SmartRemarks

While the right wing is busy spreading FUD about the economy and the Democrats’ fiscal stimulus (thereby openly opposing schools and teachers, bridges and railroads, alternative energy and environmental protection, Food Stamps and social services), and disseminating outright misinformation about what worked in the Great Depression… most of us are just struggling to keep up with the flood of bad news the meltdown keeps producing and hoping that the next shoe to drop, won’t drop on our own personal heads.

Record low housing starts, skyrocketing unemployment, new proposals to mitigate foreclosures, uncomfortably familiar proposals about getting bank balance sheets sorted out… I’ve tried my level best to delve into the details of all this over the last few months, but sometimes you feel like you have to be glued to the news just to keep up with what’s happening, and be a professional economist just to understand it.

As it happens, though, amidst all the media hubbub, a site has emerged out there that’s doing a sterling job of keeping track of all this and explaining it in terms that laymen can understand. Founded by a diverse trio of experts just five months ago, The Baseline Scenario has been hailed by the likes of Bill Moyers and Paul Krugman, and cited by everyone from The Wall Street Journal to The Financial Times to The Guardian.

What it offers are works of opinion (what isn’t, these days?)—but it’s carefully sourced, logically structured, soundly argued, and (importantly) easy for non-experts to follow. (While I admire Nouriel Roubini’s RGE Monitor, this site is a bit more user-friendly.) The site has an excellent page laying out “The Financial Crisis for Beginners”… and of particular note in regard to this week’s goings-on among policymakers, it has this to say:

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Tags: economy, financial crisis

After much Congressional wrangling and pontificating, Obama was finally able to sign the economic stimulus bill yesterday.

What exactly does this mean?

Make no mistake: this bill is less than it could or should have been. Really, there should have been only two guiding principles in putting this bill together:

1) Figure out every worthwhile project on which public funds could reasonably be expended—public or private, state or federal, “shovel-ready” infrastructure or long-term investment.

2) Fund them all.

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Tags: economy, Obama, Republicans

It’s a nice refreshing tingly feeling, isn’t it, to watch a president who clearly not only understands complex economic concepts, but is even capable of boiling them down into simplified versions for the press? (Even if he’s occasionally visibly frustrated by the need to do so.) Bush always came across as just barely in command of the PowerPoint version of reality some adviser had walked him through, and painfully incapable of going into greater depth about anything.

The corporate media, of course (at least so far as I saw on NBC), was preoccupied with the fleeting meme that strategically speaking, Obama should have done this a week ago. That, however, utterly misses every point worth getting.

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Tags: economy, media, Obama, television

It’s been far longer than I intended since my last post. Sometimes time just runs away from you. So let me just toss off a few ideas that have crossed my mind in recent days, and get caught up…

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First off:  the wrangling in Washington over the new “economic stimulus package” has been interesting to watch. Obama has gone out of his way to be as “post-partisan” as promised, extending an olive branch to Republicans the likes of which Dems never saw under eight years of Bush, wining and dining them, inviting input… and in response they basically gave him the finger. (Although, anxious not to alienate a public who likes him, they tried to shift their ire toward the Democratic leadership.) And the usual suspects in the punditocracy backed them up.

Basically, the GOP’s goal right now seems to be to shrink the stimulus bill down to something so small and weak that it won’t be effective… and then to blame their opponents for its ineffectiveness. All while the country at large continues to suffer, of course.

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Tags: Battlestar Galactica, Congress, Dan DiDio, DC Comics, economy, Final Crisis, House of Representatives, Illinois, Legion, Obama, Republicans, Senate, super-heroes, television, Tom Geoghegan, unemployment

At 4:52 p.m. yesterday, the Illinois Senate voted unanimously to remove Gov. Rod Blagojevich from office, following his earlier impeachment by the Illinois House. Seven minutes later they voted to ban him from ever holding any future public office in Illinois. And by 5:30, Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn had been formally sworn in as our new governor.

(This neatly demonstrated just what the U.S. Congress should have done with George W. Bush years ago, when the news of his illegal wiretapping program broke… but spilt milk and all that.)

Blago himself appeared during the late morning for an excruciating-to-hear “closing statement” in the trial he had otherwise eschewed, playing to the cameras as usual with what amounted to a campaign-style speech, complaining about the Senate’s procedures but offering no evidence nor submitting himself to cross-examination. His public tone was, needless to say, markedly different from the private one captured by the FBI’s wiretaps. At one point he actually said to the assembled legislators that the charges against him were “just politics”—that “you guys all know what it’s like out there when you’re running an election.” He insisted (again contra the tapes) that his ends were to serve the public, and the means didn’t matter.

Through it all, he demonstrated a profound misunderstanding of what it means to govern in a free country. Blago (not unlike Bush) seems to think it means being a ruler. What’s really important, and what he utterly failed at, is being a leader.

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Tags: Blagojevich, economy, Illinois, Pat Quinn

Can this be real?

Out of all the floods of commentary generated by the economic collapse of the last few months, variously thoughtful and outraged, panicked and funny, this is the first site where I’m left admitting I have absolutely no idea what to make of it. It’s about… well, it’s about young New York women who (used to) date Wall Street bankers, complaining to allegedly comic effect that their gravy train lifestyles have been disrupted by their boyfriends’ dissolving professional lives. From the site’s mission statement:

Dating A Banker Anonymous (DABA) is a safe place where women can come together – free from the scrutiny of feminists – and share their tearful tales of how the mortgage meltdown has affected their relationships. DABA Girls was started by two best friends whose relationships tanked with the economy. Not knowing what else to do, we did what frustrated but articulate girls have done since the beginning of time — we started a blog. So if your monthly Bergdorf’s allowance has been halved and bottle service has all but disappeared from your life, lighten your heart with laughter…

Is it meant to be satire? Can it possibly be intended to be taken straight? Should readers be in on the joke, or cringe at the shamelessness of it all?  Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: blogging, economy, humor, relationships

President Barack Obama. Has a nice feeling as it rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?

