How much wealth did the housing bust eliminate?

Did you guess $6 trillion?

Real balance effects (wonkish) - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com

... Since I’m rushing off to class, let me do this from memory. Before the world went crazy, the US monetary base was about $800 billion. Suppose that the price level fell 20 percent. This would raise the real value of that base by $160 billion. Right there you can see the problem — the housing bust has wiped out something like $6 trillion of wealth; compare that with the effects of even a drastic fall in the aggregate price level....

Sure, it was never real. But .06 quadrillion dollars ain't nothing, even though it's a fraction of the .4-.5 quadrillion dollars now being deleveraged.

Michael Lewis on the End of Wall Street. My God.

I knew it was bad. I didn't know it was this bad.

Michael Lewis, who made his name writing about the once "wild" (now quaint) 1980 rogue market years, updates his story...

The End of Wall Street's Boom - Michael Lewis - Portfolio.com

... In the two decades since then, I had been waiting for the end of Wall Street. The outrageous bonuses, the slender returns to shareholders, the never-ending scandals, the bursting of the internet bubble, the crisis following the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management: Over and over again, the big Wall Street investment banks would be, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet they just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to 26-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility...

...Then came Meredith Whitney with news. Whitney was an obscure analyst of financial firms for Oppenheimer Securities who, on October 31, 2007, ceased to be obscure. On that day, she predicted that Citigroup had so mismanaged its affairs that it would need to slash its dividend or go bust. It’s never entirely clear on any given day what causes what in the stock market, but it was pretty obvious that on October 31, Meredith Whitney caused the market in financial stocks to crash...

...here’s a simple measure of sanity in housing prices: the ratio of median home price to income. Historically, it runs around 3 to 1; by late 2004, it had risen nationally to 4 to 1. “All these people were saying it was nearly as high in some other countries,” Zelman says. “But the problem wasn’t just that it was 4 to 1. In Los Angeles, it was 10 to 1, and in Miami, 8.5 to 1...

...In 2000, there had been $130 billion in subprime mortgage lending, with $55 billion of that repackaged as mortgage bonds. But in 2005, there was $625 billion in subprime mortgage loans, $507 billion of which found its way into mortgage bonds. Eisman couldn’t understand who was making all these loans or why. He had a from-the-ground-up understanding of both the U.S. housing market and Wall Street. But he’d spent his life in the stock market, and it was clear that the stock market was, in this story, largely irrelevant. “What most people don’t realize is that the fixed-income world dwarfs the equity world,” he says. “The equity world is like a fucking zit compared with the bond market.”...

...But Lippman, along with traders at other Wall Street investment banks, had created a way to short the subprime bond market with precision...

... The big Wall Street firms had just made it possible to short even the tiniest and most obscure subprime-mortgage-backed bond by creating, in effect, a market of side bets. Instead of shorting the actual BBB bond, you could now enter into an agreement for a credit-default swap with Deutsche Bank or Goldman Sachs. It cost money to make this side bet, but nothing like what it cost to short the stocks, and the upside was far greater...

... Eisman knew subprime lenders could be scumbags. What he underestimated was the total unabashed complicity of the upper class of American capitalism. For instance, he knew that the big Wall Street investment banks took huge piles of loans that in and of themselves might be rated BBB, threw them into a trust, carved the trust into tranches, and wound up with 60 percent of the new total being rated AAA.

But he couldn’t figure out exactly how the rating agencies justified turning BBB loans into AAA-rated bonds. “I didn’t understand how they were turning all this garbage into gold,” he says. He brought some of the bond people from Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, and UBS over for a visit. “We always asked the same question,” says Eisman. “Where are the rating agencies in all of this? And I’d always get the same reaction. It was a smirk.” He called Standard & Poor’s and asked what would happen to default rates if real estate prices fell. The man at S&P couldn’t say; its model for home prices had no ability to accept a negative number. “They were just assuming home prices would keep going up,” Eisman says.

As an investor, Eisman was allowed on the quarterly conference calls held by Moody’s but not allowed to ask questions. The people at Moody’s were polite about their brush-off, however. The C.E.O. even invited Eisman and his team to his office for a visit in June 2007. By then, Eisman was so certain that the world had been turned upside down that he just assumed this guy must know it too. “But we’re sitting there,” Daniel recalls, “and he says to us, like he actually means it, ‘I truly believe that our rating will prove accurate.’ And Steve shoots up in his chair and asks, ‘What did you just say?’ as if the guy had just uttered the most preposterous statement in the history of finance. He repeated it. And Eisman just laughed at him...

