Month: February 2007

Prince of Sands

The news this morning that Britain’s Prince Harry is heading to Iraq does raise the question — what do the Bush twins do with their days? They don’t seem to have jobs or post-college academic commitments. I don’t expect them to follow Harry’s lead here, but (as Joe from AmericaBlog points out) you’d think they could at least get off their butts and volunteer at Walter Reed once in a while.

Wednesday Random 10

Because sometimes, you need to crank up the tunes really loud to get you over the hump.

While There’s A Candle Burning – Steve Winwood
Honey Bun – Mandy Patinkin
Walking Down Your Street – Bangles
Bomday Dreams – Bombay Dreams – London Cast
Mandolin Rain – Bruce Hornsby And The Range
Chimes of Freedom (live) – Bruce Springsteen
Gloria – U2
Warrior – Matisyahu
Hold What You’ve Got – Carly Simon
ndependent Woman – Destiny’s Child

A Different Glow

One of the big issues with converting from old-style Edison light bulbs to compact fluorescents is the cost. I wonder whether the news today that Australia intends to ban old-style light bulbs will help drive down CF prices over time.

The Australian government on Tuesday announced plans to phase out incandescent light bulbs and replace them with more energy-efficient compact fluorescent bulbs across the country.

I’m all for saving energy and reducing greenhouse gases, but I have to say that this news also makes me feel a bit sad. “Old-style” light bulbs give off a warmer glow than CF bulbs, and I like the feel of that warmer light.

Ah well.

So Much For “New Hotness”

Nothing busts up a morning quite like discovering that your less-than-six-months-old Melitta coffeemaker has given up the ghost.

I suppose that’s what you get when you buy discontinued merchandise from Woot!, but the other stuff I’ve gotten there hasn’t had problems, so maybe it’s just bad luck.

I had some vague plans of heading over to a car dealership and starting the long process of looking for a new car, but instead a trip to buy a new coffeemaker is definitely in order. Yes, the coffeemaker has a warrantee, but I don’t want to wait several weeks to get it repaired. I want a coffeemaker now.

Is The Subprime Mortgage Market Screwed?

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a real estate expert. But when browsing through the online WSJ today, I was struck by some of the data in their article about the ‘subprime’ mortgage market. Here’s a few tidbits:

– At least 20 subprime mortgage lending companies have either closed, been sold, and/or filed for bankruptcy.
– Almost 1.2 million foreclosure filings were reported in 2006, a 42% increase from 2005. That is a rate of one per every 92 US households.
– “Creative” subprime loans (such as interest-only and no-doc aka ‘liar’ loans) accounted for 47% of total loans issued in 2006. At the start of the decade, these types of loans were less than 2% of total mortgage loans.

As I said, I’m not an expert, but none of that looks like particularly good news to me. Even Ben Bernanke is starting to mention it as a possible concern.

One thing does make me wonder, though — this article seems to be treating the market as if each of these mortgages were acquired by individual households. Yet it’s also true that this recent real estate boom included a lot of speculation, and at least some of that speculation was financed via these same exotic subprime mortgages. (Casey Serin is a good example; he used a number of different subprime mortgages to unsuccessfully speculate on at least 6 properties). So — my question is — is the impact really going to be as broad as this article suggests, or will it be more localized?

I have no desire at all to ride out another recession so soon after that last one, so my hope is that things don’t turn out as badly as they could. Whether I’m indulging in wishful thinking or not … well, we’ll see.