Is there anyone out there, ANYBODY, who knows just what the hell is going on with the economy? No matter who I hear talking about this mess, whether its a politician, a talking-head journalist, a supposed “expert”, or someone in the financial sector, no two stories (or 10 for that matter) match up. Is it really that complicated or is it just that nobody wants to fess up that they or their group screwed up?
Anyone else have a viable theory of what went wrong? If so, please, enlighten me.
In the meantime, I think I’ll go try fixing my washing machine and have a beer… not necessarily in that order…
6 users commented in " Somebody? Anybody? "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackMiles, I feel your pain. I think we all feel a tad lost in the maelstrom. If I had to point you to just two writers to pay attention to to help unravel the complexity, they would probably be these:
Washington Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein, whose column archive is here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2005/03/24/LI2005032400138.html
and economist Nouriel Roubini, who was among the first to warn about the trouble the housing bubble could do to the larger economy:
http://www.rgemonitor.com/roubini-monitor
Do let me know if they helped any.
Thanks for the links, John. But I’m afraid they only serve to prove my point. Roubini asks if the $700 billion bailout is the best solution to the problem and answers a resounding “NO”. But Pearlstein seems to be saying that rejecting the bailout plan is a fatal mistake and that Americans in general just don’t get how serious this problem is.
So again, it appears that I’m back to square one.
Sorry, I shouldn’t laugh, but this did make me chuckle a little. I guess I really did help you prove your point. But this is an incredibly complex subject, and I hope you don’t give up in trying to master it at least enough to be a responsible citizen. We can’t leave it up to the professional political class, since they helped put us in this mess in the first place.
Oh no, not giving up at all. And those two writers you suggested are some of the most articulate about the crisis.
Good. And by the way, I think that as a poet-engineer, you probably have access to more menntal connections balancing the right and left hemispheres of the brain than most of us, and thus can probably understand things in a way beyond most of us. So keep leveraging all that brainpower as god intended.
Oh, I don’t know about that. But I will keep trying.
Leave A Reply