Just like everything else.

From the New York Times.

Good piece on Morgan Stanley and Wall Street in general at Deal Journal.

It seems easy to view Morgan Stanley’s travails as a morality tale: Courageous chief Mack fighting off nefarious speculators in a heroic effort to save the hallowed firm. But that would be pretty much wrong.

The ratio of home prices to the cost of renting is still high, though it is down substantially from where it was a few years ago.

From Calculated Risk.

Awesome chart from FlowingData.

Frankly, the OECD is pissing me off this morning.  I am searching for the national public indebtedness link, which is an excel table detailing public indebtedness of OECD member countries.  I used to be able to find it on their web site as table EO82 in the Public Sector section.  Now it is gone and I am losing patience trying to hunt it down again.

I am seeing a lot of hand-wringing in the blogosphere about the amount of debt being put on the US government's balance sheet.

Now, let me say, I am not minimizing the enormous problems in the asset markets and the general economy.  They are massive.  The numbers being tossed around as a solution to the problems are staggering, and now number in the trillions.   That's plural, and with a "t."  The fact that we allowed ourselves to get into this mess is unconscionable.

It still amazes me that people argued that home prices could not go down because they had not gone down since the Depression. 

Such specious thinking was far more widespread in financial circles than one would have thought.

Anyways, we're closer to the end of this decline than the beginning.

I got thinking about what could cause the market to rise dramatically higher and reverse this extreme oversold condition.  These include

The S&P 500 is down 25% over the past 12 trading days.  This a bear market within a bear market.

Volume picked up, with 8.8 billion shares traded and the 2002 lows were taken out like they were not even there.

Once again, it was the last two hours that caused the pain.  The market was flat at 2pm.  The losses came thereafter.  The total loss was 4.22% in the final two hours of trading. 

End of the day volatility has been mind-boggling as of late.  The average change in the final two hours of trading over the past eight days has been 2.61%. 

Dear Mr. Paulson

I noticed today that the debt instruments of the entity you head are trading at levels for which you pay virtually nothing.  For example, one-month and three-month T-bills were yielding a knee-scraping 0.02%, the 2-year was at 0.97% and the 10-year at a shade under 3%.

Clearly, everybody loves you, even though you are issuing boatloads of the stuff.