(no subject)

[rm]

Right. So for those of you who don't know part time job is doing media analysis on US politics and the banking and financial industries. It's been a rough week.

Right now, I'm working on data about the "collapse" of Canary Wharf.

That is, the inevitable financial real-estate mess as all its tenants go bankrupt. But really? I have to do this? And I can't drink coffee? Are you fucking serious?

Comments

[fortysevenbteg.livejournal.com]

I couldn't help it. :/

[rm.livejournal.com]

Right. Exactly. The desire to include that in this Powerpoint is really high.

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

Do it. I double dog dare you!

[stef-tm.livejournal.com]

Oh my. I can only think of Airplane! "I guessed I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue..."

Failed attempts at levity aside, ack. Hopefully you can get some rest soon.
I don't know how things are elsewhere but people in Silicon Valley are freaking out.

[roy-batty.livejournal.com]

Re my response to your previous post . . . apparently not. :-(

[britgeekgrrl.livejournal.com]

You're remarkably stronger than I am - well, I knew that already and all - as I would have LONG since flipped out and gone into Fanwank Overdrive...

[lllvis.livejournal.com]

Wow. Sorry you're being run ragged (it sounds like it anyway), but it also sounds like an interesting arena to be looking at right now. Given how the market has done this week, it's not too difficult to look at the economic panorama and presume nobody's really got a clue as to what's going on right now.

If you're frazzled, stop here!


Dad and I disagree a little bit on the "if the government didn't bail out these institutions it'd likely be worse" but I'm uncomfortable with the idea of taking a 'wait and see' approach as well.

The mortgage industry I kinda get...the loans they were creating and who they were able to sell them to spelled trouble. How far back does that go? To the Community Reinvestment Act or even before then? And I'm not talking about Nixon getting us completely off the gold standard, I think that's a whole different problem!

[rm.livejournal.com]

When I finally have a moment to breathe, I really want to write about what I'm seeing.

I'm basically working with the WSJ, FT (US), Barrons, WashPost, NYT, LATimes so what I see is how media affects sentiment and how sentiment feeds the crisis, but what I also see is a decent aggregation of analyst commentary on it all, and it's just amazing to me the degree to which people see what they want to see -- including the analysts, where it's at least a conscious strategy.

And yeah, as a tax-payer, I think it sucks ass that any of my money is going to this bullshit, but I also think getting some real control over Fannie and Freddie was long overdue. I also think that letting AIG go down would have made things 5 times worse.

The real question is what's going to happen with Wachovia and WaMu. If they both go down I think we're going to see further unexpected cascades, through banks we thought had resolved their issues.

[lllvis.livejournal.com]

Wow. Ok, I'll very much look forward to when you have a chance to write about it all!

Being the nature of the beasts, I certainly don't mind oversight...but since money wields such influence I don't think we'll happily get to where we ought to be in that regard. I'm sure there are more dominoes to fall, and somewhere in here I'd like to think there are heads that should roll. But CEO's and what have you tend to have no (or exceptionally little) accountability, and it'd be a process protracted over decades I'm sure, and it shouldn't be.

I also tend to disagree with the media sentiments that we're in the throes of another Great Depression (which was worldwide, not just here), but lately it is looking like the vanguard for getting into one if we're not careful.

[rm.livejournal.com]

I also tend to disagree with the media sentiments that we're in the throes of another Great Depression (which was worldwide, not just here), but lately it is looking like the vanguard for getting into one if we're not careful.

This is what scares me Working with the media reflection of actual data shows the power of sentiment. Playing on LJ while I'm doing it and watching memes and postings shows me how sentiment works here. If I posted every piece of scary financial news I think people should know, and then every person on my friends list with over 200 friends reposted it, and we assume that trend continues across LJ, and that 90% of the people taking in the information don't know jack about economics, that process alone has the potential to create bank runs.

[lllvis.livejournal.com]

Yup. I had the same idea about 'creating bank runs' given the tone of the news I was hearing yesterday.

[jfargo.livejournal.com]

*nods* The ability to spread (mis)information through the power of our own personal medias, be they blogs, websites, email, or anything else, is amazing. Unfortunately, it seems that it can easily do more harm than good in situations such as these.

[sethg]

I once tried to explain to a co-worker how fractional-reserve currency works. She got an expression on her face not unlike a character in a horror story who is gradually realizing that no, the monsters are not just in her imagination.

[newsbean.livejournal.com]

When you have time to breathe, I will be quite interested in reading it.

I hadn't realized that your work for the Germans is basically my job, too. It's an interesting business right now, but at times I really really wish that I didn't acutely understand what was going wrong. (I would love to just be oblivious, but since I can't get that I'm hoping for just a dollop of blissful ignorance.)

[sethg]

The Community Reinvestment Act only applies to banks; banks generated a lower proportion of subprime mortgages than non-bank entities, such as mortgage brokers.

From what I've read, the not-so-short summary of How We Got Into This Mess goes something like this:

(1) Financial wizards come up with ways to bundle lots of grade-B debt into packages and sell pieces of the packages a grade-A debt, on the assumption that even if some borrowers in the packages are certain to default, they're not all likely to default.

(2) Insurance companies check the financial wizards' math and say "yes, this is grade-A debt, so for a very small fee we will guarantee your customers against default".

(3) The crowd goes wild. Everyone wants a piece of this action. They're even willing to borrow money to invest in these securities.

