Markets, Business, and the Economy – Page 7

The New New Economy is Not Improved

Let me start by pointing out that today alone, the FDIC had takeover teams at 6 — yes, 6 — different banks in 3 different states. I think that Count Von Count would not be happy to keep track of this. Another number that would fail to please the Count but might make Dr. Evil happy, an anticipated one million foreclosures this year. That situation will get uglier before a healthy market can possibly emerge.

But as Expert Ezra points out, the reason people are so unhappy with the economy right now has a lot to do with the fact that corporate profits are up over 5%, the actual number of available jobs is down over 5% just since 2007. And frankly, I am of the opinion that without the economic shell game the government has been playing with the data, you would probably find that the 2001 recession never ended.

So then, with unemployment what it is, nobody should be particularly shocked that retail sales are down, again, and specifically sales of big ticket items are down. Nobody being able to afford goods leads quite understandably to the possibility of deflation — particularly if you can’t find a way to mask housing prices that are down by half in some parts of the country. Meanwhile, the rich get richer and the poor can, well, do whatever it is they do.

Add to this toxic stew two items: a political party that still thinks you can raise revenues by cutting taxes, but that making sure that “the least of these” can afford groceries is a bad thing; and a financial reform bill that the nicest thing anybody can say about it is that it’s better than nothing, probably. The safety net is being cut just as we need it most despite our protests, and our largest banks may still have the power to ruin us all.

Next time, assuming I am not distracted by something shiny or butterflies or kittens, The Latte Economy.

In Closing: Gee, greater blogosphere, thanks for noticing what I thought I was too late to say yesterday!; this could be bad; Senator Ensign should really give up now; I wonder how much; and two dinosaurs for the price of one.

America’s Joyous Future

It’s the Jobs, Stupid.

You can’t swing your arms on the internet these days without hearing talk about jobs, and with good reason. We’ve got fewer job openings* and high unemployment, particularly high long term unemployment. It’s all about the jobs, and in many ways its about the fact that despite the law, people much over 40 are having a hard time getting them. And if you’re a new grad? You’ll be taking less pay* than you would have in recent years (and be delighted to have anything, alas). Meanwhile, the income gap is growing and our credit scores are getting worse — a polite way of saying we’re collectively having trouble paying our bills.

However, instead of talking about works programs that would put people to work now and create infrastructure that would create more jobs later, we have Hundreds of Hoovers looking to slash spending anywhere they can — but Heaven Forbid they should slash the Wars Without End, or turn thousands of criminal jobs into decent jobs, or slash actual waste, or make the people (and corporations!) who can most afford to pay taxes pay just a little more! Oh no, we can’t have any of those things.

Nope. They’re saying that tax cuts don’t result in the government getting less money, everything is Obama’s fault, that somehow cutting taxes creates jobs (I suspect the underpants gnomes are integral to that working), and — get this! — we little people are just going to have to get used to the idea that Social Security is going to be gutted.

We may also have to get used to the coming food riots.

I can’t think of the last time I linked Atrios, but he’s right. They don’t care about cutting the deficit, they care about making things better for the people at top and worse for the people at bottom.

Somewhere, Baby Boomers got the idea that there was never gonna be any Social Security money for them, so they set about destroying the system, insuring that prediction came to pass. Now those selfish young adults are getting on towards retirement age, and some of them have been forcibly retired. Talk about raising the retirement age to 70? Fine, but when was the last time you saw a 70 year old bricklayer, truck driver, computer programmer, barrista, or waitress?

So in the end, this is what we’ve got:

In Closing: nuclear explosions (a worthwhile way to spend 14 minutes); malaria; useless fliers; alert the media, the FDIC wants to do it’s job; factory farming means our produce isn’t as healthy as it was 30 years ago; why Johnnie doesn’t know his colors; super-extra polite phrases in Japanese.

*Somewhere along the line, USA Today turned into a proper news source! Kudos to them.

Nice of him to notice, and Economic Bonus Round

I am glad to see someone with a high profile speaking out on this, and I sincerely hope other journalists start talking about it.

Now, about that economy.

The nicest thing I can say about the United States economy right now is that unemployment isn’t as bad as it is in much of Europe. Our economy lost jobs last month — and only partly because some of those temporary Census workers were let go — but the really awful part is that the number of workers went down. It isn’t that we had an abnormal number of people die or retire or anything like that, it’s just that over a half million people gave up on trying to find work. And that’s why the official unemployment rate went down.

