Golf Course Environmental Profile - Water

Interesting full series can be reviewed here. Some elements, pesticide, energy use - haven't been published yet, but are scheduled for later this year.

• The average person in the U.S. uses 100-175 gallons of water every day at home….
• In Africa, the average family uses 5 gallons a day.
• 15 billion is spent annually on bottled water in the U.S. 24% is ordinary tap water repackaged by major soft drinks companies. More than 70% of the plastic bottles are not recycled; 38 billion bottled end up in U.S. landfills.
• The United States uses about 346,000 million gallons of fresh water every day.

“When it comes down to it, it’s up to each community to decide what is a fit use for water,” Lyman says. “That’s where the percentage that golf uses is important — at the local level. I think where golf needs to be at the end of the day is to be known as an efficient user of water. If it is, it justifies a seat at the table to help decide how communities use their water.”

The Southwest agronomic region leads in annual water use per facility with 149.5 million gallons, followed by the Upper West/Mountain region with 97.9 million gallons. The Northeast region uses the least, 13.8 million gallons per facility. Interestingly, in total annual water use, the Southeast, with more than 3,200 facilities, consumes 260 billion gallons, while the North-Central, with 4,125 courses, uses 92 billion gallons.

The second survey of GCSAA’s Golf Course Environmental Profile is in, and results are being released this summer. The survey estimates that U.S. golf courses account for just 0.5 percent of the country’s daily water use. Photo courtesy of The Toro Co.

The survey divided the U.S. into seven agronomic regions — Northeast, North-Central, Transition, Southeast, Southwest, Upper West/Mountain and Pacific — and Lyman found it interesting that significant differences in water use, irrigated acres, costs, etc., surfaced across the regions.

“This study really documented the diversity of use in a way that we haven’t known before,” he says.

For instance, of the estimated 762 billion gallons in total annual water use on U.S. golf courses, the use per facility ranged from almost 250 million gallons a year in the Southwest and Upper West/Mountain regions combined — 2,300 courses — to only 29 million gallons in the Northeast and North-Central regions — 6,800-plus courses. Likewise, the annual cost of irrigation water in the western three regions is far above the rest of the country (topped by nearly $108,000 per course in the Southwest). Moreover, the proportion of courses that pay nothing for water is well over half of those in the four eastern regions.

The differences by region in the number of acres of irrigated turf on 18-hole facilities follows the pattern, but in far less dramatic fashion. Irrigated turf acreage, however, sticks out in the survey results as one of the issues that is a bit disconcerting to the golf course industry.

The Southwest region has the highest irrigation water costs at $107,800 per facility a year. The Pacific region is the next highest at $42,400 per facility. The lowest annual costs are in the North-Central region, $4,700. In recent years, irrigation water costs have increased at 27 percent of U.S. courses and have decreased at only 3 percent of the facilities.

Oil prices Impacting Golfers

From today's New Zealand Herald; The time is coming when golfers will have to choose - pay more to cover the increasing cost of oil or play on scruffier courses with longer grass?

That's the conundrum posed by the New Zealand Sports Turf Institute in the latest New Zealand Golf Update. Their fact sheet reinforces that golf, more than any other sport, will have to make significant adjustments.

Maintenance and grooming of grassed properties at least 40ha, means machinery fuel, fertilisers, pesticides and other chemicals, many of which are oil-based.

The Sports Turf Institute has taken a pragmatic view. Firstly, it asks if all the course, especially areas not intended for play, really need to be mowed and maintained. It suggests some areas off the fairway, well away from where you're supposed to hit the ball, could be re-vegetated with cluster planting of native species requiring no further maintenance. It may make the course more difficult to play - but is that a bad thing?

Sovereign Funds Shift to Asia

From Reuters; Sovereign wealth funds, controlling over $3 trillion in assets, are likely to turn to investments in Asia, a move likely to push the U.S. dollar lower against Asian currencies including the Japanese yen.

"This is not a euro-dollar story. It's going to be a developed world versus developing world story," said Stephen Jen, who heads up Morgan Stanley's global FX strategy.

Authorities in Kuwait this week said the state's sovereign wealth fund, which manages its massive petro-dollar assets, will not buy future Fannie or Freddie debt, opting instead to boost investments in stocks, bonds, and real estate in China, India and Japan.

A Chinese think-tank also said the travails at the two U.S. government-sponsored enterprises add urgency to China's goal of diversifying its $1.8 trillion stockpile of currency reserves.

