This from Naked Capitalism…

The debacle in Florida, namely a $27 billion short-tern investment fund being frozen after the revelation it held $700 million of defaulted debt (today reported as $900 million) led to $12 billion in withdrawals, is producing a cash crisis at the government entities that hadn’t gotten their money back.

Aside from the troubles this impairment is creating in and of itself, it will feed “run on the fund” behavior if any other government-operated funds encounter similar difficulties.

I always get mad when I hear people spouting off about how the immigrants are taking away jobs from those poor blue collar Americans. Speaking as a blue collar American, I know that this is not so. There are plenty of good jobs out there for blue collar Americans; you just have to want Click Here to continue reading.

From the comment section at Calculated Risk….

You know what cracks me up though (just a final word on FL vs. NY?) Forbes just listed Binghamton N.Y. as one of America’s hottest RE markets. Oh man I can’t get over THAT one.

It’s “hot” only because you won’t lose your shirt on a house you bought there last year…!

Since “Dale” is someone who is unknown to me, I had to check this out. I could not find the Forbes article that he mentioned online, but I did find this article that seems to back up his claim. It mentions a Forbes article and it shows that prices in Binghamton have gone up almost 20 percent since last year. That puts Binghamton in second place (just under Salt Lake City) in terms of real estate appreciation over the last year.

Who would have ever thought that Binghamton’s real estate market would one day do better then almost every where else in the country?

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)