Archive - Jun 2, 2009

Hey Kids! It's time again for Marla's Romper Room!

Today we are going to play "Statistically Significant at the 95% Confidence Interval!" No sniveling Julie or you'll get the hose again.

Children, you have a very important mission! You know all the soft fuzzy bunnies we have in Marla's petting zoo? Well, of the 2923 bunnies in Marla's petting zoo, we are going to have to cruelly put to death 702 of them on tomorrow's program. Your job is to pick which bunnies you want to save!

Fun! Yay!

Absent a few tokes of the occasional green shoot, Richard Brown, Chief Economist at the FDIC, has put together a more or less objective presentation of the current and projected economic state. Some notable highlights:

Slide 5 - increase in arm and alt-a distress.
Slide 14 - annualized 6.1% decline in GDP Q109 due to big drop in business investment; you can bet the consumer spending fudge factor won't stay blue for long.
Slide 17 - shows more than 100% increase in loss provisions in Q408 over Q407.

In the first bondholder splinter group in the GM bankruptcy, today Paul Weiss filed a statement under rule 2019, creating an informal group of bondholders. The four initial members hold $1.6 billion face in notes, and were previously members of the HLHZ-advised ad hoc committee, which was instrumental in attaining to the highly questionable 54% of plan supporters.