Michael Gracie 

Light on thought. Check out today’s shocking level of discount window borrowing. Who wants to start a bank? A crank Craigslist posting led to a run on an Oregon man’s possessions. Henry Blodget wonders who’s responsible (i.e. who should pay for the ransacking). I’m wondering when the copycats are going to arrive. Luxury car sales [...]

Tom Chandler posted some excellent tips for taking fine photos while on the river. He followed it up too. This is good, especially for me – I’m a self-proclaimed camera idiot. And…the tips can actually be used just about anywhere (outdoors preferred, of course).

Why anyone would listen to financial advice from a television program host is beyond me. It’s comedy, not advice: After it was announced March 16 that J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. (NYSE:JPM) was purchasing Bear Stearns Cos. (NYSE:BSC) for $2 a share, the stock plummeted over 80 percent at the open of trading on March [...]

Denial and insanity are next door neighbors Via FT: We will never be able to anticipate all discontinuities in financial markets. Discontinuities are, of necessity, a surprise. Anticipated events are arbitraged away. But if, as I strongly suspect, periods of euphoria are very difficult to suppress as they build, they will not collapse until the [...]

The Wall Street Journal calls it a rescue, but at roughly $2 per share I doubt anyone but the remaining prime brokerage clients and derivative counterparties are looking at it that way. Monday the company was trading at $70 per share, which sounds more like a bloodbath. In a short conversation this evening with a [...]

I only shrug and nod compliantly when tech folks say the housing debacle, the credit crunch, the equity market gyrations, and other macroeconomic factors those very same tech folks proudly proclaim their ignorance of, does not effect them. It does. And it will continue to do so.

Spreads in the gargantuan credit default swaps marketplace are forcing otherwise platinum rated borrowers to pay significantly more for their money. A bit of this is to be expected – up until summer credit spreads were tighter than a snare drum, and some widening was to be expected. But nobody foresaw GE paying 129 basis [...]

Interesting analysis of Ben Bernanke’s latest mortgage musings.

Liz Moyer writes: Friday, a group of bank and academic economists calculated the mortgage credit toll on the financial system to be $400 billion. About half of that will be borne by U.S. financial institutions. Most of the losses are coming at leveraged financial firms, like banks, which will in turn pull back lending, applying [...]