More Grapes, Less Wrath

Everyone that is arguing with the author here is proabably doing so on their own computer via access to the internet which they have probably paid for. My father lived through the Great Depression. They had no running water, heated one room in the house with only a wood stove, and often went to bed hungry. We were by no means wealthy, but he taught me to be thankful for what little we had. Even when we were forced to move into public housing and take food stamps, he never thought of us as poor. He was thankful for the safety net that allowed us to survive. Maybe the problem today is that we don't know the difference between necessities and luxuries.

This is nitpick-y, but it was Walker Evans, not Agee, who took those hauting photographs in "praise of famous men." (Agree wrote the accompanying essays.)

This is nitpick-y, but it was Walker Evans, not Agee, who took those haunting photographs in "praise of famous men." (Agee wrote the accompanying essays.)

It is a shame that Newsweek gives space for this guy to write this blather. We know there is a superrich in these countries that is doing fine. But, has he not heard that in China there are more than 20 million unemployed peasants returning to their villages. That hundreds of millions worldwide are returning to the poverty of living on less than $2 a day. This guy believes this is all caused by irrational fear, mostly because he doesn't have a clue how to analyze the situation and figure out what the real cause is.

This is going to be very severe and take a decade to work out of as municipalities begin to fail, pension funds and life insurance companies bankrupt and the baby boomers give up looking for jobs and start retiring en masse. There is a huge debt overhang so that no one is going to borrow and consume for a long time, and country bankruptcies have begun with Iceland, but Russia, Argentina, Hungary, and yes maybe even the UK and the US are not far behind.

I'm sure not ordering any $17 cocktails. I'm drinking generic Wal-Mart soda and pinching the pennies until Lincoln screams, because of good old stagflation.

One of the reasons it has not become a depression of the 1930's, may be because so much has been done to avoid it.

I don't think there are any doubt that this crisis had the potential of becoming a depression if nothing would have been done to avoid it.

Good article, but two sides to the story:

Firstly, it would be flippant, at best, for anyone to assert that the sheer scale of wealth destrucion is not going to have a persisting impact on one's ability to spend, and 'feel good' about one's private accumulate wealth. These are real forecs and not psychological tinkering by doomsayers. Interest rates at effectively zero percent and the FED creating several trillion dollars at a pen stroke are actions of a surgeon fighting to sae a patient. These are real.

However, the other side also carries some currency. People are amazingly resilient, and society will bounce back. It has taken a real (not only psychological) knock. That this is not a knock-out punch, and the doomsayers overstate the downside, just as the optimists overplay the upside.

We are somewhere in the middle. As jesus christ remarked (Spiro Agnew takes second place here, old chum) 'The poor will always be with us.' So, the persistent poor are not, as proposed by the article, a measure of wealth. This is a deeply moral and, long term, an economic failing. But in itself, not a metric for economic success.

Good article, but two sides to the story:

Firstly, it would be flippant, at best, for anyone to assert that the sheer scale of wealth destrucion is not going to have a persisting impact on one's ability to spend, and 'feel good' about one's private accumulate wealth. These are real forecs and not psychological tinkering by doomsayers. Interest rates at effectively zero percent and the FED creating several trillion dollars at a pen stroke are actions of a surgeon fighting to sae a patient. These are real.

However, the other side also carries some currency. People are amazingly resilient, and society will bounce back. It has taken a real (not only psychological) knock. That this is not a knock-out punch, and the doomsayers overstate the downside, just as the optimists overplay the upside.

We are somewhere in the middle. As jesus christ remarked (Spiro Agnew takes second place here, old chum) 'The poor will always be with us.' So, the persistent poor are not, as proposed by the article, a measure of wealth. This is a deeply moral and, long term, an economic failing. But in itself, not a metric for economic success.

Boy is Zachary Karabell out of touch with reality. He must be one of the wealthy who is not affecred by the "DEPRESSION". His let them eat cake attitude is appauling abd an offense to the 90% of the world living day to day and pay check to pay check, if they are lucky enough to have a job. Sorry Zack but the bread and soup lines are blocks long where they exsist. Food pantries of churches etc are empty and tent cities are popping up all over America. All I can say is "brother can you spare a dime".

Boy is Zachary Karabell out of touch with reality. He must be one of the wealthy who is not affecred by the "DEPRESSION". His let them eat cake attitude is appauling abd an offense to the 90% of the world living day to day and pay check to pay check, if they are lucky enough to have a job. Sorry Zack but the bread and soup lines are blocks long where they exsist. Food pantries of churches etc are empty and tent cities are popping up all over America. All I can say is "brother can you spare a dime".

Excellent article. Words that need to be heard especially by the "nattering nabobs of negativism" that share their constant and depressing refrain on daily TV. (I never thought I would use an old Spiro Agnew phrase)

Well, i guess you are ok. Not sure what the point is, and it seems that you think the downdraft is at an end. Everything from here on out is Chinese production labor at .20 per hour, making everything that used to be made here by the middle class, which has been essentially eliminated, games shipped back to the consumer world, everyone buying phones, Googling leading the economic recovery, as long as we have clubs opening in Argentina all is well. Ok. The "middle" class feels much better now that we see Newsweek is hiring thoughtful bloviators. - where do we apply to replace yu dude.

Although looking back we can see signs from a couple of years ago, we are now about 6 months into whatever we are in. We have little idea how it will develop. We even have little idea of all the sorts of ways it could develop, and the likelihood of each. Most of the ideas we do have are developed by people who are trying to sell something (guns, gold, safe investments, government involvement or non-involvement in this or that part of the economy). Other ideas come from trying to figure out how to safeguard something (like their savings or their market position) from whatever might happen. Neither of these really help us feel secure by having a sense that anyone knows what is going on, what is likely to happen, what we can do to steer out of our current problems, and how we can avoid a repeat in a few years. But these are where we need to focus Shedding light on these questions will require money, numbers of knowledgeable people who are not busy developing sales pitches or helping someone game the system, invasions of privacy (to find out exactly what happened), and new ways of asking and answering the questions. Nobody is trying to even get this process started.

If the world economy does return to its normal state, we get right back to continuing to disrupt Spaceship Earth's temperature control system (which we do not understand very well and are not spending all that much on increasing our understanding). So we need to develop a way the world economy can run without having to run full speed, creating and satisfying more and more needs for more and more people, more and more entrepreneurs finding more and more entrepreneurial success until something much bigger than the world financial system crashes

Not worrying about all this is adopting the attitudes of all the players in the recent subprime mortgage game. And we know how that turned out!.

By the way, there were people who continued to live well and spend high during the Depression; if you are going to write an article that hundreds of thousands of people will read, maybe you should check with a historian on whether luxury spending vanished in the 30's or just decreased by (do research to get percent). Anecdotal evidence can give you a vivid proof of anything. So what?