European Central Bank Steps in as Lender of Last Resort….Again

As reported by Financial Times:

The European Central Bank on Wednesday loaned commercial banks €75bn ($104bn) for three months, a sign that institutions in the money market remain wary of lending to each other for periods of more than a week.

The Frankfurt-based central bank said 140 banks had applied for €139bn in central bank deposits, agreeing to pay an average interest rate of 4.52 per cent as compared with current interbank prices of 4.75 per cent.

The size of the refinancing operation shows how worried commercial banks remain that the crisis in the US mortgage market could yet render fellow institutions in the money market unable to repay loans.

It chimes with remarks by US Treasury secretary Henry Paulson that, even as short-term lending normalises, the crisis of confidence in the credit markets could last longer than any recent financial crises.

Category 5 Stink Bomb of Bad Mortgages

Dear Readers, I thought you might enjoy this cheery news, as reported in the Financial Times:

“Washington Mutual, the largest US savings and loan company, said on Monday it was increasing its reserves for loan losses to as much as $2.2bn because of a “near-perfect storm” in the mortgage markets.”

So much for a super-cycle.

So much for real estate markets being "local"

The news on the housing market just keeps getting worse. According to the New York Times, the median price of American homes is expected to fall this year for the first time since federal housing agencies began keeping statistics in 1950.

A new Health Food?

This Runner's World article confirms what Gopher Girl learned long ago: Peanut butter is the perfect food. "Peanut butter-yes, that sticky companion to jelly on all those sandwiches your mom made-just might be the best runner's food on the planet."

Mortgage Lender Implode-O-Meter

This website is devoted to tracking the mortgage finance meltdown. Is this guy nothing more than a tool of the shorts? He might be, but it's still a good read with lots of good information.

The New Tycoons

This thought-provoking NY Times article exposes the 21st century robber barrons: “…[S]tarting in the late 1970s, as the constraints receded, new tycoons gradually emerged, and now their concentrated wealth has made the early years of the 21st century truly another Gilded Age. Only twice before over the last century has 5 percent of the national income gone to families in the upper one-one-hundredth of a percent of the income distribution — currently, the almost 15,000 families with incomes of $9.5 million or more a year, according to an analysis of tax returns by the economists Emmanuel Saez at the University of California, Berkeley and Thomas Piketty at the Paris School of Economics. Such concentration at the very top occurred in 1915 and 1916, as the Gilded Age was ending, and again briefly in the late 1920s, before the stock market crash. Now it is back…”

No One Likes a Neglected Blog...

And for that, I apologize. The good news is that Pat Neshek's nomination for the AL All-Star team motivated me to get off the couch and on to the computer. Click here to vote, and vote, and vote, and vote...for Pat.