MY TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS?

Methinks it’s a lot.

O and his retreads are stuck. They have now retreated to PR mode.

No solutions at hand; matters getting worse. Bond vigilantes just called Bernanke’s bluff.

The decline will begin to accelerate now.

I can almost see that house from my office. A spectacular POS.

Seller “can’t go lower”? Ha. The limbo of RE collapse knows only one phrase: “how low can you go”?

I don’t have a bad back, but just sitting and eating in that tomb gave me sciatica for about three days. And a stomach ache.

Congrats! Shoot to kill.

Hamilton’s & Harvest Moon Inn?

Yuck.

Gordon Brown says: London is not ‘Reykjavik on the Thames’

Gordon Brown mounted a spirited defence of his government’s economic record at the World Economic Forum in Davos yesterday, pointing to the country’s low inflation, low interest rates and low public debt. He dismissed suggestions that London was “Reykjavik on the Thames” and rejected the comments of Jim Rogers, the investor, who warned a few days ago Britain was finished.

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/article5627301.ece

In the southern province of Guangdong, three jobless men detonated a bomb in a business travellers’ hotel in the commercial city of Foshan to extort money from the management. The Communist party is so concerned to buy off trouble that in one case, confirmed by a local government official in Foshan, armed police forced a factory owner to withdraw cash from the bank to pay his workers. “Hundreds of workers protested outside the city government so we ordered the boss to settle the back pay and sent police armed with machine-guns to take him to the bank and deliver the money to his workforce that very night,” the official said. On January 15 there were pitched battles at a textile factory in the nearby city of Dongguan between striking workers and security guards.

On January 16, about 100 auxiliary security officers, known in Chinese as Bao An, staged a street protest after they were sacked by a state-owned firm in Shenzhen, a boom town adjoining Hong Kong. About 1,000 teachers confronted police on the streets of Yangjiang on January 5, demanding their wages from the local authorities. In one sample week in late December, 2,000 workers at a Singapore-owned firm in Shanghai held a wage protest and thousands of farmers staged 12 days of mass demonstrations over economic problems outside the city. All along the coast, angry workers besieged labour offices and government buildings after dozens of factories closed their doors without paying wages and their owners went back to Hong Kong, Taiwan or South Korea.

Bankruptcies, unemployment and social unrest are spreading more widely in China than officially reported, according to independent research that paints an ominous picture for the world economy. The research was conducted for The Sunday Times over the last two months in three provinces vital to Chinese trade – Guangdong, Zhejiang and Jiangsu. It found that the global economic crisis has scythed through exports and set off dozens of protests that are never mentioned by the state media. While troubling for the Chinese government, this should strengthen the argument of Premier Wen Jiabao, who will say on a visit to London this week that his country faces enormous problems and cannot let its currency rise in response to American demands.

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/article5627687.ece