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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I’m so old I can remember second semester of my final year in high school, where we had senior ditch day. Out in Utah, they appear to be talking about senior ditch year:
At Utah’s West Jordan High School, the halls have swirled lately with debate over the merits of 12th grade:
Is it a waste of […]

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Getting ready for dinner the other night when the doorbell goes bing-bong. Not expecting anyone; door-to-door sales types, even Scouts, are pretty rare in our neck of the woods. Maybe one of the next-door kids wants to go sledding?
No. An Indian gentleman, I’d guess late 20s, mumbling about how he lives the next street over […]

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As per some of the discussions yesterday, a bit from Yves Smith touching on an op-ed in the Washington Post that bascially says: Don’t regulate the banks, they’re the ones driving the recovery!
And so you have Democrats, and you have Republicans. Democrats stand for social equality, and put them in power and you’ll have things […]

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Been reading a bit on the proposed “alternative” budget put forth by Republican Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, and I have to say that at first blush - here’s a guy who at least offers up a plan. Unlike the rest of his colleagues in the Party of No.
But jeebus, what a plan.
Among other things, […]

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Via Atrios, CRE being commercial real estate, which is expected to hit the wall this year - maybe particularly hard in places like Lancaster County:

Emphasis added (and crudely, too).

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And then there are days you think Palin couldn’t possibly be any worse.

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Kunstler, dead on this week:

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Not much posting around here these days, been very very busy with the whole Conestoga Log Cabin Leasing/Plain investing story and other things. Other reasons as well, mostly having to do with the economy, and the fact that as Ilargi at The Automatic Earth titled a post the other day, “we’re having the wrong conversations.”
The […]

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The Dow, actually - down nearly 229 points as of this writing, could break through the 10,000 floor if this keeps up.
It ain’t over.
Update: Ends the day down more than 268 points, settles at 10,002.18
Stocks buckled Thursday under the growing belief that the global economy is weaker than many investors expected and is likely to […]

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House Republicans release first draft of a budget. Josh Marshall takes a look:
First, it calls for big cuts in Social Security benefits for everyone currently under 55 years of age. On top of the cuts it also calls for privatizing Social Security.
Basically the exact plan President Bush tried in 2005. Next, it calls for the […]

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More municipal fiscal apocalypse - right here in the Susquehanna Valley:
Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania, will consider Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection along with tax increases and asset sales as options to address $68 million in debt service payments due this year, the chairwoman of a City Council committee said last night.
Every option, including tax and […]

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Depressing.
Ilargi: During his State of the Union address last week, President Obama said this:
“We’re working to lift the value of a family’s single largest investment — their home [..]”
While this statement raises many questions -or should at least-, it’s also very clear in a way: it’s all you need to know about current American politics. […]

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