Walt Mossberg says Apple’s new browser Safari is fast

Apple Safari 4 is out and it’s slick and lightning fast. Most people are still using Internet Explorer, which quite frankly does not meet the grade. Firefox, which I had been using, has huge memory bloat if you leave the browser open for too long. Very disappointing. For me, right now it is a toss-up

Twitter founder Evan Williams on Charlie Rose

Everyone is using Twitter these days. Econbloggers are getting in the spirit too. I have started to use it. I know Paul Kedrosky uses it. Even Yves Smith is thinking of getting in on it, although her inner luddite holds her back. So what is Twitter all about?

Watch the video with Twitter CEO and co-Founder Evan Williams to find out. By the way, Williams also co-founded Blogger before selling it to Google. He is one heck of an Internet mogul

Obama’s mortgage relief and housing plan

The details on Obama’ new mortgage relief plan are out. The key parts are the following

Cramdowns are coming your way

Below is an interview with an expert on the issue of mortgage cramdowns. Basically, this issue is all about debt forgiveness for borrowers and writedowns for lenders. Lenders do not like cramdowns for that reason. See below for a view on cramdowns from Paul Van Valkenburg of the Mortgage Industry Advisory Corp.

Warning: you should expect him to have a negative bias given who he works for. I actually like cramdowns. Van Valkenburg is looking at this from an investor’s perspective and wants senior creditors not to be negatively impacted by the coming cramdown legislation. Nevertheless, I am posting this video because it is informative as to the impacts on mortgage-backed securities, mortgage servicing and housing

Jeff Bezos of Amazon on Charlie Rose

Bezos talks to Charlie Rose about internet retailing, the new Kindle 2, and more

Creeping Nationalization

Banks do not have enough tangible common equity to make the grade on Tim Geithner’s stress tests. That means the government will have to step in and bail them out. I will call this creeping nationalization.

Paul Miller of FBR Capital Markets does a good job of explaining the issues at hand here in this video via Bloomberg. The long and short is that banks do not have enough common equity. They are not going to get funds from the capital markets to top that equity up. That means the government will have to step in and dilute common shareholders with taxpayers’ funds — a reality we have seen with Citigroup but that is coming to a bank near you

Jamie Galbraith: Stimulus not enough

James Galbraith, a well-known professor at the University of Texas-Austin has joined Paul Krugman in declaring Barack Obama’s nearly $800 billion stimulus plan too small. Below is a video from the Wall Street Journal explaining why the stimulus is not enough and what needs to be done with the banking plan

Bloomberg talks Eastern Europe as Latvia downgraded

Yesterday, Latvia was downgraded to junk. Despite its diminutive size, this is a big deal. Fist, it is a harbinger of what is to come for the rest of Eastern Europe. But, more importantly it is a signal that Western European banks lending in the former Soviet Bloc are overexposed and threatened by large loan losses. In a global economy in which European banks lend at home, but also have significant U.S. mortgage debt and Eastern European loan exposure, events in Latvia will have a snowball effect.

While the EU, IMF and World Bank are all busily drafting up crisis solutions, the videos below should give a little colour on what this means for the economy, credit and investing

Russian economic collapse

After 10 years of 7% growth, the Russian economy is set for a serious setback. The video below lays out some of the details

Nationalization talk everywhere

Everybody is talking about nationalization. The latest trigger is the Citi discussions with the U.S. government to convert taxpayers’ preferred shares into common equity.

Below are a few Bloomberg video clips from just this morning where experts including Marc Faber, Peter Hahn and Bloomberg’s Tom Keene talk about nationalization. It is a very controversial issue. Hopefully, these clips will give you different viewpoints on the subject

Manhattan real estate in freefall

This week’s Barron’s magazine highlights the abysmal state of the Manhattan real estate market. Manhattan was one of the last bubble markets to burst. Now, things are unraveling quickly, particularly at the high end. Some experts see another 30% down before the carnage is over. The trigger for the bubble’s bursting came in the form of Lehman Brothers, making the NY real estate market another reminder of how badly the Lehman situation was handled by Paulson, Bernanke and Geithner

Meredith Whitney says nationalization is wrong and banks will lose money

Meredith Whitney, the well-known former Oppenheimer analyst had some interesting words to say on CNBC about the banking sector, nationalization, dividends and Citigroup. Take a look