Forget all the damage control about this thing being significant but small, with localised effect… a quick tally of the chart at BBC, of losses declared thus far, comes up with about $80 billion. While that’s not in the Bush league of screw-ups (he being the genius who is spending upward of a billion dollars a week to kill Iraqis) but it sure is beginning to look like real money. And that’s not just me… read below on what Herr Wheeldon, one of the moneybag insiders (a.k.a “senior strategist”) has to say.

BBC | Citigroup’s $9.8bn sub-prime loss

[…]

Citigroup is far from alone in being hit by bad debt, but its write-off is by far the biggest announced by any bank to date.

Analysts generally welcomed the results, as the $18.1bn bad debt write down was less than market expectations of $20bn.

However, analysts had mixed views on what message cutting the dividend and selling securities sent to the market.

“It does nothing to send any signal that we are anyway near the end of the road that we’ve been going along for the past seven months, in the overall credit market woes,” said Howard Wheeldon, senior strategist at BGC partners.

Let’s see if the road leads to the sort of numbers posted by Dubya’s brother.

In late October, a Cleveland judge halted foreclosures due to the inability of the banks to prove their ownership (that’s my summary — click the link for the legalese). Now Cleveland is suing them (the banks):

Cleveland Sues 21 Lenders Over Subprime Mortgages – NYT

Cleveland is suing 21 of the nation’s largest banks and financial institutions, accusing them of knowingly plunging the city into a financial crisis by flooding the local housing market with subprime mortgage loans to people who could never repay.

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In a post on PEN-L, Michael Perelman wrote:

Dean Baker reminded me at the meetings that Mankiw and Hubbard used to do decent work. There is a problem that as you ascend the ranks, your critical facilities decline.

My response:

Interesting:

The River That Raised a Mountain — Berardelli 2008 (110): 2 — ScienceNOW

[…]

To say that the Yarlung Tsangpo River flows through the Himalaya Mountains of Tibet is a little like saying Tyrannosaurus rex tiptoed through the world of the Cretaceous. The Yarlung Tsangpo is the highest and one of the roughest rivers in the world, and its total drop of about 3000 meters–more than twice that of the Mississippi River in less than half the length–makes it an extraordinary excavator. In one section, the river pushes past a mountain named the Namche Barwa-Gyala Peri massif and has cut a gorge nearly 5 kilometers deep. Here, researchers think they have made a startling discovery.

Although most of the Himalayas along the Yarlung Tsangpo’s length have been rising at a uniform rate during the past 50 million years, the massif has shot up tens of times faster. Parts of it have reached more than 7700 meters in less than 2 million years, an international team concludes in the current issue of the Geological Society of America’s GSA Bulletin. The event, which geologists call a tectonic aneurysm, occurred because the river removed so much material during that time frame from a corner of the Indian crustal plate. This lightened the plate enough to allow a small part of it to lift more rapidly than the rest, thrusting Namche Barwa-Gyala Peri above the surrounding landscape.

[…]

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How do you say punctuated equilibrium without saying punctuated equilibrium? Here's how:

Another Big Bang for Biology Researchers have uncovered what they think is a sudden diversification of life at least 30 million years before the Cambrian period, the time when most of the major living groups of animals emerged. If confirmed, the find reinforces the idea that major evolutionary innovations occurred in bursts.

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