Brad Setser calls this a scary graph. I think that fear factor is a little overdone. The graph only tracks long term flows and I think a lot of investors are parking their money in short term accounts until they figure out what’s safe and what’s not. Still, if there was a prize for dramatic drops this graph would take the prize for the year. And considering how this year went, that is saying something.

Plus, there is an implicit threat in this graph. If the fed does not start to value a sound currency then it is going to have to find 200 billion extra dollars a quarter to keep the US afloat.

Shake those cobwebs out of your head and try to imagine this:
If we are pretty well sure that we shipped something and the customer says they didn’t get it, then we have to go beat up the trucking companies for compensation. Only we are too busy getting beat up by other customer who want us Click Here to continue reading.

Calculated Risk and Tanta have been on the war path. They are fed up with people who talk about the current problems as being sub prime problems. This is a pretty sick example of why they don’t think that the current problems should be blamed on poor people.

Is a newspaper doing its job when it presents two sets of statistics as being fact in the same article when the two figures are mutually exclusive? Felix Salmon points out that the reporting on the Black Friday sales just does not add up.

The Fed is taking more steps to bail out the banks. I guess this a sub prime problem because people who are sub prime don’t get the bail out.

If you learn nothing else from this profile of Blaine Lourd, you should learn to always hang up on Brokers.

I laughed out loud when I read this….

Nina loans?

The abbreviation stands for “No income, no assets.” It does not mean the loans went to people without either assets or income, only that the borrowers were not asked if they had either. I had known about “stated income” loans — also known as “liars’ loans” — in which the bank took a borrower’s word for how much he earned. But I had not realized you could borrow money without even being asked about your income.

Starting this month, Freddie won’t guarantee such loans, which seem to default more often than other loans.

If you don’t check to see if someone has any income or assets, the loan is more likely to default. Who would have thunk?

(h/t Calculated Risk)

From R-Squared comes an explanation of why oil did not break the 100 mark even though inventory fell. I did not understand the explanation until I read the last comment.

The Bank Of England is going to (has already?) lose a lot of taxpayer money.

From the New York Times comes an article about how insurance companies are shifting costs to homeowners.

Airbus is getting killed by the falling dollar even as its orders soar. It has the misfortune of selling its products in dollars even as it pays for its supplies in euros.

Not much to say about the past week. I did keep up with the claims as they came in, and I spent Saturday dispatching the remaining backlog. But as the second (or third?) week of working overtime to quell the claims came to a close, my capacity to continue doing so waned. on Thursday and Click Here to continue reading.

It is easy to get tired of reading about the current subprime problems. It seems likes everyone is writing the same story over and over again with different words. But sometimes I read something that tells me something I did not now before.

This speech by David Einhorn on the rating agencies was one of those things that told me something new. It is well worth reading if you want a better understanding of how we got into the current mess.

This from Bloomberg….

Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest crude oil exporter, rejected a proposal by Iran and Venezuela to discuss the weak dollar at this weekend’s OPEC summit in Riyadh, saying it didn’t want the U.S. currency to “collapse.”

Saudi Arabia won’t discuss pricing oil in currencies other than the dollar, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal said, speaking at a meeting of oil and finance ministers today that was accidentally broadcast to journalists.

Oil has stopped its rapid rise for now. So I had hopped that would mean that gas prices would slow their rise. But the government does not think so….

U.S. consumers could pay record gasoline prices for the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday with pump costs expected to climb another 20 cents over the next two to three weeks, the government’s top energy forecaster warned on Monday.

Guy Caruso, who heads the U.S. Energy Information Administration, said not all of the recent jump in crude oil prices has been reflected in motor fuel costs which now top $3 a gallon in many parts of the country, about 80 cents more than a year ago.

“We haven’t seen the full pass-through (of high oil prices) yet,” Caruso told reporters at a briefing on oil market conditions held at Energy Department headquarters. “I would say what’s in the pipe right now (for gasoline) is about another 20 cents.”