Of course, if you just happen to have the right set of highly technical job skills, there are plenty of jobs. But — as Jill so ably points out — somehow or another businesses don’t think they should actually have to train employees to use very specialized equipment. I guess they are waiting for the “Qualified Employee Fairy” to stuff resumes under the door.

It’s also worth pointing out that the SBA is running out of money again, which means it will be even harder for small businesses to get money to ramp up operations and create jobs. I am no supporter of the SBA — everyone I’ve ever known that has ever talked to them has ended up with an application for a second mortgage — but this is crazy.

So when all is said and done, I think that more than being “still in the gravitational pull of the Great Recession” and perhaps headed for a “double-dip recession,” it is more intellectually honest to say that from the standpoint of the typical American, there is no recovery: we still aren’t finding jobs, we still are having trouble paying the mortgage, we are still declaring bankruptcy at an alarming rate. Fine, maybe our largest corporations are still making plenty of money, but without the American consumer having money in pocket to buy goods and services, GDP growth can only be somewhere between shaky and an illusion.

In Closing: Uncle Shelby; turns out the kids are bored and not learning the things they should; on the newly revised dietary guidelines; fun with Google auto-complete; biggest banks in the world (and the ones that don’t exist anymore; and please, please drive safely this weekend.

Mortgapocolypse

Before we get to today’s news, let’s start with a bit of history and background on how banking and lending works. Long ago, the first bankers realized that the odds of everybody wanting their money at the same time were just astronomical. So if they were to lend some of that money out at interest, not only would they profit, but they could pass on a little bit of that interest to depositors, making people want to deposit money with them. Charging of interest is even discussed in the Bible, so we know it happened in Biblical times. This process in fact creates money, so it’s very important to the economy.

But let’s fast-forward to a mythical and highly simplified bank somewhere in America. We’ll call it Bailey Bank. Bailey’s got ten thousand depositors with an average daily balance of $1,000. Simple math says they have roughly $10,000,000 in deposits — small by modern standards but still nothing to sneeze at. The Federal Reserve Bank regulates how much money they need to have on hand, and also says how much needs to be deposited with them for emergency purposes. They still have plenty of money to lend out.

So Bailey makes a few dozen mortgage loans, and lends for a few farms and small businesses too. If they are short on cash, they can borrow money from nearby Potter Bank or from the Federal Reserve, at interest rates set by the Fed. These are the rates that Greenspan used to mess with, and the ones Bernanke can change today, not the rates that banks charge us but the rates they charge one another and the rate that the Fed charges them.

When they came to the point where they didn’t really have more money to lend, they sold a bunch of mortgages to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Fannie and Freddie paid them to be the servicers — sending the bills and collecting the money — and paid Bailey most of the money they would have earned by keeping the mortgage until it was completely paid off. This left Bailey with more money to write more mortgages. But Fannie and Freddie have rules about what they will and won’t buy. So Bailey changed some lending policies to make sure that Fannie and Freddie would buy their loans. There are properties that you almost can’t get a mortgage on because other banks did the same thing.

You already know the sad story of banks being left holding the bag in the foreclosure crisis they created. And maybe you even have seen how banks are driving down property values in your neighborhood by dumping properties at ludicrously low asking prices.

This also left Fannie and Freddie behind the 8-ball, and it may yet cost American taxpayers $1,000,000,000,000 to fix it. Why bother? Because banks have stopped counting on holding mortgages until they mature and count on selling the paper to investors like Fannie and Freddie. Without someone to buy the paper and give banks more money to lend, lending will dry up even more than it already has. And that means almost nobody buys property without cash. It may already be too late to save Fannie and Freddie; they are being delisted from the New York Stock Exchange. It would be polite to say that’s a negative for the stocks.

But there is one ray of sunshine in the mortgage mess: the arrest of Lee Bentley Farkas of mortgage company Taylor, Bean & Whitaker. He and unnamed conspirators are accused of fraud in the TARP program, “misappropriating” $400,000,000, and causing the collapse of Colonial Bank by selling them $1,500,000,000 in bad mortgages. I agree that this prosecution is a good start.

In closing: Arizona still keen to repeal the 14th Amendment even as its schools wonder how to comply with state law; homelessness in America; China owns 13% of the publicly held national debt; some people said I was nuts when I suggested that some religious nuts favored the life of an embryo that couldn’t even become a baby over that of a fully grown woman; terrorist nitwits; and sometimes buttons are better than velcro.

