Summary of the day.

Bloomberg's reporting: Record 19 Million U.S. Homes Stood Vacant in 2008

Panasonic warns of $4.2 billion loss, to cut 15,000 jobs.

After years of blistering growth, installation of wind and solar power is plummeting due to the credit crisis and the broader economic downturn.

Eastern Europe tops the list of emerging market regions susceptible to a full-blown financial crisis. Unlike emerging markets elsewhere, Eastern European economies are heavily dependent on external financing and current account deficits have been the norm. So, the sharp drop-off in capital inflows - expected in 2009 - will not only be a major blow to growth, but it could also potentially trigger a regional financial crisis. The Baltics, Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary stand out as particularly vulnerable but a crisis in one country could trigger a regional domino effect.

“The present system has been broken; it’s failed the test of the marketplace,” former Federal Reserve Chairman PaulVolcker said Jan. 15 in New York in calling for strengthening regulation.

"Coal is 80 percent of the planet's problems," Dr Hansen maintains. "You have to keep your eye on the ball and not waste your efforts. The No. 1 enemy is coal and we should not forget that." All fossil fuels are a problem, of course, but a coal-fired plant emits twice as much carbon dioxide as a gas-fired plant producing the same amount of electricity.

There is a history of earthquakes triggered by dams, including several caused by the construction of the Hoover dam in the US, but none of such a magnitude (as the 7.9 one in Sichuan possibly causwed by construction and filling of the Zipingpu dam).

The Obama Administration is as obviously and fully hostage to the interests of the financial services industry as the Bush crowd was.

Let's turn to a study by the IMF of 124 banking crises. Their conclusion:

Existing empirical research has shown that providing assistance to banks and their borrowers can be counterproductive, resulting in increased losses to banks, which often abuse forbearance to take unproductive risks at government expense. The typical result of forbearance is a deeper hole in the net worth of banks, crippling tax burdens to finance bank bailouts, and even more severe credit supply contraction and economic decline than would have occurred in the absence of forbearance.

So we the taxpayers are going to eat a ton of bank losses that should instead be borne first by stockholders and bondholders This program should be labeled the Pimco bailout plan, since the giant bond fund holds a lot of bank debt. That show what a fiction Obama's populism is. It's mere posturing and empty phrases. Look at where the dough goes, and it is going first and foremost to the big money end of town. Cui bono, eh?