That’s what permabear Nouriel Roubini says is coming in a Barron’s interview. Only $300bm has been written down so far.

Barron’s: Unfortunately for the rest of us, you have a pretty good track record. How much more misery lies ahead?

Roubini: We are in the second inning of a severe, protracted recession, which started in the first quarter of this year and is going to last at least 18 months, through the middle of next year. A systemic banking crisis will go on for awhile, with hundreds of banks going belly up.

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That’s according to BlogNewsNet, and who am I to argue!

And we’re #5 for liberal blogs.

The excellent California Progress Report is zooming to near the top of their charts, and, hey, Happy 5th Birthday to another fine California blog, Lefti on the News.

Their rankings do not include the 800 pound gorilla of California political blogs, Crooks and Liars, probably because it has national stature and scope. I’ve known C&L editor John Amato since way before blogging, played a minor role in helping him start it and like others truly did not get that “video thing” when he, way ahead of the curve, started posting video news. He, of course, has turned it into an influential powerhouse that gets a zillion readers a day.

I’ll be checking the BlogNewsNet rankings for other great California blogs I haven’t discovered yet.

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Up pops those pesky Auction Rate Securities. You remember them. Financial institutions sold them to the wealthy as a place to park their money that was just like cash but yielded a bit more. Whoopsie. They weren’t like cash at all. Rather, they are long-term debt instruments that get turned over on a short-term basis. But when the credit markets froze up, institutions stopped buying them back.

That meant investors could no longer withdraw their money. Wealthy investors. Who called lawyers. Now attorney generals are getting involved.

According to Bloomberg, the auction rate securities market was worth $330 billion before its sudden collapse in February. If the stated goal of buying back securities at par with a penalty comes to pass, it looks like the banking industry may be dealing with another large writedown.

Looks like cheerleader Jim Cramer of TheStreet.com who has been going boo-yah, the bear market in financials is over, might have to eat his words.

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The ESL (electron-stimulated luminescence) light bulb is coming.

So why is the ESL bulb any better than CFLs or LEDs?

Vu1 claims that their bulbs do not have the trace amounts of mercury that CFLs contain, and they do not require the manufacturing energy of LEDs. The ESL bulbs, which will cost $12, are about the same as dimmable CFLs. We can expect to see these on the market fairly soon—Vu1 says the first screw-in models could be available as early as September 2008.

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