…as I argued a few weeks ago, before the monoline crisis fully blew up in public, no business that requires a AAA rating in order to be viable deserves a AAA rating in the first place. – Nouriel Roubini * (N. Roubini:macroecon::J. Kunstler:energy policy – h/t Tom)

• Friedrich von Blowhard has an interesting analysis of the ratings theater surrounding the monoline insurers here.
• John Robb posts on MEND, Henry Okah and 4GW in Nigeria.
• Reclaiming the concept of the go bag.
• Obsolete skills. Some are funny, some are (IMHO) just plain WRONG. Funny: Swapping floppy disks. Wrong: Starting a car that has a manual choke (my ’85 LandCruiser had a manual choke – fabulous vehicle), Map Reading (tell the S&R team that map reading is an obsolete skill).

An aside – I have this cranky-old-man theory that an entire science and math curriculum could be built around teaching/learning/doing celestial navigation. (sticks head out door – “Hey, you kids, get off my lawn!”)

Talks in New York with the unnamed banks are part of Insurance Superintendent Eric Dinallo’s effort to stabilize the bond guarantors and bolster the market’s finances, said agency spokesman Andrew Mais in an interview. Insurers MBIA Inc. gained 33 percent in New York trading and Ambac Financial Group Inc. soared 72 percent.

New capital may help preserve the top credit ratings for the bond guarantors such as MBIA, the industry’s largest, and halt any erosion of investor confidence in the $2.4 trillion of assets they guarantee. Ambac, MBIA’s biggest rival, lost its AAA grade from Fitch Ratings this month on concerns that losses tied to subprime mortgages may increase. *

Let me see if I’ve got this straight… Banks/financial institutions hold a lot of iffy CDOs (aka Big Shitpile/matryoshka lemons) – bundles of loans that likely contain sub-prime stuff that may default. They’ve covered themselves against the possibility of the loans going bad by buying insurance from monoline insurers (MBIA and Ambac are the ones in the news). Now, loans are going bad – it’s hitting the fan. The worry shifts to the insurers – how are they going to make good? Because folks are thinking that the MBIAs of the world aren’t going to be able to cover the CDO losses, their stock price tanks. Low stock price = even less capital in reserve at the insurers. If the monoline insurers go tango uniform (toes-up tits-up – de-bowdlerized by audience request), the balance sheets of the institutions holding the CDOs take awful hits. So, lets have the banks (some of whom have got to be holding the paper in question) bail out the people who are insuring them.

Seems a bit circular to me – my guess – only a matter of time before I, as a taxpayer, have the privilege of bailing out Wall Street…

Update – check the comments if you are interested in the topic. Prof. Kleiman replies to my email query:

…if the monolines’ guarantees are seen to be worthless, the shitpile grows. (I love “matryoshka lemons,” by the way.) And they could suffer from a kind of “run on the bank” even if they’re actually solvent. So it’s possible that pumping more equity capital in would actually stabilize the situtation, whether it’s the banks’ capital or someone else’s. But the banks have an especially strong reason to want to stanch the bleeding.