Obsolete Certainty

Captain Richard Phillips, the courageous captain that has been help hostage by pirates on a small lifeboat, has reportedly been freed and is unharmed. Sources indicate that three of the pirates were killed and one was wonded and then taken into custody by the U.S. Navy.

U.S. banks have reportedly been told by Federal regulators not to go public with the results of the so-called government stress test. I seems that the government may be worried that the unwashed masses (aka the taxpayers funding all these bailouts) will be able to determine which of the 19 large banks may not have passed if a bank doesn’t brag about positive results.

Of course there is also the view held by William Black, a former bank regulator, that the stress test exercise is just a “complete sham” derived to fool the unwashed masses into believing everything is fine with the world.

Apparently this week’s swift and forceful reaction  from the White House didn’t have much impact in Pirateland as another U.S. vessel has been captured. This time an American owned tugboat with a predominately Italian crew has been hijacked by pirates off the coast of Somalia.

No word yet if President Obama is monitoring the situation.

In the event that drivers distracted by cell phones, reading books, and drinking were not enough we will now have to deal with people surfing the internet while driving.

Ford has announced that it will offer in-dash web browsing in some of the company’s trucks and vans.  For obvious safety reasons, Ford has indicated that the web browser will be disabled while the vehicle is in motion. However, it should only take a few weeks for hacks that disable the motion lock-out to appear on the internet.

Sorry officer.  I didn’t see the red light. I was twittering…..

Well. Whaddayaknow!  It turns out that the Obama economic stimulus bill contained a specific clause that permitted the type of executive bonuses that are causing all this rage.  Of course we knew then that few if any one had read the stimulus bill before the vote. I guess that will jump up and bite some folks in the backside.

Link

So Democrats want to raise my taxes (and yours) but apparently do not like to pay their own.  Interesting.

Or perhaps there is a silver lining. As one wag put it, there are now at least two cabinet level officials that believe taxes are too high!

It is a new year, and new world, and a new beginning. And here at Obsolete Certainty things are changing as well.  This blog is going to change focus. It will move away from solely reporting on the massive meltdown in the financial sector. That has become old news and has been very well covered by others.

Beginning today, this blog will be a contain a reflection of all observations from a period in time that will be unlike the previous period. Good or bad. For whatever it is worth.  The journey is about to begin.

Ticor Title, a mortgage title insurance company, has sued Countrywide over the title claim to a Chicago home that was reportedly bought and sold THREE TIMES during a period where the previous owner, Randy Johnson, sat mummified in a chair next to his dead dog.

The 2007 loan in question is a $360,000 first mortgage loan on a Victorian on the south side of Chi-town in which Tricor insured title. However, Ticor argues Countrywide was “reckless and grossly negligent in its underwriting of the mortgage.”

It seems that the owner Johnson had grown up in the house but seemingly dropped off the face of the earth in 2005. Cook County officials then discovered that a fraudulent deed had been backdated to 1996, which improperly transferred the property from Johnson’s deceased mother to a woman named Rhonda Evans. Evans then “sold” the house to a Donald Franklin who borrowed the money from Countrywide. The loan reportedly soon went into foreclosure and was then sold to another owner who discovered the bodies of Mr. Johnson and his loyal pet.

The Royal Bank of Scotland, the second largest bank in the U.K., posted a net loss which was the first loss recorded by the bank since becoming a public company 40 years ago.  However, the apparent good news is that the company believes that the $11.4 billion (U.S.) in write-downs announced earlier this year may be the only markdowns needed for the remainder of 2008.  Of course that hasn’t been true for other large banks, so we will all have to wait and see.

An interesting little piece by Matt Nesto on CNBC.com about the market capitalization of General Motors.  GM, which was once the biggest and baddest corporate creature on the planet, now has a market cap of only $7 billion dollars That is drastically down from a market cap of $56 billion in 2000.

To provide context to just how far the mighty have fallen, Matt compares the current GM cap to other U.S. companies.  For example, GM’s market cap is now just one half of that of Avon.  That’s right – Avon.  It is one fifth of the market cap of Ebay.  And it is 1/66 the size of Exxon.