My friend Nassim "The Black Swan" Taleb lets loose about economists, forecasting, risk and the financial crisis while on a U.K. TV program.

Economist

Newsweek

BusinessWeek

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

• European union to guarantee interbank lending (Marketwatch)
• The new age of frugality (BusinessWeek)
• MBA finance students keep their job hopes alive (NYTimes)
• What comes after the Great Unwinding? (Reuters)
• Insecure Minds Wired for Pattern-Finding (Discovery News)
• Wells Fargo's big gamble on Wachovia (Forbes)
• What a U.S. default might look like (Satajit Dayas)

The Deposit Trust & Clearing Corporation folks do some weekend working debunking myths about credit default swaps (or, as I like to call them, rodents of unusual size). Among other things, the DTCC says that net Lehman-related CDS fund transfers will be closer to $6-billion than the $250 to $400-billion figures that had been bandied about last week. It also says that less than 1% of the CDS contracts extant are directly mortgage related.

I'm going to come back to both of the above later today, because they actually matter in a longer post I am writing, but I was struck by the following claim:

Reported estimates of the size of the credit default swap market have so far been based on surveys.  These surveys tend to overstate the size of the market due to each party to a trade separately reporting its own side.  Thus, when two parties to a single $10 million dollar trade each report their “side” of the trade, the amount reported is $20 million, which overstates the actual size by a factor of two since both reports relate to a single $10 million contract.  When examining the outstanding amount of actual contracts registered in the Warehouse (not separately reported “sides”) as of October 9, 2008, credit default swap contracts registered in the Warehouse totaled approximately $34.8 trillion (in US Dollar equivalents).  This is down significantly from the approximately $44 trillion that were registered in the Warehouse at the end of April this year.

Whew, only $34.8-trillion! I feel so much better! (I know, I know, it's still only notional,  but let me briefly enjoy the black humor here of someone implicitly calling $34.8-trillion a less worrisome figure.)

More here.

I have more thoughtful posts queued up for later tonight, but for now let's do a quick spin through Asian markets and the U.S. pre-market futures. In short, the ever-solipsistic markets are (mostly) digging all the political happy-talk and general attention over the weekend. For me? You did this for me? Ahhhh ... you shouldn't have!

• All Ordinaries 4,099.30 Up 159.80 (4.06%)
• Shanghai Composite 1,976.48 Down 24.09 (1.20%)
• NZE 50 2,839.62 Up 34.31 (1.22%)
• Straits Times 1,985.80 Up 37.47 (1.92%)
• Seoul Composite 1,262.19 Up 20.72 (1.67%)
• Taiwan Weighted 4,974.37 Down 154.07 (3.00%)

The U.S. pre-market futures are up, with Dow futures up 237, S&P 500 up 32, and Nasdaq Composite up 37. What the situation will be by market open tomorrow, is, of course, anyone's guess. I've been sent legions of rumors, ranging from massive hedge fund collapses to be announced, huge all-cash buyouts, and, the kicker, that the U.S. exchanges will do a Full Pakistan and close for a few days to "sort things out". I attach little credence  to most of that sort of thing: Weekends tend to produce a sort of persistent suspension-of-disbelief among traders, resulting in endless deranged chatter.

I have an idea: Let's do a sentiment-check contest. How many times between 7am EST and 7pm EST on CNBC tomorrow will we hear the word "bottom" uttered? (We can't include me, as I'm on CNBC at 11am EST tomorrow. And any on-air mentions of Queen songs don't count.) Post your guess in the comments below, and I'll name the proud winner tomorrow evening.

The person closes to the correct number wins a copy of  Edward Chancellor's great Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation. Contest closes at 7am EST tomorrow, so no more guesses after that.