For a while, the Wall Street meltdown gave the rich a bad name.
Even they seemed embarrassed by their own excess. There were reports of designer shops packaging purchases in plain paper bags.
But as going downscale lost its novelty, the rich have grown weary of their own embarrassment. Gratuitous extravagance is making a comeback. I noticed a Tiffany's ad in a Toronto newspaper last week for a "diamond solitaire on a platinum band of channel-set diamonds. From $3,550 to $1,000,000."
Our
economy has gone into the toilet over the past 30 years, and President Obama
and his advisors think "free trade" is the solution. Like Bill Clinton and both George Bush's, he's so enamored
of it he's even recommending it to poor African nations.
President Obama was elected with a large enough mandate for fundamental change that he could forge a fresh social compact, lock in place a new set of mutual obligations and rewrite the relationship between the state and the populace.
For the book I'm writing about unemployed Americans, I had no trouble finding
accountants,
brokers,
cashiers, or
die casters. Admittedly, I had to go out of town to interview the die casters. But when I arrived, alphabetically, at unemployed
editors, I had only to look in my address book.
Financiers were further from my life experience than either die casters or editors.
Is America on its way to becoming a boiled frog?
I’m referring, of course, to the proverbial frog that, placed in a pot of cold water that is gradually heated, never realizes the danger it’s in and is boiled alive. Real frogs will, in fact, jump out of the pot — but never mind. The hypothetical boiled frog is a useful metaphor for a very real problem: the difficulty of responding to disasters that creep up on you a bit at a time.
And creeping disasters are what we mostly face these days.
The so-called "green shoots" of recovery are turning brown in the scorching summer sun. In fact, the whole debate about when and how a recovery will begin is wrongly framed. On one side are the V-shapers who look back at prior recessions and conclude that the faster an economy drops, the faster it gets back on track. And because this economy fell off a cliff late last fall, they expect it to roar to life early next year. Hence the V shape.
As soon as the Obama administration-in-waiting announced its stimulus plan — this was before Inauguration Day — some of us worried that the plan would prove inadequate. And we also worried that it might be hard, as a political matter, to come back for another round.
We bailed out the banks to the tune of 2 trillion dollars in the past year, put through an enormous stimulus bill, bailed out the European banks, put through yet another war supplemental, and never asked how we were going to pay for it. We just wrote a bunch of big checks.
But now that it has come to taking care of the health of Americans, well, we have to tighten the old belt and it's suddenly "pay-as-you-go."
Mortgage lenders don't try to rework most home loans held by borrowers facing foreclosure because it would probably mean losing money, a study released yesterday by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston concludes.
The Boston Fed's findings suggest the Obama administration's major effort to solve the foreclosure crisis by giving the lending industry $75 billion to rewrite delinquent loans to more affordable levels is not likely to work.
BRUSSELS - World powers pushed for sweeping financial reforms to prevent another crisis Thursday, with EU leaders set to join Washington in calling for tough new controls despite British reservations.
A day after US President Barack Obama's administration unveiled a shake-up of US financial regulation, EU leaders are to approve steps to set up three new pan-European authorities to oversee banks, insurers and securities firms.