(4) The demand puts pressure on various not-entirely-savory parties, such as mortgage brokers, to create grade-B debt, so that it can be packaged. Therefore lots of people with dubious credit get grade-B mortgages. And some people with good credit get grade-B mortgages, because they don't realize that they qualify for grade-A mortgages, and the brokers get a higher commission for the grade-B stuff.

(5) Because of various hiccups in the economy, a lot of people with the grade-B mortgages stop being able to pay, all at the same time, which is the sort of thing that the financial wizards and the insurance companies thought couldn't happen. Now all these big investment firms are holding onto paper whose true value is totally uncertain. (If we knew they were worthless, then we could escape from this mess in a more orderly fashion.)

(6) Now we have the modern equivalent of a run on the bank--many deep-pocketed prestigious Wall Street firms suddenly have to pony up cash. Except that they did all of these investments with borrowed money. Which means that not only are they at risk of becoming insolvent, but their creditors are at risk of becoming insolvent, and their creditors' creditors are not feeling too safe themselves...and if you play "six degrees of Lehman Brothers" then you've pretty much covered the entire world financial infrastructure.

(7) The central banks, which unlike all the other players in this game have the power to print money, say OH SHIT.

[lllvis.livejournal.com]

Ah. Thank you, that is very helpful. So very much like calling in leveraged purchases and such and actually having to deal in cash rather than assets.

Thanks much!

[marchek.livejournal.com]

Alan sent this image of Canary Wharf:

Spot the Dalek:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jsi2/2769197746/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jsi2/2769195580/in/set-72157603853177509/

[bodlon.livejournal.com]

[rm.livejournal.com]

Hahahaha. That's awesome. And may have to go up on my bulletin baord. Also, so lovely, as our little post-CERN piece is turning into a Jack and Ianto discussion Yvonne thing.

[bodlon.livejournal.com]

Other things that are bad for the economy: void ships full of Daleks. They've been known to exterminate the consumer base.

(Blame my friend John for that. It's his fault.)

And post-CERN Jack and Ianto? Happy.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Yup. It's just some candy really, but it's part of the ongoing fic, falling in before the most recent piece chronologically. But while we've had subby Ianto and points in the series, we haven't had distressed Ianto, so we were like "oh, Ianto has a migraine because telepathic aliens were playing in his head again, they've missed the last flight out of the day and the airport hotel only has one room for the trhee of them."

[darthhellokitty.livejournal.com]

Speaking of CERN, here's a cool web cam thing. It's fun to watch, even if you're not 100% sure what's going on.

http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhc-webcams.html

[rm.livejournal.com]

Just, just a little piece about the immediate aftermath of Lost Souls set in the I Had No Idea I Had Been Traveling universe. Basically it's some Jack/Ianto candy while we take a brief detour for the Jack/Rose/Nine piece of the arc.

And yeah, I'm allergic to coffee and black tea (I normally say "caffeine" but I can manage red bull and chocolate just fine. It's something about coffee and tea that fuck me up bad though).

[rm.livejournal.com]

I don't know what it is. I just know that if I have so much as a _sip_ of coffee or black tea I shake for 4 to 8 hours and have heart palpitations, panic attacks, etc. Other things with caffeine, no problem. Although I don't drink any sort of soda or cola with caffeine so there's no data there. I try coffee every few years to see if it still happens, and it still happens.

And wow, the acronym for our fic looks remarkably like INHIBIT to my tired eye. Weird. Thank you for the kind words, however.

[newsbean.livejournal.com]

That happens to me when I drink coffee or tea. I talked to my doctor about it, and she suggested that it was the concentration of caffeine is different in them. So, there's lots of stuff to balance out the caffeine in chocolate, but not as much in tea or coffee. So, it's like there's nothing keeping the caffeine from absorbing all at once. Although, I'm not sure how that would explain your tolerance for Red bull. (I've never tried it, so no idea if I would be fine on it...)

[rm.livejournal.com]

I try not to drink it, because I'm sure it must be terrible for me and it's not cheap, but the thing is I really like it, although it's rare that I'll have it more than even a couple of times per year (although I may have rediscovered the "charm" of mixing it with vodka at Dragon*Con).

I try coffee every few years to see if it still happens

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

Don't do that anymore. It will.

[eac.livejournal.com]

Your life confuses me. Really. The marble thing, too.

[raaven.livejournal.com]

I'd love a look into any links you think are important on the econ stuff. I've been horrifically fascinated since the housing prices started skyrocketing and the whole sub-prime thing got rolling.

This might also interest you, if you've not already read it: http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/18/diamond-and-kashyap-on-the-recent-financial-upheavals/

[legionseagle.livejournal.com]

Canary Wharf has been blown up by the IRA less than 2 decades ago (and we don't even mention the Cybermen). You can see it from thirty miles away across the Surrey plain, like a lighthouse, on clear days. It's going to take more than even the most monumental of Wall Street cockups to bring that bloody place to its knees.

[editrx.livejournal.com]

I'd be very interested to read your thoughts on what's happening to the financial market, from your perspective -- I'm sure this week has been an exhausting one for you.

There are going to be a lot of empty buildings in Manchester, NH, soon, too -- one of the headquarters for AIG is here, as is some of the depts for TD Bank, which now owns a great deal of New England's banking and mortgage industries, as well as investments (and coincidentally is where my investments are held, gah). It's going to affect the entire economy up here (as Manchester and environs is the biggest city north of Boston until you get to Canada if you go up the Rt. 3 corridor -- the "IT industrial corridor") -- it's going to get interesting very quickly.

Post-CERN Torchwood fic? Oh, yes!