Everyone knew that things were going to collapse, but wanted to stay in till the last minute because there was money to be made, so it was not animal spirits, but people trying to rationally judge when to run to the exits.
Category: economics
Obama lashes out at the innocent to protect the guilty
Immediately after losing a senate seat to a Republican populist, Obama the next day proceeded to go populist. He, is, he tells us, going to punish those unregulated wall street fat cats who caused the crisis. He is going to tax the banks, and restrict proprietary trading by banks. But proprietary trading had little to do with the crisis. All the things that caused the crisis are still going: the …
What the election of Scott Brown means
Notice Scott Brown’s old pick up truck. Partly, of course, it is simply a massive swing against the Democrats. The economy is collapsing, people blame the party in power. But it also means more important and more interesting things: Scott Brown was campaigning as the anti elitist candidate, brandishing a working class and underclass identity, such as his old truck and his conviction for shoplifting. The elite is unpopular, not …
Google censors Google censorship
Recursive censorship: Typing climategate booker into bing four of the first five hits are about Google censoring Booker’s climategate article. The Booker Climategate Article – Scandal or Indexing Problem … Climategate: Googlegate? – Telegraph Blogs Of Climategate, Googlegate & When Stories Get Too Long Mimsy: Climategate crashes Google? Typing climategate booker into google, none the first four hits are about Google censoring Booker’s climategate article – the same hits are …
What the Tea Party stands for
There is a risk that the Tea Party movement is sufficiently vague and unspecific to enable everyone to read into what they want, so that people with fundamentally irreconcilable views believe they’re part of the same movement, which is a good way to get people into power so that they can start scooping up some of the gravy, and a bad way to accomplish any political objective. The original Tea …
Unemployment
Officially, unemployment has fallen to the curiously round number of ten percent. Are you feeling more prosperous? Yes, strange to report, zero hedge observes that the money paid to the unemployed has risen substantially, and risen a lot in the last two months. While there are officially nine and half million unemployed, there appear to be fourteen million receiving unemployment benefits. Funny thing that.
How bloggers saved the world
The Air Vent tells us that China saved the world, which is true, but China saved the world because of what bloggers did. The enemy plan was to use global warming to roll back science, technology and western civilization.  Copenhagen was to have established a “world climate treaty organization†which would exercise centralized control over all the worlds economies, thereby avoiding that inconvenient embarrassment that ensues whenever socialist economies face …
Official lies
Official statistics have gone the same path as peer review. Obama holds a jobs conference, and then immediately after Obama’s cheerful jobs conference, the BLS tells us that there are fewer unemployed, and more jobs. Supposedly there are over a million more jobs this year than the same period last year – yet withheld income for salaried employees and payroll tax have fallen 19% compared to the same period last …
Tony Abbot takes aim at Copenhagen
Tony Abbot made news around the world, by unseating Malcolm Turnbull as leader of the Australian opposition over Climategate, and then stalling the carbon tax.  By stalling the tax, Abbot challenged the Prime Minister to a double dissolution election, which would have been a referendum on the carbon tax. By backing down from that challenge, the Prime Minister finds himself empty handed in Copenhagen, making it much harder to …
Provenance of the surface temperature graph of doom.
“So what the hell did Tim do?!! As I keep asking.†The IPCC blessed the results of Hadley-CRU. Hadley-CRU blessed the results of the religous fanatic PhD student Tim Mitchell, and, as is clear from the Harry Readme file, no one checked how Tim produced these remarkable results. Harry, in what is now the world’s most studied document on global warming, the Harry_Read_Me.txt file, asks “So what the hell did …