As the continuing turmoil in the financial sector and a mind boggling trillion $ bailout are together contributing to the general feeling of economic gloom and doom across the nation, the distressing news of a big bank failure last Thursday made it worse. The Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS), announced that it had closed Washington Mutual (WaMu), a big bank with over 45,000 employees, more than $300 billion in assets, 2,200 branches in 15 states with over $100 billion in deposits. Billed as one of the largest bank failures in the U.S. history, WaMu was taken into receivership by FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corp), the federal regulatory agency and promptly sold to the highest bidder, JP Morgan & Chase Co for as little as $2 billion.

According to OTS, WaMu, one of the largest savings banks in the country, became unsafe after deposits of more than $16 billions left the bank in just last two weeks. WaMu, which specialized as a mortgage bank was the latest victim after IndyMac, of the combined crises of downturn in housing sector, subprime and credit crunch. FDIC maintains an ongoing list of 100 risky banks. However, this is a secret list that will never become public and neither is the process by which such a list is created.

So we at FortiusOne decided to create our own list the 100 banks based on the level of their exposure to risky/bad loans on their books. For this analysis, risky loans are computed as the sum of the total value of loans on foreclosed residential properties and mortgage defaults (30 plus and 90 plus days late mortgage payments as well as the residential properties that have stopped paying mortgages but have not been foreclosed yet.) The data for the 2nd quarters of 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005 and 2004 was downloaded from the FDIC website and then geocoded. Only those commercial banks who specialize in real-estate mortgage business were selected and then ranked according to the level of risky loans. The top 100 banks for each of these quarters were combined into one single file, then sorted by the value of the risky loans for the 2nd quarter of 2008. The map below shows only those banks that have risky loans for each of the 2nd quarters, the pie-charts represent risky loans by the 2nd quarters between 2004 to 2008.

Pie-Chart Legend: Red = 2nd qtr 2008, Orange = 2nd qtr 2007, Yellow = 2nd qtr 2006, Green = 2nd qtr 2005 and Purple = 2nd qtr 2004

So how exposed was WaMu to risky lending practices? A lot, according to our analysis of FDIC’s banking statistics for last several quarters. See the cartogram version of the data below where the size of the pie represents the total value of the risky loans. Clearly, WaMu tops in the risky loan business for each of these quarters spanning the pre- and post-housing bubble. WaMu’s bad loans for the 2nd quarters for each of the years between 2004 and 2008 range in value from just a $2.32 billion (2004), $2.63 billion (2005), $4.76 billion (2006), $6.7 billion (2007) to $15.8 billion (2008).

Pie-Chart Legend: Red = 2nd qtr 2008, Orange = 2nd qtr 2007, Yellow = 2nd qtr 2006, Green = 2nd qtr 2005 and Purple = 2nd qtr 2004

However, what is scary is that Wachovia, Countrywide, E-trade and few others are not that far behind. Does that mean, they are the next in line to fail? Not necessary, because exposure to risky loans may just be one of the factors involved in a bank’s failure. Search for a more comprehensive bank data for all quarters between 2004 and 2008 on the Finder! with key word “FDIC” and its analysis in the near future. In the meanwhile browse for the data discussed in this blog here:

Risky bank loans 2nd quarter 2008
Risky bank loans 2nd quarter 2007
Risky bank loans 2nd quarter 2006
Risky bank loans 2nd quarter 2005
Risky bank loans 2nd quarter 2004

Popularity: 30% [?]

Is the geospatial industry affected by the world’s financial situation? Not as much as you would think, according to Jeff Thurston and Matt Ball of V1 Magazine . Thurston claims the geospatial industry tools are relevant because they are based on reality. Ball states that as long as geospatial technologies serves critical markets (government, homeland security, etc.), the industry can weather out economic downturns. The geospatial industry is innovative in its technology, which drives growth and will certainly provide career opportunities and a bright future for those involved.

Google adds a voting mapplet, offering registered voters polling location information by just entering your address. The developing site will feature voting information in mid-October. Visit your state or location election sites for registration information. Still want more political maps? Check out Electoral College map predictions and John McCain’s geo-biography in Google Earth.

Google Maps isn’t always perfect though. This week, reports on map spamming surfaced, also recent changes to Google Maps (switching from TeleAtlas to NavTeq) is rendering both Google Earth and Google maps incorrectly, according to Chad at Earth is Square.