Limits to Growth

Blackouts Spread

The daily synthesis comes courtesy Falls Church News Press.

Unfortunately, several major countries appear to be on the path to an energy shortage-induced economic and perhaps political collapse within the foreseeable future which obviously will have serious consequences for us all.

Currently, the most serious situations appear to be in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Both are nations with populations in excess of 150 million people that are ensnared in devastating power shortages that have destroyed their export industries. Both are facing water and agricultural problems that threaten their food supplies. Liquid fuels are running short and reductions in exports threaten their ability to import oil and natural gas. It was recently revealed that the Saudis already are forgiving $6 billion of Pakistan's $12 billion annual oil import bill.

On top of this, Pakistan has nuclear weapons and its strategic location is vital to the course of the insurgency in Afghanistan. Worsening blackouts, the liquid fuels shortage and probably the food situation are likely to lead to serious political instability before the year is out.

Where race/caste, cornucopian/population, peak oil/energy and Mayawati musings all blend together to form a vaguely coherent whole.

India's Obama

Here's a data point I suspect you may want to begin to follow, if you haven't done so already.

Kumari Mayawati, a daughter of so-called untouchables and India’s most maverick politician, stunned the nation last year when she won majority control of India’s largest state with an inventive political coalition that fused votes from up and down the ancient Hindu caste pyramid.

Now, with national elections only months away, Ms. Mayawati has emerged as the most important low-caste politician in India’s history, and she is asserting herself as a rainbow coalition leader, a woman whom all Indians can trust to be their prime minister one day. How far she will rise remains to be seen. But there is no disputing her importance.

While the advance of so-called low-caste, or Dalit, politicians like Ms. Mayawati has reshaped Indian politics for 20 years, no one from her social rank has so shaken up the country’s traditional political order. Dalits represent roughly 16 percent of the population and have traditionally been shunted to the lowest rungs of Indian society.

Also in today's NYTimes.

Blind Governor Can Clearly See....,

David A. Paterson, in his first major speech to a national audience since becoming governor of New York, said on Thursday that even as black Americans rejoice about the possibility that Senator Barack Obama could become president, they cannot lose sight of the serious social and economic ills that plague their community and should remain mindful of the racism that still exists.

“The gap between the haves and have-nots right in our own community is wider than it has ever been before,” Mr. Paterson told a crowd of thousands at the N.A.A.C.P.’s annual convention here.

“No matter how prosperous we are, no matter how well heeled we may be, no matter how ambitious and successful we have been, we still can be cast under the same net regardless of our circumstances.” In today's NYTimes - Paterson, at N.A.A.C.P., Warns of Racism’s Power

Catastrophists versus Cornucopians

It's been a minute since I last visited the we can do better group blog. In this article, man-made catastrophists (such as myself) get very short shrift. The emphasis is on silly cornucopians and their concerns over possible declines in human population growth.

The faith of the Cornucopians in a radiant future is based on growing growth. To anticipate lower economic expectations, resulting from less people to feed, clothe, house, educate, mobilize, and serve in the army - even if this includes unemployment, crowding, pollution, cementification, and social conflict - goes against the conventional assumption that human inventiveness doesn’t accept biological limits and is the motor of progress.

The over-optimistic view that purports humanity’s capacity to overcome every difficulty, with time, technology and lots of human beings, has turned on its head, when confronted with the awful perspective of a diminishing population.

If humans are so deft in inventing new solutions to ever increasing problems, what then stands in the way of creating new solutions to the economic affliction of demographic decline, publicised by the press and governments as the ultimate tragic event?

The highlight of the article was this historical bon mot addressing the inflection point of the european middle ages;

Back in 1348, Europe suffered the Black Death or Plague, the second worst catastrophe in recorded history, which reduced the estimated European population by about a third.

It also brought stability, progress and freedom from want to the people who escaped death. As the distinguished scholar David Herlihy pointed out, the great reduction in population created opportunities for the survivors and those who came after them; there were fewer people, more jobs and a higher standard of living. (David Herlihy and Samuel K., Jr. Cohn)

Another historian agrees that, before the Black Death the continent “was caught in a Malthusian deadlock” in which “the balance between people and resources had become very tight.” After the plague, Europe “emerged from the charnel house of pestilence and epidemic cleansed and renewed, like the sun after rain.”(John Kelly)

Moreover: “Serfdom declined more rapidly. The status of women rose. Wages rose for common people. Talented young people were able to advance faster. The power of the kings declined more rapidly.” (Norman Cantor ) It is an indisputable fact that the sudden population decline stimulated labour-saving technologies that transformed the economy.

