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The End of the World as We Know It

The Money Meltdown is your one-stop-shop for information on the current global economic crisis. Its excellent design values make it a calming way to encounter extremely alarming information.

Speaking of which, as a follow up to the excellent Giant Pool Of Money, This American Life has come out with the aptly named Another Frightening Show About the Economy. 

Update: The fine folks who brought you the alarming TAL segments above have created the Planet Money Podcast. 

Among the most interesting aspects of the AFSAtE linked above is a passing reference to asymmetrical information - the idea that one party in a transaction knows more, or different things, than another.  Much economic theory is implicitly predicated upon transparency and the free flow of information. But in actuality - in policy, the economy, and countless other fields of human endeavor, information is not distributed equally.  IN this case, thos means that the credit freeze comes as a result of the complexities of the Credit Default Swaps, or as a result of the fact that they are unregulated and therefore, institutions that hold the CDS's, i.e. highly leverged bonds, know more about their exposure to the toxic securities than lender whom they are beseeching for credit. 

A reminder

... to keep things in perspective.

A Grim Meathook Future

Prognostications:  

“Of course, nobody really wants to talk about that future, because it’s depressing and not fun and doesn’t have Fischerspooner doing the soundtrack. So everybody pretends they don’t know what the future holds, when the unfortunate fact is that — unless we start paying very serious attention — it holds what the past holds: a great deal of extreme boredom punctuated by occasional horror and the odd moment of grace.”

 

And:

"Scientists recently back from the Russian region say the world's largest frozen peat bog is melting into shallow lakes. It is thawing for the first time since it formed 11,000 years ago.

The area, a million square kilometres, is equivalent to the size of France and Germany and could release billions of tonnes of methane, a greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere, the New Scientist said on its website."

Aftermath

Acrimony and recrimination fill the air and spent shell cases litter the ground.  But now that the traditional democratic firing squad has formed (always in the shape of a circle, for some reason), we have to go about the business of washing the ashen taste of bitter defeat from our mouths.

The first step is to assess what went wrong. Teeming droves of commentators have spent the week spilling much ink on such matters as whether we hate our neighbors; whether we must secede; whether they must secede; whether the rapture will return our country to normal, or whether it isn’t as big a deal as it seems. Of all the competing analyses, I think a few are very cogent and point towards next steps.

Bring the Noise

As it should appear in the Congressional Record:

As a quick-thinking senatorial aide switched on the Senate’s public-address system and cued up the infamous “Seven Minutes of Funk” break, Mr. Leahy and Mr. Cheney went head-to-head in what can only be described as a “take no prisoners” freestyle rap battle.

Funny Pages

I started reading Doonesbury in college. This had little to do with an emergent or shifting political consciousness on my part, rather, it was a means to spend a few more minutes in the campus grill/ coffee shop before heading to class. What started as procrastination became habit which became a ten year interest in the lives of a peer group old enough to be my parents.

Everyone knows the innovations and the tropes that Doonesbury brought to the funny pages (aging in “real time,” Mike’s summer day dreams, six-month-long vacations, strong metafictional elements). But no one reads the funnies for formal experimentation (a shame that the newspaper/syndicate side of the business discourages such work – we might still have Calvin and Hobbes were it otherwise) – we read them for the stories and the engaging characters.

Of the cast, the character I have traditionally had the least affinity for is B.D. This perpetually helmet clad authority figure has always saluted whatever ran up the flag. He was a joiner and his helmet signified his willingness be (literally) a team player. His helmet is a totem of his sense of duty, obligation, and his suspicion that hippies were truly dangerous. After graduation, he traded the football helmet for an infantryman’s helmet when he went to Viet Nam, a motorcycle helmet when he joined the California Highway Patrol, and once again, a soldier’s helmet for Gulf Wars I and II. He always did his duty, even what that duty ill served him and his family.

But here’s the thing: while I don’t always agree with B.D., he’s the only person I know serving in Iraq.

Pax Americana

Here we are at the center of things. It has rained for more about a week now. A brief respite on Monday allowed us a glimpse of the sun. I also saw the sun on Saturday afternoon while riding the metro from D.C. to the park-and-ride where our car waited out the day. The sun was a flat orange disk seen through five days worth of cloud cover and years worth of air pollution. It seemed a million miles away.