Twofer Thursday: This is Your Economy and Warren Buffett Redux

This is Your Economy:

The ADP payroll report is out today. They’re the people who print paychecks, so they have a very good idea how many private sector jobs there are. And in May, they say there were 55,000 more private sector jobs. All the gains came from the “service” sector: jobs that often begin with “how can I help you” and end with “is there anything else” (or alternatively, “would you like fries with that”). No new manufacturing jobs; no new construction jobs; no jobs doing anything that won’t be gone or irrelevant in 6 months. Tomorrow the Bureau of Labor Statistics will come out with their own numbers, which include government jobs. And since there are roughly 400,000 extra Census workers on the job right now, they are expected to announce something like 540,000 new jobs. Because those Census workers will be unemployed by Christmas, we should really call this 140,000 new and possibly permanent jobs. Once more, we haven’t added enough jobs to account for people entering the workforce (sorry, class of 2010!) let alone put the unemployed to work.

Speaking of the unemployed, the percentage of them who have been out of work more than half a year is at record levels. Sadly, unemployment is higher among parents, who have families to feed. Let’s not forget that the biggest reason for unemployment benefits is that those kids didn’t do anything wrong and still deserve roof-over-head and dinner-on-the-table. And in an unconscionable move, at least one employer is advertising that they won’t consider your application if you are unemployed! On what planet is it desirable to hire people who you know will jump ship for a better gig, when there are thousands of unemployed people desperate to work for you? Even without the public relations nightmare unfolding, how can this possibly be good business?

No wonder personal bankruptcy filings are up.

This is your economy. And now, in the face of a consumer revolt that threatens to turn into a voter revolt, Congress is actually considering doing something about the people who got us here. It sure sounds like too little too late, if it happens at all.

Warren Buffett Redux (a follow up):

Yesterday was the big day for the Oracle of Omaha. He had to sit down in front of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission and explain how the 3rd richest man in the world let a ratings agency he had partial ownership of overlook the real estate bubble. Well, he didn’t want to “look foolish” by sounding the alarm. After all, everybody was trying to make a buck in real estate. Nobody could have seen it coming, especially the company that was paid to see it coming. Which is it: he didn’t want to be the first to say anything, or nobody could have foreseen it?

Kind of unimpressive testimony. It’s almost like he was trying to invoke his right to remain silent.

In Closing: Androids don’t play Tetris; Wal-Mart’s lawyers warned the company not to be misogynist prigs in 1995; obligatory Gulf of Mexico oil spill items; Congressional slap-fight may make it hard to buy a home anywhere floods are a remote risk; Driving While Black (I feel certain that “brown” is close enough in many areas); cooking is hard; health insurance limbo; vaccine refusal puts everyone at risk; National Association of Evangelicals might actually be ready to face reality, that birth control prevents abortions; farewell Mercury; the 50 year “anomaly”; Governor Gibbons made the Real ID Zombie walk again, but the ACLU’s got a boomstick; and Star Trek insignia. Yes, I do try to always make the last item fun.

Oh Great Oracle of Omaha, START TALKING!

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission has requested the company of the world’s 3rd richest man next week. And then, when he declined their invitation, they sealed the deal with a subpoena. CNN helpfully points out “If you don’t know how a subpoena works, this one begins with capital letters, ‘YOU ARE HEREBY COMMANDED to appear and give testimony.'”

Why have they summoned the Oracle to Washington?

Warren Buffett is the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. Berkshire owns a lot of things; some of the ones you are likely to recognize are Dairy Queen, GEICO, Fruit of the Loom, Acme Bricks, and Pampered Chef. Berkshire also holds a lot of big stock positions in things like American Express, Bank of America, General Electric, Coca Cola, and Moody’s. Moody’s is a company that does business and economic analysis. While you might think that AmEx and B of A are what the FCIC is interested in, they want to know more about what happened at Moody’s regarding the investment ratings of mortgage backed bonds.

I wonder what the FCIC expects to hear from Mr. Buffett.

In Closing: the 3 ring circus that is the Nevada race for Senator; California health insurance rates going up (again); none of the 10 Commandments are in the Constitution; Social Security is sustainable; American citizen almost deported to Mexico; Wish List; joblessness among those under 24 at record levels; and Cat Cafes.

Left Behind: The Jobpocalypse

Even though officially, the Great Recession is over and the economy is no longer contracting, most people believe the recession is still ongoing. They believe this because as the saying goes, “Things are tough all over.”

