Every financial bubble has its popular phrases, initialisms and acronyms. In the 1980s they were junk bonds and LBOs. The most recent bubble offered CDOs, Option ARMS, Structured Notes and a virtual lexicon of complex and convoluted financing. Though it all started to fray early in 2008, the Sept. 15 bankruptcy filing by Lehman Brothers began a new, far more frightening chapter. Today the Lehman Brothers building in Manhattan carries the name of Britain’s Barclays bank, the stock market is up more than 40% from its lows, and the ailing automotive industry has registered a couple of months of healthy growth. But while talk of economic recovery fills the air, there’s quiet acknowledgment that the economy is still on life support. Without hundreds of billions of dollars in government assistance, we don’t know quite where the economy would be, but we do know it would be worse. Even with it, economists are talking not about a V-shaped recovery but of possibly a double-dip, the dreaded W.
Did all this have to happen? The consumer excesses were building for years, and the structural flaws in our financial system — as President Obama emphasized in his Monday, Sept. 14, address to Wall Street — were a slow build as well. But it is also clear that the mad scramble for safety among financial institutions, which sent bond-market spreads out of sight and shut down access to credit for virtually everyone, began in earnest the day Lehman went down.
In the year since, institutions have changed — some grown larger, others gone — as have the people who lead them. Here’s a gallery of major players in the financial crisis — how they got into trouble, and where they are now.
Read “After the Financial Crisis, a Cleanup That Changes Everything.”
Jay Newton-Small:
.
What has to happen in order for you to report on what the Baucus bill means for health care costs in the United States?
.
I wrote a miniture screenplay in your thread here http://tinyurl.com/mtjc4p , in which reporters were somehow magically gifted with the ability to speak about the fact that Americans spend $7,421 per person per year on health care, twice the price of the developed world.
.
I guess if big Democrats don’t talk about it, you can’t either?
.
Is that how it works?
I concur with SZ. Any article that attempts, in any measure, to compare or analyze reform proposals (or bills) without providing the projected changes (if any) in per capita health care spending is, on its face, incomplete.
I get PAYGO. I get the CBO scoring. I get deficit spending. I thing those factors are largely overblown distractions, but if you need to report on them, knock yourself out. But it is journalistic malpractice to ignore the bottom line: What is America going to spend on health care after “reform” is passed?
Agree with both of you. Other things they could (and never will) discuss in depth: a) the truckloads of cash delivered to congress’ door by the corporations concerned, b) the 2.4$ trillion the wars in I/A will cost by the time we pay them off (CBO). Why is half that amount, to properly fix a thorougly broken system, why is putting gov’t to work for Americans judged to be profligate but putting it to work in countries they DO NOT give a flying sh!t about a great investment?
Imagine if for every Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin post over the last 9 months, for every MS fluff piece, they’d been spending time and energy doing what SZ does, researching how other countries do things and reporting it to their readers. Well, that’s better left to music, “imagine”ing.
“All great historical ideas started as a utopian dream and ended with reality. Whether a particular idea remains as a utopian dream or becomes a reality depends on the number of people who believe in the ideal and their ability to act upon it.”
You’re right… the Soviets never invented anything once the Iron Curtain was drawn because there was no economic incentive to do so.
.
…oh, wait.
Cliff:
.
What is the essence of liberalism?
The essence of liberalism?
.
The desire to see the benefits of society made available to everyone?
.
If you’ve got an official one, let me know, but otherwise I think it’s difficult to pin down.
For a video that shows the diverse range of media coverage this story has received check out this video- not gonna lie you guys have lost me.
http://www.newsy.com/videos/on_an_island_for_health_care_reform
These are the facts, according to impartial, absolutely reputable, economics-types at something called the OECD:
.
Americans spend $7,421 per person per year on health care.
Everyone else spends less than half of that, like Japan, for example, who spends about $3400. They live longer than us, they see the doctor more than us, they’re older than us, and they’re healthier than us, they’re happier with their system than we are with ours –yet they pay much less.
The bottom line is that we, as a country, are getting a really, really bad deal for our dollars. We’re being over-charged in a way that other countries aren’t.
Will health care reform change that? If not, then we’ll continue to go broke, but it will just happen a lot sooner after we cover everybody.
Tweaks will be made and items will be changed, but the bottom line is that liberals will not vote against health care reform.
http://www.political-buzz.com/
…and neither will centrist Democrats.
Kos claims that his poll he commissioned of the Public option in Maine shows “HUGE support”.
http://twitter.com/markos
It might be time to start asking why the two Senators from Maine hate their constituents so much?
Mencken, again, on the village:
“To get in at all he must show a talent for abasement–and abasement makes him timorous. Worse, that timorousness is not cured when he succeeds at last. On the contrary, it is made even more tremulous, for what he faces within the gates is a scheme of things made up almost wholly of harsh and unintelligible taboos, and the penalty for violating even the least of them is swift and disastrous… He must harbor exactly the right political enthusiasms and indignations… He must read and like exactly the right books, pamphlets and public journals… Within the boundaries of his curious order he is worse fettered than a monk in a cell. Its obscure conception of propriety, its nebulous notion that this or that is honorable, hampers him in every direction, and very narrowly. What he resigns when he enters, even when he makes his first deprecatory knock at the door, is every right to attack the ideas that happen to prevail within. Such as they are, he must accept them without question. And as they shift and change he must shift and change with them, silently and quickly. To hang back, to challenge and dispute, to preach reforms and revolutions–these are crimes against the brummagem Holy Ghost of the order.”
CAN ALL THE ELECTED LAWYERS TAKE ON LAWYERS?
The American public is right to be suspicious of leadership that will not take immediate and specific action that would reduce an estimated $200 billion dollars from the Nation’s annual medical bill.
http://pacificgatepost.com/2009/09/health-care-what-are-you-not-hearing.html
The administration and legislature are staying away from confronting their friends, and former classmates, in the legal profession.