Crash Survival Zone

The global economic crisis isn’t about money - it’s about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution
It’s over — we’re officially, royally fucked. no empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running [...]

By Thomas L. Friedman

It’s always great to see the stock market come back from the dead. But I am deeply worried that our political system doesn’t grasp how much our financial crisis can still undermine everything we want to be as a country. Friends, this is not a test. Economically, this is the big one. [...]

A new report says that Wall Street has only itself to blame for the misguided deregulation that led to the current deepening financial crisis.

Issued Wednesday by Essential Information and the Consumer Education Foundation, the report documents billions of dollars spent by the financial sector on what would eventually be their own downfall.

The 231-page report, “Sold [...]

By Paul Krugman

President Obama’s plan to stimulate the economy was “massive,” “giant,” “enormous.” So the American people were told, especially by TV news, during the run-up to the stimulus vote. Watching the news, you might have thought that the only question was whether the plan was too big, too ambitious.

Yet many economists, myself included, actually [...]

After his landslide electoral victory in 1964, President Lyndon Johnson acted urgently because his power would wane with time.

“This honeymoon won’t last,” Johnson said to aide Jack Valenti. “Every day I lose a little more political capital. That’s why we have to keep at it, never letting up.”

Barack Obama, who during his 2008 campaign talked [...]

The budget that President Obama proposed on Thursday is nothing less than an attempt to end a three-decade era of economic policy dominated by the ideas of Ronald Reagan and his supporters.
The Obama budget — a bold, even radical departure from recent history, wrapped in bureaucratic f
ormality and statistical tables — would sharply raise taxes [...]

By Paul Krugman

By any normal political standards, this week’s Congressional agreement on an economic stimulus package was a great victory for President Obama. He got more or less what he asked for: almost $800 billion to rescue the economy, with most of the money allocated to spending rather than tax cuts. Break out the Champagne!

Or [...]

The president, speaking to business leaders at the White House, says trouble in the housing sector is at ‘the root of our economic challenges.’

As Congress prepares to pass his economic rescue plan, President Barack Obama today promised to turn immediately to the housing crisis, saying he would soon offer more details on how to address [...]

by Thomas Friedman
Leave it to a brainy Indian to come up with the cheapest and surest way to stimulate our economy: immigration.

“All you need to do is grant visas to two million Indians, Chinese and Koreans,” said Shekhar Gupta, editor of The Indian Express newspaper. “We will buy up all the subprime homes. We will [...]

It’s hard to take Republican leaders too seriously when they criticize recovery plans for the economy; it’s sort of like those geese criticizing evacuation plans for US Airways Flight 1549. Their critiques look even goofier when you see their alternatives. They warn that President Barack Obama’s stimulus package will explode the debt — and so [...]