Economic Mess for Non-Dummies

UPDATE VI:  As noted many times before, the Great Recession, AKA Lesser Depression, was caused by credit default swaps, deregulation and lack of government oversight.  Watch the special FRONTLINE four-part series, Money, Power and Wall Street.

"FRONTLINE finds plenty of blame to go around (Goldman Sachs and CEO Lloyd Blankfein take a particular bruising), but is most devastating in its dissection of the chummy collusion between bankers and the government leaders who should have been watch-dogging them," just as I have been saying for years.

UPDATE V: Despite Republi-con myths to the contrary, "[t]he 2008 financial crisis was . . . caused by widespread failures in government regulation, corporate mismanagement and heedless risk-taking by Wall Street . . . permitting a calamitous concoction: shoddy mortgage lending, the excessive packaging and sale of loans to investors, and risky bets on securities backed by the loans." Read The New York Tiems, Financial Meltdown Was 'Avoidable,' Inquiry Concludes


UPDATE IV: Is it the best documentary of 2010. Watch the preview:




UPDATE III: "Wall St. moguls, Washington polls, government regulators, rating agencies, unscrupulous lenders, or unqualified borrowers—who is free from blame.

There were those who were outright crooks. There were those who failed to do due diligence. There were those who were simply greedy. There were those who were too dumb to see what was going on. What McLean and Nocera have written is an indictment of all the devils involved, and everyone involved smells of the sulfurous pit. "

Read All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis.


UPDATE II: For other reviews of the movie, read:

San Fransico Chronicle, Who was responsible for the global financial collapse? Filmmaker Charles Ferguson finds out in "Inside Job"

Huffington Post, Will Inside Job Start a Popular Rebellion?

The movie is the economic horror film of 2010.


UPDATE: And still having a hard time understanding the economic mess. Then "you haven't seen "Inside Job," the new documentary about how our economic crisis evolved." Read the Washington Post, The economic crisis was an 'inside job'.

After watching the documentary, the writer concludes "trying to assign blame to either Democrats or Republicans is pointless. Everyone is culpable. From the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan deregulated banks, through the two Bushes, Bill Clinton and now Barack Obama, each administration has endorsed -- and each Congress has helped tweak -- laws and rules that made systemic abuses and the meltdown not only possible but, looking back, inevitable."

Still having a hard time understanding the economic mess. My previous post, Economic Mess for Dummies, not challenging enough. Then read Charles I. Jones, A Supplement to Macroeconomics (W.W. Norton, 2008), The Global Financial Crisis of 2007–20??.

Also still wondering who's to blame. Read, NPR, Planet Money, He Blames Greenspan.