You know we’ve gone through the looking glass when foreclosure rates continue to edge up - and it’s good news!
The foreclosure crisis isn’t over, but the pace of growth may finally be slowing down.
RealtyTrac Inc. said Thursday that the number of U.S. households facing foreclosure in February grew 6 percent from the year-ago level, the […]

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This may be the most insightful, dead-on thing I’ve ever read about the economic crisis, and the Obama team’s (non) response to it. With apologies to Yves, must quote at length - but we’ll also mention she has a book out, which you might be interested in picking up.

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Jeebus.
The percentage of American workers with virtually no retirement savings grew for the third straight year, according to a survey released Tuesday.
The percentage of workers who said they have less than $10,000 in savings grew to 43% in 2010, from 39% in 2009, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute’s annual Retirement Confidence Survey. That […]

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Sure sure, this is a fantastic idea:
States and companies have started investing very differently when it comes to the billions of dollars they are safeguarding for workers’ retirement. Companies are quietly and gradually moving their pension funds out of stocks. They want to reduce their investment risk and are buying more long-term bonds. But states […]

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So liberal, this piece on the Tea Partiers by Will Bunch. So liberal it makes me want to throw up:
The piece by Michael Bader makes the point that I completely agree with, which is that people who’ve lost their job or who are frightened by conditions in America right now deserve empathy — these are […]

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I suspect/fear Karl Denninger is right about this:
I understand that everyone wants to avoid taking the pain.  I understand that everyone claims that “its not fair!”
None of this changes the facts.  You cannot continually offshore your better-paying labor to China for the purpose of being able to have a $30 DVD player, destroying the $40/hour […]

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Great, great call by Taibbi:
the Tea Party movement contains a lot of people who are far more impressed by what they can see with their own eyes than with what, for instance, they read about. I’ve been to Tea Party events where global warming was dismissed by speakers who, without irony, pointed to the fact […]

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Depressing. Tom Friedman today has a column about how America can be competitive in terms of start-ups and tech jobs.
Better education is one part. A bigger part is - tax breaks:
“The things that are not conducive to investments here are [corporate] taxes and capital equipment credits,” he said. “A new semiconductor factory at world scale […]

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The bit about the role Goldman and maybe other banks have played in the Greek debacle is just fascinating:
Greece has suffered from large deficits for years, and until now it seemed as if big banks would always be there to bail it out. As far back as 2000 and 2001, Goldman helped Athens quietly borrow […]

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From the Huffington Post’s front page:

Hey, I’m sure the old dude was behind on his payments! That’s how it works in this great society of ours!
Oops - “great society.” That’s socialism.
And, might have created the conditions where this guy would still be in his home.

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Crazeee Beck got into this at CPAC Saturday night, just saw a link where Jonah Goldberg over at National Review inveighs against it as well.
Here’s the Teddy Roosevelt quote that so offends Beck, with additional context added:
The absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class […]

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In convenient graphic form:

Note authors Simon Johnson and Peter Boone:
What will happen when the next shock hits? We believe we may be nearing the stage where the answer will be – just as it was in the Great Depression – a calamitous global collapse. The root problem is that we have let a ‘doomsday cycle’ […]

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Via Sullivan, a Wired interview with Peter Theil, co-founder of PayPal who subsequently became the first investor in Facebook. And this sounds very, very plausible to me:
Wired: You say that we have big problems in the US economy and that investors have unrealistic expectations. We’ve certainly been through a major crisis, but over the long term […]

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Paul B. Farrell over at MarketWatch is more or less a doomsday columnist - I read him when Kunstler is too uplifting - and today has another piece on the death of American capitalism, sell it all and flee to the hills, AAAAIIIEEEEEE…
Not that his advice/analysis is necessarily wrong, mind you; I like reading the […]

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Rocky Vega over at The Daily Reckoning points to a piece in the Wall Street Journal that you simply might not expect to read… in the Wall Street Journal:
But the panic enveloping Europe and the Middle East offers just a hint of what the U.S. markets face. Our budget deficit is a problem, but it’s […]

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Yves Smith with an insightful post on the IRS plane attack yesterday, but the comments are particularly good - especially this one:
I have been in tech for 25 years and over this time I’ve seen the degradation of the profession, due to outsourcing and other consequences of our labor market “flexibility,” meaning the rise of […]

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Taibbi’s latest, in Rolling Stone. Makes me want to cry:
It isn’t so much that we have inadequate rules or incompetent regulators, although both of these things are certainly true. The real problem is that it doesn’t matter what regulations are in place if the people running the economy are rip-off artists. The system assumes a […]

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Bill Bonner dispatches Rep. Paul Ryan’s conservative budget alternative with the back of his hand:
Mr. Ryan has a solution. He calls it a “Roadmap for America’s Future.” After studying it for all of 30 seconds, we’re convinced that Mr. Ryan should get a GPS. His roadmap is a series of squiggles, dodges and twists to […]

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Hmm, this all sounds a little… familiar.
My initial thought was that the financial crisis and recession might have a salutary effect because the middle class, faced with serious economic insecurity, might start worrying more about economic security (and identifying more with the poor and working class), instead of thinking that individual initiative alone would make […]

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Andrew Cockburn came up with that one, a great term, detailed by Simon Johnson over the weekend in response to the story about how Goldman Sachs - there they are again! - helped Greece and other European nations hide their debts, actions which Johnson calls “fundamentally destabilizing to the global financial system, as they undermine: […]

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