Housing Doom

I sincerely hope that Larry Mizel’s project stays up on YouTube for a good long time.  If nothing else the opening frames provide a valuable tutorial for inflating what looks like pretty thin and local [ LATER: oops^{1 2} ] official encouragement into something that to the casual viewer might link the message to the policy level of a government agency like the FBI or FEMA.

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Starbucks promises I won’t be able to tell the difference.  Yeah, from the stuff I was swilling the last time I was on The Ocean.

Our crack team of Doomish researchers has already solved the riddle of how these top-notch marketing geniuses managed to come up with a uniquely Doomed-in-Canada campaign.  Look carefully at what led them astray — the subliminal flash in this 2-decades-old TV spot.  In case you’re not fast enough to interpret it, we’ve reproduced the image under "Read More" below.

Doomers should carefully study the second link in my comment from yesterday.  That, folks, is a last call for the lemmings presently in the profitless safety of debt to transfer across to a whole other platform. (But the banks are going to need all the fresh common equity sucker-money they can get their hands on to survive Shiela’s looming shakedown, and the victims at least will have the comfort that it’s all in a good cause.  I figure the process will take about 4 more weeks.)

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There are some who think it’s time for the central bank to exit the market. Others say such an abrupt end would undo the Fed’s efforts to keep mortgage rates low and instead suggest a gradual wind down of its purchases and an extension of the program into the early months of next year. - Nasdaq¹

A year ago last Friday, exactly 7 years and 7 days after 9/11, the US became a command economy.

Now, in a "fit of absent-mindedness," key agencies of American financial policy find themselves with side-businesses as Soviet-era economic secretariats, and they don’t quite know what to do about it.

Starting from zero eight and a half months ago, the Federal Reserve Board has gorged on $685 billion worth of mortgage-backed securities, making "the Fred" America’s dominant player in residential real estate.

Meanwhile, thanks to the 9/11 ‘09 collapse of Corus, the Federal Deposit Insurance Agency has suddenly been propelled into a leading role in commercial RE.

Dow Jones is covering both aspects of the story, framing it as an effort to return to capitalist business-as-usual, but Murdoch’s deploying his bigger guns² against the commercial side, as Ms Bair prepares to impersonate Jesse Jones, hopefully without "discovering" prices for strip malls in the Ghost Towns in the desert around Las Vegas that will send CMBS asset prices (and the holders of such assets) straight into the tank.

The Corus transaction is being structured as a partnership between the agency and winning bidder. The FDIC will hold a 60% stake and provide financing, according to people familiar with the matter. While seven other FDIC deals since 2008 have had similar partnership structures, the Corus deal is by far the largest. A similar arrangement was made in last week’s sale of $1.3 billion in residential mortgages to a venture between the FDIC and Residential Credit Solutions Inc., these people said.

The public-private partnership structure is modeled on about 70 such deals pioneered by Resolution Trust Corp., a federal agency formed to clean up the savings-and-loan mess of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Rising property values in the mid- and late-1990s enabled the RTC to reduce taxpayer losses.

Still, the partnerships expose the U.S. to more financial risk than it might face by selling assets completely to private investors. The Corus auction also is complicated by an oversupply of condos in some of the same states where Corus concentrated its lending, such as Florida, California and Nevada.

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At any rate, the stock market, at the center of today’s economic crisis, closed on the eighth anniversary of 9/11 at nearly the exact same level the Dow Jones industrial average was at the day of that tragedy. Was this an eerie coincidence or some kind of coded Wall Street tribute? - Prison Planet¹

Seems more like a mischievous exploit to me.  I’m guessing some young trader cowboy with more HFT horsepower than brains saw that the index was close to that symbolic level and nudged it into position, thereby coding an Easter Egg into the Dow itself. 

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Don’t Be Evil ™

Happy 25^th, George.

I slept through this one, but there’s still lots to be seen sifting through the debris.  Twist, and a lot of other people, were transfixed last night by a headline flying around Bloomberg’s ticker: "Anything-But-Treasuries Gains as Credit Rebounds After AIG Death in China"

Indeed, I recently found it floating here at http://www.bloomberg.com/news/worldwide/

But when twist clicked on the link last night, the story wasn’t there.  Indeed when I first tried the link this morning, this is what I got too, …

… although most recently I got the official¹ 8/8 version of the story with that revised headline "Anything-But-Treasuries Credit Gaining After AIG Ruin"

Hat tip to the commenter redhatty here for pointing me at what looks like a saved version of the 9/7 [corrected from 8/8 -- where did August go anyway? - jm] version here.  Curiously, the old text seems to be nearly identical to the new text.

… however, on reflection I can see a problem with the 9/7 headline.  This text is from deep in the story.

AIG has announced sales of some $9.8 billion of assets, including an auto insurer, an equipment guarantor and a Japanese office tower, to help repay Fed loans extended as part of the firm’s $182.5 billion bailout. AIG is soliciting bids for its Taiwan unit, Nan Shan Life Insurance Co. The company is the island’s second-biggest life insurer, with 4 million policyholders.

So the original 9/7 headline was conflating China with the R.o.C., a huge no-no.

But the really disturbing part of this affair is the suppression within Google News of a recent headline, in the face of Bloomberg continuing to circulate it around their ticker for many hours, although BL was modifying the story in that period.  It makes one wonder what other things have quietly gone down the online memory hole in ways less likely to be noticed.

LATER: Sorry, forgot to include this image (captured just about exactly 1000 Zulu this morning) of a Google News Search on "Anything-But-Treasuries Gains as Credit Rebounds After AIG Death in China" — repeating the experiment at 1454 Zulu still yields an empty result, but if you hit "web" you’ll likely see over 2,100 hits.

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When I did hit web just now this post was about #4 in Google rank, but of more interest for us conspiracy buffs is this CRisk comment from late last night at #8.

1 currency now -yogi (profile) wrote on Mon, 9/7/2009 - 10:28 pm

Bberg headline:

"Anything-But-Treasuries Gains as Credit Rebounds After AIG Death in China"

Leads to:

"Anything-But-Treasuries Credit Gaining After AIG Ruin"

I don’t have a clue. Did that $500 million deal fall through?

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