Such an inflection point is most definitely on our global species event horizon. See it yet?

Turf War

toxicity, habitat destruction, resource depletion, enforced conformity.....,

If one accepts the idea that lawns are, in a deep sense, unethical, how does one fill the front yard?

The essential trouble with the American lawn is its estrangement from place: it is not a response to the landscape so much as an idea imposed upon it—all green, all the time, everywhere. Recently, a NASA-funded study, which used satellite data collected by the Department of Defense, determined that, including golf courses, lawns in the United States cover nearly fifty thousand square miles—an area roughly the size of New York State. The same study concluded that most of this New York State-size lawn was growing in places where turfgrass should never have been planted. In order to keep all the lawns in the country well irrigated, the author of the study calculated, it would take an astonishing two hundred gallons of water per person, per day. According to a separate estimate, by the Environmental Protection Agency, nearly a third of all residential water use in the United States currently goes toward landscaping.

Something so simple, so obvious, and so deeply entrenched in the cultural expression of the drive to keep up with the joneses.....,

sunGlasses

o:O:o

As our terrestrial nursery undergoes explosive cycles of organismal variation, thriving, and extinction — the preserved complexity and diversity of the survivors is being by turns enhanced and compressed. The compression is of a sort that becomes rapidly explosive, but explodes in a way that establishes dimensions rather than erasing them. It is something like pure sentience-precursor, cultivating itself in ever more diverse and complex contexts, transports and vehicles of biocognitive relation.

Turns out that it is possible to engineer a perpetual motion device, and you can engineer one that gains amplitude of expression in geometric leaps which reach absurd speeds and complexities almost instantly. The problem is making it explode in a way that generates life and complex diversity rather than reducing them to their energetic constituents rapidly.

The reason we can’t do this as easily with technology is simple: when you create scalarly self-amplifying standing waves in ‘things’ — they explode. When you do this in a biocognitive dimension... eventually you get something akin to human sentience. The sunglasses we use shield us from the incredible inward brightness of the self-magnifying explosion that we are and are with(in).

o:O:o

By their underlying inferences the physical sciences train us to value individuals and species as the primary conservators of biological and cognitive complexity. This move subtly manipulates us to see the structure as most significant and deserving of precedence, and is materialistically biased. It is in fact the content which has precedence, and this is largely obscured by hidden choices we make when agreeing with common models, logics of identity, and terms.

Evolution, we are told, is a process requiring vast epochs to produce even the smallest attenuations in organismal form. But organisms are not merely their forms. What we find apparent in careful examination is that evolutionary complexity is preserved as much in the transports of organismal relation and in environments as it is in individuals, or separate assemblies of given members. What this turns out to mean is that there are hidden wells of motive energies that find expression in what we call evolution, and they are not competitive — but relational.

What Earth has been doing for about the past 4.5 billion years is something far beyond anything we have a metaphor of. The endless relational symmetries of Life here have been assembling a scalarly recombinant sentience explosion. It‘s the biocognitive equivalent to rapidly cultivating galaxies — and the media required is cognitive, or relational, rather than ‘purely physical’.

And for at least the past 1500 years, our species has been tearing it limb from limb, without realizing that those are our own limbs, in realtime.

o:O:o

From organelle sunGlasses.....,

Memetic and Information Diseases in a Knowledge Society

Speculations towards the development of cures and preventive measures by Anthony Judge.

This is an adaptation of Networking Diseases: speculations towards the development of cures and preventive measures (Transnational Associations, 30, 1978). As argued there, despite widespread exposure to organizations and organizational systems in various states of growth, health and decay, it would appear that there is no convenient checklist of the malfunctions to which organizations are subject. The matter is of course normally broached through the various kinds of management problem, and the measures required to "get an ailing organization on its feet again". But the range of possible malfunctions is not identified as such, particularly for the kinds of structures -- like networks -- which are supposed neither to require, nor to lend themselves to, management.

In a knowledge society, there is a related need to better understand the "information diseases" to which individuals themselves are vulnerable within the networks in which they variously participate, or as they interact with their sources of information -- or indeed as they themselves act as producers of information.

