Buckle your seatbelts and save your pennies, kids. We're going to have another recession:

• Freddie Mac loses $2 billion.
• In October, 72 percent of the U.S. mortgage securities offered to investors were guaranteed by Fannie and Freddie--up from 41 percent in 2005. Fannie Mae holds $270 billion in Alt-A and subprime loans, with $40 billion in capital.
• Goldman Sachs calculates the $400 billion credit-crunch loss to be leveraged out to $2 trillion. Essentially, taking $400 billion in "more-real" money (money is imaginary, but some money is more real than others) out of the pool makes that money unavailable to the world's financial machinery that needs to be constantly taking out and paying back loans to function day to day. The analysts have now put a number on that multiplier loss, but just like the death toll after a natural disaster in a Third World country, you know $2 trillion is just a lower bound, and the eventual number will be substantially higher.
• Foreclosures and default notices are increasing roughly on schedule as predicted.

Back in my own little bubble, I just saw Annie Hall: it's got Paul Simon in it, which cracked me up, since it must have been a lot more topical in 1977 than now. Also a very young Christopher Walken. It's one of those movies where (if you're my age) you watch it and go "Huh, that's kind of cliched" and then realize that this is the movie all the cliches are imitating. I also saw Wag the Dog, which has aged incredibly well because the Bush administration appears to have watched it and thought it was an instructional video. Seven Years In Tibet is also good (yay for the Redwood City Library).