There is so much news to process as things fall apart. I feel like I could spend the whole day reading and by the end of the day events will have rendered half the facts obsolete. Here in Iraq, I spend an hour and a half to two hours teaching math on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and I feel exhausted by the end of those days. I have no idea, none, how I managed to hang on through the same class for six weeks, teaching six days a week, not three last November and December. That whole time seems like a blur to me, and it was some of my busiest time during my “day job” as well.

Well, at least John Ellis has time to read and ask the right questions. He is consistently very good on the financialization crisis. My news reader’s gutter of “to read” articles is consistently of links from his blog.

(From “Social Cohesion“, via Ellisblog!.)

This reminds me of a short story by Italo Calvino, in which an aged accountant awaits the utter collapse of the bank where he has worked his entire life, waiting the entire time for the error of pennies he had made as a young man to multiply and compound until its magnitude dwarfed the holdings of the bank.

I strongly suspect that the true state of the market is more like something out of a Borges short story.

Hard to put my pessimism into words without sounding ridiculously melodramatic.

(From “Dow Takes a Harrowing 1,010.14-Point Trip – WSJ.com“)