February 2009 Issue

readme:

Sorry about the delay in posting this issue. A cat was using the computer.

While cooling my heels in the next room (I can hardly wait to see what FedEx delivers to Mister Boots next week), I’ve been paying entirely too much attention to the End of the World and am now on first-name terms with Nouriel Roubini, Joe Stiglitz and Yves Smith (who I had been assuming until recently is a man but is rather obviously not).  Anyway, I’m finally to the point where I kinda sorta understand credit default swaps, which is pretty scary in itself and which I take as Nature’s way of telling me to go back to bed.  If anyone cares, my personal take on all this is that the US economy has been broken for a long, long time, and re-inflating the housing bubble (or conjuring up a whole new bubble) is not a productive long-term strategy.  I can’t imagine what the answer to all this might be, but I think it would be nice if it involved rebuilding our rail system.  I like trains.

Onward. Before I forget, it is no longer necessary to create an account on this site and log in to leave comments on the columns.  If you have already created an account and picked a login and  password, you might as well just go ahead and forget both of them.  The old system was confusing and never worked for a lot of people, so now anyone can wander in here and comment on anything.  The catch is that I have to moderate the comments, so it may be a day or two, or more, before your comment appears online.

Lastly, if you are not yet a subscriber to this site, please consider becoming one.

Roughly 30,000 people visit this site every month, which is great. Many of you are repeat visitors, which is wonderful. This site has been a free resource for the internet community for almost 15 years, and I love producing it.

In the beginning, this site was just an addendum to my work for newspapers and writing books. Unfortunately, the collapse of newspapers and book publishing has coincided with my increasing disability from ms, and the small income from this site has become more important than I ever would have imagined.  So if you can swing $15 per year, it would be truly appreciated.

And now, on with the show…