Just what you've suspected. Math and computer science professors Mark Schilling and Len Adelman (that's THE Adelman, the 'A' in RSA), analyze the various tracking polls from March through this week, and lay out their systematic bias. An overview here and the original paper here. Unsurprising, the polls run by the MSM are biased significantly to the left. Keep it in mind in the next few days.
A good read for beginning entrepreneurs. It's been out there a while, but I just bumped into it: This piece is a useful reflection on the old 'youth and enthusiasm meet age and cunning' rite of passage. YMMV re the applications to the current scene, but it's worth a read. Via TJICistan. Deflation again. The MSM catches the meme. Unwinding leverage at all levels from i-banks to consumers puts pressure in this direction. The Fed et. al. are trying to compensate by injecting hundreds of billions in both usual and 'one time' ways. You've only to look at Japan after its real estate bubble collapsed to see what they are worried about. The least likely outcome is stability: What are the odds that this shoot-from-the-hip monetary policy happens to just compensate for the deflationary forces?And I thought I could get obsessive. Everything you ever wanted to know about bands' recording studio setups and much, much, much, much more.
Dissecting the crash. American Thinker has a well documented blow-by-blow of how CRA lending and Fannie and Freddie helped create the mortgage crisis, and how they were politically forced or enabled. It's damning enough, but I think they err in emphasis on at least one point: Once the GSEs and the regulators and raters had been debauched, it wasn't CRA debt that made up the bulk of the never-should-have-been-written loans. With the door open and no rationale to keep them out, it was real estate punters plus average Joes trying to live above their means who made up the bulk of the bum loans. Update: More here.You can see this graphically by replicating an experiment I did after my driving vacation in September: Bring up the curiously named but useful real estate service Hotpads, and click on the 'Foreclosures' tab. Search on your own metro area, or one you know well. Unfortunately, Hotpods doesn't have a 'satellite' view, so crank up Google Earth in another window. Now look for clusters of foreclosures in Hotpads, and then use GE to see what's actually on the ground. When I did this for four different metro areas (Medford, Vancouver, Boise and Reno) I found that the biggest clusters were associated with recent tract developments, the kind with the postage stamp lawns and the huge houses packed in tight. That's house flipper territory. When I do this on Bay Area regions that I know, there's a wash of possible CRA foreclosures in East Palo Alto and Menlo Park and Fair Oaks here on the Peninsula. But if you want to see the neighborhoods that have been hammered, you jump out to the growing edge of the East Bay beyond Dublin, or all the way out to Stockton and Merced in the Central Valley.