As more stuff comes out about the government’s actions during the initial financial crisis, I…

As more stuff comes out about the government’s actions during the initial financial crisis, I start to wonder if Occupy didn’t do far more worse than good. The problems we faced then, and continue to face today, in regard to our economy and fiscal policy are enormously complex. 

The spectacle of Occupy pushed important coverage and op-eds about these problems off the front page, if not right out of public consciousness, and the discussions about these issues were nether as detailed or as public as they should have been.

If there was any part of the whole movement that did do far more good than bad, I think it was the ‘We Are The 99%’ folks. When stories of hobos and police raids are long delegated to the dustbin of history, I suspect the images of The 99%, silent, suffering Americans, looking out from thousands of internet posts, will remain. I think they are likely to join images from events like the Depression and the Dust Bowl as representative of times that, whatever the cause or the fault, America truly screwed itself over. 

Visualizing The Triumph Of Hope Over Reality | Zero Hedge

Visualizing The Triumph Of Hope Over Reality | Zero Hedge:

Remember when we talked about how TARP implicitly made risky funds safe by bailing out the banks? (After all, if we bailed them out for screwing up this time, then surely we’ll be able to bail them out next time.) Well, as was predicted by many a person with sense, the risky and fairly terrible assets on the market have been tanking the *real* value while our government waves a hand and says ‘all is well here.’ And the market believes them. 

All is not well.

How Student Debt Is Holding Back The Housing Market

How Student Debt Is Holding Back The Housing Market:

College grads should be getting ready to live the American Dream and buy a house of their own. But they’re being held back by their crushing debt loads […] Students got caught in a housing market spiral: many parents who had once used home equity to help finance college costs had to pull back when the market tanked, leaving students to take on more debt, which is now getting in their way of owning their own homes. […]

BTW: the housing market is rebounding on speculation of an increase in homeownership that WILL NEVER HAPPEN. Prepare for student debt to crash the US economy not just once, but twice. 

“This error is needed to get the results they published, and it would go a long way to explaining why…”

“This error is needed to get the results they published, and it would go a long way to explaining why it has been impossible for others to replicate these results. If this error turns out to be an actual mistake Reinhart-Rogoff made, well, all I can hope is that future historians note that one of the core empirical points providing the intellectual foundation for the global move to austerity in the early 2010s was based on someone accidentally not updating a row formula in Excel.”

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