The sad truth is that many of the jobs that were lost in the first decade of this century are not coming back. Ever. They’ve been replaced by computers and cheap overseas labor. Some of them did what they were told is the “smart thing” and trained for other jobs in the “new economy.” And while a few of them have been fortunate, many of them merely end up with a pile of student loan debt and not nearly enough experience to get a job. The only “good news” — if it can be called that — is that while they were students, they did not actually count as unemployed. And some of them have discovered that regardless of the law, many employers consider them too old to bother hiring. It isn’t that they did anything wrong. They’ve just not been fortunate. No wonder there’s been a sharp rise in Social Security disability claims!

So in the middle of this truth, FactCheck.org insists that immigration doesn’t cost American jobs. In fact, the economic papers they cite tell us, their existence creates jobs and raises wages for “native” workers. They admit that illegal immigrants performing unskilled labor do drive wages (and opportunities) down for those at the very lowest end of the employment scale. Otherwise, the distinction between legal and illegal immigrants is largely glossed over.

Now let me make one thing perfectly clear. I have no problem whatsoever with the fact that people continue to come to the United States to create a better life for themselves and their families. My son has ancestors who arrived in this nation in the last hundred years; some of them did not speak English and some were fluent in multiple languages when they arrived. But you know what they all did? They followed the law. They did what was necessary to stay legal and become citizens.

Everyone benefits when the playing field is level: immigrants benefit when there is a clear and possible path to citizenship, and they benefit when they get minimum wage and a safe work environment; law abiding businesses benefit when unscrupulous employers are not allowed to undercut them with illegal laborers; communities benefit when there is not a group of people who are trying to be invisible to authorities, and when human trafficking is not tolerated (yeah that’s right, not all the illegals pick veggies and clean toilets); families benefit when a living wage and reasonable hours are the standard; everyone’s health benefits when agricultural workers have proper sanitary conditions; everyone’s safety benefits when construction workers are paying attention to their work instead of looking out for La Migra.

But the flipside of a level playing field is that the companies that employ us must be made to follow existing law, and they must respect that their profit depends on Americans having money to purchase their goods and services. We can only run our economy so long on selling cheap foreign made goods to one other. We have got to produce something of more lasting value than a cappuccino.

If you are so inclined, here are two bloggers who could use some monetary help, both long term unemployed. Just hit the “Donate” button.

In Closing: Doesn’t this look peaceful?; Doesn’t this look suspicious?; Government says there’s only a risk of “price pressure” (not inflation!) but Gold prices say **** that!; the truth about offshore drilling; Congress looking into whether it’s fair to use credit history for employment and insurance purposes (gee, I can’t imagine why somebody with no job might have lousy credit!!); Fannie and Freddie, too big to reform; Shinkansen; GOP to hold convention in Florida during hurricane season; Common Ancestor; next time some asshat talks about “tort reform” when they mean “damage caps,” just remind them of the Gulf Oil Spill; last word (I hope) on the aptly named TARP; the Maine idea; car dealers want to be exempted from proposed financial rules (waaah); duh, insurers stand to make a lot of money on health insurance reform; and history of the slider.

Economy Jigsaw Puzzle

Normally, you start a jigsaw puzzle with the edge pieces. However, that’s really hard on this one because the fallout of the dysfunctional banking system that resulted in many of our economic issues is in the process of bringing down a foreign nation: Greece.

Mr. Buffett is really good at these puzzles, so let’s let him have a go first. Oh look, he’s put together a housing recovery in 2011 (I think that’s assuming we actually get through all the foreclosures) and a slow recovery. He thinks that something has got to be done to punish the financial whiz kids who got us into this mess, and that our current system of paying for health care is a colossal drain on our economy. This is one of the two richest guys in the world and as nearly as I can tell he didn’t need to defraud anybody to get there, so just maybe we ought to listen to him.

Of course there are other parts of the puzzle that bring into question whether there is really a recovery, even a slow one. We’ve got millions of people who are unemployed, millions more who are “underemployed”, stagnant wages, and just enough inflation to mean the savings rate is going down. Those low interest rates — which were supposed to make businesses borrow money from banks who won’t lend it and renters buy houses they can’t afford (but that are actually tempting people with higher mortgage rates and underwater homes to walk away and buy something nicer and cheaper at a lower rate) — mean that there’s not much point in saving money. That hooks in with lousy consumer sentiment, the continuing (and at least partly bank-caused) bubble and subsequent crash of housing prices, and a trillion with a T dollars in lost economic growth. That’s a million million dollars. $1,000,000,000,000.

