Bill's Notes

You know, one thing that's puzzled me about this economic crisis is I didn't see a lot of foreclosures near me, in Pennsylvania. Things seemed fine. Then I looked at the on the link. Turns out none of the "bad counties" are in PA, and only one in Jersey (Sussex, apparently).

In fact, vast sections of my area of the country are fine, include all of New York City and State. This crisis is really about a boom in the southwest and Florida that crashed mercilessly and spread throughout the world.

Here's my guess at what happened: A lot of those counties might have been long commuters. Gas prices went up and they were overexposed for a long period of time, until they got sunk. A lot of those counties look like long-commuter areas.

The same thing might've happened to me, if my boss didn't let me work more and more at home. (Although I did hedge my risk by making sure the house costs would be comparable to rent in the area.)

But this part is still a guess.

So here we are in 2009. Trends that have been in the works for years — will globalization work? was it a good idea to repeat Glass-Steagall? what will happen to newspapers? Is the nation-state obsolete? where are we going?

Obviously, the nation state will continue. Newspapers have a big problem, but it's obvious to anyone: You can't give away your product in one channel and sell it in another. Bloggers may have killed the golden goose — the reporters who do the reporting. That leaves bloggers to report (now you'll have to quit your day job), or rely on official sources.

This economic collapse, however, has taught me a few things:

Our economy is now extremely vulnerable. Half the mortgage foreclosures happened in 35 counties in the U.S. — and most of them in four states. Those counties comprise 20 percent of the U.S. population. That should not have cascaded throughout the world.

I had no idea that companies such as AIG could essentially hold the world economy hostage. If a company has that much power, that is, cannot fail without causing a national or international depression, the system is too vulnerable. Especially since folks from one unit within AIG took the company down.

As I've written before, you need to think of an economy a little like fireproofing a facility — you need firedoors, plenty of exits, emergency lights and the like. That way, fires get contained.

What we've seen here is a system that allows fires to spread throughout the world ...

Glass-Steagall needs reinstating, and not in a hollowed out state. If you're in the mortgage business, that's your business. If you're in the investment banking business, that's your business.

Firewalls. Distributed economy power, not centralized economic power. (Strangely enough, this is an area where many of the left agree with many on the right — it's the center that's the problem.)

And we need to do something about globalization — that is, the people who've been playing labor arbitrage for 15 years now by building in a cheap area and selling in an expensive area.

I dunno.

I've enabled comments again, having disabled the comments on the archived post that was getting spammed every 15 seconds. Let's see if this works.

Recently, a blogger wrote some of the most beautiful prose I've ever read.

All this post cost Amy was everything, but what she got, just read ... my heart broke at "He wasted no time. He came immediately." Pax.

I really got it there for a moment -- Christ as God, seeing God as incarnated as Jesus, instead of Jesus as God, God as Jesus -- for a few minutes, I was a real Christian. Then it went away and y'all stuck with me again.

I don't have time to dedicate removing comment spammers from this blog. While I appreciate the actual human comments, even if you disagree with me, I simply don't have time to keep removing 300-400 spammed comments every few weeks. I've long tried sunsetting provisions and other tools, but they don't work: The spam keeps coming.

Until I figure out what to do, feel free to email your comments. Thank you. -- The Management.