Naked Capitalism Added to Library of Congress

We received this very nice note, “Permission request to archive Naked Capitalism,” last month from the Library of Congress. We thought we’d share it as part of our fundraiser:

Greetings,

My name is XXXX, and I am a Business Reference Specialist in the Library of Congress Science, Technology and Business Division (Washington, DC). I also manage and curate the Economics Blogs Web Archive (https://www.loc.gov/collections/economics-blogs-web-archive/about-this-collection/). I would like to get in touch with you about archiving the Naked Capitalism blog (https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/) for this web archive collection of the Library of Congress. The permission request sent from our web archive platform might have gone in your spam folder.

The Economics Blogs Web Archive is a digital collection that includes archived versions of blogs over time. The goal of this web archive is to capture current economic research and original thought as reflected in the blogs by professors of economics, economic policy and/or research institutions and other practitioners of economic disciplines. It is important to preserve this openly available content that covers a variety of topics in economics ranging from general macro or microeconomics to specific sub-topics in finances, taxes or healthcare economics.

For information and FAQ’s about our Web Archiving activities, visit https://www.loc.gov/programs/web-archiving/about-this-program/. Please let me know if you have further questions that are not addressed by the web archiving FAQ’s.

You can grant permission by responding to this message or emailing me at XXXX@loc.gov and we hope you will. We do not crawl websites without permission from site owners.

It appears Naked Capitalism will have lofty company.

And keep in mind, “crawling” almost certainly means copying all content, including comments. Bots aren’t typically smart enough to know where the page ends, plus we imagine archivists would want to have the contemporaneous reactions.

Of course we said yes and thanked XXX and made positive noises about this project, particularly since so much good analysis took place during the financial crisis, yet some informative sites are no longer publishing. We’ve been told by academics that Naked Capitalism is a go-to source for researching the crisis, in part because we quoted key observations from sources that are no longer on line.

We had a sneaking suspicion that XXX had played a part in initing this project. His reply:

Thank you so much for your response and permission to archive Naked Capitalism. We will start crawling as soon as it’s prepared by the tech team.

I also appreciate your comment on the importance of preserving these blogs–that has been my firmly belief as well and I am sure the archive will be of high research importance for years to come.
There is a one year embargo, which means your blog will appear on the Economics Blogs Web Archive (https://www.loc.gov/collections/economics-blogs-web-archive/about-this-collection/) page a year from now. That will be the access point for you and the public to view the archived blog content. We will be continuously archiving blogs in this collection unless they become inactive.

Thank you again, and have a wonderful weekend!

Thanks to all of you for making this milestone possible.

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51 comments

  1. Mark

    Amazing and well deserved.

    I have been reading this site since 2007. No other blog/forum or information source has held my attention as consistently and for as long. (Plenty have come and gone, mostly involving more recreational hobbies and interests. Just one has outlasted this but it is a hobby that I’ve largely left behind along with my youth.)

  2. The Rev Kev

    This is really great and well deserved news this. Maybe more so than on first glance. Years from now when they start to analyze what went wrong in the first decades of the 21st century, the Library of Congress will be an obvious first stop. But it will be quickly seen that the main stream media had it wrong mostly cross the board and never saw what was in front of them. And that is where Naked Capitalism will prove such a treasure trove. The vast range of articles and analyses within its files will give historians a priceless view of what was really happening under the hood and an understand where it all went wrong. I hope that they include comments in their crawl too as there are many a priceless gem buried within. Congrats to everyone at Naked Capitalism for this well deserved honour.

  3. IM Doc

    I cannot tell you how much this made me smile today.
    You all deserve every bit of this.

    Wouldn’t it be interesting to have this kind of treasure trove of what the average Joe thought right before the Depression, during the Spanish Flu, right after the JFK assassination?

    What a treasure trove – and all thanks to your amazing work.

    Thank you Yves and Lambert for all you do.

  4. griffen

    Congratulations, well deserved. It’s been a long while since the GFC and Great Recession. This site is such a valued destination for hard hitting analysis and frequently a thorough debunking of our leaders, elites and the narratives they expect us all to accept.

  5. JohnB

    Congratulations :) That’s a pretty nice/unexpected honour. With the prescience and accuracy of the sites analyses of many major topics/events over the years, leading ahead of other news sources, it’ll be a valuable archive for historians – as it is as a source for us all, in the present.

  6. Eileen Appelbaum

    Congratulations!! So good to see NC get this recognition. There is a wealth of important insights ri be had here

  7. GF

    Congratulations. Very important acknowledgement.
    I was wondering about the links that occur regularly in comments and posted articles. Will the links be archived in a manner that somehow preserves them and their original content as related to the comment or article where they occur even after the linked sites have gone away?

  8. shinola

    Congrat’s on a well deserved honor!

