Links of the day

Loan Officer Forum...you can see in real time what is happening in the mortgage broker business; a lot of the messages are loan officers and mortgage brokers looking to get loans done...

Private Equity Enthusiasts: Will Someone Please Expose Their Delusion?..."A string of corporate collapses is likely next year as debt-laden private equity deals begin to unravel, a leading firm of accountants said yesterday. The complexity of the deals and the timing of debt repayments will undermine companies that under previous ownership structures might have survived, said insolvency experts from Ernst & Young"..."Keith McGregor, an insolvency partner at Ernst & Young, said the complex nature of many private equity deals was likely to make them more prone to collapse if they suffered a downturn in sales or increase in costs"...""The quality of the debt has dropped off in the last few years. Debt with a CCC rating has a one in three chance of going bust within two years. But it is the fastest growing element of debt in private equity structures," he said."...these transactions are all about the deal fees for the PE firms and pension funds' need for yield in a low interest rate environment when promised pensions won't be able to be covered at realistic rates of return.

Automotion Parking Systems...their automated parking garage technology is very impressive. It is essentially a ferris-wheel like structure with "pallets" that you park your car on; after you get out and lock up, the pallet with your car is raised into a slot out of the way. Some of the benefits that I can see include elimination of car theft (since your car isn't sitting in a giant garage), reduced footprint of the parking area for a structure, and reduction of accidents (a significant percentage of auto accidents take place in parking lots). It would be interesting to see the cost to build one of these systems versus the cost of a traditional concrete parking structure. I have no financial stake in this company...

Towards a 3D search engine... a 3D molecular search engine that is over 1,500 times faster than anything previously developed. The researchers, from Oxford University, developed a lightning-fast way to quickly match 3D shapes mathematically.