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.

H/T Calculated Risk

From Mish….

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.

Don’t have time to write more at present. Read this for a good overview.

From Survival Blog…

As of June 30th, GM slipped beneath $20 billion in remaining cash assets but is burning $17 billion per year. In other words, GM probably has just 9 to15 months of life left, at the most. And if I were one of GM’s creditors, I’d prepare to swoop in and call all my loans after Congress goes on holiday break shortly after the election. No one will be able to stop it and GM will be history. And the lenders will still only get pennies on the dollar for each dollar they loaned.

I am not sure where this gentleman gets his figures from. Best I could tell from a quick search no one else is using them at the moment. But it could be he has a more updated source then I have.

At any rate, there is no doubt that a lot of mainstream forecasters have started worrying about GM going bankrupt. And lately, when mainstream forecasters start worrying about something, it means that it is a sure thing.

Bringing Down Bear Stearns is an essay that claims to tell the story of Bear Stearns last days. Some parts of it are a little dubious, like the repeated hints that Bear Stearns demise was all due to the work of some evil short sellers. Once you read the article all the way through, you get a sense of a how fragile Bear Stearn’s position was and it makes you doubt that anyone would have had to deliberately do it in.

Nonetheless, the article makes for a great read once you get past the rather slow beginning. Some of the anecdotes in the article will fill you will unholy glee such as when you read about the Bear Stearns traders grousing about the risk adverse nature of Warren Buffett. Other anecdotes will make you wonder how independent the Federal Reserve really is. One gets the impression that Paulson was calling a lot of the shots for the Fed.

A lot of people get antsy leaving their money in savings accounts. They act as if there is some kind of moral imperative to seek out higher returns. Just remember though, you would have done better leaving your money in a good savings account over the last 10 years then you would have done by investing that money in the stock market. From a comment on Calculated Risk from Average Joe……

10 years ago today the S&P500 was at 1157

Today it’s at 1263.

That my friends is a .87% return. If you add in dividends, you’re up to a 2.7% average annual return.

This is before we even get into the bubble years of 99 and 2000. The ten year window of positive returns in closing fast.

(Note: this is lump sum, all-in investing returns…not the horrendous dollar-cost-averaging returns you get by buying through the dotcom era and last summer as the stocks stayed significantly above the trendline for much longer than it was below during this decade)

Never invest any money in the stock market that you think you will need in the foreseeable future. And never invest in anything that you don’t understand for yourself. If you can’t explain why you think a stock might have a good return using actual numbers, don’t buy.

Now that the stock market has officially turned into a bear market, a lot of people are starting to get excited. But that is premature. There will be no real excitement as long at the US government can sell bonds at will without effecting the interest rates. As Brad Setser reminds us….

The scale of growth in central bank foreign assets is hard to overstate, as is the extent to which central banks are now central to the financing of the US deficit. The US capital flows data significantly understate official purchases of US assets.

From the New York Times….

A simple change to the design of the gallon milk jug, adopted by Wal-Mart and Costco, seems made for the times. The jugs are cheaper to ship and better for the environment, the milk is fresher when it arrives in stores, and it costs less.

What’s not to like? Plenty, as it turns out.

The jugs have no real spout, and their unorthodox shape makes consumers feel like novices at the simple task of pouring a glass of milk.

Regardless if people like this new design or not, I think all stores are going to be using it soon if oil prices stay high. The old design is just to inefficient to keep.

I guess this just goes to show that it could always be worse. From the Telegraph (h/t Calculated Risk)…..

British households are now more indebted than those of any other major country in recorded history, it has emerged.

Families in the UK now owe a record 173pc of their incomes in debts, official figures have shown. The ratio of debt to income is higher than any other country in the Group of Seven leading industrialised economies, and is sharply higher than the 129pc of incomes it was five years ago.

The figures, published by the Office for National Statistics as part of its National Accounts, underline the scale of the coming slowdown facing the UK, economists warned yesterday.

Michael Saunders of Citigroup warned that – at 173pc of household incomes – the debt burden is higher even than Japan’s when it peaked in 1990, before more than a decade of deflation.

“Not only are we the highest in the G7, we are the highest a G7 country has ever seen,” he said.

From MarketWatch.…

Crude-oil futures climbed to unprecedented levels Thursday, as weakness in the U.S. dollar, influenced by the U.S. Federal Reserve’s decision to stand pat on interest rates, sent prices to a peak above $140 a barrel.

I don’t think that raising rates are going to cure all the economic problems we face. I don’t think there is a quick cure for all the economic problems we face. But when you depend on the rest of the world for financing, I really think that ignoring the value of your currency is a big mistake.