...The first tower is made of the original subprime loans that had been piled together. At the top of this tower is the AAA tranche, just below it the AA tranche, and so on down to the riskiest, the BBB tranche—the bonds Eisman had shorted. But Wall Street had used these BBB tranches—the worst of the worst—to build yet another tower of bonds: a “particularly egregious” C.D.O. The reason they did this was that the rating agencies, presented with the pile of bonds backed by dubious loans, would pronounce most of them AAA. These bonds could then be sold to investors—pension funds, insurance companies—who were allowed to invest only in highly rated securities...

...when Eisman bought a credit-default swap, he enabled Deutsche Bank to create another bond identical in every respect but one to the original. The only difference was that there was no actual homebuyer or borrower. The only assets backing the bonds were the side bets Eisman and others made with firms like Goldman Sachs. Eisman, in effect, was paying to Goldman the interest on a subprime mortgage. In fact, there was no mortgage at all. “They weren’t satisfied getting lots of unqualified borrowers to borrow money to buy a house they couldn’t afford,” Eisman says. “They were creating them out of whole cloth. One hundred times over! That’s why the losses are so much greater than the loans. But that’s when I realized they needed us to keep the machine running. I was like, This is allowed?”...

...No investment bank owned by its employees would have levered itself 35 to 1 or bought and held $50 billion in mezzanine C.D.O.’s. I doubt any partnership would have sought to game the rating agencies or leap into bed with loan sharks or even allow mezzanine C.D.O.’s to be sold to its customers. The hoped-for short-term gain would not have justified the long-term hit...

I have only a few thoughts percolating in the general horror.

1. We need to close the rating agencies down. Now.
2. When you give 99% of the human race money and power, they cannot imagine that they don't deserve it. They are convinced they are brilliant. I know I would.
   
3. The part where shorting the bad loans with credit-default swaps enabled the generation of 'virtual' bad loans involving real money is mind-boggling.
4. I don't think this was caused by poor black people getting too many loans. Do you?
5. Compared to these people Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are bleedin' saints.
   
6. This really is a complexity collapse.

Update - see also:

1. Complexity collapse
2. Disintermediating Wall Street
3. The future of the publicly traded company
   

Update 1/3/08: Mr. Lewis writes a f/u essay for the NYT.

Kiss your Google Notebook good-bye

I sure hope you don't been, you know, using your Google Notebook ...

Google Cost Cuts Take The Company Away From Its Engineers (GOOG)

... Search sandbox SearchMash, virtual world Lively and Google Page Creator will soon be gone. Google Audio Indexing and Google Notebook could follow...

Axing Notebook will educate many about the limits of the Cloud.

I wonder how much Google makes from Picasa Web Albums. Now you don't suppose ...

The Dacopalypse continues.

New frontiers in the evolution of life

To me geologists are the greatest of detectives. They work from the tiniest bits of evidence, and painstakingly build their case.

I'd never have the patience.

The NYT profiles advances in geologistt's understanding of the early earth, along with implications for the evolution of life ...

A New View of the Early Earth, Thanks to Australian Rocks - NYTimes.com

... Genetic studies of current life support that notion, pointing to an organism that lived in a high-temperature environment as the last common ancestor. That does not mean that life started there, but that is almost certainly where survivors of the giant impacts would have huddled...

The evolution of earthly life has been problematic. We thought the earth dropped below the boiling point and, bang!, life happened.

Too fast. That's why scientists have tried to imagine how prebiotic chemistry could occur outside of the early earth, in the relatively benign environment of outer space.

If the new theories are right, earth cooled a lot sooner than thought, and the massive asteroid impacts of the time might have spared a few extremophiles. Life wouldn't have to reboot every time the oceans boiled.

The GM bail out: fund it with a carbon tax, a break-up, and new fuel efficiency standards

Robert Reich is on fire. He's got one great Keynes mini-bio post, and another on why it's absurd to make fuel-efficient car manfacture a GM bailout condition.

Happily, my tyrannic rule is no longer needed in the blessed reign of Obama. If I were tyrant, however, these would be my bail-out conditions:

1. Bail and break: Too big to fail means too big to live. Make breaking up GM a condition of the bail-out
2. Per Reich: industry must sign-on to new fuel efficiency standards.
3. Account for the bail-out monies through a carbon tax (not a gas tax directly).
   
4. Offset the carbon tax (the Great Recession is the wrong time to increase next taxes) with a large investment in public transit development and universal wireless internet access to diversify commuting-free employment.

The same terms would, of course, need to be offered to every automotive manufacturer, not just GM.

