This isn't me. I'm not here right now.

So, I see that we have had a barrage of wacky subprime news, and couldn't bear not commenting.

• Wells Fargo, the company that dominates the California market where broken mortgages are only slightly less common than yummy mommies with recent liposuction scars, beat the Street, raised its dividend, etc.
• JPMorgan, the company that is allegedly so conservative it will only lend itself money, has announced this morning a 53% drop in net income on another $1-billion in mortgage markdowns. And that's good news, of course.
• IndyMac, the recently FDIC-taken over California bank, is alleged this morning on CNN/WSJ to be under FBI investigation for fraud, along with 21 other banks.

You just can't make this stuff up.

This from my friends at Terapeak shows some interesting post-iPhone 3G trends in the used iPhone market. The used market is crumbling for iPhone 1.0 for some reason spiked around the iPhone 2.0 launch, and is now trailing off. Interesting, auction action on iPhone 2.0 is now falling a little too. Perhaps people are now finding them in stores.

[via Terapeak]

All the previously broken SE Asian currencies have now all flipped and are running ahead of the U.S. dollar. Only the Vietnamese Dong and the Indian Rupee are still down over the last few weeks against the dollar. Mean reversion is alive and well in currency markets: No outlier move goes unpunished.

[via Pacific Exchange Rate Service]

My friend, columnist Joe Nocera at the NY Times is newly blogging. Unsurprisingly, the blog is bruising, funny and irreverent. Good reading, and a fun complement to his Times columns.

Check it here.

Pakistan is busily putting down riots at its stock exchange. After leading the world over the past decade, soaring by almost a factor of 10, it has dropped 35% since April, and traded down 15 of the last 18 days.

As usual, people got a sense that markets would always go up, and when they found out otherwise they reacted like kids who had their Wall-E toy taken away. They smashed stuff, shouted, and generally demanded the government do something about it. Aiding and abetting things, of course, have been Pakistani regulators, with a rule (until recently) that equities could never go down more than 1% a day. (Sound familiar?)

Check this (Reuters) picture of investors smashing through a door at the Karachi exchange, and then the following color from Bloomberg:

In Karachi investors today broke windows, threw plant holders in the parking lot of the building, burned shareholder statements and at least one protester was injured, prompting intervention by police and the paramilitary. Investors were also protesting outside the Lahore and Islamabad stock exchanges, Geo Television reported.

"We demand that all stock prices be frozen at current levels,'' said Kauser Javed, who heads the Small Investors Association. "People have sold their assets in the last 15 days to meet payments and if things continue this way, you will start hearing of suicides. The regulators always favor big brokers and investors.''

With potted plants flying outside the Karachi bourse after this stock crash, it reminds of a favorite adage: Trading stocks is fun, until someone loses an eye.

More here.