Sign of the Apocalypse: The TED Spread Gadget

Back in the glory days of 1999-2000 (I was in Silicon Valley at the time, and for us that was the real boom, not this housing thing everyone else likes to talk about), otherwise reasonable people would spend an inordinate amount of time checking stock tickers on their computers. It was probably one of the things, along with email, that first made the Internet a mass phenomenon. (For you kids out there, no, we didn’t have YouTube.) Well, in a perverse, bizarro-world echo of those times, now you can track the TED Spread using a Google gadget (you can add it to your iGoogle home page, or, I believe, to Google Desktop). So now you can distract yourself at work worrying about the fate of the financial system, without even having to go to Bloomberg.

By the way, it’s at 2.56, down from 4.64 on October 10. So the first battle is going well, although there are many more to fight.

(Thanks to Planet Money for catching that.)