I guess you can call this the Buffett deathspiral effect. Warren shows up to eat your lunch when you are on your deathbed. He casually reaches over and unplugs the ventilator while saying "It's for the best."

Warren is starting to turn into the financial Kevorkian.

Someday this war's gonna end...

The situation reminds me of a table of thieves with their hands and arms each covering their own piles of cash. There is a little more money in the center of the table, but do you risk moving a hand to leave yourself exposed.

Meltdown Man | 02.29.08 - 11:31 am

It's also like the monkey with his hand (grasping the apple tightly) stuck in a jar.

crispy&cole writes:
Expectations for the U.S. economy turned sharply negative among senior-level executive CPAs as the outlook for finance, real estate and retail trade declined in the first quarter, according to the latest Business and Industry Economic Outlook Survey of the AICPA"

Maybe if they took a little time to read this blog it wouldn't be such a shock.

Marcus-
Monkeys...Thieves...both apply, but at least monkey's actions are based on stupity, not lack of character.

Stupidity...how stoopid of me

I think stupid monkeys would have done far less damage.

Has Berkshire entered the business yet?

Re Ambac: The consortium will now come up with another structure

That means SIFMA is looking for new offshore derivatives which can be used to bridge the gap in reality they engineered.

Rating/credit analyst follow up:

The Monkey Shakespeare Simulator" website, launched on July 1, 2003, contains a Java applet that simulates a large population of monkeys typing randomly, with the stated intention of seeing how long it takes the virtual monkeys to produce a complete Shakespearean play from beginning to end. As of January 3, 2005, matches as long as 24 consecutive letters, four words have been recorded

I'll bet alot upside down homeowners could use the help of a volcano about now.

CNN.com - Page not found

Homeowner: 'It's very easy to outrun lava

This pisses me off, I thought there was a rating company credit simulator, where a group of monkeys gave AAA ratings to bond insurers?

Damn, this is all I have:

http://everything2.com/index.pl?node=Monkey%20Shakespeare%20Simulator

The Monkey Shakespeare Simulator was created by Nick Hoggard to see how long the famous quote "If you have enough monkeys banging randomly on typewriters, they will eventually type the works of William Shakespeare," would actually take to accomplish.
The monkeys began their work on July 1, 2003. There were 100 monkeys to begin, but their number grows as they find time to procreate (basically, the population doubles every couple of days). The lifespan of each monkey is set at 50 years. One monkey is assumed to hit one key per second with 2000 characters per page. The monkey's typewriters have keys that are all the same size, so the monkeys have an equal chance to hit any key.
Rather than match characters from the entire page submitted by each monkey, the program only reads from the beginning of a page to the end, because it only looks for an exact match. It does not matter how many characters beyond the first character to the first mistake of a page match, although current records are kept. As of this writing, April 15, 2004, the most characters matched are the first 15 from Pericles. It took 958,399,000,000,000,000,000 monkey-years for them to achieve this record.
A year in the program passes every second. Monkey years are the number of years multiplied by the number of monkeys.
The program compares each page of random monkey text against 37 uncopyrighted plays of Shakespeare's; his sonnets and lesser regarded poetry are not scrutinized by the program.

If the program was trying to match Bush's assertion that we're not heading for recession, it would only take 30 seconds, as that statement must only be translated from the original Chimpanzee.

In regard to Bush, any monkey could have made better choices, but if we would have exchanged Bush for 10 monkeys, imagine the clarity the world would have had, versus the insane chaos we do have!

FMT 8k - delaying F/S

Expired

Yahoo finance ( I HOPE) is messing up the Ten year note today.. check out the days range:

Day's Range: 0.36 - 3.62

.36??

^TNX: Basic Chart for 10-YEAR TREASURY NOTE - Yahoo! Finance

Sorry for off-topic. I am hearing from friends with Countrywide & impound accounts that they're being told CW needs to increase the impound reserves, upward of 50% in one case. Googling the news doesn't show any info on this. Something to look for.

(One way to shore up losses, I guess ..)

...that's "with mortgages with Countrywide", not friends @ Countrywide.

Looks like Canada was caught with it pant down also,,,,is anyone immune?

