The economic crisis has the country flailing.
That's not a controversial statement. Since early 2008 the federal government has been trying various, and expensive methods, of jump-starting the economy and propping up the housing market. Since December 2007 the Federal Reserve has created an alphabet soup of programs to stabilize the credit markets.
So far all of these attempts to stabilize the economy have had mixed results at best. Trillions of dollars have been spent and yet the economy is still crippled. Why?
The problem is that the people in charge are asking the wrong question. They are asking, "How do we get back to where we were before this crisis?" The question they should be asking is, "How did this happen?"
Unless we understand what happened and why, we will never be able to fix the economy.
It's Friday Night! Party Time! Time to relax, put your feet up on the couch, lay back, and watch some detailed videos on economic policy!
Frontline has a must watch documentary on the woman who tried to warn on derivatives and the shadow banking system and the men who stopped her. Realize if she had prevailed the financial crisis probably never would have happened.
In remarks that will fuel the row around excessive pay, Lord Griffiths, vice-chairman of Goldman Sachs International and a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, said banks should not be ashamed of rewarding their staff.
Speaking to an audience at St Paul’s Cathedral in London about morality in the marketplace last night, Griffiths said the British public should “tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity for all”
The National Academy of Sciences has issued its own estimates of the number of Americans in poverty, and yes, it’s much worse than the official statistics have been telling us for the past decade. The new NAS formula estimates nearly 1 in 6 Americans, 15.8 percent, are living below the poverty line. That’s 48 million Americans.
By comparison, the latest official Census Bureau statistics are that 13.2 percent of Americans, or 39.8 million, are impoverished. It should be noted that the Census Bureau is reportedly cooperating with the National Academy of Sciences to get this information out as quickly as possible.
John Montgomery Ward was inducted into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame in 1964. He debuted with the Providence Grays on July 15, 1878, as a pitcher. He won 164 career games with a 2.15 ERA. He threw the second perfect game in baseball history.
When an injury ended his pitching career in 1884, he learned to throw with his other arm and became a shortstop and second baseman. He went on to collect over 2,100 hits and steal 540 bases, including 111 in just one season.
He played on two pennant winning New York Giants teams, and managed the team for two other seasons. No other player in the history of baseball has won over 100 games as a pitcher and also collected over 2,000 hits.
For all these reasons he deserves to be remembered.
However, these accomplishments were nothing in comparison to the real legacy that defined him as a person and left its mark on baseball.
This last spring, I posted on how I thought that there were basically two recessions going on. That is that there were two sectors that made up a disproportionate share of the employment losses. From that post:
It's Friday Night! Party Time! Time to relax, put your feet up on the couch, lay back, and watch some detailed videos on economic policy!
First is quite a bombshell from Bill Moyer's Journal on the financial bail outs. Congress Representative Marcy Kaptur and Economist Bill Simon brazenly say Wall Street is in charge of the government. This is a must watch.
(CNNMoney.com) -- Oil prices have vaulted above $78 a barrel this week as investors continue to fret about a weak dollar and the pace of the economic recovery.
When the news media has mentioned oil they've tried to paint it as a good thing - expected demand from a booming economy. Of course the general economy is not booming, or doing much of anything for that matter.
On The Economic Populist you might have noticed the middle column. We try to list other sites and blogs who have exceptional insight and writing on what is happening in the U.S. economy.
Sometimes though, one cannot say it better but miss those who did.
It's Friday Night! Party Time! Time to relax, put your feet up on the couch, lay back, and watch some detailed videos on economic policy!
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