The Dow and S&P 500 tumbled to levels not seen in nearly 12 years Monday, as investors continue to worry that the government's efforts to slow the recession won't be sufficient.

CNNMoney.com Market Report - Feb. 23, 2009

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker speaks in New York about the impact of the financial crisis on the U.S. economy.

I don't really agree with him about inflation. Prices are up. Prices for homes are up substantially in Atlanta versus 10 years ago and this is a market that isn't thought to have seen substantial price increases relative to some of the markets at the epicenter of this crisis. But its not just houses. Cars are substantially more expensive than they were ten years ago. For example, I drive a 1998 ford explorer, which is a pretty popular American car. The MSRP in 1998 was 18 to 30 thousand, today it is between 30 and 40 thousand. Thats a 60% increase in price! The price inflation has already been built in, but there hasn't been a simultanous wage inflation - as Volcker notes, the difference was sucked up by the incomes of a small segment of society and not broadly distributed in the economy, and the whole system continued to function by offering unsustainable credit.

I think you have two choices. You can either inflate the currency such that salaries come in line with current prices on a nominal basis, or you can deflate assets until prices come in line with present salaries on a nominal basis. Either way, somebody gets fucked. You are either going to fuck people who own assets, which is what you are currently doing, or you are going to fuck people who own debt. A reasonable compromise would split the difference.

TARP and this anti-foreclosure bill seem to be attempts to get out of this situation without having to make this hard choice. I don't see how thats possible, because it presumes that the present situation is sustainable. Something must give.

Calculated Risk: Volcker Speech: Economy May Suffer for a `Long Time’

Metro Atlanta is among the nation’s leaders in vacant rental units and single-family homes, according to new Census Bureau data.

In fact, it’s the third emptiest metro area in America, behind only Las Vegas and Detroit, a Forbes.com ranking says.

Overbuilding, foreclosures and the sheer size of the Atlanta metropolitan statistical area —- 28 counties —- have all pushed Atlanta close to the top.

Metro area 3rd worst in empty homes | ajc.com

Rather than rely on Wall Street Analysts who are chock full of the conflicts, and seem structurally incapable of catching major economic turns, let’s revisit a long term look at P/E ratios, via historical cycles.

click for ginormous chart

A Cyclical Look at P/E Ratios | The Big Picture

Sens. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) introduced the State Secrets Protection Act. The problem with the state secrets doctrine, a press release from Kennedy’s office explained, “is that sometimes plaintiffs may need that information to show that their rights were violated. If the privilege is not applied carefully, the government can use it as a tool for cover-up, by withholding evidence that is not actually sensitive.”

The Kennedy-Specter bill would require federal courts to review any invocation of the state secrets privilege in a civil suit, looking not just at government affidavits but at the evidence underlying them. (As state secret law is now practiced, court review is generally not required.) It would also require the attorney general to report to both the House and Senate on any civil case in which the government invokes the privilege. As of early February, the bill was being considered by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

There are a lot of weirdo headlines flying around about this such as Glen Greenwald's assertion that it is designed to reign in Obama. I think thats just posturing.

The states secrets privilege, like the idea that customs can perform random searches without reasonable suspicion, is one of these "ancient legal principals" that was in fact invented whole cloth during the postwar era, and in this instance was used in bad faith in its very first application.

The Obama administration announced a few days ago that they will be reviewing the Bush administration's use of the privilege, which was unusually frequent. This move was also viewed cynically. If they found an unreasonable use of the privilege I don't think they'd miss the chance to score political points against the outgoing administration. If the report comes back all clear, its probably all clear.

I've been waiting for the new political order's first moves on civil liberties. I don't think closing Gitmo mattered. I do think this matters, and its positive.

Need to Know: State secrets in court - Reason Magazine

The deepening recession is speeding up the shakeout in Silicon Valley, forcing droves of start-ups to shut down or sell themselves at fire-sale prices.

I'm not a WSJ subscriber, so I thought I'd search google news for startup.

Redpoint Tells Startups to Cut Staff Amid Lack of IPOs, Mergers

“If you invest early, and the sales growth doesn’t come, you run out of money at the worst possible time,” said Yang, 49, who founded Redpoint in 1999.

