naked capitalism

ndk says:

Extensive discussion of What to do? over at Economist’s View. Walt and I take each other to the woodshed, I have an epiphany about why China can’t revalue the yuan that I’ll post here on the next China thread, and it seems all outcomes suck.

M.G. says:

Krugman is not making at all a convincing economic and logic case for a big and quick fiscal stimulus. His case is being mounted on a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy: if we do it, it will work and if it will work we must do it, now.

Andrew Foland says:

This story is more unvarnished than the Black Friday coverage I see in the US.

Thank you for this comment! In Boston, malls and electronics stores looked like a normal weekend yesterday (at best); today (Saturday) was, if anything, a slow (but not horrible) Saturday. The toy store had more employees than shoppers.

Yet what do I see on TV? “Vast crowds line up for days, shop until they kill people!” I’m sure there are isolated crowds. But they are isolated, not representative.

The disparity between reality and the news on this subject was enough last night to mention to my wife that I felt like I was gaining an understanding of what it was like to read Pravda.

doc holiday says:

Are those songs for the inauguration ball?

I remember the great feeling watching Fleetwood Mac playing Don’t Stop, for The Clinton’s, and getting pumped up for change — but things did stop and they did change, and now many years later, we have, as a nation, a new chance to begin and look at what can be — looking back, reminded that, “Yes We can”, realizing, yes we did, and now what? Can we?

I hope that The Obama Music Programe is not too weird, not too old, not too un-original, but perhaps a connection to something heart-felt and emotional like Dylan or some American that cuts to the bone and passes over all the bullshit and the pop lyrics that caught the ear of The Clinton’s. Maybe even some mournful and somber thing from johnny Cash? I hope we don’t see the violent heart-felt despair of young people and the angry rap that morphs into some foul desecration of what America may still be or has been, or the synthetic up-beat happy sound connected to some shopping mall tunes that pump up people to believe in the spirit of XMAS.

I’d like to hear truth from Obama and then songs that are based on the emotion of The American Experience, something we can all share and feel, versus feeling out of touch.

If Obama can’t solve the mystery of
inauguration music he won’t have a chance for the economic nightmare that is unfolding!

Anonymous says:

Here’s the nub of Krugman’s economics: “Depression economics, however, is the study of situations where there is a free lunch, if we can only figure out how to get our hands on it, because there are unemployed resources that could be put to work.” The problem with this is that there are always unemployed resources. When oil prices were 150frns/barrel there was lots of unemployed oil and there is even more now. Seems like labor is different but it isn’t. You have to have capital, e.g. food, clothing, shelter (or else equivalent paychecks) to employ that labor. I grant that now that the US (the leader of the rational world) has transcended racism we can engage in a dispassionate discussion of the merits of restoring slavery. However even slaves have to be paid in food, clothing and shelter.