Finally, FINALLY the Bailouts / Credit Market / Whole FUBAR makes some SENSE!
Okay, this is the best thing I’ve found all week.
Like many people, I’m worried about the economy, I’m anxious to call/influence my legislators the right way, and I’m not an economist. But the “ground-level” or “layperson”-type explanations I’m getting through the mass media are not enough; even I can tell they’re some combination of flawed, oversimplified and disingenuous. And they keep using words like “credit swap” and “derivatives”, without defining those terms so I can get an accurate picture of what’s actually going on.
ARGH!
HOWEVER. I think yesterday evening my boy caught us a break, by finding this article. (It’s actually a book excerpt, I think.) This makes more sense, seems more rational and genuine and likely an explanation, than anything I’ve seen so far. The writer holds a law degree and writes non-fiction, research-oriented books for a living — and you can tell; her sources are sound, and she presents information with the ruthless clarity of that teacher you had in high school who somehow made you remember every single word s/he uttered.
I AM SO RELIEVED RIGHT NOW. I mean, yes, the situation is still scary — maybe even scarier, subjectively, than it was yesterday — but I understand it much better, and good information cuts my stress level like almost nothing else. I also like that the author doesn’t end this explanation on a doom-and-gloom note; there are good ideas here for what can be done, going forward, if not to rescue the rich people who dug themselves this hole, then at least to salvage jobs and industries and mortgages and people, and that makes me happy to know.
Love to hear your comments / insights / etc., if you happen to have any laying around. (Shutup, I have etc. laying around all the time.)
Sorta side-note — all this got me reading up on New Deal, which I’ll admit I didn’t know much about before, other than that it was responsible for the Social Security Administration. One of the more interesting things I’ve learned about that has to do with railroads: Did you know that we didn’t need all the railroad tracks we built all over the United States? Roosevelt basically saw that the economy was suffering from a lack of good jobs, and decided that hey, infrastructure is always a good investment, and the economy can’t recover with all these people unemployed, so…he had the government start building railroads. Everywhere. I’m sure some people thought the government had gone guano for doing it — but of course, with the railroads in place, they started getting used, and not only did the job market benefit, but industry and travel increased exponentially thanks to the spiffy new infrastructure, from which the government ended up making tons of money back on the long-term. (And, in case you haven’t noticed, seventy years later we’re still benefitting from much of it!)
…Now, can you imagine what would happen in the U.S. if we did the same thing, upgrading our existing system to (or adding to it with) high-speed rail? Bye-bye, airline snafu! I’m taking the Maglev!!
Sorry about the digression, though — in addition to being happy and relieved about the Derivatives article, I’m also flamingly pissed-off this morning about the Big Three Bailout (Mark…what, three? Seven? How many times have we bailed out these assholes again??) Some professor (conveniently an ex-industry-executive) was explaining to NPR how this wasn’t really a bailout; instead it’s just like the government investing in bio-sciences because it’s good for the economy.
Because, you know, a few outdated monopolies are totally the same thing as a budding research industry. And, like, it’s totally okay for our capitalist government to be supporting private companies (remember, Chrysler isn’t even publically-traded anymore) with $billions in taxpayer money. Totally.
…I hit my poor radio, but thankfully didn’t crash my car. *sigh*
(I’m also lucky I didn’t damage my radio — oddly enough, these iron-fist exercises and arm-strengthening jiggers I’ve been doing for a month or so have made my “hitting something” a far more destruction-prone event!)