Calculated Risk notes that the Obama administration is considering the elements of the next stimulus package. Unemployment is right around 10 percent and the 2010 elections are close.
{ 0 comments }
The economy needs more stimulus to help us out of the recession, says Nieman Watchdog in its latest project, Reporting on The Collapse. The stimulus effort helped us stave off worse disaster, and is helping us recover, and could do even better with even more. A time that calls for aggressive fiscal policy is not the time to worry about deficits, says Nieman.
I agree. I think anyone who’s watched impartially has seen the stimulus work – in fact we’re currently seeing states lay off workers now as the stimulus funds are used up.
We don’t need to suffer job losses during recesssions – it’s only through ignorance and uncaring that we do. During contractions we should retool our economy and most importantly retrain our workforce, and gladly use budget deficits if necessary for these ends.
{ 1 comment }
We’re seeing a lot of stories about big bonuses to the recipients of taxpayer bailouts. What’s odd is that the outrage we read doesn’t seem to penetrate into the financial industry. The moral voice doesn’t seem to carry through the insulations of layers of money.
As to why we coddle these giants of finance, apart from their having bought the political system with our money: our culture contains much forebearance for financiers, perhaps from the assumption – now proved obsolete – that what they do is both difficult, and incomprehensible to most of us.
{ 0 comments }
If your own research persuades you that the Earth truly is warming, then watch a sadly beautiful and terrifying thing: time-lapse photography recording glaciers melting around the world.
This is a film presented at TED by photographer James Balog with the Extreme Ice Survey, a network of time-lapse cameras aimed at vast bodies of ice, all now receding at a fearsome pace.
{ 0 comments }
BBC News upset a good many people on Friday by claiming that the oceans are cooling and that global warming has stopped happening – this during the hottest decade in recorded history. The story, What happened to global warming?, was completely discredited yesterday by no less an expert than Joe Romm at Climate Progress.
Paul Hudson, a weather presenter writing under the byline of climate correspondent for BBC News, claimed that “for the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.” He cited Britain’s Met Office for this claim.
The problem is that even Met Office data show that the planet has continued to accumulate heat. See their own report: Global temperature slowdown – not an end to climate change.
And the oceans? They “have continued to warm, as the peer-reviewed literature makes clear.”
{ 1 comment }
Here’s some analysis that resonates keenly. It says that mainstream media is irrelevant. You can read the whole article here: Why the News Media Became Irrelevant—And How Social Media Can Help
“The truth is the Internet didn’t steal the audience. We lost it. Today fewer people are systematically reading our papers and tuning into our news programs for a simple reason—many people don’t feel we serve them anymore. We are, literally, out of touch.”
{ 2 comments }
Here on the eve of Obama’s speech on health care before Congress, I just caught up with a Frontline special from 2008 on how five industrialized nations around the world handle their own health care.
It’s compelling viewing. I felt somewhat ashamed of how poorly America has done when it comes to this most basic of needs for sustaining a society. The countries examined are Britain, Japan, Germany, Taiwan and Switzerland. We could take lessons from any of them.
{ 0 comments }
Bookmarked a great point by Krugman, that I hope gets followed by our political process during Obama’s terms:
Let me add a sort of larger point: aside from the essentially circular political arguments — centrist Democrats insisting that the public option must be dropped to get the votes of centrist Democrats — the argument against the public option boils down to the fact that it’s bad because it is, horrors, a government program. And sooner or later Democrats have to take a stand against Reaganism — against the presumption that if the government does it, it’s bad.
- Why the public option matters
{ 0 comments }
Paul Krugman published a great article in the New York Times last week, summarizing the history of economics since the Great Depression, and showing how economists forgot the lessons of Keynes, and started to believe again that markets are perfect. The article is called, How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?
I recommend the article as a cornerstone reference for you if you’d like to know how we could be so blind to the housing bubble, how the finance industry took over the economy, why the Federal Reserve System allowed it all to happen – and where we go from here.
