Here is a sneak peek at some links from my weekly Weekend Reading column over at TheStreet.com.

• Fact sheet from Treasury with Saturday night revisions allowing foreign banks into program (Treasury)
• How author Ian Rankin managers his money (Telegraph)
• The housing meltdown: Why did it happen in the United States? (BIS)
• Telephone users are finally tossing their landlines overboard (NYTimes)
• Fascinating Donald MacKenzie essay on Libor (London Book Review)
• We came within minutes of plunging to Dow 8,300, according to some traders (NY Post)

Like it or not, Time and Newsweek talk to a huge swath of the population. And both discovered the credit crisis this week -- but took strikingly different approaches. Time buried itself in populist rhetoric and awful accounting, while Newsweek personalized it by anointing Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson as "King Henry". (Click for larger versions.)

A friend of mine pointed out in an email this morning that since all we taxpayers are party to a big transaction (i.e., bailing out the U.S. financial system), Treasury should send us all fine new Lucite-encased tombstones for the deal. He sent a sample:

Thanks to Dan Gould for the excellent idea.

Oliver Stone, the director of the movie Wall Street, was reminiscing with the Wall Street Journal this week. At the end of the discussion he divulged the following:

“I have stocks. I don’t even know what the [fuck] they are now. We’re all tied in to this mess.”

Good to know that excoriating Wall Street hasn't kept him from putting in some money. I like flexibility like that.

[via WSJ]

It alternately amusing and discouraging to look back at news stories from 2002/3 and see how studiedly ex-Fed chair Alan Greenspan dismissed the idea of a housing bubble in the U.S. He called it "quite unlikely", said that there is no national housing market, and expanded with "We've looked at the bubble question and we've concluded that it is most unlikely...", etc.

Read more if you can take it here.

Mind you, he wasn't the only one saying that sort of thing, despite evidence to the contrary. Check this quote from Bloomberg in 2003:

[A prominent economist] said he'd only predict a nationwide housing slump if a worldwide economic slump "kills'' consumer confidence. Only some "high-flying'' cities like San Francisco, Denver and Boston are at risk of price depreciations, and the chances of declines in those regions are less than a third, he said from his office at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

"In the last bubble in 1990 the declines were preceded by a slowdown and accelerated by a slowing economy, and the slowdown might be a harbinger of a drop in some places,'' [he] said. "Even so we predict increases everywhere. It would be quite daring to predict'' a nationwide housing bubble, he said.

So, no national bubble, and no crash from where that Yale economist sat. And who is he? Some guy named Robert Shiller.