The fiancial meltdown has dominated the news recently. Here are some related takes from around the Internet:
- Bill Moyers interviews Kevin Phillips. Among other things, Phillips identifies seven “sharks” plaguing the economy:
[T]he first is financialization because we’re so dependent on this industry that’s sort of half lost its marbles. The second is that you have this huge buildup of debt, absolutely unprecedented anywhere in the world. The third is you’ve now got home prices collapsing. The fourth is you’ve got global commodity inflation building up.
The fifth is you’ve got flawed and deceptive government economics statistics. The sixth is that you’ve got what they call peak oil where the world is, to some extent, running out of oil. So it’s not just commodity inflation, it’s a shortage of oil. And then the last thing is the collapsing dollar. Now, whenever you get this sort of package in one decade, you got a big one. And when Greenspan says it’s a once a century, I think it’s another variation but on a par with the Thirties. - Donald MacKenzie in an informative piece, “What’s in a Number?”, discusses the importance of Libor and how it is calculated
- The Big Picture has “13 Questions for Paulson & Bernanke” during their Congressional testimony
- Calculated Risk similarly has “Paulson Plan: Questions for Congress to Ask“
- Mish, who opposes the Paulson bailout plan, summarizes his objections in “Open Letter To Congress On The $700 Billion Paulson Bailout Plan“
- macroblog answers “What’s a swap line?”
- I see Senator McCain is continuing his comedy tour. Recall that last week he first insisted that the fundamentals of our economy are strong, then proceeded to contradict himself for a couple days.
Now McCain is criticizing Obama for not showing enough “leadership” during the crisis:
“Sen. Obama has declined to put forth a plan of his own. At a time of crisis when leadership is leaded, Sen. Obama has simply not provided it,” McCain said. “The truth is we don’t have time to wait for Sen. Obama’s input for our nation to act.”
The absurdity of this attack, coming from a man who can’t even offer a coherent set of talking points, is self-evident.
Of course we want to know how a presidential candidate would respond to such a crisis and the principles he would follow. But it necessary Obama rush out a “plan”? After all, such a plan is moot, because he would not assume office for months, and whatever emergency plan we take will have long since adopted. More importantly, why shouldn’t people be taking a few days to deliberate over a solution to this mess? Emergency legislation that gets rammed through Congress inevitably has problems, as we’re seeing with Paulson’s plan. In this case, we’re dealing with hundreds of billions of dollars. We don’t need to create an even larger mess by hurriedly adopting a bad plan. It’s perfectly acceptable (even desirable) to weigh options for a few days. - Billmon: “Things Become More Serious.”
- Funny: Buy My Shitpile.