Last night, in discussing Paul Krugman‘s NYT op-ed, Lest We Forget, I wrote: … But there are a number of Economists, Krugman among them, who have had their finger on the pulse of this thing for a long time.They’ve spent the past years warning us, as in this article. What we need now is a […]
I don’t believe President George Bush. What happened was clear. On Sunday, September 7th, the Federal government took control of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac who guaranteed half the nation’s mortgage market. On Monday, September 15th, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy protection, and the Stock Market began to fall. By Thursday of that week, President […]
Castles in hot air Is another bubble about to burst? May 29, 2003 From The Economist THE rapid house-price inflation in many countries over the past few years is clearly unsustainable. But will house prices just flatten off or will they slump? Alan Greenspan, who criticised the stockmarket’s “irrational exuberance” long before that particular bubble […]
Obviously, I am currently obsessed with something I actually know the least possible about – economics. But I think that being as personally uninformed as I was about the last thing I knew absolutely nothing about [Neoconservativism] liked to ruined me. So, I struggle on to try to find a way to have at least […]
Lest We Forget By PAUL KRUGMAN November 27, 2008 A few months ago I found myself at a meeting of economists and finance officials, discussing — what else? — the crisis. There was a lot of soul-searching going on. One senior policy maker asked, “Why didn’t we see this coming?” There was, of course, only […]
daughter Abby
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results… I’m unwilling to get into what’s happening in Washington in this time between Administrations. The news reports aren’t very helpful, but it sounds like the Bush Administration is opening the spigots trying to bail out all the financial institutions that participated in creating […]
What is the worst Company in America? We interrupt this spellbinding review of the insanity of deregulation and its disasterous results to wish you a Happy Thanksgiving. Even with all of the problems being left behind by the Bush Administration and the Reagan Dynasty, we won a big one this month – maybe the biggest […]
F.D.R.‘s regulation of the Banking System and the Stock Exchange stayed intact for nearly a half of a century [perhaps because after F.D.R., the Republicans only briefly had control of both Houses of Congress before 1994], even though it remained a perennial straw man for the business community, Banks, Conservatives, and Republicans: In 1971, Richard […]
While economists treat their discipline as a science, with all the charts, graphs, and numbers that go along with the hard sciences, when they talk, they sound like the softer scientists [paychologists, psychoanalysts] as they describe things like investor behavior, consumer confidence, and risk management – essentially mob psychology. In good times, we are irrationally […]