    (and a tip-of-the-hat to Barry Ritholtz who some years ago linked to some of NC’s articles which led me here)

    1. Susan the other

      Yes, Barry Ritholtz was the path I took too. And I had really been wandering around in shock and wondering what happened to it all. When I found NC I was instantly hooked. No jargon, no intellectualizing, no canned answers – just straight talk. I once said in comments how grateful I was to have found NC and that the very minute I arrived I knew I had found the well. Been drinkin’ ever since.

  9. Basil Pesto

    This is very cool, my sincere congratulations. Not bad at all for a Russian propaganda outfit ;)

    As an amateur who was too young and well off at the time to fully understand and appreciate the GFC, I often turn to the NC archives as primary source material when reading about the period (for example this year, when reading Tooze’s ‘Crashed’, or watching the HBO telemovie of Sorkin’s ‘Too Big To Fail’). So I heartily agree with XXXX’s observations about the site’s significance, especially when much of the contemporaneous coverage in the mainstream press at the time was so bereft.

    Congrats again to Yves and all her contributors over the years, and the high-value below-the-line commenters over the years who have had a lot more to offer than my snarky bullshit :~) I’ve learnt a lot from all of you and appreciate it immensely

    1. juno mas

      Yes, let me Second that eMotion!

      The level of talent that leads NC is beyond belief. The interesting perspectives of the Commentariat are both free-spirited and deeper than the sea. Hope NextGen will avail the resource at the Library of Congress.

  10. flora

    Congratulations! This is a great recognition of the quality of NC’s reporting. The Library of Congress’s collections are a national treasure.

  11. Dave in Austin

    A well-deserved spot in the Library of Congress econ blog list.

    Every day I start out with the front pages of the NYT, FOX, the Guardian/UK, Al Jazeera, POLITICO, Asahi Shimbun, Taipei Times, South China Morning Post and Chosun.com to find out what the semi-official pablum-of-the-day is. Then after 45 minutes I turn to NC to find out what the real news is. By the way, going to the link https://www.loc.gov/collections/economics-blogs-web-archive/ is worthwhile.

    I don’t believe the word “Kardashian” has appeared in NC once. Keep it up guys.

    1. Lambert Strether

      > I don’t believe the word “Kardashian” has appeared in NC once. Keep it up guys.

      A search will tell you that it has, although not often at all. We do need to pay some attention to the zeitgeist, after all.

    2. moss

      The archive list was most interesting. Thanks. There are only a handful of individual blogs, so this is certainly an honour. Well done!

      Only two economic blogs I still read have persisted in offering sufficient worthwhile substance that continues to engage me (though one has run off the rails into numerology – no, not quite JMG – but I only continue to follow its now desultory posts on a fascinated “what next?” basis) for longer than my fifteen plus years here. That other one, perhaps worthy of archival recognition in my view is Doug Nolan’s Credit Bubble Bulletin.

  12. The Representative from Credit Suisse

    While I may not be Speaker Of The House anymore, my words and True Title will live on now.

  13. JEHR

    I am so pleased and happy that NC will get the recognition it so clearly deserves. I came to NC through a blogspot (called goldmansachs666.com ) which is crumbling now but where I guest contributed by linking to important articles including NC until I realized that there were not going to be any bankers tried for the fraud they committed during the GFC. Now, I read NC instead.

  14. Rod

    Kudos on the Confirmation–well deserved, and the accompanying glow of a Surprise.
    Good Company there in the Library of Congress.
    After the GFC i was looking around hard for insight. Sometime in 2009 I stumbled into http://epicureandealmaker.blogspot.com/ — which was beautifully written but way beyond my Carpenter self–and found NC referenced there.
    What an education to wander into.
    Inspiring by the community of seekers sorting truths and policies that effect us all, and humbling by the extent of understanding of those truths and policies expressed in both articles and comments.

    In my Crafts vocabulary–that’s some real pretty work you’ve made…
    Congradulations on the recognition of your earnest work.

    1. ChrisPacific

      I miss the Epicurean Dealmaker, even though he was arguably one of the ‘bad guys.’ He was like the Anthony Bourdain of Wall Street.

      I started out at the Motley Fool and thence to Mike Shedlock’s blog. He was one of the ones who predicted the GFC in advance, and more importantly backed it up with evidence that made the conclusion apparent even to a layperson. Apart from giving regular updates on the financial status of Bear/Lehman/Citi (all clearly slow motion train wrecks) he also had an insider source that supplied regular breakdowns of a so-called ‘AAA’ mortgage backed security. He used to link to NC regularly so I started reading it more and more. I found Yves offered a more balanced and insightful view, free of the libertarian ideology that Mish was prone to, and filled in some extra details. I think my first understanding of the derivatives time bomb came from here, for example.

      Congrats to Yves and NC on this – well deserved. It’s kind of a shame that you will share space with the likes of Mankiw, but he’s certainly influential, and if you were researching the question of how economists got it so badly wrong (for example) then he would be an important primary source.

