'Depression Economics'

Raise, and stabilize, the interest rates. It sounds counterintuitive, but most of the money in the system is concentrated at the top right now. Lenders need an incentive to lend, and borrowers need an incentive to make sure they don't take on foolish loans at teaser rates.

Hey, Yanks. Give the bailout to me, and I will fix everything! No, really. Simply deposit the money, care of Horrible Bastard, in the First Bank of the Terrible Marching Powder, Medellin, Columbia, and I'll take it from there. Hey, it will do exactly as much good as giving the money to AIG, right?

Act now! If you don't give me a bailout, the economy will collapse, gays will get married, and terrorists will kill you and make your children GAY! For God's sake, HURRY!

Paul Krugman may have been right all this while.

The November 2008 employment report says with more than half a million jobs lost in the month, the unemployment rate has gone up by 0.2% to 6.7%. Indeed, even without the current financial eclipse, many jobs could have been redundant.

Inflating unnecessarily to expand the base of employees and growth of infrastructure so as to bloat the image of corporate during the so called ???good times??? in past decades, a good number of companies are over-employing. Now, in bad times, superfluous staff would certainly have to go first. And compulsory reduction of work force will follow gradually. This is the price to be paid in a recession induced depression, as Krugman might want to put it.

Things can only get worse, at least for the year 2009. There is no need to pretend to be optimistic. Reality is both ugly and cruel. Just face it with calm and dignity.
(Tan Boon Tee)

No bailing out anyone, no blaming presidents, senates, congress just ourselves. We did this now we pay the piper stand up, quit whining and deal with it.

One of the most distressing problems I see here is the complete vacuum of leadership from our Congress and Executive. In order to restore confidence they need to show that they understand what went wrong, punished the culprits responisble, and then write intelligent regulation to prevent this from ever happening again. This 10 trillion dollar shadow financial system collapsed because it was an unregulated bubble that imploded upon itself. It should not have been a shadow system abd it should have been regulated. But even now I do not see that any steps have been taken to reign in this process so that it does not re-create itself. Worse yet the same insitution and corporate managers are largely still running their ships even after they have been run into the ground and bailed out by the government to keep them afloat.

I like it! thank you!

Although there is much mention of the fact that our economy has been based on Americans going shopping for years now, there has been little thought as to what would happen when we stopped shopping. Either because materialism has become an unsatisfying lifestyle or we no longer have the money to spend this day was bound to come.

The problem with the US economy is the US administration itself. Since Bush is a lame duck, he is not eager to really give full attention and commitment on the economy. Leave the s** to Obama. But unfortunately his interests in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are still haunting him, he has no qualms in spending and doing whatever necessary on the wars to try to safe whatever legacy that still exist.

Professor Krugman, this is right-on-the money: "The most obvious thing is capital requirements, which is basically limits on the degree of leverage. " The problem is that the banks, investment banks and traders (including hedge funds) don' t want any part of it and will do all they can to avoid de-leveraging. Of course, it's counter-productive as far as recovering from this debacle is concerned; but, it's the name of the game and has been for a long, long time.
The Fed could raise Reg. T margin requirements but, surprisingly, hasn't done so.

...............................It is interesting that the state of the economy was not called a Recession until this month, almost a whole year after it was diagnosed that America was in Recession. It is obvious that the failed Bush Administration was being protected by economists who were politically biased. But if the "R Word" was used that would have made the Republican McCain Campaign totally unecessesary because the GOP would not been able to go over the 45% vote percentage no matter how much deception they threw at us!!!

This is the man who gave economic advice to Enron and he's given a Nobel Prize? Someone please tell this ideologically bankrupt Socialist to keep his nose out of our affairs and just GO AWAY...

Isn't it a joke to throw money at a problem? It's not funny when someone tells you to toss your money. And I would get down right violent if someone took thousands of dollars from me and tossed it in. So why is it OK for the Government to throw our money at a BANKS problem. The way they gouge the working poor and middle class, they should be rolling in money. But since they can't take more directly from us, they want to take our tax money.

This is clear and comprehensible. I hope the book is required reading for every congressman. Why all the drama by politicians and rich beggars? I am convinced that Angelo Mozillo is the worst banker, and he persuaded too many people to pick up a condo in Las Vegas or Florida so that they could reap the profits in the not too distant future. That's it, no more to be said. We're going to have to deal with all the get rich form reat estate consequences now.

CALLING ANDREW JACKSON !!!
Hank Paulson, aka Nicholas Biddle, is trying to turn the middle class of this country into a peasant class.
Instead of bank wars and hard money, we have free trade fanatics trying to outsource everyones job. At the same time they are using the government trough to get rich with bailouts. Time to horse whip some people and take our country back.

Estimated Pop on July 1, 2007 was 301,621,157 according to the US census bureau. If you divide that into 700 billion that would come out to about $2,310 a person, regardless of age or income, or about $9,240 for a family of four. Please check my math. If my math is correct, that is about 1/3 of a car per family. My family would definitely spend that money over the course of six months to a year, but probably not on a car. I just lost my job at a GMC-NISSAN-CHRYSLER dealership and we would use that to supplement us until I find a decent job again. The problem is right now that there is a HUGE number of low wage jobs around $7.00 but very few above that. I am reluctant to take one of those because of the possibility of getting stuck there. While that may be inevitable, such a stimulus would certainly prolong that inevitable for my family.