Thanks to the Bakersfield Bubble blog, I note this article in the Bakersfield Californian - “A local home appraiser is alleging widespread mortgage fraud in Bakersfield’s housing market, accusing local real estate professionals of artificially inflating prices to generate illegal profits.”

First quarter data is now in. Paul Kasriel’s indicators say that recession is here. Paul Kasriel is the recipient of the 2006 Lawrence R. Klein Award for Blue Chip Forecasting Accuracy.

ECRI doesn’t agree. We’ll see. I’m going with Kasriel, myself, because of the ancillary evidence - such as falling sales tax receipts in key states like California and Florida, slowing trade - February real imports into the US fell 1.9% and real exports by 3.7% - to say nothing of the price of mortgage insurance now rising sharply on commercial mortgages as well as all kinds of residential. Oh, and did I mention $3 gasoline?

To quote Paul Kasriel: “I am not aware that any recession has been predicted by a consensus of economic prognosticators. Two reliable recession indicators are now flashing a warning signal and private domestic demand is showing weakness. Maybe it’s different this time? Perhaps it isn’t. Only the National Bureau of Economic Research will know for sure.”

It has been a week now with no need to go back to Windows. Ubuntu Linux is running happily. I have a few problems playing some videos on the net, basically because they are using proprietary protocols which are not supported in Linux, as they would require a license. The tradeoff is access to a huge library of free applications, many of which are both useful and of high quality. Other than that, it is working well.

I reclaimed an older (but fast - 15,000 rpm) SCSI hard drive and installed it in my system as the Linux boot drive. I then used the Linux partitioner to shrink the Windows partition on my Windows IDE boot drive, to reclaim the free space, and format the space as a Linux file system. I also mount the Windows NTFS file system read-only to Linux so that I can get anything I might need off the Windows drive.. When I restart the system, Grub the boot loader gives me a choice of Linux or Windows.

I chose the Ubuntu distribution because of its reputed easy installation and was generally satisfied. My Linksys USB wireless adapter did not work initially. It was recognized, but nothing good came of it. I swapped it for a different one off my son’s machine, he happened to be here, and it worked fine. The little Linksys adapters all look the same, but they aren’t, there are several variations with different chips in them. My USB printer (Samsung ML1740) came up effortlessly, no driver install was needed, although the CDROM that came with the printer had a Linux driver on it. I upgraded from my old 19″ Mitsubishi monitor to a Samsung 22″ flat panel (1680×1050) and immediately regretted not having done so earlier. Much easier on the eyes. I used a tool called Envy (NV - get it?) to upgrade from the supplied Nvidia driver to a more recent one, that allows direct rendering. I installed a desktop theme that makes it look rather like Mac OS X, which is cool. Considering the cost so far is $35 for Crossover Office and a €5 donation to the author of Envy.

I am using Mozilla Thunderbird for e-mail, and it was able to directly convert my Outlook mail folders and address book. I added the Lightning calendar plugin for Thunderbird. I was already using Open Office under Windows, so no hassle there of course. Mozilla Firefox 2.0 was in the Ubuntu distribution.

So far, so good. And it is sure nice to have a decent command line shell. But before anyone runs out and tries this, you should know that I have been using mainframe Unix off and on (real Unix, mostly System V) for twenty years. So vi, awk, grep and so forth are old friends. It’s like coming home after being in a foreign country for a long time. Thanks to Linus Torvalds and his friends.

Politicians and their toadies are running around talking up the need to prevent the wave of defaults and foreclosures that they see in property loans. A bankruptcy lawyer that I know says (of his clients) “You can’t get blood out of a turnip”. These defaults are occurring because the borrowers can’t or won’t pay as agreed. They’re turnips. When they don’t pay, there’s a loss. So now it is only a question of who bears the loss. The original lender? The current lender, the owner of the mortgage? The taxpayer? Does the borrower share in the loss by being forced to pay for his living quarters? Does whoever bears the loss get the opportunity to realise on the collateral? Those are basically the choices. Just figure out where you want the deckchairs, boys and girls. But it doesn’t change a thing. The bubble is going down because of the lack of new debt.

The Census Bureau reported that housing starts rose slightly last month. Given the  massive inventories of unsold new and existing homes, this seems like suicidal behavior on the part of the homebuilders.

Either a miracle needs to occur, or starts need to fall to allow the inventory to be worked off.