It is hard to take this article too seriously–the conclusions seem too sweeping and too simple–but it is worth the amusement of this sentence alone:
“A safer environment leads to smaller families with larger offspring, but places species at greater risk of extinction, according to research.”
If that doesn’t make you smirk, you probably have never met the barbarian horde of the Ethereal Land.
h/t Sippican Cottage
Okay, so that the tittle of this post does not take into account inflation. Still, Indy Mac was not as small as most banks that have failed recently.
From Sacramento Real Estate Statistics (a blog)….
Indymac Bank officially failed a few minutes ago. The FDIC has taken it over, and will begin liquidating assets on Monday. The failure will cost the FDIC trust fund between $4 and $8 Billion. Sadly, it looks like many depositors will lose a lot of money as well.
I don’t believe that the FDIC will only lose between $4 and $8 billion on this deal. More like 10 to 16 billion. For one thing, I think they are going to keep Indymac a float for to long in hopes of finding a buyer.
Naked Capitalism has a good overview of how this will affect FDIC.
More details from Credit Bubble Stocks.
New nuclear plants are being built in…..
And that is just the most prominent ones.
Many of these are being built in countries that are famous for their sloppy building processes and corrupt building inspectors. For that matter, with so many being built at once I wonder how even the the rich countries going to find competent builders for all of them. Not just anyone can build a nuclear plant. It is also going to be trick to find competent people to run all of them. If I was terrorist or had inclinations that way I would be brushing up my resume right now.
And last I knew, people still had not agreed on a place to store the resulting waste. Did something change while I was not looking?
Drug safety officials are calling for an urgent safety warning for Cipro and similar antibiotics.
The Food and Drug Administration is ordering the “black box” wording due to evidence the drugs may lead to tendon ruptures. They say the ruptures could result in serious injury that can leave patients incapacitated and in need of extensive surgery.
I don’t understand why Freddie and Fanny’s stock prices are crashing today. I don’t understand why former Fed president Richard Poole is now calling Freddie and Fanny insolvent. I don’t understand why the Wall Street Journal is now reporting on how the government is coming up with contingency plans for what to do if Freddie and Fanny fail.
Why now of all times? What has changed? (H/T Naked Capitalism here and here) (H/T Calculated Risk)(H/T Felix Salmon)
Edit: Here is a YouTube clip to news anchors reacting the drop of Freddie’s stock in real time. It is funny hearing them stammer.
Fannie Mae holds or guarantees over $5 trillion in mortgages. A mere 1% decline would wipe them out. Is that adequately capitalized? I do not think so and neither does Minyanville’s Kevin Depew.
Demography Matters on Germany….
Germany lost about 97,000 inhabitants in 2007.
And Japan…
The Japanese government reported at the end of May that the number of children (all individuals under the age of 15 years old) had fallen to approximately 17,400,000. According to Japanese government estimates, if this trend continues, Japan is on course to lose somewhere between 26% and 31% of its total population.
From Russell Shorto essay in the New York Times….
I put this to Carl Haub of the Population Reference Bureau, who monitors global fertility on a daily basis from his perch in Washington. Is it possible that these are basically “good problems,” that Europeans, having trimmed their birthrates, are actually on the right path? That all they have to do is adjust their economies, find creative ways to shrink their cities, get more young and old people into jobs, so that they can keep their pension and health-care systems functioning?
Haub wasn’t buying it. “Maybe tinkering with the retirement age and making other economic adjustments is good,” he said. “But you can’t go on forever with a total fertility rate of 1.2. If you compare the size of the 0-to-4 and 29-to-34 age groups in Spain and Italy right now, you see the younger is almost half the size of the older. You can’t keep going with a completely upside-down age distribution, with the pyramid standing on its point. You can’t have a country where everybody lives in a nursing home.”
While safety agencies in France are playing down the risk to public health from Tuesday’s uranium leak at the Tricastin nuclear plant, water-usage bans have worried skeptical residents and environmental organizations.
Following Tuesday’s accidental leak of over 30,000 liters (7,925 gallons) of a solution containing uranium in southern France, nuclear safety agencies are minimizing the possible danger. But emergency bans put on water use in the area by local authorities have worried residents and environmental organizations at a time when much of Europe is re-embracing nuclear power as way to slow global warming.
The thing that’s actually funny about this video is the commentor who says, “i gave that to my fish and they all died.”
He probably used some cheap imitation brand. For tricks like this you really have to buy the name-brand stuff.