A 26-foot-long dying shark washed ashore Tuesday on a Long Island beach, the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation said.

The male basking shark, which weighed an estimated 5,000 pounds and was measured at 26 feet, 6 inches, died shortly after authorities arrived on the scene, according to marine educator Tracy Marcus of the Cornell Cooperative Extension.

Tom McGiveron has a new post up on foreclosure statistics in Nassau and Suffolk from RealtyTrac. RealtyTrac doesn’t have the best reputation for accuracy, but even still there’s bad new all around Suffolk county.

The big shock, 34 homes in foreclosure right here in Babylon. That may not seem like a lot. Looking at the numbers, there are 176 homes in foreclosure in Tom’s backyard of Deer Park.

But Babylon isn’t Deer Park. Not only is it smaller, it’s a much more upscale and exclusive community. There are no real bad or undesirable parts of Babylon. I’d guess that there’s not a lot of sub-prime lending here. The next time a Realtor tells you that Babylon is “holding it’s value”, tell them about the 34 foreclosures.

As for me, I’m waiting for the REOs that should be showing up in the spring. Until then, I’ll be hiding under my desk.

Photo by Flickr user Respres used under a Creative Commons license

He’s got a new book out, Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity, a a more general book about notable financial catastrophes of the last twenty years, including the current sub-prime debacle. I’m really looking forward to reading this one.

He recently wrote a spectacular article on the ongoing financial meltdown, told from the perspective of some smart cookies who saw the crisis coming and moved their assets around to take advantage of the coming bust.

There’s a long list of people who now say they saw it coming all along but a far shorter one of people who actually did. Of those, even fewer had the nerve to bet on their vision. It’s not easy to stand apart from mass hysteria—to believe that most of what’s in the financial news is wrong or distorted, to believe that most important financial people are either lying or deluded—without actually being insane. A handful of people had been inside the black box, understood how it worked, and bet on it blowing up. Whitney rattled off a list with a half-dozen names on it. At the top was Steve Eisman.

At the end of 2004, Eisman, Moses, and Daniel shared a sense that unhealthy things were going on in the U.S. housing market: Lots of firms were lending money to people who shouldn’t have been borrowing it. They thought Alan Greenspan’s decision after the internet bust to lower interest rates to 1 percent was a travesty that would lead to some terrible day of reckoning. Neither of these insights was entirely original. Ivy Zelman, at the time the housing-market analyst at Credit Suisse, had seen the bubble forming very early on. There’s a simple measure of sanity in housing prices: the ratio of median home price to income. Historically, it runs around 3 to 1; by late 2004, it had risen nationally to 4 to 1. “All these people were saying it was nearly as high in some other countries,” Zelman says. “But the problem wasn’t just that it was 4 to 1. In Los Angeles, it was 10 to 1, and in Miami, 8.5 to 1. And then you coupled that with the buyers. They weren’t real buyers.

There was only one thing that bothered Eisman, and it continued to trouble him as late as May 2007. “The thing we couldn’t figure out is: It’s so obvious. Why hasn’t everyone else figured out that the machine is done?” Eisman had long subscribed to Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, a newsletter famous in Wall Street circles and obscure outside them. Jim Grant, its editor, had been prophesying doom ever since the great debt cycle began, in the mid-1980s. In late 2006, he decided to investigate these things called C.D.O.’s. Or rather, he had asked his young assistant, Dan Gertner, a chemical engineer with an M.B.A., to see if he could understand them. Gertner went off with the documents that purported to explain C.D.O.’s to potential investors and for several days sweated and groaned and heaved and suffered. “Then he came back,” says Grant, “and said, ‘I can’t figure this thing out.’ And I said, ‘I think we have our story.’ ”