
of war,

as nations gain access to space
capabilities and come to rely on them;
further, the distinction between military
and commercial space systems
– combatants and noncombatants –
will become blurred. Information
systems will become an important
focus of attack,
particularly for U.S. enemies
seeking to short-circuit sophisticated
American forces.

And advanced forms
of biological warfare
that can “target”
specific genotypes
may transform biological warfare
from the realm of terror

to a politically

useful

tool.

source: "REBUILDING AMERICA’S DEFENSES: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century", A Report of The Project for the New American Century September 2000, page 60.

Just to say the word
home, that one word alone,
so pleasantly cool

Issa

A couple of months ago, Twist and I got to talking about housing and poetry. Twist thought we might someday ask Doomers for their contributions of housing and bubble haiku. Mr. Twist knows Japanese and even has some strong opinions about Robert Hass, an American haiku expert, so who knows, he might have one or two up his sleeve. Anyway, last Monday my poetry class [1] workshopped haiku. Twist had already shown me the gman029 comment that later formed the basis for her Tuesday post What’s Behind the Subprime Meltdown?, so I was startled when one of the haiku presented by Ken, a fellow student, seemed to concentrate gman029’s post and much else in just a few syllables. I got his permission to expose it here, and that’s why I’m posting on haiku and inviting contributions today.

As it happens, one of my submissions to the Monday class was about housing, although it pretty much failed as a haiku.[2] This is a good example of what not to do.

Old Hunter Street house –
prime address? Well, yes and no,
but easy to learn.

John Wise McLeod

Here’s a better one. It comes from LINC, a California affordable housing group, and forms one of a half-dozen housing haiku (if you follow the link below you’ll find them and a form from which to submit your own to LINC).

Dark days ahead,
Great cities living and dead.
Jane Jacobs, adieu.

Hunter Johnson, LINC Housing

This one was posted by a commenter to Patrick.net almost a year ago. It’s a good example of bubblehead haiku.

Pop Pop Pop I hear
The prices are coming down
Houses are cheap soon

SFWoman

Finally, here’s Kenneth Varner’s haiku.

money looking tiger

grabbing everything in sight

only to be poor

OK Doomers, now it’s your turn.

________________________

Notes and References

[1]: English 3381, St Mary’s University, Halifax. instructor: Professor Brian Bartlett.

[2]: from Brian – It’s not supposed to need footnotes.

Once again it was frequent Doom reader Mike that got me started (see Tuesday’s comment #12 and following after "Safety Net" episode X). Following Mike’s challenge to my less than well thought out comment #13, I had the good fortune to run a reality check with a real expert the next day. [2] [3] Unfortunately I failed to bring up possible manipulation of the US Strategic Reserve statistics, but from my understanding now, these wouldn’t be that important to the price fluctuations (I don’t doubt these numbers are fiddled with, it’s just that there are larger forces at play).

The main driver of gasoline market volatility these days is the ongoing conversion from RFG, America’s legacy gasoline product, to the new mandated RBOB blend, the stuff you can add 10% alcohol to and it still works the same with standard gas engines. In effect, the US oil industry is running two parallel full-up distribution systems, as the changeover is about half done. The Slate article [1] describes Sachs’ recent modification of the "Reformulated Gasoline Blendstock for Oxygen Blending futures contract" as the most plausible candidate for manipulating the price of gas down. Indeed the change is having a major effect on gas prices, but it’s much easier to believe that the change was driven by the huge forces involved in handling the RFG/RBOB cutover as opposed to political forces. Yes the temporary depressing effect on pump prices is a plus for the GOP, but they are benefiting from luck, not skill.

The experts remain unimpressed by the widely reported hypothetical 50% increase in US reserves that’s supposed to follow from Chevron’s reported discovery in the Gulf of Mexico last month and the less widely told story that Saudi Arabia can maintain current output for 140 years. Investors, the MSM, and the general public seem to have gotten a lift from these stories, though. Again, the effect seems to have been less any plan than a lucky bounce of the ball for the Republicans.

All that being said, the bottom line is that world oil production peaked last December. Whoever controls Congress after November 7th, we have an urgent need to cut back on commuting, and that does effect housing.

________________________

Notes and References

[1]: "The Oil Conspiracy: Is the Bush administration manipulating oil prices to win elections?", by Daniel Gross, Slate, October 4, 2006. The article’s answer is approximately "uh, no". All the emphasis in the quotes is mine.

"These days, gas prices interest political consultants as much as they do truckers. Politicos believe there is a direct relationship between the price of a gallon of gas and the fortunes of Democrats at the polls. High gas prices during the fall campaign season? Hello Speaker Pelosi. Falling gas prices in the post-Labor Day period? Crank up the Karl Rove Political Genius Machine again. Before the Foley scandal broke, Matt Drudge was tracking the falling price of a gallon of gas in Iowa on his site."

[2]: "Oil a better bargain than Starbucks? Energy expert thinks so", by Clare Mellor, Chronicle Herald (Halifax NS), October 5, 2006. Simmons’ PPT deck should show up here with his previous speeches in about a week.

"If you think you’re paying through the nose every time you fill up at the pumps, think again, says Matthew Simmons.
…
The world is not about to run out of oil soon or even in the next 100 years, but a scarcity is looming, he warns.
…
Unlike many other industry analysts, Mr. Simmons said the world has probably already passed "peak oil production," and it has nowhere to go but down.

In fact, the Harvard University graduate, who has done exhaustive research in the field, calculates the world hit peak production at the end of 2005.

‘Until there is better data coming out, I am going to assume that 74.3 (million barrels per day) number that we hit in December 2005 is the highest we are going to get,’ he said."

[3]: Mr. Simmons gave an encore performance of his WTCC talk [2] to a general audience Wednesday evening. He arrived at the venue a half hour early and most gratiously gave me at least five minutes patiently going over the points from comment #13 (summary of his corrections at comment #16). There was an extensive Q&A after the talk where he fielded a variety of questions from the 100 or so people in attendence, and then stayed an additional hour at the reception. Altogether a memorable evening for all concerned. Mr. Simmons is a gentleman and a scholar.