I heard today that both Larry Kudlow and Helicopter Ben have both guaranteed that we will not have a double dip recession. That’s the perfect contrary indicator: we’re going to have a double dip recession. The economy might as well be on the cover of Sports Illustrated wearing a red sweater before the Masters.
See article in the BAOJ: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/nyregion/07rangel.html.
This is everything that’s wrong with the ratsocrats, and more generally wrong with politics. Who should represent Rangel’s current district? The proper answer to that question has NOTHING to do with Chuckie Rangel’s needs. The mere fact that Rangel gives this as a reason to re-elect him is more than ample reason to disqualify him.
There’s this thing called public service, look into it.
As this article shows, the ratsocrats are now resorting to hiding from the voters. Well, like Harry Truman used to say…
Three banks failed on Friday, June 4, raising the number of banks which have failed so far this year to 81. That’s an average of .5226 banks per day, down from last week’s cumulative daily YTD rate of .5270.
The rate for 2009 was .38 banks per day. The rate for 2008 was .07 banks per day.
The estimated cost to the DIF of Friday’s failures is $313.6 million, compared to the previous Friday’s cost of $317 million, almost a dead heat. The cumulative average daily DIF cost YTD is $110 million, down from last week’s $113 million. So far this year, the estimated total DIF cost is $17.054 billion.
Enrico has to confess a certain amount, not a huge amount, of schadenfreude upon reading this story about Elon Musk’s financial predicament.
Elon Musk has made a lot, a LOT of money, notably with the sale of PayPal to Ebay, but that was not his only big score, by any means.
Elon Musk is very, very satisfied with himself. He exudes self satisfaction. Frankly, he is boastful. Enrico strongly disapproves of boastfulness. Enrico thinks the universe disapproves of boastfulness.
But, all that said, Elon Musk has a lot to boast about. All the more credit to him if he can manage to resist the temptation.
This robot is pretty cool. Enrico ran into the CEO of iRobot at FiRe a few years ago, and she was talking about her conversations with the military about applications for her technology in Iraq, to help deal with IEDs. Enrico is stoked to see that these conversations and effort bore fruit.
See this story in the FT. This is quite a blow to Microsoft.
I am looking into the Appleseed project, open source distributed social networking. Still in beta.
The walled gardens of facebook and myspace and so on are definitely a dead end. Facebook has not really been able to monetize. People want those features, but only idiots are going to subscribe for more than a very nominal sum to pay for them, and most people will not be willing to pay ANYTHING. In five years, maybe less, Facebook will be inhabited only by the kind of people who were still on AOL in 1999.
Here are two views of the pace of bank failures year to date. Banks have failed so far this year at an average daily cumulative pace of about .527 banks per day. It appears that the main pacing factor for the number of bank failures is simply the capacity of the FDIC undertaking squad to go bury them.
However, the good news is, it appears that there is some reason to believe that the average cost to the insurance fund is going to go down. Sheila Bair hailed the April 30 takedown of several large Puerto Rico banks as a milestone in the bank resolution process, and it is easy to see from the DIF chart why she might have said that. The banks that failed that week cost the fund $7 billion!
We will probably end 2010 with about 180 banks failed, from 78 as of May 28, 2010. Then, based on the number of banks still on the troubled list, this pace of bank failures will probably continue for at least the first quarter of 2011. Then, barring a double dip recession, which, actually, I think will transpire, the rate of bank failures would return to normal.
But that’s a big caveat. I DO expect a double dip, and I DO expect euro zone disasters, and I DO expect further commercial real estate calamities.
I quit Facebook today. Mohammed can suck my cock.
