Oct 092008
 

As I write, the stock market is flatlining, credit has seized up, no one seems to know what to do, and bad times seem in store. What caused it? Not what you think. Not, basically, greedy Wall Streeters, ordinary consumers taking on loans they could not pay off, bad accounting requirements, faulty credit ratings, failures of regulators to regulate, nor a formerly too rosy outlook from the Fed. These were all surface phenomena. What lay […]

Oct 022008
 

While a money-economic downturn would have happened anyway, it need not have hit with the precipitousness it did. That has to be blamed quite substantially on the combination of cupidity and stupidity of the elite bankers. Here’s why. The sub-prime mortgage meltdown began months ago. As more foreclosures are instigated, the adjacent homes lost value, helping lead to still further foreclosures — thus lowering the value of the collateralized debt obligations that include “tranches” of […]

Sep 292008
 

It seems to me unlikely that the financial crisis now will not lead to a full-fledged economic crisis, nor that there is much the government can really do about it. The Paulson plan was at best a Hail-Mary  pass that incidentally preserves much of the hyper-inflated Wall Street which gave him his own half-billion dollar nest egg. I will write more about all this and its connection with the rising Attention Economy soon. Meanwhile here […]