See? These puzzles are a lot easier when people work together!

Over by the bankers, brokers, and other financial whiz kids there’s these rumors of “reform” and “consumer financial protections.” Careful, though. If you don’t put that together just right, it’s worse than nothing.

Oh yeah, and in this corner over by underemployment, we unfortunately have government budget deficits. It doesn’t take a financial whiz kid to know that when income is stagnant, unemployment is up, underemployment is high, and not enough jobs are being created, that means tax revenues aren’t what they should be either. That in turn means bigger deficits, even without any sort of spending on economic stimulus. Senator McCain wants to cut that deficit just exactly the way Reagan did, which I suppose means he proposes higher deficits.

The nice people at Forbes think all those government workers need a pay cut. Now riddle me this, Batman: while I understand their sentiment, exactly how is cutting the pay of the guy who delivers my mail or the lady who processes my passport application going to help? That’s just going to exacerbate the “stagnant wages” problem. I feel certain that they can’t really mean cutting pay for high wage workers like our Congressmen and key people in the Executive branch; such a proposal would never make it out of committee. Besides, until campaigns become solely publicly funded, I think you can argue that all those people are underpaid. After all, every one of them spent more to get elected than they will ever make at the job itself!

Of course, state governments don’t have the option of deficit spending. That’s why Nevada is moving most employees to a 4 day workweek. The only way this works, of course, is to make all those offices like the DMV open only 4 days a week. Right, because nobody needs to get a drivers license or car registration on a Saturday, right? That way they aren’t spending money to light, heat, air condition, and clean those buildings all weekend. And I suppose it’s probably good for the environment that all those state workers will be sitting at home instead of getting on the freeway. Maybe they will spend some money on their extended weekends — assuming they aren’t deathly afraid of job cuts.

There’s still pieces missing. I’ll check the box and under the sofa. In the meantime, it’s a pretty ugly picture.

In Closing: How much scientific research is thwarted by harassment that borders on textbook definition terrorism?; the Chile quake actually tilted the Earth on its axis, such that the day is 1.26 milliseconds longer (funny how Pat Robertson isn’t dredging up some made up reason why Chile has a pact! with! Satan! that explains why they had an even bigger quake than Haiti); no **** ***** cuss free week at this **** **** blog!; man accused of selling outdated videogame systems to help a terrorist group; origin of the peace symbol; ok, ok, something on health insurance reform; happy daddies; and your overdue dose of Japanfilter, Cat Costumes. Oddly enough the cat doesn’t look unhappy, and the human has no obvious wounds.

Why Housing Prices Won’t Go Up Soon

I know, I usually talk about housing over on my real estate site.

Today there’s a bunch of conflicting information about whether nationwide, house values are going up or not. Prices fell 2.5% in Q4 of 2009 (not in Vegas, but nationwide), but rose in December, but only if you looked at it on a “seasonally adjusted” basis. That’s a nice way of saying you ignore the fact that prices “always” go down in December. You could get dizzy trying to make sense of this data.

But here’s the thing. 1 in 4 homes is “underwater” right now — the mortgage is more than the house is worth — and it’s more like 7 in 10 here in Nevada. That means among other things, that the owners of those homes have limited ability to pick up and move to a new job, and that unless a very specific set of circumstances apply to them, they can’t realistically reduce their housing costs. Add to that the fact that a record number of mortgages are seriously delinquent or in foreclosure. Add to that the expert opinion that over 6 million delinquent homeowners will not be able to negotiate with lenders and will lose their properties. The mortgage system is overwhelmed and in need of reconstruction, and the latest program announced by the President is little more than a bandage on a chest wound.

So we’re not out of the woods yet, even though there are some signs of a trail ahead.

Here’s the next set of hazards as I see them. First, none of the plans out there do a thing to help legitimate investors. Investors are necessary, because not everybody will own their primary dwelling when all is said and done. If there is to be affordable rental housing, somebody must invest in it. Right now, it’s hard for investors to buy unless they have cash. And right now it’s almost impossible for investors to refinance or get any sort of assistance; somebody decided that only owner-occupants deserve help, so screw the family that rents from the investor. To a lesser extent, a sub-problem of this is the difficulty that non-citizens have getting mortgages for property in the United States. I currently have no, zero, zip, nada sources for mortgages for Asian or European clients (I speak Japanese and French), and can only help Canadians if they plan to live in the property.