More writedowns seen after CIBC's C$1.46 bln loss

Bob in MA,

Scanned the article. Anti-Marxist/Anti-FDR (Democrat) rant. This comment sums it up the best:

"... For an example of the distortions still being caused by these myths in serious scholarship, see, David Kennedy, "Freedom from Fear" (I), Economic Great Depression, a seriously flawed Pulitzer prize winning volume of the Oxford History of the U.S..."

A seriously flawed Pulitzer Prize winning volume of the Oxford History of the U.S?

Must have been rife with inaccuracies and half-baked ideas.

Typical wing nut revisionist-history hatchet job.

Ask your grandparents who pulled their chestnuts out of the fire in the Great Depression.

S&P may downgrade 1,887 classes of Alt-A mortgage securities

S&P may downgrade 1,887 classes of Alt-A mortgage securities - MarketWatch

Bob_in_MA
You are not going far enough back in time, remember that the Florida housing boom and collapse happened in 1925 and in Oct 1929 no one really knew yet that the early 1930's was going to get as bad as it did. The two wars and proctionism certainly played a hand in the timing, which is why knowing when it will happen this time is very hard, however at some point ordinary people need cash today!
It used to be called "eating your seed corn". You had to have money for today's needs so you sell whatever you have. In 1929 they thought globilization was going to change the metric. The twenty's were marked by hugh investment inflows from England. The rich are last to see what a little "belt tightening" can do to the price of supposedly "necessary" goods when the recession is in it's late stages.

I guess MBIA is the first insurer who got AAA under run-off mode.

Buckle up, guys...

FYI:

The Committee's decision to reduce the target federal funds rate 75 basis points on January 22 surprised market participants and led investors to mark down further the path of policy over the next few months.

Consistent with the shift in the economic outlook, the revision in policy expectations, and the reduction in the target federal funds rate, yields on nominal Treasury coupon securities declined substantially over the period since the December FOMC meeting. The yield curve steepened somewhat further, with the two-year yield dropping more than the ten-year yield. Near-term inflation compensation increased in early January amid rising oil prices, but it retreated in later weeks, along with oil prices, and declined, on net, over the period.

Conditions in short-term funding markets improved notably over the intermeeting period, but strains remained. Spreads of rates on securities in interbank funding markets over risk-free rates narrowed somewhat following the announcement of the TAF on December 12 and eased considerably after year-end, although they remained at somewhat elevated levels. Spreads of rates on asset-backed commercial paper over risk-free rates also fell, on net, and the level of such paper outstanding increased in the first two weeks of January for the first time since August.

In longer-term corporate markets, yields on investment-grade corporate bonds fell less than those on comparable-maturity Treasury securities, while yields on speculative-grade bonds rose considerably. As a result, corporate bond spreads climbed to their highest levels since early 2003, apparently reflecting increased concern among investors about the outlook for corporate credit quality over the next few years. Nonetheless, gross bond issuance in December remained strong

eb. 29 (Bloomberg) -- Peloton Partners LLP, the London- based hedge-fund manager being forced to liquidate a $1.8 billion asset-backed fund, said it's a victim of the lending drought on Wall Street.

``Credit providers have been severely tightening terms without regard to the creditworthiness or track record of individual firms, which has compounded our difficulties and made it impossible to meet margin calls,'' Peloton co-founders Ron Beller and Geoff Grant said in a letter yesterday to clients.

Peloton joins Thornburg Mortgage Inc. and Sailfish Capital Partners LLC on the list of funds and companies that have had to sell securities or shut down after banks restricted how much they could borrow, or demanded more collateral as values of securities backed by mortgages slumped. The world's biggest financial institutions are cutting off lines of credit to hedge funds after at least $163 billion of asset writedowns and market losses.

More hedge funds will blow up this year than ever before,'' said Michael Hennessy, who helps oversee $10 billion of hedge fund investments at Morgan Creek Capital Management in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.Financing is much harder to get. The bubble has burst.'

It now makes sense why there was all this LAME pumping up of the mkt... based on Lies... and a 2 week manipulation...

Oh YES.... Bad news are priced in.... priced in my a.s.s.

I am guessing that the SEC is not going to step in, because they don't want it to be their problem. If they try to jump in front of the train & try to make it stop, the SEC officials could end up getting run over themselves.