The power of blogs: Fords GM to drive to handout

I can't remember which of the blogs I read said that the US auto CEOs should have driven a hybrid instead of taking a private jet when begging for a bailout.

Now we learn ...

Ford Will Speed Green-Car Launches - WSJ.com

.... Mr. Mulally plans to drive a Ford Escape hybrid to Washington, where he and his GM and Chrysler counterparts are set to appear later this week...

Now that's power.

Too big to fail means too big to live

Another voice saying we need to fund a failing industry because GM is too big to fail ...

Toyota to cut bonuses 10% | Business | guardian.co.uk

... Earlier this week Carlos Ghosn, who brought Nissan back from the brink of bankruptcy when he became chief executive officer almost a decade ago, warned that car-makers faced massive job losses and urged governments in the US, Japan and Europe to come to their rescue.

'It is important for governments to finance industries that employ a lot of workers,' he told a symposium in Tokyo. 'The credit crunch has made it difficult to finance day-to-day operations.

'Job destruction will be massive in those countries that do not rapidly help the auto sector to finance itself. It will not be seen immediately, but in a few years.'...

Just like Citigroup was too big to fail.

It has occurred to many, many, people that "too big to fail" should also mean "too big to live".

Maybe the price of bailing out these industries should be to break them up into smaller pieces that aren't too big to fail.

Human pathogens attack their mosquito hosts

In medical school, about 250 years ago, I was very interested in comparative and evolutionary immunology.

How, I thought, could we hope to understand the human immune system without knowing how it evolved, and without comparing our strategies to those of very different animals?

Happily, at the time I was asking those questions, other people were studying them. Now, 24 years later, we're learning some amazing things.

This is new science. Until today I would have said mosquitoes mostly tolerated the human pathogens they carry ...

Bug vs. bug: How do mosquitoes survive deadly viruses unscathed?: Scientific American Blog

Why can mosquitoes carry deadly viruses without succumbing to them and live on to give humans West Nile, dengue fever, and a host of other fatal illnesses. According to new research, the insects' primitive immune systems recognize that the viruses are dangerous and slice the microbes' genetic material into harmless pieces....

... The prevailing theory had been that these viruses and mosquitoes lived in harmony. But entomologists found quite the opposite to be true. "We were shocked," lead author Kevin Myles told ScientificAmerican.com, "This had long been viewed as a very benign relationship."...

I take exception to the word "primitive" in the first paragraph. Why would there be anything "primitive" about the immune system of the modern mosquito. They've been evolving for a long time ...

Mumbai attacks - maybe not so expert

As expected, Schneier's analysis of the Mumbai attacks, is much better than anything from the mainstream media, including the WSJ, NYT or The Economist.

Blogs rule. Again.

Schneier makes several important points (read the post), but this one I'll call out (note the current count of attackers is 10) ...

... The attacks were surprisingly ineffective. I can't find exact numbers, but it seems there were about 18 terrorists. The latest toll is 195 dead, 235 wounded. That's 11 dead, 13 wounded, per terrorist. As horrible as the reality is, that's much less than you might have thought if you imagined the movie in your head...

Ineffective in quotes, perhaps. Mumbai is both unfathomably large and quite small. A family I personally know has lost several friends and colleagues.

The key point, which is not reassuring, is these young men accomplished the kind of devastation one might expect from healthy, ruthless, men with some military training and no particular desire to live. I suspect a suicidal team of SAS soldiers would have done far worse.

The thesis that these were not spy movie super-warriors is reinforced by the cooperation of the single barely adult captive (it pays to take these people alive):

Mumbai terror attacks: Rice calls for 'total transparency' from Pakistan | World news | guardian.co.uk

... Azam Amir Kasav, a 21-year-old Pakistani national who speaks fluent English, told interrogators his team took orders from 'their command in Pakistan', the investigators, speaking anonymously, told Reuters. The training was organised by the Lashkar-e-Taiba group and involved former members of the Pakistani army, they added...

If the US, EU and India can use this attack to force Pakistan to move against its internal terror network then this nightmare might be used to reduce future harm.

If Pakistan cannot act, then we will all have a better idea of what we're up against.

Update: Two incidents in Montreal, Canada, the 1989 Ecole polytechnique shootings (14 dead, 14 wounded) and the 2006 Dawson college shooting (19 wounded, 1 dead) are illustrative. In both cases the killers were mentally ill, had no particular military expertise, and used non-military weapons. Both killers committed suicide fairly early in their assault.

The city is not large or hard to navigate, and even in 1989 the police were experienced and well trained. Even so, the toll was considerable.