It feels like taking a deep breath of fresh, clean air after eight years of holding your breath.

This kind of enthusiasm about the inauguration of a new president is unlike anything in living memory—certainly not mine, at least, and I’ve heard the same thing from folks considerably older. It’s a wonder to behold.

Obama’s name and image are everywhere. He’s on book and magazine covers, he’s on banners hanging over city sidewalks. He’s on soda bottles and baseball caps, coffee mugs and children’s drawings on refrigerators. At the gym yesterday I saw a young woman wearing a T-shirt reading “I (heart) Obama.” Major newspapers have published extra print runs of their Nov. 5 victory editions to sell off at $5 or $10 a pop.

Americans are ready, more than ready, to feel optimistic and idealistic again. After eight years of oppressive despair and decline, the country has (not for the first time in its history) won itself a second chance, a chance to correct the errors of its ways… and proved it deserved that chance, all at the same stroke… by the actions of its citizens at the ballot box.

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Tags: climate, diplomacy, economy, Grant Park, inauguration, Obama, polling

Boy, doesn’t that sound just too exciting for words? (Don’t drool all over your keyboard in anticipation.)

See, here’s the thing. On the one hand, an old friend had made a comment in response to my recent post about the top news stories of last year, with a link to a piece from AlterNet calling into question just how serious the problems on Wall Street really were. And I read that with some mild interest, but didn’t really follow up on it… until he shared that same link on Facebook, kicking off what became a lengthy discussion thread.

Meanwhile, on the other hand, on New Year’s Eve an entirely different old friend and I were having a semi-intoxicated discussion about the current economy, and he put forward the proposition that much of the blame for the downward spiral (on Wall Street, at least) should be pinned on mark-t0-market accounting. It was all a bit slurred, however, and didn’t quite dovetail with what I thought I knew about the subject, and I pretty much forgot about it… until the subject popped up again when he linked to an article about it in that very same Facebook discussion.

And it was off to the races!…

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Tags: bailout, economy, FASB, financial crisis, investing, mark-to-market

Sorry I haven’t posted for a few days. But the holiday interregnum is now well and truly over, and the ordinary part of winter has commenced. Kids are back in school, the full staff is back in the office, and as of today the new Congress has been sworn in.

(Of course, that last part took place absent the junior Senators from Minnesota—although Franken’s win in the long, long recount, finally certified yesterday, is heartening, Norm Coleman’s legal challenge will delay things further despite being almost certainly doomed to fail—or Illinois—one can’t help but feel a little bit sympathetic to Roland Burris, but rejecting him as a symbol of Blago’s hubris is the sensible thing to do, and Burris certainly knew what a minefield he was stepping into. From Delaware Joe Biden is actually still there, until his successor is formally appointed on January 20; and likewise New York and Colorado will need new appointees Very Soon Now too, when Hillary Clinton and Ken Salazar move on to the cabinet.)

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Tags: Al Franken, Apple, blogging, Congress, economy, Gaza, Illinois, Israel, Obama, resolutions, Senate, transition, unemployment

A completely subjective list, of course. But what the hell… aren’t they all?

Going in to 2008, one could hardly open a magazine or flip a channel without hitting a media comparison to 1968. It was 40 years ago (a nice, round number), and it was a paradigm-shifting political year that looked familiar, with an open competition for the presidential nomination in both parties, all while a war was on overseas.

As it turned out, 2008 was a momentous year in its own right, arguably the most significant year in decades, and without question one we will all remember vividly. But it was not assassinations and riots that made its mark in the history books, unlike in 1968; it brought distinctive events all its own.

There’s not really a lot of room for debate over the two most significant news events of the year, and the annual AP survey of news editors corresponds with what almost all of us would surely conclude on our own, a point-counterpoint of encouraging and discouraging developments:

1) The presidential election of Barack Obama

I’ve already written quite a bit about this one, of course… but suffice it to say that it’s historic for the fact that he’ll be the first African-American president; it’s historic for the fact that he won with a (generally) upbeat, honorable, serious campaign; and it’s historic in that it marks a realignment back toward progressive politics after a generation of destructive radical conservatism, and after eight years of arguably the single worst president in American history. How Obama really performs in office of course remains to be seen, but what he’s accomplished so far this year stands on its own.

2) The worst economic meltdown in our lifetimes

Written more than a little about this, too, of course. It seems almost quaint now to recall that when I started this blog, back in mid-September—although we now know that we were already nine months into a recession—it was still possible to ask “how bad is the economy?” and wonder if it would still get worse. Within days, everything started to go to hell in a handbasket… in a way that seems to have created a destructive feedback loop, where every new development just exacerbates what came before. Homes foreclosing, jobs disappearing, businesses (and entire industries) collapsing, credit freezing, investments evaporating… we’ll remember this for a long time, no matter how much we might prefer to forget it.

After that, the choices grow more arguable. My assessment:

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Tags: Blagojevich, Chicago, climate, Congress, economy, Election 2008, financial crisis, FISA, history, Illinois, international, iPhone, journalism, Madoff, media, Obama, Top 10 lists