      1. Rod

        I miss the Epicurean Dealmaker, even though he was arguably one of the ‘bad guys.’ He was like the Anthony Bourdain of Wall Street.
        –yes, that’s a good handle for its attitude-one that was never denied there–

        they did have a way with the written word

        I followed a link from comments in Rolling Stone to that site.
        Working with the residual memory of the blog–i remember thinking that whoever it was writing: ‘ they made a habit of washing their hands and face and changing their clothes when they got off work’

        And how they had maybe an amazing ability to compartmentalize what they did for a good living and what they might have had to do, and sacrifice for such.
        I also recall how they thought they had payed their dues, and learned the details, and put in the time, to achieve the rewards–something they couldn’t rectify with the way they money tree was shedding rewards to those who worked at it less.

        We also both lost our longtime Best Friends at about the same time(within weeks) –and i still carry the comfort of their sensitive written tribute to our best friends with me in each years Day Minder

  15. Laughingsong

    Take THAT, PropOrNot!

    Wow, just….wow! What a great piece of news to encounter first thing on a Sunday morning. That, and that especially killer-cute tiger cub in the fundraiser email! Thanks for making my day. I will certainly contribute though I think it’ll have to wait for the next paycheck – I’ve been shopping early for Christmas this year and am a bit skint at the moment.

  16. Jeremy Grimm

    Congratulations! I believe future historians will notice a much higher correlation between the predictions and analysis in Naked Capitalism and what actually happens in the political economy than they will discover through study of most of the other “…economic research and original thought as reflected in the blogs by professors of economics, economic policy and/or research institutions and other practitioners of economic disciplines”.

    If comments will indeed be included as part of the archive, I suppose we should all take especial care for our spelling and editing. I would also highly recommend that commenters make a practice of introducing the acronyms they use by stating the entire word string the acronym represents followed by the acronym in brackets — e.g. Naked Capitalism [NC], or Military Industrial Complex [MIC]. This is especially important when using acronyms for expressions that might only show up in the latest ‘Urban Dictionary’. Otherwise, the future historians will not only deal with archaic language and usages, but also various dialects and sub-dialects of slang and web-talk. Imagine trying to read Chaucer in Middle English with a smattering of the current slang and urban talk, some of it presented as acronyms.

    1. flora

      re: acronyms and abbreviations. Good point. Imagine now reading the then local newspaper articles from 100-150 years ago. The same modern confusion about past language slang and past locally understood abbreviations applies:
      “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
      – Leslie P. Hartley (1895-1972)

  17. Woody in Florida

    Wow that is amazing but undeniably deserved. Hopefully the people will find this in the rubble after one of our completely unpredictable bubbles finally burst, so that maybe somebody important with a moral compass can prevent us from making the same mistakes over and over…at least for a little while.

  18. Elizabeth

    Congratulations to NC and Yves, Lambert and Jeri-Lyn! In my opinion there is no other site that even comes close to what you write about. Such a well-deserved honor!

  19. Ahimsa

    Kudos!

    I have been reading the site for over 10 years now! – easily the website I most often recommend to fellow internet travellers.

    NC has introduced me to eclectic writers, thinkers and commentators! becoming my first port of call for honest, incisive, takes and analyses of pivotal world events.

    There is such a wealth of knowledge available here and I do not exaggerate to say that I have frequently found myself better informed about various topics than professional friends and acquaintances (engineers, venture capitalists, MBAs, doctors, journalists).

  20. Glen

    Congratulations – very, very well deserved!

    Nice to see at least one part of our government doing the job!

  21. Mucho

    Congratulations! It makes me happy to hear that such an intellectual treasure-trove will be preserved.

  22. Jozef IMRICH

    Congratulations are in order ?It is said that every treasure is guarded by congressional library dragons. That’s how you can tell it’s valuable …
    Clothed in trends, patterns and insightful wisdom, ‘Naked Capitalism’ rocks …

  23. ChrisRUEcon

    Huzzah! This is amazing and all of you who have worked so hard on making and keeping this site as special as it is deserve so much thanks and admiration …♥♥♥♥♥

    It was #MMT, and specifically cross-posts from neweconomicperspectives.org that brought me here. This Family Blog always feels like home, even when I’m mostly lurking. Gonna put my money where my keyboard is for the fund raiser too. Thank you for this truly special place.

  24. drumlin woodchuckles

    One hopes the Library of Congress is able to put all this material onto microfiche and microfilm also, for when the web and the net and then the power grids go down for good.

  25. hemeantwell

    Congratulations to Yves and everyone else here. NC is one of the best examples of what internet-based issue coverage can be. I often refer people to it as an antidote to disinformation despair and it’s rare that they’re not encouraged and impressed.

  26. Wukchumni

    It’s a major award!

    Congrats on being considered to be so valuable a part of the conversation and having a leg up on the competition.

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