Indy Telecom & Industrial Media

Fascinating visualization of US bank failures by the folks at Computational Legal Studies.

The interesting thing to note, of course, are the three key takeaways:

1. Acceleration: There were four failures in the first six months of 2008, followed by another 22 failures in the next six months. By January of 2009, there were 21 failures in the first three months of the year, followed by 138 from April to last Friday.
3. Magnitude: Failures in the past two years have cost the Depositors Insurance Fund an estimated $57B. The IndyMac failure of July 2008 accounted for $10B alone, followed by BankUnited at $4.9B and Guaranty Banks at $3B.
4. Spatial Correlation: There is a significant amount of spatial correlation in California, Georgia, Florida, Texas, and Illinois. These states account for 77% of the total costs to the Depositors Insurance Fund. Furthermore, most of the losses in California and Georgia were concentrated highly around a few urban centers.

(Link du jour Paul Kedrosky)

I’ve been meaning to post this for a while now.

Some time ago, the WSJ had an excellent interactive graphic that chronicled the timeline of credit crisis by stacking the 6 key financial indicators through these two years.

The key indicators were DJIA, Treasury Yields, Libor, Commercial Paper Yields, CDS Spreads & Mortgage Backed-Securities Spreads.

Here’s a slightly better attempt at creating a heat map, this time with the Google Gadgets API.

The heat map below is that of the Average Gross Yield (Nominal) of MFI institutions from various countries in the world. The yield is in percentage (i.e. .06=6% and .85=85%).

Data was sourced from MIX Market.

Here’s a fun visualization created using Google’s Visualization API.

The data was queried from International Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook Database, October 2009.

Lately, I’ve been playing around with some fun MFI data from around the world. In particular, I was curious to see what the Gross Loan Portfolio across various microfinance institutions were, and how they aggregated within each country of operation.

Luckily, I was able to source some rather excellent data from MIX Market.

Given this (and the fact that I’ve been playing around with Google’s Chart API for a while), I went ahead and created a little heat map of the global MFI rankings by Gross Loan Portfolio:

If you look at the above map, those countries with higher portfolios are in a darker shade of green and those with lower portfolios are in a lighter shade of green.

The list of the top all countries with more than 1% of the global MFI Gross Loan Portfolio is also listed below.

Excellent visualization in the NYT showing how Americans spend their time.

Debt as GDP % for the top 20 debtor nations — if you notice, despite our high debt, we are quite a bit lower on the totem pole.

Data was sourced from Index Mundi.

…this is how it would be spent.

…is receding. Or so it would seem, at least according to Google Insights’ web search interest for the term recession.

Either that, of people have finally figured out for themselves what on earth a recession is all about.

How much surface area would be needed to power the world, entirely through solar panels?  Not all that much, it would seem.

(Source: Information Is Beautiful)

The WSJ had an interesting interactive graphic showing the nation’s failed banks.

The size of the circles is based on the value of assets at the time of failure.

Interesting visualization of national debts from Wolfram Alpha.

An interesting point to consider is the presence of such high levels of debt in much of the developed (and developing) world, compared to  the underdeveloped nations. For instance, the top nations in debt are US, Japan, Italy, Germany and France.

And an even more interesting visualization is the comparison of debt vs. the GDP, which is provided by this graph -

Fascinating piece by Barry Ritholtz comparing the bailout versus historic expenses after adjusted for inflation.

• Marshall Plan: Cost: $12.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $115.3 billion
• Louisiana Purchase: Cost: $15 million, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $217 billion
• Race to the Moon: Cost: $36.4 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $237 billion
• S&L Crisis: Cost: $153 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $256 billion
• Korean War: Cost: $54 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $454 billion
• The New Deal: Cost: $32 billion (Est), Inflation Adjusted Cost: $500 billion (Est)
• Invasion of Iraq: Cost: $551b, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $597 billion
• Vietnam War: Cost: $111 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $698 billion
• NASA: Cost: $416.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $851.2 billion

TOTAL: $3.92 trillion in 206 years.

BAILOUT TOTAL: ~$15 trillion and counting.

Of course, there are a few caveats. A very significant amount of that money (including the wars and the bailout) have been “borrowed” from the future. Truth be told, the only way we are ever going to pay back those amounts if by inflating our way through it. Not that it makes them any less real, but it brings about some interesting questions on the “true” value of such a cost.

In fact, one cannot even call the bailout a “cost” since that money hasn’t necessarily been “lost”. It has basically been invested in commercial paper — now, some of that may not be very good commercial paper, but that does not necessarily make it a sunk cost.

And while we we’re on that topic, I would much rather prefer commercial debt (and all that it entails) than what passes for treasury bonds (especially given the folks we’re beholden to). The only reason bond valuations are where they are is because of the wonderful job our treasury has been doing to make sure it stays that way.

Secondly, that figure does not include World War II. Or World War I.

The only single American event in history that even comes close to matching the cost of the credit crisis is World War II: Original Cost: $288 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $3.6 trillion

The $4.6165 trillion dollars committed so far is about a trillion dollars ($979 billion dollars) greater than the entire cost of World War II borne by the United States: $3.6 trillion, adjusted for inflation (original cost was $288 billion).

Of course, one could always argue that the Louisiana purchase got us good music, great food and the French Quarter.

Disturbing charts that show the comparison of the four bad bear markets — Dow crash of 1929, Oil crisis of 1973, Tech crash of 2000 and the current sub-prime/credit crunch crisis.

The inflation/CPI adjusted ones are particularly scary in that they show just how closely we are mirroring the Great Depression.

(Via Paul Kedrosky)

Some interesting trading desk setups.

This one belongs to the famed Hedge Fund manager Adam Sender.

This one, no idea — it’s from Forex Chronicles.

And this last one is from Greg Simmons‘ Scope Labs, LLC.

Check out the yields for inflation indexed bonds issued by the treasury.  We’re almost down to half of where we were at just a few months ago.

Look at the data above, and then look at the inflation data.

Even a quick look at the data shows that breakeven inflation that’s embedded in TIPS yields would be at least 1% per year. This effectively means that the market is literally burning through all the money that we are printing.

The data can be downloaded here: Inflation Data (source) and TIPS Yield Data (source).

My friend Rebecca sent this along — be warned that the accuracy of this has not been validated, but it looks about right.

Interesting word cloud from Obama’s acceptance speech tonight.

(Tool used: Wordle)