The fact that 18 survived the Dawson shooting, even two who had terrible injuries, is astounding and is credited to luck (of a dubious sort - it would be better luck not to be shot), superb emergency responses, the youthful vigor of the victims, the courage of bystanders, police strategies developed after the 1989 shootings, and a very well placed shot by one officer.

So there are things that can be done, but there are some vulnerabilities every modern city shares - from Mumbai to Montreal.

Rule #1 for spotting a con ...

Via FMH. This is my favorite tip in a brief article on avoiding cons ...

How To Avoid Getting Conned - Executive Careers - Portfolio.com

... Confidence is, after all, where the con in con man comes from. The sharper someone makes you think you are, the more likely you are to believe that you're in control—and the more vulnerable you'll be when the loop of deception is closed. 'The easiest person to con,' says Robbins, 'is someone who thinks he's too smart to be conned...

Moral - Never think you're too smart to be conned.

Return of the WMDs - from Pakistan

There is, of course, these press leaks are related to the Obama transition.

The WMDs are back. Emphases and italics mine.

Panel Fears Use of Unconventional Weapon - NYTimes.com

An independent commission has concluded that terrorists will most likely carry out an attack with biological, nuclear or other unconventional weapons somewhere in the world in the next five years unless the United States and its allies act urgently to prevent that...

... “Were one to map terrorism and weapons of mass destruction today, all roads would intersect in Pakistan,” the report states...

... The report is the result of a six-month study by the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism, which Congress created last spring in keeping with one of the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission...

.... Commission officials said that date is a judgment based on scores of interviews and classified briefings conducted by members of the panel — led by former Senators Bob Graham, Democrat of Florida, and Jim Talent, Republican of Missouri — but does not represent a new formal assessment by the United States intelligence agencies...

... The commission urges the Obama administration to work to halt the Iranian and North Korean nuclear weapons programs, backing up any diplomatic initiatives with “the credible threat of direct action” — code for military action, a commission official said....

So what part of this do I personally find least persuasive? This sentence: "unless the United States and its allies act urgently to prevent that."

Ok, so the idea that military action against North Korea, short of occupying it, would prevent a bioweapons attack is probably even stupider.

I don't see how even the smartest and most urgent action could prevent a bioweapons attack -- if someone with money and brains really wanted to try it.

I assume the reason that it appears not to have happened so far [1] is that no national tyrant, even Sadaam, has wanted to do it, and that al Qaeda appears to have alienated all their potential geeks.

Note to murderous religious fundamentalists yearning for the medieval -- you really aren't geek-friendly. Please stay that way.

So, yes, we should pay special attention to bioweapons. Bush made that harder by using smallpox fraud to sell his Iraq invasion -- at the cost of a number of American's maimed or killed by the unwarranted and now forgotten federal immunization program.

So, by all means, pay attention. The threat appears real. But don't imagine we can necessarily prevent this from happening -- especially by attacking North Korea.

The cost of havoc is low and falling.

[1] I say "appears" because if an attack fizzled there's no way we'd recognize it. People die of basically inexplicable causes all the time. It's not a daily event at a sizeable hospital, but a few times a year.

What shall we call the study of the emergent google meta-mind?

I like to think of my blogs as, in part, a conversation with the emergent Google meta-mind - aka "Skynet".

Yes, I have a dark sense of whimsy. Maybe I'm contributing to the future delinquency of a Minor. On the other hand, it seems reasonable to encourage a sentimental streak in any potential future Deity.

Whatever, the point is we need a name for the study of the Google-mind. It's probably not appropriate to consider this a branch of psychology; the meta-mind isn't sentient (I hope!) and certainly isn't human (even if it runs partly on human wetware and partly on Google's machines).

I like "skytology". Any better ideas?

I'm sure I'm not the only one conversing with the meta-mind. What do my fellow delusionists say?

Emergence and the neo-Marxist meme: Google throws up an Amazon book

I was searching on the "golden age of fraud", curious to see what the Google-mind said about fraud in the 1920s.

Turns out, there was no Google "golden age of fraud" connection to 1920.

Number 3 on my Google list was a post of mine, but that's a side-effect of the emergently solipsistic world of Search -- Google learns what I like and gives it to me.

Number 4 though was interesting: Amazon.com: The New Golden Age: The Coming Revolution against Political Corruption and Economic Chaos: Ravi Batra.

From a scan of the reviews it appears Mr Batra has been predicting doom for some time. This 2007 publisher's weekly critique is funny today (emphasis mine) ...

