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Links 8/17/09

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India’s water use ‘unsustainable’ BBC

Pandas could be extinct in 2-3 generations: report PhysOrg

Walking Around Your 3D Data h+ (hat tip reader David C). Snow Crash, here we come!

Developing Nations May Reuse More Electronics Than Thought GreenerComputing (hat tip reader John L). A bit of good news.

The Coming Foreclosure Wave The Economic Populist. A lot of cool charts.

Brace for a Wave of Foreclosures, the Dam is About to Break Michael Shedlock.

IBM uses DNA to make next-gen microchips Reuters (hat tip reader John D).

Weber warns of second wave of credit crisis Eurointelligence. I’d run a separate post on this, but I don’t read German…

Roubini Project Syndicate Op-Ed: A Phantom Economic Recovery RGE Monitor

Pork Plummeting 30% Signaled in Futures as Swine Flu Cuts Chinese Imports Bloomberg

Watchdog’s failure to act on lost savings says it all Ed Valzey, Financial Times. Some Lehman fallout.

Did Women Cause The Recession? John Carney. It’s telling when a male reader takes offense at this sort of thing. From reader John D:

I found this just plain stupid. Not sure it made a point other than to complain about women having jobs. Does he really think that women are responsible for buying more house than a couple can afford? Is this the start of a new conservative meme?

There are some remarkable fact free broadsides, like “But when it came to the mortgage and consumer spending boom, the innocence of women is not so obvious.” The whole gender blame theme is bizarre to begin with, but the subtext is pure prejudice. It amounts to “a lot of women work in real estate, ergo, they must have something to do with housing bubble. And we all know girls like to shop.” Hun? How about some stats, like how many were MORTGAGE brokers that sold subprimes and option ARMs, or what proportion of the top executives at, say, Countrywide, IndyMac, and New Century were female? There could be a case here, but resorting to stereotypes is an insult to the reader’s intelligence.

Iceland: what ugly secrets are waiting to be exposed in the meltdown? Telegraph

Foreign Direct Investment in China Falls 35.7% on Global Economic Slump Bloomberg

The Swiss Menace Paul Krugman

Failed Banks Weighing on FDIC Wall Street Journal. Quelle surprise! Recent closures are sicker than historical norms. But what the article fails to add is regulators had discouraged banks from putting up large loan loss reserves. The belief was that they wanted to do that to smooth earnings. Even if true, it would have been a good move.

Antidote du jour (hat tip reader Barbara):

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5 comments

  1. Anonymous

    Never trust the BBC on anything relating to India.

    The Brits are still stung and haunted by the fact that in the 70 odd years since they left, there have been no famines in India that caused the death of millions (neither have there been any in Ireland).

    In the last years of their occupation, but literally tens of millions of Indians died of starvation while HMG was importing racehorses and their feed for various tracks around India.

  2. Kelli K

    RE Carney's posting on Clusterstock: it is par for the course at that site which occasionally is fun to read but often trips itself up in an attempt to be the Frat House of FinBlogs. "That CNBC reporter is HOT", etc.

    I think this post was a way to test the waters and see what the mix of men to women (20 to 1) and get a snapshot of the general values of its readership at the current moment. Also generate buzz and links. Crude but effective.

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