Cash for Clunkers has taken a number of awful cars off the road – including a rare 1985 Maserati. Granted, the BiTurbo was one of the worst cars ever made, but still.
In other clunker news, maybe that first billion dollars was all the program really needed, as participation has slowed precipitously since the funding extension. Oops.
Continuing the car theme, Porsche and Volkswagen finally figured out how they can live together, after three years: a Qatari roommate.
The receiver in the Stanford Ponzi case is demanding fees of $27m for his role in recovering investor money. That just so happens to be exactly one-third of the total amount of money he has in the receivership account. No one is amused by this, except me.
Colonial Bank, Alabama’s second-largest bank, found itself shut down by the FDIC Friday in the largest bank failure since WaMu. BB&T now owns almost all of Colonial’s assets, to the tune of $20b.
Depending on how you like your news to slant, consumer prices either held steady from June to July, which is really great news, or they fell year over year from 2008, which is the worst news possible.
No, nevermind. New real estate numbers show that we are all still very, very screwed for now. Unless you live in a van down by the river, as I know many of you do nowadays, you’re probably going to be upside-down on your mortgage if you aren’t already. I know I am!
mr_clueless // Aug 16, 2009 at 3:21 am
No home, no mortgage, so nothing to be upside down on! And I don’t live in a van either. I almost bought in 2004 and backed out because I read about Dean Baker selling his own house, and also discovered patrick.net at the time. Basically between the time I put a deposit and the time I had to commit, I surfed like a maniac to decide whether housing was in a bubble. I decided it was and was willing to risk getting priced out, which I did by mid-2005…