"Credit crunch will last another 18 months"

HBOS (aka the Halifax) has caught up with me:

Britain’s credit crunch will last for at least another 18 months, according to the head of the country’s biggest mortgage provider.

Andy Hornby, chief executive HBOS, said the economic squeeze would continue until house prices in the United States began to recover, which he does not expect to see until 2010.

If both of us are proved correct, I may then take my financial services business out of hibernation. I've spent the best part of 10 years trying to stop my clients throwing away their money, so I hope they'll believe me when I suggest that "the dark days are gone, the bright days are here," as Bobby Hebb put it (I love the Feliciano version).

Especially if the US economy begins to be run the Sarah Palin way.

His Dark Materials don't exist

My theory: there is no such thing as dark matter, so the Large Hadron Collider won't find it.

Albert Einstein found a better way to describe observable phenomena, and another Einstein will one day improve the theory to include the effects for which the existence of dark matter has been postulated.

Time for the stockmarket to smell the coffee?

Michael Panzner reproduces a graph that implies a possible 25% fall on the Dow, factoring-in a little overshoot.

A new theory of the Big Bang

13.7 billion years ago, an ape-evolved creature supervises the last stages of construction, before testing the Large Hadron Collider.

Your money - no hiding place in the Crash

I've spent some time trying to find out where's a safe place for any little wealth you and I might have. Looking at the Great Depression for a precedent, Jesse suggests it's more a game of cat-and-mouse, or fox-and-geese. No "fire-and-forget," then: we will have to keep looking, thinking and acting. (htp: Michael Panzner)

Palin for Prez?

If her words are her own (and her delivery certainly is), I think I've heard a potential future first woman President of the USA, and it's not Hillary. Is it too late for McCain and Palin to swap?

P.S. I notice Donal Blaney is thinking the same.

The financial brakes are on

Mish argues that CPI inflation is now overstated because it ignores house prices, with the result that real interest rates should be viewed as high already.