Links of the day

Nissan to Launch Clean Diesel Maxima in U.S. in 2010...that's good news; I would be interested in one...I currently am driving a 1993 Altima with 156,000 miles on it and it still runs nicely...

Gold not really a great investment?...Here's a chart found at Institutional Economics that shows the real price of an ounce of gold since 1900...

Micro-Innovation: vacuums..."Joel Moykr is an economic historian who argues that much technological progress comes from small improvements, and these little improvements are complementary to the large improvements that most people focus on"...example is "the vacuum cleaner, as Dyson created this new vacuum based on cyclonic separation"...check out the link for a diagram...

Analysis of Intel stock trades based on dollar flow..."Recall that dollar volume flow looks at whether transactions occurred on upticks or downticks and weight those transactions by their dollar volume. As a result, it's an excellent indicator of institutional interest in companies and sectors"...
The Fannie & Freddie Bailout: Less Than Meets the Eye...
"There is some good news in yesterday's announcements, but it doesn't have much to do with the headline $20 billion figure. What Fannie and Freddie announced yesterday is important rather because it finally creates an official criterion for what constitutes a good subprime mortgage. Banks love to write loans which conform to F&F's standards, and now they can do that in the subprime market. That will go a long way to reducing the amount of dodgy mortgages being written – although of course underwriting standards have already tightened up an enormous amount since last year.

In the meantime, though, individuals facing foreclosure today, or people who live in a house they can't afford, should take little comfort from the headlines. None of this is going to help them in the slightest"...

Pension Watch..."That approaching wave of pension debt is bigger than it looks. The purpose of this site is to provide an overview of the multiple pension crises that are about to drown America's taxpayers"...a wealth of information and links are made freely available...nice...

A list of 750 real estate blogs...

Improving economic conditions in Washington DC?..."Washington D.C. and the surrounding area has undergone a dramatic transformation that has re-cast the area as a dominant retail hub—rivaling for the first time cities like Los Angeles and Boston"..."Retail spending in the Washington D.C. region is now $19.2 billion a year—nearly double Boston’s figure of $11.2 billion and greater than Los Angeles"...

Commodities Bubble Not Bursting Any Time Soon..."Year to date, the Standard & Poor's 500 Homebuilding Index, which includes large builders such as Pulte Home Inc. and D.R. Horton, is down 20 percent while copper prices are up 86 percent. Is China really buying all that copper?

The answer provided here in Dissecting the Duck Diagnosis, a rebuttal to Ms. Baum's column (long before the two of us exchanged emails earlier this year) was "Uh, Yeah"....