Redpoint recommends that startups rank the performance of their staff and eliminate the bottom 10 percent. The firm also told entrepreneurs to impose “zero-based” personnel decisions during performance reviews, asking whether each employee would be hired again if he or she were applying for the first time.

...companies should be happy just to keep sales steady, he said.

I believe the term for firing one in ten is "decimate." Redpoint is telling startups to decimate their staffs.

Downturn hits Seattle Startup list, 25 companies gone

The ventures shut down, failed to launch, restructured or were sold.

Angels Flee From Tech Start-Ups

“Crashes make liquidity vanish, and venture investing — especially angel investing — runs on liquidity,” said Steven McGeady, an angel investor and former executive at Intel....

When David Levine started Wireless Environment, which makes motion-sensor light-emitting diode bulbs, in November 2006, he quickly raised $135,000 from family members and business school friends, with few questions asked.

The angel investors he met with this fall, though, were far more demanding. “I could not believe the complexity,” he said...

Some made impossible requests... Others would not even meet with him. “I think we have a very compelling business, we’ve hit all our milestones. I set up lunches with friends and they just keep putting them off,” he said.

Imagining tech's post-nuke winter? A preview

You know that old cliche about cash being king? These days, it's more like the Holy Roman Emperor.

More Tech Start-Ups Call It Quits - WSJ.com

For decades, space experts have warned of orbits around the planet growing so crowded that two satellites might one day slam into one another, producing swarms of treacherous debris.

It happened Tuesday. And the whirling fragments could pose a threat to the International Space Station, orbiting 215 miles up with three astronauts on board, though officials said the risk was now small.

U.S.-Russian Satellite Collision Sends Debris Flying - NYTimes.com

So, if you have a domain you are required to publish a telephone number in the whois database for everyone in the world to access. I have a number of domains, including this one. I had a working email address and real mailing address in the contact fields for these domains, but the phone number was phoney. (My registrar had my real phone number, but it wasn't published in whois.)

Why? Because I don't want to publish my personal cellphone number so that every idiot who wants to buy one of my domains can call me up at any hour of the day and talk to me about it. There is no real technical or administrative coordination issue that could possibly come up with any of my domains that would require that someone be able to immediately reach my personal cellphone. An email would always suffice. I could go to the trouble of setting up a voice mail box, but I'd never check it, so this would be a waste of time.

ICANN's policy is that if any of your whois contact information appears to be invalid anyone can file a complaint about this. You receive an email and you are required to fix your contact information in 5 days. If you do not do so, you loose the domain. God forbid you are on vacation or in the hospital. God forbid your spam filter eats the email advising you that you have 5 days to comply. You must absolutely drop everything and fix your domain contact information immediately, because it is absolutely necessary that everyone in the world have a telephone number where you can be reached.

Because its so likely that people who are the victims of these invalid whois complaints won't manage to update their contact information in time, this process becomes a pretty effective way to steal their domains. You prepay a registrar to instantly register the domain if it becomes available, file your complaint, and wait a week. Poof - the domain is yours.

Someone did this to Blogworld this morning. Because I'm not interested in publishing my cellular phone number I purchased proxy whois information for all of my domains. This has the following side effects:

1. My domain name registrations now cost twice as much as they used to.
2. My name, real email address, and valid mailing address are no longer published in the whois database and are no longer available to people who have a legitimate technical or administrative reason to contact me.
3. Law enforcement filing a subpoena have exactly the same information that they had before.

In other words, DNS costs more for me, whois has less useful information in it, and a squatter almost got control of one of my domains. What an excellent set of policies!

The debtors are still too indebted and not able to properly service the debt. Only when those debts are actually written down will we get to the point where we will have credit growth. There is a mortgage debt piece that will need to be restructured. There is a giant financial-sector piece -- banks and investment banks and whatever is left of the financial sector -- that will need to be restructured. There is a corporate piece that will need to be restructured, and then there is a commercial-real-estate piece that will need to be restructured.

I agree with this.

Recession? No, It's a D-process, and It Will Be Long - Barrons.com

Does anyone know how you disable the "feature" wherein Google will return results that do not include all of the search terms that were supplied?