In order to focus thinking more clearly on the information malfunctions to which individuals and networks may be subject, some guidelines are required to provoke recognition of unforeseen possibilities which might otherwise go unrecognized. In passing one may note the effort by Michael Haas (Types of asymmetry in social and political systems, 1967, see Table 1) to identify the different kinds of "asymmetry" to which systems may be subject. However he defines asymmetry as "an attribute of a system which may vary over time, space, and other such dimensions". Such asymmetry may or may not be viewed as associated with some kind of malfunction.

This text is intended to provoke an imaginative examination of the current information health of individuals and their networks. When discussing diseases one should take care to avoid engaging in medical "quackery" -- how that might be understood is an essential part of the challenge in this context.

Autonomous Meaning

Extract from William Pensinger's Strategic Assessment Part 10.

I do not consider the essential quandary in the existing global circumstance a mere matter of whether or not Al Qaeda and Associates is going to win “the clash of civilizations”; much, much more is involved in the prevailing historical conjuncture than simply one take on coercive imposition of planetary monoculture prevailing over another such take. But people don't see it; and not seeing it, they cannot see what AQ & A is actually all about; and not seeing what AQ & A is all about, they cannot comprehend its self-organizational initiative; and not cognizing the organizational dynamic, they cannot see how “what AQ & A is actually all about” regressively embodies very large issues the human species is fatally foundering upon. And these non-comprehenders, because of their inability to comprehend, regard such usage as “fatally” in “fatally foundering” as hysterical exaggeration. The human species is not, repeat not, they insist, launched upon a collective and cooperative martyrdom operation modeled upon lemming behavior, no matter what ecologists like Peter Turchin might think. Hah! What else could the editorial exemplars of normotic illness at The Economist possibly conclude? Aye, open up, that yon of yours, and you find… nowt! Bloomin' mercy, it's beginning to notice! And it will soon be all! Nothing is the number when you die! The “why” of their non-comprehension is firstly, even predominantly, a matter of psychological ineptitude, most especially introspective incompetence. An incompetence with consequences. They do not believe that everything is connected to everything else. In spite of the unconscious being infinite sets, they do not believe in Germanic, indeed Hegelian, notions like superintegration and overdetermination. They believe that reality is as fragmented as their inner state, as are their perceptions and proprioceptions, as is the knowledge base -- and that “the mechanism of meaning” and “history as force” (vector sums of Newtonian force-structures) verify, and will continue to verify, truth-value validity of the involved “identitarian” 1T2 outside-inside isomorphism. And they make judgments based on cultivation of this tacitly held imputed schematic isomorphism. Such reliance on mere sculpture! In spite of the haptification of space and the concretion of time.

Cemetary Metal Theft....,

Grave robbers, a curse of burial grounds for centuries, are back for new valuables: metal ornaments that can be melted down for quick cash as copper and other metal prices climb.

In West Virginia, it was vases bolted to headstones. In Washington State, it was bronze markers on veterans' graves. In Chicago, it was nearly half a million dollars' worth of brass ornaments.

"It's a crisis of the times," said Ruth Shapleigh-Brown, executive director of the Connecticut Gravestone Network, which monitors cemeteries for theft and vandalism. "People are finding a way to make money."

Across the country, police have reported mounting scrap metal prices translating into increased thefts that range from manhole covers and church downspouts to telephone and power lines.

Stealing from the dead is a practice that goes back far enough in history to be the subject of curses on the walls of Egyptian pyramids.

A decade ago, metal urns, flag holders and ornaments in cemeteries were mostly ignored by thieves, who instead stole grave markers and other stone fixtures for the antiques market, said Shapleigh-Brown.

But with copper currently selling for about $3.75 per pound — close to historic highs of over $4 a pound in 2006 — thieves are carrying off brass and bronze items that can be melted down for the copper they contain.

"I don't know what could be more sacred than protecting our cemeteries," said West Virginia state legislator Kevin Craig, who co-sponsored a law against scrap metal theft after a bronze door was stolen from a tomb at a cemetery in his district in 2006.

The measure, passed last year, increases pressure on scrap dealers to avoid stolen metals by requiring them to keep records of sellers' identities and provide these records to police.

Still, thieves in June stole 150 copper vases worth about $18,000 from a St. Albans cemetery.

"It's a crime of opportunity," said St. Albans Police Chief Joe Crawford, whose department has arrested a suspect in the cemetery thefts.

"A cemetery is a walk in the park" compared to the closed coal mines and active power stations where thieves also seek out copper, he said.

Manhole Covers Stolen....,

Officials in Flint, Mich., say they've had to replace hundreds of manhole covers and grates that were probably stolen and sold for scrap.

