Too Funny! It would appear that Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman may have been reading Weber County Forum yesterday. From this morning's New York Times op-ed piece:
The Widening GyreAlternatively, just more evidence that great minds think alike?
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Economic data rarely inspire poetic thoughts. But as I was contemplating the latest set of numbers, I realized that I had William Butler Yeats running through my head: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”
The widening gyre, in this case, would be the feedback loops (so much for poetry) causing the financial crisis to spin ever further out of control. The hapless falconer would, I guess, be Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary.
And the gyre continues to widen in new and scary ways. Even as Mr. Paulson and his counterparts in other countries moved to rescue the banks, fresh disasters mounted on other fronts.
Some of these disasters were more or less anticipated. Economists have wondered for some time why hedge funds weren’t suffering more amid the financial carnage. They need wonder no longer: investors are pulling their money out of these funds, forcing fund managers to raise cash with fire sales of stocks and other assets.
Read Krugman's full article here. It's a formidable piece, addressing the U.S. domestic financial gyre that's now spiraling into world-wide economic crisis. There's also some savvy discussion in the article comments section.
News is a mite slow today.... so please consider this an open topic thread, if you like.
Talk about whatever you want to talk about.
