The Market Religion

A recent article by Time columnist James Poniewozik highlights “The Market” as the focus of ideology, especially as expressed by commentators on financial cable network CNBC. (See CNBC Under Fire: Sticking Up for the Big Guy?):   … CNBC looks at everything, particularly politics, in terms of how it will affect “the Market.” The commentators on CNBC murmur about [...]

Ron Paul predicts 15-year depression

According to an article by Phil Davis in Financial Times yesterday, U.S. Congressman Ron Paul believes the U.S. economy could be heading into a 15-year depression: “The US government just won’t allow the correction the economy needs.” He cites the mini-depression of 1921, which lasted just a year largely because insolvent companies were allowed to [...]

Attributed Value: How much is stuff really worth?

Today the term “attributed value” occurred to me as a way to modify the concept of value in the light of subjective opinion. How much is something really worth? The traditional common sense answer is that something is worth whatever someone else will pay for it. In other words, the value attributed by the best [...]

Gallup: Americans favor economy over environment

Since 1984, research firm Gallup has been asking Americans whether they think priority should be given to the economy over environmental protection or vice versa. For the first time this year, the trend crossed over in favor of the economy, as you can see on this graph: Writing for Gallup, Frank Newport comments: The reason [...]

The Grandest Ponzi Scheme and The Great Disruption

In his recent column “The Inflection Is Near?,” New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman raises the question: What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically [...]

Does Bubbleconomics offer solutions, or is it all negative?

Someone with a critical eye might look at Bubbleconomics as a negative endeavor. So this is a valid question: Are we just mouthing off about how bad the human economics system is, or do we offer solutions? One answer to that is that Bubbleconomics is very much an exploratory project. Our ideas are in discovery [...]

Levels of Economic Bubbles

It seems useful to identify several levels of economic bubbles: Personal bubble: The economic bubble formed by an individual or a family created and maintained by self-interested behavior (See “Defining terms in Bubbleconomics“) Microbubble: An economic bubble formed on a relatively small level, such as in a limited geographic location or niche market Macrobubble: A [...]

Warren Buffet’s simple lifestyle

According to an article in Forbes yesterday, Warren Buffet, the world’s second richest man, prefers a relatively simple life, living in “the same five-bedroom, gray stucco house he bought in 1958 for $31,500.” (See “Homes of the Billionaires.”) The article includes a series of photos of billionaire’s homes, with Buffet’s gray stucco home by far [...]

The little bubbles on top of The Big Bubble

Writing yesterday for CBS News, Declan McCullagh, chief political correspondent for CNET, says that the U.S. government is essentially throwing good money after bad trying to revive a bubble-based economy that was “erected on a rickety foundation of debt, leverage, speculation and interest rates held unreasonably low by the Federal Reserve.” (See “You Can’t Inflate a Burst [...]

Economist: Unemployment is actually 19.1%

John Williams, consulting economist and publisher of  ShadowStats.com, says that the U.S. unemployment rate  would actually be 19.1 percent if it were calculated the same way it was during the Great Depression. The Labor Department reports an official rate of 8.1 percent as of February 2009. (“Statician says US joblessness near Depression highs,” Reuters, March [...]