I have to say I found it sad to see again that the discipline of economics doesn’t really understand how the economy works.
{ 0 comments }
Here in its entirety is the Frontline episode from Tuesday, June 16th, called Breaking the Bank. It’s a very clear exposition of the fundamental change that occurred in the collapse of Wall Street in late 2008. Essentially, the government is in charge.
The episode contains the usual wonderful stuff from Simon Johnson, to the effect that we really kind of went ahead and nationalized the banks back around the time of the Lehman bust, and the government-brokered acquisition of Merril by Bank of America.
Entertaining and enlightening. Below the fold is more from Simon Johnson, in the full transcript of his background interview the Frontline people did with him preparing the show. Johnson’s perspective really is valuable, and resonates quite soundly with me. I think he’s worth reading. Here’s the show:
{ 0 comments }
I loved to read this about Nancy Pelosi, especially in a time of people gunning for her, thinking she makes for helpless prey. Chickenhearts themselves, they don’t understand true toughness. I didn’t realize Pelosi had been so principled all this time, one of the very few people who decried the US’s delinking of human rights from its other considerations of relations with China.
I say bless her for her courage – far beyond all of the gutless cowards in their high office and the greedheads in business who turned their backs on both the Tibetan and the Chinese people. Pelosi, love you we do … read the full post from the International Campaign for Tibet:
Pelosi, we love you!
So read one of the slogans painted by a group of Chinese on the main gate of Beijing’s propaganda office directed at the Speaker during her China trip this week. It is a sentiment shared by those of us in Washington who advocate for human rights in China and Tibet.
{ 0 comments }
The New Yorker has an article on health care in America, and why it costs so much for so little extra benefit. This will be the best thing you read all year about our medical system. Written by a doctor who is also a very good writer – I envy his skill. It’s called:
The Cost Conundrum
What a Texas town can teach us about health care.
by Atul Gawande
When you look across the spectrum from Grand Junction to McAllen – and the almost threefold difference in the costs of care – you come to realize that we are witnessing a battle for the soul of American medicine.
{ 0 comments }
Obama at Notre Dame on May 17th talked a lot about climate change. Ezra Klein wrote about it, and I’m just copying him verbatim here. You should click through to his post – which is short and to the point – if only to see the maps he included: they show graphically which parts of the world have primarily caused climate change, versus which parts of the world will suffer most from its effects. Very sad. And Obama seems to get this.
{ 0 comments }
Here’s a comment left on a blog that I want to remember:
The subprime mortgages aren’t the real evil. They are like the kid who acts as a mule for a big-time drug dealer; involved but fungible. If it wasn’t subprime mortgages it could have been something else, such as tech stocks or tulips. Total subprime mortgages were worth less than 1 trillion, of those, a few hundred billion worth of defaults. That is a lot of money, but an amount that could have been absorbed by the economy without causing particular harm.
The real evil is unregulated derivatives. Credit default swaps alone are estimated at over $60 trillion. Those are all just side bets on the original 1 trillion of subprimes. It’s like a craps table. The guy holding the dice drops a $100 chip on the table. If he loses, he goes home $100 poorer. But the derivatives markets then bet the farm on that same roll of the dice. And I mean the whole farm. The entire world’s domestic gross product is estimated at about $60 trillion. Derivatives makers and dealers bet the equivalent of the world’s economy on whether some poor schlub would default on his mortgage.
Deal with everything else but not unregulated derivatives, and this will all happen again. Deal with the derivatives market, and everything else is just mopping up.
{ 1 comment }
Does our economic system require banks in order to function? Should banks exist?
The modern system of adjusting the money supply through interest-dependent banks is an inheritance from the centuries during which the only thing that could move money around was interest. Banks were the vaults that handled the stores of excess liquidity, paying less interest than they earned, and making their profits in the difference.
But given all the damage the current system has caused, don’t we have better ways of moving this money and credit around now?
{ 0 comments }
