Dan Ackman, prominent short-seller of troubled bond insurer MBIA, doesn’t believe their disclosures and doesn’t think the rating agencies are doing their job.  So he did his own analysis.

In his report, Ackman, of Pershing Square Capital, will contend that both bond insurers have said their mark-to-market losses are less than $1.5 billion, but according to his analysis, the losses for each firm will be around $12 billion.

I love that this is possible.

The Wall Street Journal published “Insurer Woes Put Munis in Bargin Bin” today, echoing almost exactly what I said on 12-2 and 12-8 (and continuing the Journal’s own coverage on 12-8).  The article starts:

Bad news about bond insurers in recent days sent mutual-fund managers racing into the market - scooping up insured municipal bonds at a steal.

Just as predicted, more bond insurers are getting caught in the ’subprime’ mess and the prices of the munis they backed are dropping.   However, since munis rarely default, the lack of background insurance is battering their prices more than is likely justified.

I was excited - but ultimately disappointed - with the last section of the article entitled “Insurance Even Needed?” The WSJ could’ve made the case much more strongly that the insurance is redundant/unnecessary … but of course this is an article, not an editorial.

I’m still not jumping into the market until I feel bottom … and we’re not there yet.  None of the returns -at least for Massachusetts municipal bonds - look very appealing right now.  Of course some states are better;  maybe I should move to Maine or Wyoming or some other less affluent place without a well-off middle-upper class chasing tax-exempt interest on the same local bonds?  [That’s for another post…]

and fwiw: that my investment acumen was this accurate probably scares me more than it does you.

An admittedly-rumor-based-but-still-thought-provoking post from John McCrea:

…a source who-shall-go-un-named shared with me that Facebook has just quietly launched a “single sign on” initiative designed to put them in position of de facto cross-site identity monopolist.

I’ve been saying for awhile that MySpace could get-back to relevancy if they became an OpenID provider.  Not much of a surprise that Facebook would be working on the same thing (they’re smart) … and not much of a surprise that they would take a proprietary approach (worked pretty well so far) …

The only prediction I want to make is that the name for their single-sign-on service will notbe something the tech community currently uses (’single-sign-on’ and anything with ‘identity’ are out).  Facebook changed ’social network’ to ’social graph,’ ‘blogs’ to ‘Notes’, a ‘website’ to ‘Pages’ … maybe they’ll just call it ‘Sign On’?  Or just ‘Login’?  Place your bets.

And on the you-own-your-identity-data-side, there’s also lots of action …