The economy *will* tank.

"One way or another, we need to rescue both consumers and businesses with serious money that will last until the crisis is over. Let’s knock off the bullshit and get started."
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/03/chart-of-the-day-1-million-new-unemployment-claims-this-week/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The ruble is collapsing

In 1998, I traveled to Moscow for the first time to teach in a summer course at the Russian Academy. The week before, we were on vacation and I heard on the radio “Today, the ruble lost 100% of its value.” This news was arresting—it meant that the ruble was worthless. That seemed unlikely. Indeed, the next day, the announcer apologized and said she meant to say that the ruble lost 50% of its value.  In the event, by the time I arrived at the Hotel Sputnik in Moscow, all the cash machines in the city were shut down. Restaurant prices changed hourly during my five-day stay, and there were sidewalk signs posting exchange rates that were written in chalk so they could easily be edited. Certainly puts our recent experience with inflation in perspective.   Over at jabberwocking.com, Kevin Drum notes that the ruble is down 30% since the war started and 20% just since September.   From the comment thread: “The problem with the Russian economy at this point is that it is basically...
Read more

Saving Ryan

I just finished reading “Saving Ryan” by Emil Kakkis. Kakkis is a physician who pioneered enzyme replacement therapy for Mucopolysaccharidosis I (MPS I), a progressive and fatal disease. The story is about the patients and their families who struggle with the disease and Emil’s struggle to deliver life-enhancing therapy against terribly long odds. The Ryan of the book’s title is a kid with MPS I. His working class parents were not content to watch Ryan decline and die in his first or second decade. MPS I is an extremely rare disease, so big pharma sees no potential for return on investment for developing treatments or cures. Ryan’s parents start a foundation to raise money for a cure. I seldom read lay science/medical books because they usually spend too much time explaining technical details that I already understand, and I find myself wincing at the imprecision and outright errors. This book avoids that pitfall, both by being scientifically sound and concise, and by keeping the f...
Read more

Black Earth

 Just finished reading “Black Earth: The Holocaust as history and warning” by Timothy Snyder. It is a detailed account of the Holocaust, as well as an effort to abstract lessons from this history for our time. Like his book “Bloodlands,” Snyder’s “Black Earth” makes for painful reading. As the grandson of a Ukrainian Jew and the son of a Jew, I would have been targeted in the Holocaust had I been in the wrong place. I had read several histories of Europe in World War II that included the Holocaust. I knew the basic story of the Holocaust and Hitler’s anti-Semitic vision. I learned a great deal by reading this book. I won’t belabor the ghoulish atrocities committed by the Nazis and their collaborators. To summarize them here would be to trivialize the enormity of the crimes and invite pointless debate about who did what and who suffered more. You’ll have to read the book to understand Snyder’s historical insights. However, I learned many things that I did not know by reading thi...
Read more