... After nearly 20 years of predicting economic disaster, Batra (Greenspan's Fraud, etc.) suggests a reversal, though only after we rise up in revolution against the forces of chaos. This time, he charges politicians, academics, business executives and rich people with "corruption," defined as "any policy that enriches the rich and impoverishes the poor and the middle class." Among the practices Batra censures are raising congressional pay but not the minimum wage, and cutting income taxes while increasing Social Security taxes. Though the analysis is keen and provocative and the conclusions unorthodox as ever, his specific economic predictions aren't likely to be any better than those in his 11 previous books...

Well, it turns out that 2007 was an excellent time to predict oncoming disaster, though 20 years of precedence inevitably evokes "stuck clocks".

I've not read any part of the book, but the reader reviews have a neo-Marxist flavor.

I suppose this is the right time for a neo-Marxist revival. As someone sympathetic to the obligations the (transiently) strong owe the (currently) weak, I'm not entirely opposed.

It is necessary to point out, however, that Marx was at least as deluded as Freud.

Post-crash review: What if our inflation measurements were terribly wrong?

We're still fighting over the causes and remedies of the Great Depression -- 80 years later after the crash of '29.

I'll be pleasantly surprised if humanity is still able to debate the causes of the crash of '08 in 2088. In the happy event that any sentience is around for that discussion, I wonder if they'll consider systemic errors in measuring inflation to be significant contributors to a "complexity crash".

We're not there yet. A Google Scholar search on inflation rate" "cost of ownership" corrected doesn't return anything interesting as of 11/30/08. My May 2007 and June 2007 posts appear to have been rejected by the meme-space meta-mind (love the sound of that!).

That's ok, I can be persistent.

I'll try another example.

I last bought a SONY Trinitron CRT TV about ten years ago. It cost me about $350 at the time and has not cost me a moment's time post-purchase. It will probably work 20 years from now, though by then it will only work with illegal DRM-stripped media.

Today, by contrast, my neighbor asked my advice on his TV purchase. LCD or Plasma? Should he invest in software to do computer-based image calibration? Will the LCDs really last 60,000 hours, or will they need maintenance within 5 years? Will the embedded OS crash and how often? When current DRM barriers are hacked, will the TV become obsolete? Assuming my neighbor's hourly cost is $70/hour, how much will his TV service cost him over his lifespan?

Does anyone lucid imagine that the lifecycle total cost of ownership of his TV will be comparable to the TV I bought ten years ago? Will the increased enjoyment (dubious, since humans adopt rapidly to such changes) justify the massively increased cost of ownership?

Now, I suspect we're hitting rock bottom in terms of the cost of ownership. I believe the quality of Chinese exports (probably including food) is improving from a very low nadir, and I think (pray?) consumers are beginning to consider life cycle costs.

From the perspective of understanding the crash '08, however, it's the past decade that counts. During that time we've supposedly had an adjusted inflation rate of less than 3%. What if we were measuring the wrong numbers? What if the life-cycle adjusted cost-of-ownership inflation rate were really 3-8%? What would that say about what our monetary policy was doing? Could our historically low fed rates, based on the published inflation rates, have been ridiculously low compared to the adjusted rate? If the true inflation rate were 6-7%, what would that say about middle-income wage collapse? How would such an economy have reacted to a sudden contraction in credit?

Ok, I tried! I hope my Google Scholar search turns up more articles in a few months.

Update: Thinking about this, I wonder how long after the technology explosions of the early 20th century people began making intelligent purchases. There must have been a time when most people didn't really know what they were buying, when they couldn't have been making very wise choices ...

Microsoft Live Mesh won't work

Microsoft's Ray Ozzie is very excited about LiveMesh ...

Ray Ozzie Wants to Push Microsoft Back Into Startup Mode

... Then comes a demonstration of Live Mesh, which will allow people to seamlessly synchronize all their information with as many people and places as they want, across as many devices (computer, phone, camera) as they want...

Ozzie needs to spend some time hanging out with "Health Level 7" (HL-7) veterans.

Live Mesh won't work unless everyone agrees to fully embrace a complete specification of Microsoft's data model for all the entities of interest.

This is the basis for the HL-7 RIM CDA specifications and the massive formal ontologies they use (ex. SNOMED CT). That's not to say that the CDA/Terminfo/SNOMED documents will work in the real world, but at least they don't pretend to magically reconcile disparate data models and they come with a hugely expensive domain-specific expert-maintained ontology.

Microsoft is nuts to attack this problem. That's not to say I know what to do with Microsoft, but they'd be better off returning the Live Mesh money to shareholders.