Once again there are a number of economic and business posts and articles that have caught my eye.
• Jeffrey Sachs has an absolutely must-read post at The Huffington Post, The Geithner-Summers Plan Is Worse Than We Thought. UPDATE: To which Tom Maguire responds with a refutation.
• This article at the Wall Street Journal is from a pair of scholars who believe that it takes a real estate bubble to cause a truly serious economic turndown and that both the present recession and the Great Depression are instances of that. Interesting reading.
• This post from John Carney at Clusterstock reports on a paper by a couple of scholars who’ve found support for the point I’ve been making around here for six months, namely that the financial crisis isn’t because the banks are illiquid but because they are insolvent, not only negating the Geithner Plan but rendering it actually counter-productive.
• Finally, Roger Altman writing at Financial Times explains why the recovery will be long and slow. I don’t think he’s telling the half of it. The political leadership are trying their damnedest to prevent recovery. That’s not their intent but that will be the result. They are taking us willy-nilly down the very same path that Japan went down following the collapse of their real estate bubble and they’re not recovered yet nearly 20 years later. They’re trying to restore the status quo ante which drains resources that should be going to sectors better able to pull us out of the slump.
That’s the lot.
The beautiful and intriguing eye image was created by Margaret Almon
Slow down mate, one should know better than to follow Academics critiques of business transactions. And read the Segal note on the former Treasury plan.
My non-academic take is that all this effort is meant to somehow bring back the economy that was. It’s dead. It’s not going to be like that again. A lot of average citizens are still standing here hoping the government will somehow make it all right again.
If we had to give back most of the growth since 1995 or so, there’s still some left, and it averages out to a modest growth, not a boom. Probably more like what was to be expected.
I think things will be like this for a long time, most of the rest of my life.
What’s sad is that America gave away so much of its productive work, and collectively decided to be a nation that masturbates money for a living instead of doing jobs.
Kid-glove treatment of bankers? Ask William K. Black. This is a must read:
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04032009/transcript3.html
Thanks for chiming in, Lounsbury. The WSJ article I thought merely interesting and passed it on. I recently heard the other, questioning the liquidity strategy, in an interview with George Soros as well.
Callimachus, I agree with that completely. I think that the federal government needs to stop picking winners and losers.
I just found this–very cool to see my mosaic! Thanks for the credit and the link.