What looked for some time to just be our own little homegrown problem seems to be making the global rounds. Some crazy bank stuff is happening in Iceland. And the rest of the world seems to be getting beyond miffed with us for pulling them down. Way to make friends and influence people Wall Street.
And to top it all off, the spouse shares this morning that the top muckety-mucks at AIG just went on a "retreat" that cost over $400,000. Why do I get the sneaking suspicion that my tax dollars just paid for some fat, pasty broker to get a facial???
Is it any wonder that our economy is in a free fall folks? More and more I am starting to wonder if we don't all deserve this harsh bump of reality. But maybe I am just grumpy because I am having a bad hair day.
2 comments:
No, I'm with you on thinking maybe we deserve this. Well, not me and you obviously--just everyone else!
I keep thinking how this will all play out in the history books. And I also think about how the Soviet Union collapsed in part because of its huge expenses in, yes, Afghanistan. We're still there and still in Iraq, funneling in cash while our economy teeters and totters. If Palin says paying taxes isn't patriotic, then I'm going to refuse to fund these silly adventures any more!
I listen to and read a lot a punditry - probably much more than anyone should. Like most of us lay people, I've been hungering to understand what's going on and who we can trust, if anyone. And I have gradually gleaned from most of the comments, including some from many top economists, is that even they are having a hard time wrapping their heads around a solution or sometimes even imagining the possibility of a solution. Economists know how this happened, but don't know how much worse it can and will get and how or if when we'll recover.
For us lay folk, there are two absolutely stellar episodes of NPR's This American Life that are MUST-LISTEN free downloads. One on the sub-prime mortgage meltdown: http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=355
and one about the current crisis (broadcast last week): http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=365
Each of these shows are nearly an hour long, but are FREE (each is about a 30MB mp3 file), suitable for iPod listening. Highly recommended. After you listen, you will absolutely know more about economics than Sarah Palin knows about energy.
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