From Rod Dreher….

Check out this report from 24/7 Wall Street, surveying what the writer says will be the worst year in media that anybody in the business will ever have seen. It’s really incredible. I knew the Miami Herald was in trouble, but I didn’t realize that it’s likely to go under this year. The Miami Herald! Can you imagine? Same with the San Francisco Chronicle. Mind you, I have friends working at both papers, and I feel for them. My paper is doing poorly too. Nobody’s paper is doing well, frankly. Reading that report, I got a glimmer of hope when I saw that the McClatchy company, which owns the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, is on the brink of default, which could result in the Star-Telegram’s closing. “Oh good,” I thought. “If it goes under, the Dallas Morning News could pick up a good chunk of those readers, and get a lift.” Then I felt like a schmuck for looking on the suffering of others as a hopeful sign for me and my co-workers. But that’s the world we media people are in today: it’s panic time, and we search for lifeboats where we can find them.

New York Times is in trouble too. But due to their prestige they can find sugar daddies to bail them out of trouble.

From the New York Times….

This year alone, more than $700 billion in corporate loans will come due, according to Standard & Poor’s. That is the size of the federal bailout of the financial sector. Many companies were counting on being able to borrow more money to meet those obligations and kick their debt farther down the road.

But with the credit markets still tight, corporations are being forced to pay much higher interest rates than they did a few years ago, putting more strain on balance sheets already hammered by falling profits and a grinding recession.

From the Telegraph….

Events are moving fast in Europe. The worst riots since the fall of Communism have swept the Baltics and the south Balkans. An incipient crisis is taking shape in the Club Med bond markets. S&P has cut Greek debt to near junk. Spanish, Portuguese, and Irish bonds are on negative watch.

Dublin has nationalised Anglo Irish Bank with its half-built folly on North Wall Quay and €73bn (£65bn) of liabilities, moving a step nearer the line where markets probe the solvency of the Irish state.

A great ring of EU states stretching from Eastern Europe down across Mare Nostrum to the Celtic fringe are either in a 1930s depression already or soon will be. Greece’s social fabric is unravelling before the pain begins, which bodes ill.

The article goes on to detail a lot of events that we have not taken the time to cover here at the Voice.

Also from the Telegraph…

Shipping journal Lloyd’s List said brokers in Singapore are now waiving fees for containers travelling from South China, charging only for the minimal “bunker” costs. Container fees from North Asia have dropped $200, taking them below operating cost.

Industry sources said they have never seen rates fall so low. “This is a whole new ball game,” said one trader.

The Baltic Dry Index (BDI) which measures freight rates for bulk commodities such as iron ore and grains crashed several months ago, falling 96pc. The BDI – though a useful early-warning index – is highly volatile and exaggerates apparent ups and downs in trade. However, the latest phase of the shipping crisis is different. It has spread to core trade of finished industrial goods, the lifeblood of the world economy.

Trade data from Asia’s export tigers has been disastrous over recent weeks, reflecting the collapse in US, UK and European markets.

From Spiegel…..

All the country’s top commercial banks and the publicly owned regional banks known as Landesbanken took part in the survey which revealed that the banks hold so-called “toxic” securities totalling just under €300 billion ($398 billion), of which only a quarter has been written off.

They hold the remainder in their books at values that are now illusory. The government expects the banks to make further writedowns as a result, which should lead to further big losses for the banks. That in turn means that even more banks are likely to require government cash injections in the near future.

The Finance Ministry in Berlin estimates that the entire German banking sector is still holding risky securities totalling up to €1 trillion. Given that volume, Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück of the center-left Social Democrats, believes it would be irresponsible for the government to set up a so-called Bad Bank as a respository for toxic assets stemming largely from the devastated subprime mortgage market, as banks have suggested.

“In the worst case that would cause the federal government debt to more than double,” said one member of Steinbrück’s staff. At present the federal government debt amounts to almost €1 trillion.

From the Telegraph….

The taxpayer will be forced to underwrite up to £200 billion of bad banking debt under a government plan to take control of assets belonging to Britain’s major high street lenders, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.

Calculated Risk notes that if the the US handed out as big as a bailout in proportion to its GDP it would have to be almost 10 trillion dollars. Markets are not reacting well to this news. Unlike Macro Man, I personally feel that an Iceland like collapse is coming for Great Britain in the near future.

This week’s essay of the week is The End by Michael Lewis.

From Blogging Stocks…..

The German auction of 10-year bonds failed to receive the 6 billion euros the government wanted to raise. Countries across Europe including the UK, Italy, Spain, Austria, Belgium, and the Netherlands, had either to struggle to sell their bonds or cancel their debt offerings because of lack of demand. This is particularly foreboding because this year governments around the world are looking to raise $3,000 billion, three times more than in 2008.

From the LA Times…

And Los Angeles County officials said they would cover welfare payments to more than 500,000 local recipients — for now.

But California is projected to be $346 million short of the funds it needs to pay all its bills in February. By March, the state would be so far in the red that even continuing to suspend payments would not cover the shortfall. California would be insolvent, making the issuance of IOUs likely.

From later on in the article….

The state has also halted payments of bond money for more than 5,300 public-works projects.

On Friday, the state Department of Finance temporarily exempted 276 of the projects from the freeze, reasoning that because they are nearly complete, it could cost the state more to shut them down than to finish them.

From Yahoo News…

Traders unable to get rid of crude are selling at a huge discount as storage facilities fill up with unwanted oil and gas, said analyst Stephen Schork.

Those lucky enough to find unused storage facilities are holding their oil in hopes of cashing in on the higher March prices. But those prices could evaporate quickly, Schork said.

“Who the heck wants to buy right now?” Schork said. “If you’ve got barrels, you’re going to sit and wait and wait and wait.”

The uptick in February oil prices suggests there are still buyers out there who can either move crude or have found a rare storage facility. Still, Schork doesn’t expect industrial demand to perk up before the fourth quarter of 2009, and crude prices in March could suffer a worse fate than February, dropping below $30 a barrel, he said.

All those speculators who bought oil on the idea that it was going to go up forever are now getting wiped out. At first they were storing the oil hoping that it would go back up. But now they are running out of places to store the oil and and prices are still low.

From The Guardian…..

Wu is one of 160,000 collectors in Beijing who make a living from the detritus of urban life – plastic sheeting, office printouts, bottles, radiators and scraps of cardboard. Recycling has become a global industry and China is the largest importer of the world’s waste materials, taking in as much as a third of Britain’s recyclables for example. Then came the slump, decimating the Chinese recycling industry and leaving Britain, the US and others grappling with growing volumes of recycled waste and nowhere to send it.

“It’s a canary in the coalmine: it’s the front and back end of industry,” said Adam Minter, who runs the Shanghai Scrap blog and specialises in the metal trade. “Until about eight weeks ago, for example, the entire [US] west coast paper market was sent to China and most of it was sent south. It was processed and made into packaging for products that then shipped back to the US … But when US consumer demand dropped off, that broke the cycle.”

Never realized before that the US sent so much of its recyclables overseas to be processed.