In his Op-Ed, Cash for Trash, Paul Krugman gave the easiest-to-understand explanation for our current crisis. I’ve read a bunch of these over the last week, and this one seems the best.
The bursting of the housing bubble has led to a surge in defaults and foreclosures, which in turn has led to a plunge in [...]
From Section 8 of Treasury’s Financial-Bailout Proposal to Congress (read at blogs.wsj.com): “Sec. 8. Review.: Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.” [Editor's note: Are they crazy?]
From James Moore’s A Nation of Village Idiots: “Let’s just consider the money. The public bailout of insurance giant (becoming a dwarf) AIG is estimated at $85 billion. According to one report, that’s more than the Bush administration spent on Aid to Families with Dependent Children during his entire time in office. That amount of [...]
From Nicholas Kristof’s Need a Job? $17,000 an Hour. No Success Required.: “A study released a few weeks ago by the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington found five major elements in the tax code that encourage overpaying executives. These cost taxpayers more than $20 billion a year. That’s enough money to deworm every child [...]
From NY Times’s Google at Age 10: “Google’s revenue per hour in the last 4 quarters: $2.2 million; Microsoft’s revenue per hour in the last 4 quarters: $6.9 million.” [Editor's Note: How could any company fail if its brings in $2.2 or $6.9 million per hour? On the other hand, how does one measure the [...]
From NY Times Magazine’s Barack Obama, A Free-Market-Loving, Big-Spending, Fiscally Conservative Wealth Redistributionist: “‘My core economic theory is pragmatism,’ [Obama] said, ‘figuring out what works.’ This, of course, is not the whole story. Invoking pragmatism doesn’t help the average voter much; ideology, though it often gets a bad name, matters, because it offers insight into [...]
From Bob Herbert’s Letters From Vermont: “The letters to Senator Sanders offer a glimpse into the real lives of ordinary people in an economic environment that was sculpted to favor the very rich. One of the letters was from a woman in central Vermont who said she and her husband are in their mid-30s, are [...]
From Bob Herbert’s As Jobless Rate Soars, Young People Are Left to Drift: “Just a little bit of help to the millions of youngsters trying to get their first tentative foothold in that economy should not be too much to ask. It’s not as if these kids don’t want to work. Many of them search [...]
From Slate’s Four-dollar-per-gallon gas is cheap!: “Gasoline is also cheap compared with other essential fuels. A Starbucks venti latte costs the equivalent of $23 per gallon, while Budweiser beer runs $11 per gallon.”
Check out Gazeta Mercantil’s ad campaign Understand the Real Value of Money. It’s some cool and powerful shit.
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