If I may so bold as to post on a topic other than financial meltdown, I would like to take a moment to respond to a question about TV advertising. Well, not a question as much as something someone said in a comments section of a web site, and not TV as much as the TV-show portal Hulu.com—a.k.a. the best web site ever. (If you're one of those people who lives without a TV, Hulu is your main link to the outside world.)

Before you watch a TV show on Hulu, you sit through an ad, and often that ad is this public service announcement-style thing that tells you "Hulu users are proud to support Unicef." Or "Hulu users are proud to support Big Brothers Big Sisters." The comment I saw was made by someone who was annoyed at that construction. Why can't they just say "Hulu supports blah blah blah"?!

Well, because they're too smart for that. This is an example of social norms marketing, which plays on our tendency to do what other people like us are doing. Hulu users are supporting Unicef? Wait a second, I'm a Hulu user... where's my checkbook?

The most talked-about application of social norms marketing is getting college kids to drink less by telling them that their peers don't drink that much.

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When last I checked, the Official Financial Indicator of the Panic of '08, the TED spread, had dropped below 3. The TED spread measures the gap in interest rates between three-month T bills and three-month LIBOR, and it hasn't closed below 3 since Sept. 26. Of course, it was in the 1 to 1.1 range in the weeks before the Lehman bankruptcy, so it's still way high. But CalculatedRisk has a whole long list of other improving credit indicators. Things are getting better. For now at least.

There is a big exception to this Big Ease, John Jansen points out: Fannie's and Freddie's mortgage-backed securities. One reason, as Stephen Gandel was among the first (maybe the first) to point out last week--right here on TIME.com--is that the new temporary federal guarantee of unsecured bank debt has reduced the relative attractiveness of Frannie's MBSes, which for a couple of months were unique in their federal guarantee (granted by Congress over the summer) but now have to share it with others.

So interest rates in general are headed down, but mortgage rates aren't. This isn't great news for the housing market, but may be better for the economy. Arnold Kling complained today that the actions of the Fed and Treasury have so far amounted to

an attempt, as in Japan in the 1990's, to prop up a failed industrial policy. In the U.S., the locus of industrial policy has been the housing and mortgage industries. In Japan, it was the manufacturing export sector and an inefficient domestic retail sector. In both Japan and the U.S., the financial sector was used as a government tool to sustain the industrial policy. In both countries, the refusal to back out of the failed industrial policy is a recipe for stagnation.

Well, at least one government decision in the past few weeks appears to be having the effect of steering investment out of housing and into other sectors.

Update: In perhaps the most encouraging news of all, The Brokers With Hands on Their Faces Blog hasn't been updated since October 9.

The call came Saturday evening before dinner. Curious Capitalist Jr. (who is 9) picked up. The caller asked to speak to a grownup. He handed the phone to Mrs. Curious Capitalist.

Mrs. CC sat there answering questions for a while. From the answers, they seemed like very strange questions. After a while CC Jr. came to me in the kitchen, wondering what kind of weirdo his mother was talking to. "Probably a pollster," I told him. His eyes lit up. In the past couple of weeks he's become totally addicted to Pollster.com (I've tried to convert him to FiveThirtyEight, but the graphics there are much harder to understand).

It turned out she was being questioned for the Reuters-CSPAN-Zogby national tracking poll, which gave Obama a 49.8% to 44.4% lead over McCain. She was part of the 49.8%. They also asked her a bunch of issue questions, including one about "supreme lending" (the pollster mispronounced "subprime"). But you have to pay Zogby to get those results.

Anyway, it was all very exciting. Voting is great and all. But as someone who has never been polled in a presidential race (the last political poll I remember participating in had to do with Don Siegelman's successful run for lieutenant governor of Alabama in 1994), I'm deeply jealous of my wife and her role in shaping the national discourse. So come on Rasmussen, come on Survey USA, come on GWU/Battleground, come on CNN/TIME. Gimme a call!

I quoted the warnings of veteran money manager Jeremy Grantham a couple of times in the lead-up to the current financial mess. My favorite came in July 2007 when Grantham described the minor jitters that had hit markets several times already that year:

Rather like a brontosaurus that has been bitten on the tail and most of the body hasn't noticed it yet, the signal is working its way up the vertebrae.

Anyway, Grantham's latest quarterly letter to investors is out (pdf!), and while most of it consists of a trenchant analysis of what went wrong, there's also this:

On October 10th we can say that, with the S&P at 900, stocks are cheap in the U.S. and cheaper still overseas. We will therefore be steady buyers at these prices. Not necessarily rapid buyers, in fact probably not, but steady buyers. But we have no illusions. Timing is difficult and is apparently not usually our skill set, although we got desperately and atypically lucky moving rapidly to underweight in emerging equities three months ago. That aside, we play the numbers. And we recognize the real possibilities of severe and typical overruns. We also recognize that the current crisis comes with possibly unique dangers of a global meltdown. We recognize, in short, that we are very probably buying too soon. Caveat emptor.

As Grantham points out elsewhere in the letter, he was also extremely bullish from 1973 to 1986--and it was only in the last four years of that 13-year stretch that the market turned bullish too.