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Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Two Roads Diverged

I am getting a bit distressed to find people I count on for good sense strangely dividing between a "there is no crisis, it's a scam" narrative and a "they're exploiting their own crisis to exacerbate it" narrative.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I was just quoting what Jim Cramer said. We're all operating on incomplete information here, so it shouldn't be surprising that there are disagreements. Market players and their defenders in the relevant federal regulatory bodies would like to limit (at least the bad) information. That's why they put a temporary ban on short selling.

Everybody else is trying to piece together really complicated patterns and histories from sparse news accounts . I think at least Jim Cramer is more disinterested and honest than most. Cramer has been howling for months that we need to raise taxes, and although he never explicitly endorses a candidate, it seems that he favors Obama. So I don't think he's just another Bush / Republican / Wall St shill.

Dale Carrico said...

We're all operating on incomplete information here... Everybody else is trying to piece together really complicated patterns and histories from sparse news accounts.

Definitely. For me there has recently been a weird divergence where there had seemed to be an emerging consensus among the small coterie of folks I read with whom I seem often, but not always, to agree on such matters. I wasn't meaning to seem to be attacking your last comment or anything. Quite to the contrary. That Cramer guy, though, he scares me -- I always find myself thinking of the bull in the glass shop when I see his nostrils flaring on the tee vee. Like you, I have also heard he's for Obama (probably the too-DLC Obama I dislike, much preferring the community organizer Obama myself), though.

Anonymous said...

Hah. I believe Stephen Colbert said one time, "Jim Cramer was supposed to be our guest tonight, but he exploded on the way over here."

Anne Corwin said...

Personally I am crap at economic theory, and am having a terrible time just trying to figure out what the heck is going on. So far I gather that a lot of financial institutions decided to try and fill their pockets with imaginary money whilst trying to convince everyone that no, it really was REAL money -- but were not able to maintain the illusion indefinitely.

And now, everyone is running around trying to figure out how to stop everything from crumbling to bits, or something.

That's about the extent of my understanding and I'm not even sure if that's right.