“We have gone through in the last year a remarkable set of events, ranging from housing market to credit market to financial market shocks,” James Poterba, president of the NBER and an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in an interview. “The collection of shocks is a very rare coincidence. It is not terribly surprising you might get a longer-than-average downturn.”
Reminds me of the kind of story that reads "in a series of unrelated incidents," which practically begs the reader to connect the dots.
In this case, Poterba speaks of a collection of effects (the shocks), from which the careless reader might infer that each shock has a separate cause.
But surely there is a single cause? That is, Big Money bet the rent on the ponies, and lost?
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Funny
It's funny (why am I not laughing?) how the market responded yesterday to the "news" that we have been in a recession since 12/2007, when average Americans know that we've been in a recession for (about) the past 8 years and are now firmly headed into the Big D.
And who gets paid all of those big bucks? More importantly, why?
Shainzona
There's the actor in the
Libery Mutual commercial:
"If this isn't a recession, it sure feels like one."
That ad's been running for several months now.