The King's Singers Deconstructing Bach

(you'll want to turn the sound up, since it's keyed a little low)

A much needed breather

Everyone's busy arguing over whether we're going to have a "V" shaped recovery or a "W" shaped recovery (or an "L" shaped recovery). I've no greater clue than anyone else, but regardless of how it falls out, the similarity of our situation to that of Japan in the previous decade augurs for a double-dip at least, before anything long-run-positive occurs. If the boffins are right and we're going to have a rallying economy for the next year or so before the double-dip danger really rears its head, then this presents a much needed breather for households to repair their balance sheets and maybe accrue some savings. A second dip would likely be more violent than the first, as the "true disbelievers" would have all been shaken out by then, so savings cushions will be critical -- I don't know what the macro trend is looking like, but we're doing exactly what the average Japanese consumer did in the '90s: welding our wallets shut. Sure, it was bad for their retail sector and will be awful for ours (with commercial real estate to fall right on it's heels), but with baseline unemployment running 16%, deflation rampant and with equal risks of stag-disinflation and stagflation to follow, who cares?

But I'll take the breather.

It's Officially Here

That's YoY price changes; deflation is now here even when measured by price (the symptom thereof, not the real thing). It was already here, of course, but now we can expect to see people asking the government to find a way to keep prices from coming down (insanity...)

And in other fun, here's the first negative disposable personal income in 60 years:

(hat tip: the above from Mike Shedlock)


What kind of insanity might we expect people to ask from the government now that the chips are officially down? Price supports? Consumer dept-relief? Michael Moore in the White House (now that he's made all that money going after, to paraphrase Bill Hicks, "that anticapitalism dollar -- that's a great market!")? Whatever it's gonna be, hang onto yer hat and save your pennies, because money's getting more expensive, and that'll make debt even more so.



For more cheerfulness, head to EconomPic's latest labor force graphs.

The Fed, Again

The FDIC's reserve balance just went negative -- they're going to charge member banks three month's dues in advance in order to compensate. This's the moral equivalent of the FDIC borrowing from its member banks in order to sustain them.

In other news, nearly half of all treasury bonds purchased at recent auctions (which's how the sales are conducted) were bought not by regular investors or by foreign central banks, but by our own Fed, which, conveniently enough, is purchasing lower-grade paper from other central banks to help fund their continued purchase of treasuries.

Needless to say, I'm a big supporter of the bill to audit the bastards.

Vérinage

Apparently the French have been demolishing buildings 9/11-style (sans aircraft) for quite a long time and consider it a standard demo technique, called "vérinage". The general idea is that the weight of the top portion of the building, even though it can be supported by the building, contains such a massive amount of potential energy that once it's fallen a story or two it can easily sheer through any and all support beneath it.

To my uneducated eye this looks exactly like the World Trade Center's collapse, especially in the three aspects of

1. Massive ejection of dust & debris
   
2. Near free-fall appearance ("near" because if you can eyeball the difference between a 9.8 m/s*s fall and an 9.0 m/s*s fall, you're a better man than I)
3. Sheer vertical collapse similar to standard U.S. explosives-based demolition.

While I cannot declare with absolute certainty that the twin towers falling was the work of physics and not a nefarious plot by an evil vice-president and his secret legion of freedom-hating evil-doers, it's good enough for me.     :D

"A compilation of demolitions conducted using the French demolition technique of vérinage. This is achieved with hydraulics that push structural members out of alignment, allowing the top portion of a building to then demolish the structure below via gravity alone, without the use of explosives. Note that the collapses are rapid and produce copious dust."