Caution, train wreck in progress

More news later today on my new/old book project, but for a moment let’s look at what’s happening in Greece, because I’ve become quite convinced that markets have gone completely mad and the world economy is about to suffer for that madness. In fact I am sure of it. That’s because stocks are up today on word of a second debt bailout for Greece — a bailout that has no more hope of standing than the one before it. Greece is bound to default, beginning a likely fall of economic dominoes across Europe. And while that news is not explicitly about technology, it will certainly affect all of us interested in technology, because Greece is […]

Women and Children First

titanicToday is the Labor Day holiday in the USA, so to honor the more vulnerable parts of our society and economy I’m engaging in this fantasy rethinking of our current economic crisis.  If only……

When the “unsinkable” ship Titanic hit an iceberg and sank on its maiden voyage in 1911, as any teenage girl will tell you, the rich people got nearly all the lifeboats (except for John Jacob Astor IV who ordered another drink, giving up his seat), dooming the lower-class passengers including, of course, poor Leonardo DiCaprio. Much the same thing seems to be happening in the case of the current economic crisis, where the people who are hurting the most seem to be […]

Smith/Krugman Part 2 (of 3)

I’ll try to finish all the clips today. Here is the second batch and I went back to Krugman/Smith05 and unlocked it, sorry. That clip is also included here in case you don’t want to go back to the previous post to view it.

The Adam Smith & Paul Krugman Show

We’ll get back to health care tomorrow, but first I have several video clips to share.

Adam Smith is a best-selling author and for 14 years had a weekly show on PBS called Adam Smith’s Money World that won four Emmys and a Peabody Award.  He’s a very smart guy.  Smith was Tom Wolfe’s editor at Esquire, founded Institutional Investor and New York magazines, and somewhere in there about 25 years ago became a friend of mine.  I try to collect heroes and this guy is definitely one of mine.

Smith lives in Princeton, NJ, next-door to Paul Krugman, Princeton professor, New York Times Op-Ed columnist and oh, by-the-way, winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics.

I wonder how he invested that money?

On July 8th Smith […]

Wall Street and Main Street Don’t Cross

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When Barack Obama was running for President one of his favorite sound bites was that any financial bailout should not just involve Wall Street, but Main Street, too – that the government’s responsibility was to help both bankers and homeowners. But now that the election is won and Obama is in office, the two streets are still being treated very differently, with Main Street getting a lot less help from Washington.

This is a HOUSING crisis, not a BANKING crisis, yet $700+ billion has gone to help bankers and only $75 billion to “help” homeowners. The banker’s money has mainly been spent and the homeowner money has hardly been touched. If this is a […]