Second hazard strikes close to home. Most of my neighbors are underwater on their mortgages. Banks are dumping properties for less than half what they sold for 3 years ago. None of the current refinance or loan modification programs has anything to offer people like me and my neighbors, people who can continue paying the bills each month but are underwater and have interest rates 1-3% above current levels. Now, every book about stock market investing advises that you must have an exit strategy — a plan for when to sell if things go right or even if they go horribly wrong. It’s far better to take a loss, even a loss of 50%, than wait for your losses to get even greater in the vain hope that things will turn around. If you buy on margin, sometimes this decision will be made for you by the brokerage and it is a very painful mercy. This being the case, the rational thing for many of my neighbors is to stop paying the mortgage, buy something nearby for half what they currently owe, and let the bank have their overpriced asset back.

Until banks are forced to face the reality that something must be done to fix every seriously underwater mortgage, and not just the delinquent ones, we will be at risk of more foreclosures coming onto the market. And since they will continue to dump these properties at unrealistically low prices, property values will continue to decline and housing construction will continue to be a money-losing proposition. That will in turn continue to put pressure on the budget of any state or local government that depends on property taxes for revenue, and that will put pressure on the Federal government to make up the inevitable shortfall.

In closing: Mr. Volker has some good ideas, some very smart people agree with him, and don’t cry for the banks (oh, I know you want to do just that!) because they won’t go bankrupt; The Senate is highly dysfunctional right now, with record numbers of cloture votes and 290 bills passed by the House sitting in the docket collecting dust (Hey Reid and Ensign! Get to work, you bums!); unemployed people don’t buy fast food breakfasts; and Rich People Sure Are Different (yeah, they pay almost nothing in taxes).

Disconnected

As I write, it is a Thursday afternoon. The stock market is closed for the day, and the Dow ended the day at 10,322.44. It must be nice in their world.

Meanwhile, foreclosures are at a record high, with 14.41% of mortgages either in foreclosure or with at least one past due payment. Think about that a moment. Knock on 20 doors in an “average” community and 3 of them are likely somewhere on the road from “missed a payment” to “bank owned”. Needless to say, the rate is lower in most of the country, but higher in Florida, California, Arizona and Nevada.

In addition to residential mortgage loans being in a tough spot, industrial and commercial lending is down 20% year over year. At first, you might think “good, that means that banks are only lending to companies that are likely to pay it back.” In fact, this crash of lending means that firms which might otherwise had a short term liquidity problem will go bankrupt for lack of financing, putting more people out of work. In addition, it is clear that almost no loans are available for new and small businesses, which are now unable to take up their role creating jobs for the rest of us. Remember, SBA loans are government insured second mortgages; nobody has equity anymore, so just forget about it. The rest of the SBA’s functions are largely consulting.

Official unemployment — which is traditionally undercounted — is over 10%, more like 17% once you include people like “discouraged workers,” and over a million people are due to run out of unemployment benefits before the end of the year. Merry freakin Christmas.

Speaking of Christmas, I found out today about a family that all they really want for Christmas is electricity! Sure, I bet there’s someone like that in your neighborhood too. Help them out if you can, mmkay?

Roubini is right. We have two economies going on in this country right now: one for the top companies where everything is wonderful and bonuses all around; and one that you and I live in. I believe two radical things when it comes to economics. First, interest rates all by themselves don’t magically fix the economy. Second, there’s no such thing as a jobless recovery (and by extension, I think what we are now experiencing is still the 2001 recession).

Ok, a few quick items on health insurance reform: An economist tells you how he’d fix the problem; best and worst health care by state roughly correlates to political leanings; Ezra goes mining for silver linings in the Senate version of the reform bill; and one item of interest to everyone who even knows a woman in Nevada. Some idiots who believe that a fertilized but not yet implanted egg has the same rights I do — a grown woman and mother — wants to outlaw “pills that induce abortion.” However, due to sloppy writing and even sloppier understanding of biology, the amendment would also most likely make all hormonal birth control illegal. Get the word out, this could be a mess.

In Closing: Views of Mt. Fuji; short history of the internet; only 2 countries have failed to ratify an 20 year old international treaty on children’s rights — Somalia and the United States; Just Say No to plastic crap at Thanksgiving and the whole year through (seriously, don’t you have better things to spend money on??); and finally, a hilarious Thanksgiving letter.