Republicans Pull Hit and Run on Economy
March 31, 2009 6:31 pm

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Dow 36,000? and your pension
March 31, 2009 7:49 pm

Paul Krugman

So in 2007 the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation - which stands behind corporate pensions - switched from bonds only to lots of stocks, buying in at, natch, the peak of the market. Oops. And this is big stuff: the Bush administration may have left us all a gratuitous loss of hundreds of billions.

Why did this happen? I’m sure we’ll find some nasty stuff, but at least part of the reason was that the Bush administration, like many conservatives, was under the spell of the following pseudo-syllogism:

1. The stock market captures the essential spirit of capitalism.

2. Capitalism roolz!

3. Therefore, stocks will go up.

The most influential disseminator of this fallacy is the Wall Street Journal, which as far as I can tell has cheered on every bubble since the 1920s, always dismissing the skeptics as fools and promoting the dumbest bull-market arguments available. I don’t have time to search for it right now, but I think there was an editorial circa 2000 saying precisely that anyone who questioned the bull market of the time was anti-capitalist.

And now the cost for that attitude is falling on you and me.

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Stephen Colbert Rips Apart Glenn Beck: Building His Career On 9/11
April 1, 2009 11:07 am

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The 10/31 Project
comedycentral.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor NASA Name Contest

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Pitchforks and Pistols
April 4, 2009 4:51 pm

Charles M. Blow, NYT

......Others have been much more explicit.

For example, Chuck Norris, the preeminent black belt and prospective Red Shirt, wrote earlier this month on the conservative blog WorldNetDaily: “How much more will Americans take? When will enough be enough? And, when that time comes, will our leaders finally listen or will history need to record a second American Revolution?”

Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, imagining herself as some sort of Delacroixian Liberty from the Land of the Lakes, urged her fellow Minnesotans to be “armed and dangerous,” ready to bust caps over cap-and-trade, I presume.

And between his tears, Glenn Beck, the self-professed “ href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/30/business/media/30beck.html?scp=2&sq=glenn%20beck&st=cse" title="Recent profile of Beck in The Times">rodeo clown,” keeps warning of an impending insurrection by saying that he believes that we are heading for “depression” and “revolution” and then gaming out that revolution on his show last month. “Think the unthinkable” he said. Indeed.

All this talk of revolution is revolting, and it hasn’t gone unnoticed.

As the comedian Bill Maher pointed out, strong language can poison weak minds, as it did in the case of Timothy McVeigh. (We sometimes forget that not all dangerous men are trained by Al Qaeda.)

At the same time, the unrelenting meme being pushed by the right that Obama will mount an assault on the Second Amendment has helped fuel the panic buying of firearms. According to the F.B.I., there have been 1.2 million more requests for background checks of potential gun buyers from November to February than there were in the same four months last year. That’s 5.5 million requests altogether over that period; more than the number of people living in Bachmann’s Minnesota.

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Robert Reich: It's a Depression, and we need more stimulus money
April 4, 2009 5:14 pm

......All this means that the real economy will need a larger stimulus than the $787 billion already enacted. To be sure, only a small fraction of the $787 billion has been turned into new jobs so far. The money is still moving out the door. But today's bleak jobs report shows that the economy is so far below its productive capacity that much more money will be needed.

This is still not the Great Depression of the 1930s, but it is a Depression. And the only way out is government spending on a very large scale. We should stop worrying about Wall Street. Worry about American workers. Use money to build up Main Street, and the future capacities of our workforce.

Energy independence and a non-carbon economy should be the equivalent of a war mobilization. Hire Americans to weatherize and insulate homes across the land. Don't encourage General Motors or any other auto company to shrink. Use the auto makers' spare capacity to make busses, new wind turbines, and electric cars (why let the Chinese best us on this?). Enlarge public transit systems.

Meanwhile, extend our educational infrastructure. So many young people are out of work that they should be using this time to improve their skills and capacities. Expand community colleges. Enlarge Pell Grants. Extend job-training opportunities to the unemployed, so they can learn new skills while they're collecting unemployment benefits.

Finally, accelerate universal health care.

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In Memorium
April 4, 2009 7:37 pm

Jesus' General

The Opinion that getting rid of the Glass-Steagull Act "would be a wonderful idea" died on March 26th, 2009 while on vacation in the Bahamas. The Opinion, born in the 1930s (right after the creation of the Glass-Steagull Act) and fully realized in 1999 when Congress passed and President Clinton signed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (which nullified GSA and its close friend the Bank Holding Company Act) had been suffering ill health for the past six months.

A private service was held for family and a few friends at Our Mother of Incomprehensible Securitization in Sweaty Palms, Florida. Pall bearers included former President Bill Clinton, Phil "Gitcha" "Gotcha" Gramm, Milton Friedman, Penny Pritzker, magician David Copperfield, Alan Greenspan and a visibly shaken Scrooge McDuck.

The deceased Opinion enjoyed traveling, golf, yachting and hiding. It is survived by the Opinion "The invisible hand of the free market will fix everything" and its cousin "Mine! Mine! Mine!"

In lieu of flowers the family has asked that contributions be made to bankers and insurance agents everywhere.

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Class War in the Media
April 5, 2009 5:20 pm

Dean Baker

.....The people running these banks were unable to see an $8 trillion housing bubble, the largest financial bubble in the history of the world. They sold bonds and complex derivative instruments that only had value if this bubble would continue to inflate. Now, as we sit in the wreckage, with millions of people having lost their jobs in construction, manufacturing, real estate, and other areas, we are supposed to use taxpayer dollars to pay these bankers multi-million dollar bonuses?....

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The Cost of Republican Economics
April 5, 2009 8:02 pm

Shortly before the first signs of the stock market collapse, the Bush administration made a crucial decision that has propelled an estimated one to two million workers into stock-heavy retirement funds.

Many of the funds in which workers were automatically enrolled dropped more than 25 percent last year, while a more conservative investment strategy rejected by the Bush administration would have resulted in a gain of 4.7 percent.

The administration's decisions came in response to a congressional mandate to encourage more workers to participate in company-sponsored retirement savings plans. The Bush administration came up with a rule that enabled businesses to automatically enroll their workers in tax-free 401(k) retirement plans.

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Employers Continue to Shed Jobs at a Record Pace
April 5, 2009 10:08 pm

Employers shed 663,000 jobs in March - the third largest one-month fall in employment since 1949. The second largest was in December 2008, and the largest was in January 2009. Total job losses are now at 5.1 million since the recession began in December 2007, and nearly two-thirds of the total (3.3 million) have occurred in just the last five months.

The unemployment rate spiked 0.4 percentage points up to 8.5 percent in March, and is now higher than at any time since 1983. There are 13.2 million people unemployed - more than at any other time in history. And 5.3 million additional people became unemployed over the past year - more than any other year since the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics began tabulating this data just after World War II.

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How Much Do We Have to Pay Fannie and Freddie Execs to Lose Us Billions?
April 5, 2009 10:30 pm

Dean Baker

Apparently we have to give them more than $200 million in bonuses to give them enough incentive to lose taxpayers billions of dollars. The NYT says that 213 employees are slated for bonuses of more than $100k each and the top paid ones will pocket over $1 million.

That seems like a lot of money. After all, can't we pay a high school kid the minimum wage to throw away taxpayer dollars. Just to be clear, I'm not referring to the money that was lost on their prior loans, I'm referring to the money that they are losing on the loans that Fannie and Freddie are buying every day......

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