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There’s this excellent recent analogy just sitting there staring us in the face as a perfectly good answer to the question of whether cutting or increasing spending is viable solution to our debt crisis that’s creating such acrimony among Congress and waffling from the president. Just a couple years after it first crashed, pretty much all economists point to a single factor that more than any other sealed the global financial fate into that of doomed: illiquidity.
What, exactly, just happened? Just how close did we come to the brink of financial disaster with the haggling over the debt ceiling? What would that disaster look like? And what was the big stinking problem with the negotiations; in other words, what took so long?
A lot better journalists than me have dedicated some very good ink to these questions concerning the raising of the federal debt limit.
The very neat and succinct blog Parapolitical took the opportunity provided by recent murmurs about the military coup that the Greek government could face as a result of failed austerity measures and a desire to stay in the European Union to highlight a study conducted in 2004 by Harvard Business researcher Dr. Catherine Duggan. In it, Duggan surveyed the economies of 27 nations following coups each experienced between 1980 and 1997. She found that foreign investors prefer right wing paramilitary coups over left wing paramilitary coups by a landslide.
It frightens and confuses me that the field of economics, a discipline that we as a nation put such thorough and abiding stock into to make large, sweeping decisions that affect everyone, like how to allocate health care among Americans or whether to undertake air strikes in a foreign country, is so uncertain a field that it is subject to politicization. Indeed, the very economist at whose feet one sits, whether it be Adam Smith or John Maynard Keynes, is nearly synonymous in the U.S. with which political party one is affiliated.
This episode of 60 Minutes opens with the following quote: “Unemployment improved a bit last month, but it is still nearly 9%. And the trouble is, job creation is so slow that it will be years before we get back the 7.5 million jobs lost in the great recession. American families have been falling out [...]
If you watch the video and read the words in this article, it is incredibly depressing. We eat pineapples (and many other commodities like bananas, coffee beans, cocoa beans, etc.) without really thinking about or considering how they are produced. But if you go behind the scenes, you discover a human and chemical disaster: True [...]
Millions of Americans are about to face economic disaster and homelessness as their 99 weeks of unemployment benefits run out…
Last week in an interview with Tony Robbins on SYSK, Robbins made this statement:
SYSK is Motivated to Speak with Tony Robbins
the biggest concern I have in our society today, and it’s a new occurrence and it’s happened just in the last few years. We’ve seen this incredible shift where for the first time in American history, at least in a hundred years of American history, human beings in America, and it’s not just in America, it’s Europe as well, but human beings are starting now to believe, as a majority of Americans, that the quality of their life and the quality of their children’s life in the future is gonna be worse than the past.
(BTW, his show if available on Hulu)
That thought got stuck in my head. And then it was repeated today in an article in the WSJ…
Growing up in the ’70s and ’80s, I spent a lot of time in arcades and skating rinks. And I love pinball. Unfortunately, virtually all of the giant game manufacturers — at least, the ones still in operation — have discontinued the game. As far as I know, Stern Pinball is the only company in the United States still making machines.
Ig Nobel Prizes 2009: Panda Poop and Economy Wrecking
by Robert Lamb | October 9, 2009
As you might have noticed, a few of us here at HowStuffWorks.com devoted a little blog time this week to run down this year’s Ig Nobel Prizes, the absurdest cousin of the more prestigious awards. In this post, you’ll find the links to the rest of the Ig Nobel blog entries from Josh, Chuck, Allison, Sarah and myself. But first, I thought I’d run through the two remaining winners.
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