Conservative NYT Op-Ed columnist David Brooks believes in change, too

Republicans are still saying it wasn't that bad of a loss? Congressman John Boehner is.

Two gay Obama supporters assaulted near White House on election night

Amid Rising Unemployment, A Few Bright Spots for Job Seekers

Because you can never have too much Rachel, here is Rachel Maddow on The Colbert Report talking about Keith Olbermann via The Daily Beast. How's that for an impressive feat of information wrangling?

A 1:46 clip of Obama's first press conference. In this clip he discusses the economy.

The 60 Minutes examining the causes of the financial crisis helped me understand a litte bit better what's going on. (I apologize for the commercial at the beginning, but I thought it was worth it since the information given in the report is so helpful.)

The world's financial system teetered on the edge again last week, and anyone with more than a passing interest in their shrinking 401(k) knows it's because of a global credit crisis. It began with the collapse of the U.S. housing market and has been magnified worldwide by what Warren Buffet once called "financial weapons of mass destruction."

As Steve Kroft reports, essentially [derivatives] are side bets on the performance of the U.S. mortgage markets and the solvency on some of the biggest financial institutions in the world. It's a form of legalized gambling that allows you to wager on financial outcomes without ever having to actually buy the stocks and bonds and mortgages. It would have been illegal during most of the 20th century, but eight years ago Congress gave Wall Street an exemption and it has turned out to be a very bad idea.

Below, a 60 Minutes report from 1995 that predicted the financial meltdown. "07/23/95: Steve Kroft investigates what stock derivatives are and the dangers they pose to investors."

This week's Economist takes a look at how a poorer, hotter world will "bode ill for life’s infinite variety."

GREEN-MINDED folk of many shades came to Spain this month, to talk about the need to save from human recklessness as much as possible of nature’s bounty of genes, habitats and species. They brought bad tidings. Common birds are in decline across the world. Almost one in four species of mammals is in danger of extinction. If current trends continue until 2050, fisheries will be exhausted. As it is, deforestation costs the world more each year than the current financial crisis has cost in total, one economist argued.

While some of the language used might be hackneyed (I mean, who doesn't know that it's very In to be Green?), this article can serve, yes, as a reminder to Be Green, but, I think, as importantly, it can be used to leverage our understanding of how to implement an effective global response to a global crisis. Global financial institutions have demonstrated that they can work quickly and cooperatively to mitigate the effects of a major crisis. As this article points out, they might have to do it again, and they will have already had practice doing it.

Remember that cartoon from yesterday? Yeah.

Benjamin Barber at The Huffington Post writes:

QUESTION: What's the difference between capitalism and socialism according to Henry Paulson?

ANSWER: Socialism is when big government steals from the banks to bail out the people; capitalism is when big government steals from the people to bail out the banks.

In an article in The NYT, Adam S. Posen , an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, says, “It is profound, and it is something of a shift back to the state. But is this a recasting of capitalism? I think what we’ll see is that the government acts as a silent partner and gets out as soon as it can.”

However we define the help we're getting, the Republicans, who've had the closely-held idea of an unregulated free market wrested from their grasp with the original $750 billion dollary bailout, now have to, simultaneously, watch as the banking industry is, in effect, nationalized. (On Monday, large American banks agreed to accept government investments totaling $125 billion with another $125 billion to be invested in smaller banks.)

Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson, Jr. might be squeamish about framing this help, but he is not squeamish about supplying it.

In another article in The New York Times Paulson says the $250 billion dollar government infusion of government money into banks is regrettable but necessary. The NYT article says that "[i]n addition to injecting money into the banks, according to the plan, the United States would also guarantee new debt issued by banks for three years — a measure meant to encourage the banks to resume lending to one another and to customers."



According to Paulson:

The alternative of leaving businesses and consumers without access to financing is totally unacceptable. When financing isn’t available, consumers and businesses shrink their spending, which leads to businesses cutting jobs and even closing up shop.

Which brings us back to the Question and Answer. From Benjamin Barber's article:

Which is to say we are not going to see any recognition that overproduction and over consuming by a capitalist system that manufactures needs rather than goods to sell all the stuff it has to sell to stay afloat is what really lies behind the crisis. Or that capitalism must change its ways - like producing goods we actually need and taking responsibility for bad decisions it makes. On the contrary, the market's heading up (for a day at least), and the credit pump is being primed so consumers will start spending again, and we can go back to where we were before phase one of the crisis started. Back to spending our way to phase two of the crisis.

How to fix what's broken while creating something new? And have the people who need to learn a lesson from all of this really learned the lesson they needed to?

With the stock market roller-coastering daily, Paulson and Bernanke giving hourly updates on the state of the economy, Suze Orman traveling to every single show on television to try to soothe the panic out of everyday people, the causes and consequences of the bailout keep getting more and more confusing. We can and should blame Wall Street greed. We can can should blame the Republican worship of free market. But we also should be able to look at the the problem from a slightly different angle.

Over at the New Republic, Alvaro Vargas Llosa discusses how it all happened, for him, in "Myth Busters." He writes that University of Texas professor Stan Liebowitz "chronicles the long march toward what we could call the Mortgage State, starting with the creation of the Federal Housing Administration in 1934 and all the way to the norms that made Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae acquire substantial loans given to people with weak credit."

Again, it's difficult to undestersand exactly what's going on right now, but this gives us one more tool to aid our comprehension.

IMF urges international response to financial crisis.

Bernanke gives speech following yesterday's stock plunge.

From the Wall Street Journal, some advice on what to do with your money. If you have it. Still. Or at all.