The lesson of the economic crisis ought to have been that there’s a lot of inherent uncertainty. Always has been and always will be. Even when we assume things are certain, or nearly certain. The problems were all caused or enabled by people having too much faith in the bets they were making, in the [...]
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Can’t sleep. So I open up my computer and there’s a new post from Felix Salmon, “When Morgan Stanley almost died,” saying that even in this “orgy of one-year-later reminiscing,” decision-makers still need vivid reminders “just how close the entire financial world came to collapse.” No doubt. Canadians can’t forget it either — even though [...]
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As a journalist, I cannot say that what I have read and seen today is the whole story: everything is too piecemeal, too unconfirmable, too one-sided. But experiencing the raw feed of history has been chilling. As we try to carve out the truth from the speculation and relentlessly repeated reports of outrage, the overall [...]
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Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness (which everyone doesn’t have to read but you definitely do need to know) blogs for nytimes.com: Money matters and today most of us have less of it, so no one will be surprised by new survey results from the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index showing that Americans are smiling less and worrying [...]
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Douglas Rushkoff is one of those writers I imagine my own work resembling. We have a lot of the same ideas and sentiments: fairly critical of business and marketing but not in a simple anti-capitalist way. Get Back in the Box has a fairly central place in my bibliography. His documentaries for PBS Frontline, The [...]
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I first saw Tom Brokaw talking about this historical moment as “a reset” when he was talking about the AIG bonuses on Meet the Press a month or so ago (I just happened to tune-in for the first time in ages). Then today when I saw his op-ed in the New York Times start with [...]
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The AIG bonuses have marked a turn, for the worse — not economically but socially, or morally. The disgrace of the bonus-giving itself has been dwarfed by the populist reaction against them. Matthew Yglesias has pointed to some of the best bits from around the web — especially via this post quoting Brad DeLong on compensation reform (also [...]
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In his interview on 60 Minutes, Ben Bernanke gingerly offered the analogy that if your neighbour lit his house of fire by smoking in bed you might be disinclined to help put it out because he had it coming. But if your own house is made of wood you can’t afford to be passive. [...]
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Most people in our society today have never experienced a depression. We’re not unlike a class of twelve year-olds being presented with something new and uncomfortable in sex-ed class. We’re used to hearing about it but it’s mostly strange — and it’s not something most of us are used to talking about when it actually affects our [...]
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Inside the Meltdown, Tuesday night at 9:00 on PBS Frontline. “Many Americans still don’t understand what has happened to the economy,” FRONTLINE producer/director Michael Kirk says. “How did it all go so bad so quickly? Who is responsible? How effective has the response from Washington and Wall Street been? Those are the questions at the heart [...]
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First a word on the US situation, which is a little farther advanced than it is in Canada. This is Jeffrey Sachs – not the most conservative economist — via Dan Drezner and Mark Thoma: The most obvious problem with the stimulus package is that it has been turned into a fiscal piñata – with a mad scramble for [...]
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… from here. To support my last argument, a few indications towards the massive changes we’ll experience in 2009. 1 - Retail: No doubt we’ll hear a lot more about this on Monday and throughout January as the Christmas numbers come in. Nobody expects it to be pretty. Felix Salmon points to this unencouraging WSJ graphic:
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