The Flint Journal reported Monday that nearly 400 cast iron covers and grates have been taken from streets in the past year. A cover can fetch $20 from a scrap yard but can cost the city more than $200 to replace.

Officials in neighboring Burton say they've lost about 200 covers and grates during the same period. Utilities supervisor Mike Holzer says it leaves behind holes up to 35 feet deep.

Genesee County officials say they've been able to reduce thefts of county-owned covers by outfitting them with a bolt that is turned by a wrench only they have.

Will China be Mad?

What will China and other countries say when they lose a trillion dollars more or less?

As politicians call for taxpayer bailouts and a government takeover of troubled mortgage lenders Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, FreedomWorks would like to point out that a bailout is a transfer of possibly hundreds of billions of U.S. tax dollars to sophisticated investors and governments overseas.

The top five foreign holders of Freddie and Fannie long-term debt are China, Japan, the Cayman Islands, Luxembourg, and Belgium. In total foreign investors hold over $1.3 trillion in these agency bonds, according to the U.S. Treasury's most recent "Report on Foreign Portfolio Holdings of U.S. Securities."

FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe commented, "The prospectus for every GSE bond clearly states that it is not backed by the United States government. That's why investors holding agency bonds already receive a significant risk premium over Treasuries."

"A bailout at this stage would be the worst possible outcome for American taxpayers and mortgage holders, who have been paying a risk premium to these foreign investors. It would change the rules of the game retroactively and would directly subsidize the risks taken by sophisticated foreign investors."

"A bailout of GSE bondholders would be perhaps the greatest taxpayer rip-off in American history. It is bad economics and you can be sure it is terrible politics."

China-Cuba Oil Myth

"China is not drilling in Cuba's Gulf of Mexico waters, period," said Jorge Pinon, an energy fellow with the Center for Hemispheric Policy at the University of Miami and an expert in oil exploration in the Gulf of Mexico. Martinez cited Pinon's research when he took to the Senate floor Wednesday to set the record straight.

Even so, the Chinese-drilling-in-Cuba legend has gained momentum and has been swept up in Republican arguments to open up more U.S. territory to domestic production.

Vice President Dick Cheney, in a speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, picked up the refrain. Cheney quoted a column by George Will, that "drilling is under way 60 miles off Florida. The drilling is being done by China, in cooperation with Cuba, which is drilling closer to South Florida than U.S. companies are."

In his speech, Cheney described the Chinese as being "in cooperation with the Cuban government. Even the communists have figured out that a good answer to higher prices means more supply."

"But Congress says no to drilling in ANWR, no to drilling on the East Coast, no to drilling on the West Coast," Cheney added.

The office of House Minority Leader John Boehner defended the GOP drilling claims. "A 2006 New York Times story highlights lease agreements negotiated between Cuba and China and the fact that China was planning to drill in the Florida Strait off the coast of Cuba," said spokesman Michael Steel.

Talking Points Memo documents the curious metastasis of the China-Cuba Oil myth in GOP circles. You should check out how far-reaching this mendacious meme has become amongst the true believers....,

Energy Tsunami Coming.....,

From the Associated Press; A bipartisan group of 27 elder statesmen is sending an open letter to both presidential candidates and every member of Congress saying the country faces "a long-term energy crisis" that threatens the security and prosperity of future generations if swift action isn't taken.

The group includes Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell and six other former secretaries of state or defense, former senators of both parties and a half dozen former senior White House advisers and other Cabinet officers for both Republican and Democratic presidents.

"There's an energy tsunami coming, and when you see it coming you better get on top of the wave, or you're going to get crushed by it," he said in an interview.

Jones, the 40-year military veteran who has had discussions about energy with both Obama and McCain, said he hoped the letter's sense of urgency will influence both campaigns. "Both candidates are still embryonic in their thinking about this," he said.

It's not only politicians who are faulted in the critique.

"We demand more energy and complain about high prices, but we restrict energy exploration and production. We embrace the promise of energy efficiency, but we are slow to make adjustments in our energy-intensive lifestyles," the letter says.

Production of electricity, for example, is taken "almost for granted." At the same time, people oppose new power plants and don't want to invest adequately in energy technology research, the writers say.

Thomas "Mack" McLarty, former White House chief of staff to President Clinton, said the letter emphasizes that "the next president is going to have to put energy right at the top of his agenda" and do it quickly.

"There will be a window there to build bipartisan consensus to move forward," McLarty said in an interview.

