You know, I had a great idea for a post today, then got home and saw that Brad DeLong had already done it. Brad Delong is much smarter than I am, and he’s a world-class economist to boot. I can’t outdo Brad DeLong. So I’ll steal his pictures, instead, and add one or two others:
The S&P 500:
The TED spread:
Housing prices:
Unemployment:
The U.S. national debt:
So how screwed are we?
Also, happy new year!
yeah.
i loved the front page of the times today. so sky is falling. it’s true, we are totally screwed.
i know that it’s completely fucked up of me, but i am taking a sort of perverse pleasure in watching this unfold.
I was too sleep-deprived when I was putting together this post to articulate it, but I also take a perverse pleasure in it. Some parts of the crisis, like the stock crash and the bursting of the housing bubble, affect me hardly at all in a direct way. On the other hand, the drop in housing prices looks to be causing a pretty bad recession, and that sucks for me and everyone I know. And this bailout plan — I’m not an economist, but enough smart economists were against it that I feel like going with my instincts that it was a bad idea for ordinary taxpayers, tremendously expensive without any guarantee of actually working.
Terrorists who have hijacked the economy and they are threatening to shoot our 401Ks if we don’t give in to their demands.
The people’s response: United 93
I was thinking of DP Moynihan’s comment about the Depression, “It wasn’t that big of a deal, we were all broke, that’s all, no one had any money, we were all broke together.”
I hope everyone likes where they’ve ended up, because we might all be stuck here for a while.
I started thinking this morning, Thank God this did not happen 4 or 5 months from now under President Obama. This is Bush’s recession and I don’ think the efforts to blame Democrats for it will gain any traction; whereas they would stand a very good chance of doing so with a Democrat in office.
The bailout is primarily a proposal to protect massive piles of ill-gotten wealth, with only a hope that it will save the economy. I can promise you this–if we capitulate to these assholes they will be be back for more, asking us to double down or granny is going to be eating dog food.
There are upsides to depressions and recessions that no one is talking about.
All I can say is, with the country in the state it’s in, if the Democrats can’t win this presidential election, we’ll never win one again. This should be a huge gimme. Even if our guy is black and has a funny name. 35 MORE DAYS!
I like to imagine each of those pretty lines as someone’s EKG. I’ll let you all assign them to whomever you wish.
ouch. that would be a lot of people coding and getting shocked if those were ekgs!
is anybody with me???!!!
annie, get your paddles ready!
5. So true, Lane. We were hoping to get out of Portland by next year, now it looks like we’re probably gonna be sturck here a couple more years…
HFSOAS, only this Congress could come back from the failed bailout, a Wall Street boondoggle designed to protect generational wealth, with millions in tacked on tax cuts for the wealthy, and call that a compromise.
Expect the markets to drop like Bush’s cold nut in a sauna come Wed morning, before the House votes on the new “improved” bailout on Thursday. Wall Street smells blood. They will try to prime the vote with the fear of total collapse. Things will pop up a little bit on Thursday morning, when the markets will tickle our ass with a feather, coyly suggesting that things are going to be fine if we give them the money. But in the long run a massive bloodletting is inevitable, whatever the results of the vote. How we manage the bloodletting is up for debate, but I think this bailout is fubar.
LP — to that end, can I make one more plug for our Obama Mama t-shirts? I just found out we’ve made $400 for Obama so far. Every little bit counts.
http://www.cafepress.com/mamazine
But what I really want is that Tracy Reece t-shirt… http://store.barackobama.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=TS29717