Category Archives: Economics

The Wreckage Continues

One in five IT jobs have disappeared, and the sudden loss of office jobs is devastating the middle class.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Newspapers and Manhattan are screwed.

[Update a couple more minutes later]

AOC tells people to refuse to return to work.

Really? Is she going to pay their bills?

[Update a few minutes later]

Yes, the Democrats totally want a depression.

The Economic Wreckage

Bob Zimmerman catalogs it.

Some things will recover quickly, but we won’t have a robust recovery until people have sufficient confidence that they can go back to sporting events or movie theaters or restaurants at normal capacity, which will probably require a vaccine (even if it’s a placebo). And now, despite all the money being pumped into the economy, the Fed has to worry seriously about deflation.

It Begins

Germany just sent a £130B bill for ‘coronavirus damages’ – sparks fury in Beijing.

[Monday-morning update]

I don’t know if that original story is valid, but apparently Israel and U.S. law firms are suing the CCP for trillions. Even if they have no mechanism to force payment, this will certainly diminish China in the eyes of the world, and it could provide a legitimate excuse for defaulting on the money we owe them.

The Great Depression

The media continues to peddle BS history about it (unfortunately, because it was what they were taught in government schools).

It was sad to see Emily Compagno the other day on The Five say that FDR was elected to deal with Hoover’s “inaction.” So even conservatives believe this nonsense.

Hoover’s policies were disastrous, but they were the very opposite of inaction, and he was the furthest thing from laissez faire. If Coolidge had had a third term, likely the economy would have recovered within a year. Hoover created the depressions, but FDR made it great.

[Update a few minutes later]

Our garbage media.

[Update a while later]

A review of Amity Schlaes’s new book on how poverty won the war on poverty, including some of the history of the Depression.

[Late-morning update]

In reading that history, I had not known that Walter Reuther had sponsored the Port Huron Statement (I lived sixty miles west, in Flint) at the time. It reminded me of a post I wrote early in my blogging career, almost two decades ago now (where did the years go?) about my brief period as a junior-high campus radical.