Dear readers,
I am going to be making some changes to the blog over the next few weeks, and anticipate the result will be a plus, although I know some of you are very resistant to anything new.
First, we will be adding some guest bloggers in regular slots, each posting one day a week. I suspect many of you already enjoy their work. Tyler Durden of Zero Hedge, Ed Harrison of Credit Writedowns, Leo Kolivakis of Pension Pulse, and Rolfe Winkler of OptionARMageddon each offer high quality commentary and analysis. Some previous guest bloggers, such as former Congressional staffer Lune and hedge fund manager Scott Frew, will also weigh in as their schedules permit.
Second, we will be doing a minor redesign in the course of moving over to WordPress. I know we need a real redesign, since the letter from the gulag look is getting a bit old, but the muse has not yet whispered to my web designer, so a mere tidying and sprucing up will have to do for now.
Third, your humble blogger has a high class problem. I have a deal agreed for a book, tentatively titled eConned: How Misguided, Overhyped Economic Theories and Policies Led Us Into the Financial Crisis, with Palgrave. Since my most prized (and far and away most expensive) book is the New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance (three volumes) I consider that to be a good omen. I have assigned myself a Bataan death march writing schedule since I want the book published by early next year. If I had any sense, I would stop blogging altogether for a few months, but I labor under the delusion that my presence will be missed (remember that De Gaulle, when asked how France would get by without him, said, “The graveyards are full of indispensable men.”).
Separately, if anyone knows of a grad or college student who might be interested in part-time interning as a researcher for the book, please have them contact me at yves@nakedcapitalism.com. And if any of you might be willing to review and comment on a chapter or two (depending on your background and interests) when I get to the point of drafting, please ping me.
I’d also welcome other forms of reader support, but am unsure if I can really leverage it (ie, if I have to spend a lot of time reading a lot of possible posts and making choices, that could well take more time than writing a post myself). One exception might be reader submitted book reviews. But I would still need a way to screen for quality and make sure they were loaded into the blog correctly. Similarly, readers send me many useful Links candidates, and I feel guilty that I don’t write personal thank you’s, but I get so many that it would take considerable time. I wish I had an idea as to how to streamline the production of the Links page.
Of necessity, I will have to blog less for the next six months. However, I will also be shifting some of my commentary to “how did we get here?” questions and issues that ought to provide new grist for reader commentary and input. Maybe I am getting burned out from the crisis, but I feel too much of my commentary keeps circling back to the same topics. The problems are not going away, and even if there are new news hooks, the themes aren’t changing all that much, the bad policies, the bad assets, the lack of will to reform, the doublespeak. I suppose in times like these, making sure one is not part of the problem and doing what one can, even in a small way, to get things on a better path is a contribution. But the trajectory of policy seems immune to public opinion and reason.
Richard Smith 
Posts
Excellent. Zero hedge is great spot.
also something perverse about wfc cutting divy today when thiey raised it into the crunch on the back of the short ban. Litte timmy was surely part of that orchestration. Unreal when the did it but poetic that they end up takign it back with their stock at 8.