Odds ‘n Sods:

I’ve recently received two anxious e-mails from SurvivalBlog readers about the Mental Militia Forums (formerly called “The Claire Files Forums”). It seems that the old URL:
http://www.tcftalk.com/clairefiles/index.php — was allowed to lapse and folks were getting a “not found” error message. But the new URL http://thementalmilitia.com/forums/ is working fine. I hope that the board’s new owners see the wisdom of maintaining the old URL with an automatic URL redirect.

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Eric S. sent us a link to a speech by Federal Reserve Board Governor Frederic S. Mishkin: Financial Instability and the Federal Reserve as a Liquidity Provider. My favorite snippet: “Moral hazard occurs when the lender is subjected to the hazard in which the borrower has an incentive to engage in activities that are undesirable from the lender’s point of view, that is, activities that make it less likely that the loan will be repaid.” This leads me to ask: If it it is “moral hazard” to knowingly lend to the less than creditworthy, then what do you call it when you use billions of taxpayer’s dollars to bail out bankers that made those bad lending decisions?

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By way for reader RBS: Extinction by comet?

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Three readers forwarded us this article link: America’s big, fat housing inventory