“September employment soars unexpectedly“. The headline is that we added 107,000 new jobs which is 10 times what was expected. The part I think is kinda shocking: only 10,000 were full-time jobs. The rest are part-time.

“Ottawa buying $25 billion in mortgage pools“. I’m somewhat confused why this was their move to add liquidity. Why not guarantee 100% of retail deposits like Ireland just did? That’s also big news as basically every other EU nation will have to do the same.

“Loonie continues its decline“. It’s at $1.17 on the greenback. This is the best news I’ve heard in weeks.

The second piece has some guy trying to explain why we can’t just take all the crappy mortgages out of these big CDOs and call it a day. Well, it turns out that a lot of these CDOs have a collection of utterly disconnected things such as “income from a specific Friday night flight on Korean Airlines between Tokyo and Seoul” and “royalties from David Bowie’s songs” but more importantly things like “the mortgage for your office building” and “the mortgage for the cell phone tower your phone used this morning”. That’s one of the reasons why this toxic subprime debt is effecting things completely unrelated, like friday night flights out of Tokyo.

The last piece is talking with some bond and paper traders. The guy mentions how he has a client who had to buy treasury notes that day and ended up only getting 1 basis point for his trouble. That’s 1/100th of 1%. That’s a 1 cent return for $100. He also mentioned that some notes cleared this week for 0, the equivalent of hiding it under your mattress.

“downside: a client told me to expect less work from them because of the global financial crisis. upside: time to work on my own projects!” - twitter

“what a gorgeous day outside. definite last chance patio weather.” - twitter

“damn you github. get back up. now i’m manually changing code on a live production site. it’s like being back at amazon.” - twitter

For example, the latest episode explains why credit markets are incredibly important to every day people and how it’s measured. The interviewee talks about Treasury Bond rates and TED spreads and how they measure “fear” but they take the time to explain where you see those rates on yahoo and bloomberg.

Anyways, if you’re confused about the credit crunch, the bailout, the economy (and who isn’t?) I’d highly recommend checking out this podcast.

“finally hooked up wesabe to my canadian accounts. that was a rude awakening.” - twitter

So, I give you mux.awardtour.net. A few comments on the choices…

• I thought the tuning fuzz noise that starts About to Walk was an appropriate opening song.
• Although it’s a year later, I still have the Rural Alberta Advantage in heavy rotation.
• I saw Hooded Fang open for The Rural Alberta Advantage the other day. They looked like they were all about 18 years old. I bought their $5 EP and Land of Giants is definitely their best track.
• I realize the RFK audio track is completely out of place but it’s so damn good more people should hear it.