The letter includes 13 broad recommendations. They include aggressively promoting energy efficiency and reducing energy consumption, increased commitments to both nuclear energy and renewable energy sources, making coal more environmentally acceptable and moving transportation away from oil as a fuel.

Other senders of the letter include former Secretaries of State James A. Baker and George Shultz, former Defense Secretaries Frank Carlucci, William Cohen, William Perry and James Schlesinger; former senior White House advisers Howard Baker, Robert "Bud" McFarlane, Kenneth Duberstein and Brent Scowcroft; former Energy Secretaries James Watkins and Spencer Abraham; former CIA Director James Woolsey; former Commerce Secretary Donald Evans; former Democratic Sens. J. Bennett Johnston, Sam Nunn and Charles Robb; and former Republican Sen. George Allen.

A brain of two halves

In this morning's Guardian;

The broader point Bolte Taylor makes about stress and relationships is that, in the 90-second aftermath of a row, we are all at the mercy of our biochemical reaction - "anger" as we call it - but that after it subsides we have a choice: to hang on to it or to let it go. It is, she says, a question of recognising that "emotions and relationships are just circuitry" and can therefore be resisted or rewired. Even if the person you've been arguing with is really, really annoying? With a flourish, Bolte Taylor cites her own mother, who before she had the stroke could wind her up like nobody else. But after the stroke, she says, it was like pushing "the reset button". "And so it was fascinating for both of us, because she had no power. Her power was gone. I looked at her differently; I did not respond to those things that I had been trained throughout my life to respond to."

Her mother must have loved that.

"Yeah, I don't think she liked it at all. We had to establish a new relationship. And she would try this stuff on me and I would say to her, 'That's not effective any more. That's not the relationship we have any more.' And she got it, real quick. And we became equals in this process and it was beautiful because we got to bury all the garbage."

Realistically, hitting the reset button sounds like something most ordinary people might only achieve by getting comprehensively stoned, shutting themselves in an isolation tank or actually having a stroke; but Bolte Taylor insists it is just a question of recognising and then bypassing the circuitry. "I try to think of something that is funny. I just go somewhere else. You have the choice of changing the focus of your attention. Some of us get into fights and we go around thinking, I should've said this, they did that to me, and that's your left hemisphere, just egging it on, egging it on. And then let's say the phone rings, you get really excited about something else and then you hang up the phone. And then you have a choice."

Always and everywhere...., remember yourself.

Confidence Ebbs for Bank Sector and Stocks Fall

In today's NYTimes;

Even as the Bush administration moved to rescue the nation’s two largest mortgage finance companies, confidence in the banking sector spiraled downward Monday.
Skip to next paragraph

In Southern California, lines snaked around branches of IndyMac Bancorp, the large lender that was seized by federal regulators on Friday, as customers hurried to withdraw their money. As the anxiety spread through the financial markets, two other big banks, one in Ohio and another in Washington State, were compelled to assert that they were sound.

Even as federal regulators issued assurances that depositors’ savings were safe, Wall Street analysts circulated lists of lenders that might be vulnerable. Shares of regional banks plunged in one of the sharpest declines since the 1980s.

Many investors fear that the government’s resolve to help Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the giant companies at the center of the nation’s mortgage market, will not hold back the rising tide of bad loans unleashed by the weakening housing market and faltering economy.

Sheila C. Bair, the chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, said the F.D.I.C. expected a small number of the nation’s banks to run into trouble over the next year. But she asserted that the worries driving down banking shares, fed by rumors in the marketplace, did not presage widespread failures.

“People should not assume that just because the stock price has been going down, that we’re going to close their bank,” Ms. Bair said. “In addition to our credit problems, I don’t want to have to start worrying about bank runs.”

Bank Fears Spread

Page one of todays Wall Street Journal;

The federal government's seizure of IndyMac Bank is deepening worries among executives, regulators and consumers about the U.S. banking industry, which is in a tightening bind following a long run of prosperity.

Banks and thrifts are struggling against a rising tide of bad loans, and it is becoming increasingly clear that some lenders won't be able to escape. While fewer banks are expected to fail than the 834 that went under from 1990 to 1992, it will likely take several years for battered financial institutions to work through their bad loans and replenish their depleted capital.

Those gloomy scenarios could be avoided, however, if the U.S. economy and housing market rebound soon, which would help consumers and businesses that have fallen behind on their loan payments.

Somebody let me know when the pixie dust and manna from heaven shows up to stimulate this rebound....,