"meat and potatoes" assessment of economic crisis

[invaziondrummer]

http://www.cepr.net/index.php/op-eds-&- ... reet-rules

[Scoundrel]

The highest paid workers (doctors, lawyers, and economists) must be subjected to international competition in the same way as manufacturing workers have been subjected to international competition.

They're already outsourcing lawyers:

India’s legal outsourcing industry has grown in recent years from an experimental endeavor to a small but mainstream part of the global business of law. Cash-conscious Wall Street banks, mining giants, insurance firms and industrial conglomerates are hiring lawyers in India for document review, due diligence, contract management and more.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/05/busin ... legal.html

I've been reading about that lately too, I'd imagine economists aren't far behind.

This pain is infuriating for two reasons. First, this was an entirely preventable disaster. The housing bubble was easy to see. Competent economists had long warned of its dangers.

Isn't there ALWAYS multiple economists screaming that the sky is falling, usually for different reasons? Some of them turned out to be right for the correct reasons, but what about the guys who were wrong? Easy to figure it out in hindsight, but isn't that always the case?

The second reason why the current situation is infuriating is that we know how to get the economy out of this mess. We just need to boost demand. This can be done either with much more government stimulus, more aggressive monetary policy from the Fed, or pushing the dollar down to boost exports.

"Guys, we just need to spend more money. The easiest way out of debt is to spend more money, duh." The wealth of a country comes from the goods and services it produces, not the amount of money it has. You can shuffle money around all you want from rich to poor, private to public, or public to private, but real wealth comes from production. As for stimulating demand and production via monetary policy, isn't it widely believed that the fed keeping interest rates so low was a major factor in what got us here in the first place?

the steps necessary to revitalize the economy could mean some inflation.

"Guys, we need inflation. All it's going to do is lower the value of the wealth held by the rich and make it easier for home owners to get out of debt so it's a double win. All that shit about higher prices LOWERING DEMAND and thus lowering production, which in turn lowers the need for labor, which usually means INCREASED unemployment (resulting in a further decrease in demand...) is bullshit." LOL at "We just need to boost demand via inflation." Yea inflation is awesome. And this guy is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.


While I agree with some of what this guy said about "corporate welfare" if you will, the title of this thread should be "Ass and taint" assessment of economic crisis.