Nokia 1.5 introduced their new mapping application, Nokia ViNe. The application gives users the ability to add location information to their geo-tagged photos. Nokia Photos uses map data from Navteq through the Maps on Ovi service.

GIS made the front page of the Coloradoan-Fort Collins. The Poudre School District received a small grant to help educate future high school graduates interested in geo technologies. The district will provide two courses for 50+ students to take in either clean energy for companies or GIS technologies.

Popularity: 10% [?]

One of the biggest gatherings of geo-folks around is the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) with over 8,000 geographers, GIS specialists, and environmental scientists (aka PaleoTards).

I went to my first AAG conference in the spring of 1998 in Boston as a new Geography grad student at University of Florida. I had been broadly researching the geography of the Internet and collecting data on what cities were physically connected to big bandwidth pipes and which were not. At the conference I met a group of other grad students also interested in what the geography of the Internet and cyberspace looked like. Martin Dodge from the University College London (CASA) had a session going on the topic and I had the chance to meet up with Matt Zook from Cal Berkley and Anthony Townsend from NYU as well. We’ve all stayed in touch since and have collaborated on random projects along the way - today Anthony works for the Institute for the Future, Matt is professor at the University of Kentucky, and Martin is a professor at the University of Manchester.

Martin and Matt have put together a provocative session for AAG called “Is Google Good for Geography?“. I agreed to be the GeoWeb punching bag (a.k.a NeoTard) and take on the masses of PaleoTards converging on the AAG. What I find most exciting about this session is it is not just traditional GIS vs. GeoWeb, but also the potential detrimental impacts of the political economy created by the GeoWeb. What are the implications of massive corporations like Google and Microsoft shaping how the public perceives geography? There is heavy fear of corporate control of geographic data amongst Geographers, and trepidation about what the implications are for academic research and the potential for hegemonic tendencies and disenfranchisement of under represented groups. We experienced a bit of this when one such article called us out for corporate control of data with GeoCommons. This got me exceedingly irritated at the time since all the data in GeoCommons is released under Creative Commons with attribution, but that is another story

While there are many good points to be made of possible abuse through the emerging GeoWeb I think the discipline of Geography has missed an opportunity to help shape it as a tool to educate the world about Geography. The debate whether “Google (a.k.a the GeoWeb) is good for Geography” should be a great session and if anyone happens to be in Vegas for it definitely drop in for the fun.

There is another interesting session being run by Digital Urban in association with Dr Andrew Crooks of CASA entitled “Concepts, Tools and Applications: The Rise of Neogeography“. Yet another session in the GeoComputation track entitled “NeoGeography Tools - What next?“. If anyone knows of any additional sessions being organized with a GeoWeb component please pass them along.

In my opinion it is great to see recognition of the emergence of the GeoWeb in Geography and the beginning of a healthy debate on its implications. In the past there has been critique of the GeoWeb and discussion of how it can be included in emerging Geography research agendas, but with the 2009 meeting there looks to be real dialogue and incorporation.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Google Maps is moving above and beyond with their new mobile offering for Street View. The application now includes a 360 degree pedestrian perspective. Google Map’s mobile version was introduced this week and is available for the Blackberry and other smart phones.

Speaking of Google Maps, Googlers (members of the Google Team) were invited to visit the University of Alaska at Fairbanks to make tools like Google Earth more accessible. The team will be conducting a series of workshops, conducting geography trivia contests and building maps (using Google Maps of course). Could Google be paving the way for mapping education?

Netezza, a global leader in data warehouse appliances and data warehousing, announced their spatial extension to its database. They will support spatial data types and operators (specifically vector data types: points, lines and areas). Netezza’s architecture is intended to work for mass queries and analysis, not operational geospatial applications.

GeoServer introduced their newest version of GeoServer and last release of the 1.6x branch, 1.6.5. The latest update features Dutch translations, and 65 bug fixes and other additional improvements.

Click2Map revealed a new feature for online crowded maps. The auto-cluster feature allows map makers to create a ‘unique marker’ for areas that are densely concentrated. The tool also enables you to laser-tune the display based on three parameters; clustering rate, minimum markers and maximum zoom.

Open Street Map is now available in Shapefile format thanks to some work from the team at geofabrik. With this addition, there is no longer any need to convert the osm.bz2 to Shapefiles as it is now supplied for users.

Popularity: 14% [?]