Stilltitled

The broad downturn in the residential real estate market continues. There are very few, if any, pockets of turnaround that one can see in the data.

—David Blitzer, chairman of the index committee at S&P

Case Shiller

• November YoY decline: 18.2%
• December yoY decline: 18.5%
  • It has fallen every month since January 2007
  • Consense was 18.3%

…and consumer confidence — 25

…and 47.8% said jobs are hard to get, the highest since 1992

As long as home prices are falling, the financial system and the economy will continue to unravel. It will cost millions of tax dollars to try to prevent additional foreclosures from coming on the market and gutting prices further, but it will cost millions more if we do nothing.

—Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com

The government measures will prevent the world from going under.

—Rudolf Buxtorf, RBS Coutts Bank in Zurich.

US Treasuries are the safe haven; it is the only option. Once you start issuing $1-$2 trillion … we know the dollar is going to depreciate, so we hate you guys, but there is nothing much we can do. We hate you guys, but there is nothing much we can do.

—Luo Ping, a director-general at the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC), complained last week.

who are these straw-men?

There are some commentators, pursuing an ideological agenda, who want to use the current crisis to nationalize the entire financial system. That is nationalization in the style of a Latin American despot.

how do you reconcile this statement with Cato’s anti-regulation position? Does it not assume regulation?

If a bank is too big to fail, then it is simply too big. Those institutions need to be downsized until their failure would no longer constitute a systemic risk. Then we can discuss how to untangle the government and the major banks, and create a banking system of genuinely private institutions.

—Quoted from Gerald O’Driscoll, senior fellow at the Cato Institute: WSJ

what we have now isn’t private enterprise, it’s lemon socialism: banks get the upside but taxpayers bear the risks. And it’s perpetuating zombie banks, blocking economic recovery.

—Krugman: NYT

It’s a lovely subject. Also a sad one.

—Truffaut

What bothers me is the ghost…Because the real theme is: If the dead were to come back, what would you do with them?

—Hitchcock on zombies, Mary Rose and presence

a machine wrapped in a zombie and made apt by our circumstances…how long until we have a movie about zombie hedge fund analysts overtaking New York?

……………………………….

Most people try to ignore the fact that Austen’s novels are sort of acid baths. She’s so much better, deeper, more sensitive and intelligent than everyone around her that she has to regulate her own misanthropy. Her novels are hostile environments.

The characters other than the protagonist are so often surrounded by people who aren’t fully human, like machines that keep repeating the same things over and over again. All those characters shuffling in and out of scenes, always frustrating the protagonists. It’s a crowded but eerie landscape. What’s wrong with those people? They don’t dance well but move in jerky fits. Oh, they are headed this way!

—Brad Pasanek, a specialist in 18th-century literature at the University of Virginia on the archetype of zombies and Jane Austen

[Quoted Via: I Was a Regency Zombie, By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER; February 22, 2009]

We’re seeing people who work at banks, for software firms, for marketing firms, and they’re all losing their jobs. Here we are in big, fancy Marin County, but we have people who are standing in line with their eyes wide open, thinking, ‘Oh, my God, I can’t believe I’m here.’

—Dave Cort, the executive director of the San Geronimo Valley Community Center in Marin County

If one of our richest counties has people signing up for food stamps who have never signed up before, that indicates the depth of this problem with the lack of food. It’s the canary in the coal mine.

—Kathleen DiChiara, executive director of Community FoodBank of New Jersey

All participants anticipated that unemployment would remain substantially above its longer-run sustainable rate at the end of 2011, even absent further economic shocks; a few indicated that more than five to six years would be needed for the economy to converge to a longer-run path characterized by sustainable rates of output growth and unemployment and by an appropriate rate of inflation.

—FOMC summary of economic projections, January 27-28

That said, the central tendency for GDP growth is between 2.5-3.3% in 2010 and 3.8-5% in 2011.