Remember the Housing Bubble and the gazillion bullshit mortgages that caused the entire global economy to collapse and send us into a terrible World Depression? It’s still going down! The housing crash, that is — one in eight homeowners is now either in default or in foreclosure, a new record! MORE »

Bob Dylan’s got a new record coming out next month, and you should be terrified. Yes, the dude continues to make great music, but his past two studio albums were also Harbingers of Doom. Love and Theft was about America in flames, and then under water, and it was recorded in 2001 and released on September 11 of that rotten year. His next record, Modern Times, was released in the autumn of 2006 — it was named after a Depression-era Charlie Chaplin movie, as the stock market hit new heights and the housing bubble was just beginning to pop, and it was filled with grim songs of working people losing ground. MORE »

PRELUDE TO THE APOCALYPSE: Ha ha, your editor told New York magazine how he would have a quiet vacation after the election, “far from any possible action” in Santa Barbara, and right now there’s a flag-waving fatigues-clad lunatic with a gun holding the entire 101 freeway hostage, in Santa Barbara. Jesus fucking christ. [KNX via Nurple]

• OCTOBER SURPRISE? Uh, the U.S. just attacked Syria. [AFP]

In good news, oil is back to September 2007 prices. (In bad news, gas was still $3 a gallon then, so, uhh …) WHAT DOES IT MEAN. It means the numbers are finally coming in to back up the gloom. Nobody in the stores, no demand for gasoline as people have no jobs, no money, and use their car as a “rusty tent.” So, we’re back to Black Friday territory, from last week. DON’T EVER LOOK AT YOUR 401(k) AGAIN. MORE »

Happy Monday, America! Wall Street is doing great, so far, this morning. The Dow Jones index is down 400 500 points at the moment, bringing the DJIA below 10,000 for the first time since … well, let’s check the chart. October 22, 2004 — right about the time everybody figured George W. Bush would somehow win re-election and the world would end. MORE »

• DOW DROPS 348 TO THREE-YEAR LOW: Whoops. All the big indexes are down another 3%-4%. Even oil and gold lost big. Joblessness, manufacturing declines, basically everything is horrible, forever. [Bloomberg]

Yikes! The markets are closed and so are you. The Dow ended down 373 — more than 3% — and the S&P 500 dropped nearly 4%. But there’s good news if you are, say, a Saudi Prince: Oil shot the hell up by $16 a barrel, the biggest single-day climb since the Van Halen album 1984. Why do investors hate Hank Paulson’s plan to nationalize the collapsing U.S. economy while destroying capitalism and providing crucial help to the nation’s starving hedge-fund managers? [Marketwatch/Bloomberg]

So you know how the Fed “bailed out” AIG with $80+ billion and now everything is okay? Right, it’s not okay at all. The $80+ billion allows the failed insurance giant an “orderly liquidation” of its assets. AIG is done. That is just one of the reasons why the markets continue to collapse today — the Dow’s down 240 at the moment, or 2.16%, the NASDAQ’s down 3.2%, and the S&P 500 is down by 3%. Oh, and the last remaining American investment houses took huge hits, again. Morgan Stanley dropped by thirty-freakin’-seven percent, this morning, and Goldman Sachs fell more than 20%. But what’s the bad news? MORE »

If you own a house, it’s now worth negative nothing. If you’re a renter, your landlord is probably already in foreclosure and you will soon be homeless. Got some investments, maybe a 401k or whatever? You really don’t even want to look. Got one of those fancy jobs with benefits and health care and such? You will soon be unemployed, living in a Hobo Jungle down by the railroad tracks in the darkness on the edge of town. Happy Monday, everybody! But how can you blame this on McCain and his boyfriend George W. Bush? MORE »

We seem to be having some economic problems. Los Angeles billionaire Eli Broad (the “B” in KB Homes) tells Bloomberg that “this is worse than any recession we’ve had since World War II.” Bloomberg editors noted, on Friday, that U.S. stock declines hadn’t been so lousy since June of 1930, during that Great Depression. Ah, hell …. MORE »