Economics 10/16/2009
Posted by rosshunter on October 15, 2009
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Burn it Down and Salt the Earth | Mother Jones
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There’s an insanity here that’s almost beyond analysis. Wall Street can spark an economic slowdown that misses destroying the planet and causing a second Great Depression only by a hair’s breadth — said hair being an 11th hour emergency infusion of trillions of taxpayer dollars — and then turn around and use those trillions to return to bubble levels of profitability within a year. And they can do it even though the rest of the economy is still suffering through the worst recession since World War II. It’s mind boggling.
Is there any silver lining here? Probably not, but I’ll try: If Wall Street can shrug off the worst recession of our lifetimes as if it’s a minor fender bender and get the party rolling all over again in less than 12 months, it means the next bubble is already in the works and its collapse will be every bit as bad as this one. That in turn means it will almost certainly happen while today’s politicians are still in office. So maybe news like this will finally spur lawmakers to realize once and for all that the financial industry needs to be cut down to size. Half measures won’t do it. Self-regulation won’t do it. Compensation limits won’t do it. Byzantine, watered-down rules won’t do it. Something like a Morgenthau Plan for Wall Street is the only thing that has even half a chance of working.
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Ezra Klein – The House That Private Insurance Built
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This is the house they’ve built: an insurance market where plans are written for the healthy and all legal efforts are made to exclude the sick. That’s meant premiums are somewhat lower than they’d otherwise be, but only because the people who most need health-care insurance aren’t able to afford it, or in some cases, aren’t able to convince anyone to sell it to them. Now that arrangement is ending and they’re scared that they can’t provide an affordable product to the people who need it. They may be right, but it’s evidence of how deeply perverse their business has become, not of what’s wrong with health-care reform. When they say that the individual market would be cheaper in the absence of health-care reform, they’re saying the individual market would be cheaper if they could continue refusing to sell affordable insurance to people who need health-care coverage.
This isn’t an argument against health-care reform. This is proof of its necessity.
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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
