Way to Think, Megan

25 Nov 2008 12:15 pm

Another way to think about Paulson

A friend IM's:  "For all those salivating at the thought of a second New Deal, this is what 'bold, persistent experimentation' looks like -- kinda  messy."  Indeed.  My question:  will consumer confidence be bolstered more by confident persistence (possibly in the wrong direction), or by a hypermanic government that seems willing to try anything?  Or will neither work, and we're simply hosed?

Hosed is much too mild a word. I suppose that usage means the only standards left at The Atlantic are FCC standards. 

As I'm so far off the grid, underground, etc., your whole "economy" thing has little or no effect on me, & I haven't been paying the closest attention to capitalism's latest ("It's a natural, boom & bust business cycle") atrocity, but it seems to me that Ms. McArdle is no farther out at sea than any other half-baked pundit/talking point retyper w/ this one. It's pretty much reduced to "Nothing like this ... ever before ... duh!" & at that point it degenerates into econ groupiedom, as evidenced here.

25 Nov 2008 12:27 pm

Deep bench?

I have to disagree with Ezra Klein:  Obama's got a much, much better economics team than Bush started out with.  I agree with his endorsement of Glenn Hubbard.  But Paul O'Neill wasn't exactly an a-lister even before he turned out to have fantastic(ally entertaining!) verbal impulse control problems.  And Larry Lindsay did not match up to Larry Summers in stature, though of course what he got fired for was not being incompetent, but telling the truth.  Bush's second term team has actually been pretty stellar, but his first term left a lot to be desired.  Unfortunately, Bush's second term team--and the incoming Obama team--have had a lot higher hurdles to jump.

In real life sports analogies, there's generally a record involved. This being an entirely new, world-wide situation, everybody's a rookie. 

But if the real issues for McArdle are bolstering consumer & market confidence (in order to get started on another boom & bust cycle) why don't any of these fucks stop to consider that a house of cards, backed by absolutely nothing, finally & completely dependent on such human emotions as greed, fear, hate, pain, rage, resentment & so forth is as stupid an idea as has been concieved by any alleged science short of Mengele's experiments on human beings.