Gulag Blog

Lunchtime Links 12-22

Furlough alert 1–Yahoo imposes week long shut down (Vascellaro, WSJ)

Furlough alert 2 –City of Chicago to shut down Xmas Eve to save cash (CBS2)

TARP deadbeat list grows to 55 (Applebaum, WaPo) Up from 33 banks + AIG last quarter.

Mega-savant Kim Peek dies (Collins, Deseret News) Peek was the inspiration for “Rain Man.” What a fascinating brain: “Scientists [recently] learned that Kim could hold a book within eight inches of his face and read the left page with his left eye, the right with his right eye at the same time. He devoured books that way.” Much more in the article.

GDP revision suprisingly large (Evans, Real Time Econ) Q3 GDP growth was originally reported at 3.5%. The first revision put it at 2.8%. The second, released today, says it was really 2.2%.

Serious delinquencies rise for prime mortgages (Dixon, Reuters) The delinquency rate is far lower than for subprime and Alt A, but prime mortgages are much larger and there are many more of them. So total dollar volume of prime delinquencies is much larger than for subprime/Alt A.

More on existing home sales (CalculatedRisk) CR offers a number of contrarian thoughts regarding today’s surprising existing home sales report.

Her glass if half empty (Boston.com) Read the photo caption.

Relative prices of different liquids (imgur) This feels about right to me…

How a bone disease grew to fit a prescription (NPR) Inventing a “disease” so a drug can be sold to correct it…

Tolerant cat…

Tags: existing home sales, gdp, Kim Peek, prime mortgages, shutdown, TARP

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