If credit could be frozen for leveraged speculation it would be a good thing.

Is credit-card debt another time bomb? I have no idea, and I'm not sure I would trust the "experts" if they said it isn't (except Dean). A lot of money for gasoline is going on credit cards, and now you can put food on credit cards. Those balances could grow a lot in a recession, more than at any time before now.

Now, you can say the largest banking failure has happened! A whopping $300 billion.

I agree about dubious politically modivation of the article at near the top of the page. Further down there an article about Agricultural credit functioning rather well in the heartland. I remain unconvinced of a Wall Street-Main Street connection.

Felix Salmon is saying that Credit Freeze is a problem over at his blog and has some nifty charts as evidence.

I'm still seeing ads for mortgage companies on TV. Granted the ads are for 30-yr fixeds and don't have the "everyone gets approved" hype-talk of a year ago, but they're advertising, which sorta suggests that they have money to lend. (I'm in metro Boston, fwiw.)

It's true that this NYT article doesn't inform us much, but that doesn't allow us to conclude that their underlying point is wrong, either. Things like this, where a $50 million bond issue by a state government isn't getting any takers, seems like a more significant sign.

I also keep hearing people I think are respectable pointing to the TED spread as a harbringer of doom, but it's well beyond my financial understanding to determine whether that's right.

IF more money that Bill Gates
should read
more money than Bill Gates THEN
it means your style and/or your thought could be wrong?

Things like this, where a $50 million bond issue by a state government isn't getting any takers, seems like a more significant sign.

According to that article you linked, the market is at around 10% and they want to sell a bond no higher than 5.5%. That's not a market shut down. It's people trying to sell something at too high a price.

If I try to sell you this glass of lemonade (fresh-squeezed) for $50 and you don't buy, and no one buys, does that mean there's no market for lemonade? Of course not. We also see this dishonest, and face it, pretty dumb, "reasoning" applied top stories about how there's no takers for jobs, and the story is actually that X business wants to hire people for far lower than people want to work. That isn't no job seekers, that's a business not wanting to pay the going rate. It's the free market those same business people like to crow about, yet don't seem to recognise when they face it.

Leaving aside what the NY Times said this morning, what are your views on other measures of the willingness of banks to lend to each other (e.g., the TED spread)?