Some quick links to items of interest:

• Queen Elizabeth on the credit crunch (Risk)
• Argentina and U.S. bookend CDS ranks (Bespoke)
• Shipowners idle 20% of vessels worldwide (Bloomberg)
• Great set of election 2008 cartograms (Source)
• Dubious about Dubai (Jeff Mathews)
• Hall of NBER: Conclusive evidence of recession (Bloomberg)
• Surfer takes on 41-foot monster wave (Daily Mail)
• Rare, profound positive events won't make you happy, but lots of little ones will (BPS)
• Real GDP per capita in developed countries (arXiv)
• Euro currency bustup: Real or not? (Morgan Stanley)
• Markets discounting harsh downturn, but not tepid upturn (Morgan Stanley)
• How big will China's stimulus be? (Morgan Stanley)
• Why are Berkshire Credit Default Swaps trading so expensively? (Bronte)
• Did Quantitative Easing by the Bank of Japan "Work" (FRBSF)

A heat map of the relative cost of insuring debt worldwide, according to current credit default swap prices. Brighter colors are bad, and gray means "no data".

[Data via Bespoke]

One of my favorite economic indicators is AM radio daytime advertising. Here in southern California back during the real estate go-go days it was all new real estate developments, home  equity lines of credit, and mortgage refinancing. Those days are gone. Yesterday, however, I happened to catch a little of the Sean Hannity show (don't ask) – which has the largest audience show in its mid-day segment -- and in the two ad-blocks I heard it was 50/50 between "credit counseling" and "buy gold now" ads. Quite a change.

With the preceding in mind, here is the latest weekly radio ad data. As an email correspondent pointed out, there is a spooky similarity between the surge in GM ads and the similar radio surge we saw for failing banks a few months ago.

[via MarketingCharts]

Had someone point this out to me, so I thought I'd make a quick post of it. If you take the eleven companies from Jim Collins' bestselling Good to Great book a few years back, knock off Philip Morris and Gillette (the former doesn't have the trading history, and the latter is part of P&G), you're left with nine "great" companies. That list, however, includes Fannie Mae, which is now ours as taxpayers, and Circuit City, which is looking increasingly like it will not make it through the next twelve months.

Good to gone, perhaps? Okay, okay, that's too harsh, but you still have to look askance at any such recent-ish list that includes Fannie Mae.

This should come as no surprise given that supposed insurer AIG has drawn down more than $80-billion of its $122-billion facility, but the company is apparently in talks with the U.S. government to be bailed out of its bailout. It wants to convert a goodly amount of its existing government loan to equity, thus cutting its interest payments, which are currently set at 850 basis-points over LIBOR.

Good for AIG, I suppose, but it points to how open-ended the two-sided AIG liability remains. It is serving as a kind of orifice via which the global credit default swap system pushes out its collateral calls, and it is forcing the U.S. government (read: you and me) into levering up on the other side. As long as asset prices keep falling, increasing the amount of collateral required in AIG's "policies", these calls will keep coming, making AIG's liabilities – and therefore ours – frighteningly open-ended. The situation is, of course, made worse by AIG's inability to sell any of its functioning assets into a marketplace where buyers are having trouble getting credit.

More here.