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Slate is organizing its readers in an effort to photographically document the current recession/depression/economic crisis. The 30s had photos of people in soup lines and the 70s had gas lines but what does the economic crisis look like when everyone is online?
You can’t take a picture of the unemployed if they never leave the house.
Interested photographers can upload their photos to Slate’s Shoot the Recession group on Flickr.
This photo by Bobby Yip of Reuters captures the current zeitgeist pretty well.
Unused shipping containers were piled up at a storage depot in Hong Kong Wednesday. The government is looking for places to store hundreds of thousands of unused containers expected to flood Hong Kong in the coming months due to China’s slow exports.
The world has so much stuff we don’t need that we don’t know where to put it all. Perhaps people will be living in those stacks of containers before too long. (via wsj)
NY Times food critic Frank Bruni notes that in this down economy, it’s easier to get reservations and deals at even the hottest restaurants as they struggle to remain profitable. And the service is less haughty.
“The attitude that a number of places used to have, they don’t have that anymore,” Ms. Rappoport said, her tone of voice communicating equal measures bewilderment and relief. “That attitude of ‘we’re doing you a favor,’ that frosty condescending attitude — I don’t find that anymore. And I’ve experienced that change over and over again.” Servers, she said, make double- and triple-sure that her table has everything it needs. Managers circle back to the table more often than ever to ask, with new urgency, if everything’s O.K.
For opportunistic diners, there are at least three big advantages to this trend.
1. Great food at relatively reasonable prices.
2. Dining opportunities at great but previously unavailable restaurants at good times.
3. The chance to become a highly valued regular at your favorite restaurant. If they’re doing things right and you support them when times are tough (visit often, tip well, etc.), they’ll gratefully reward you in better times with reservations at prime times, VIP treatment, and dishes “courtesy of the chef”.
Marginal Revolution has been posting an ongoing series of posts on countercyclical assets: things are doing well even though the economy as a whole is struggling. The latest example is that shoe repair shops are doing a booming business. One Florida cobbler’s repair volume is up 50%.
Some other examples are increasing activity on Second Life, cocoa futures, unusual pets, gold coins and wine, evangelical churches, tasers, high end prostitutes, beer, and household safes. Sounds like a hell of a party.
My own countercyclical hunch is that Internet use will rise dramatically over the year because a) it has become something that people need (even more than TV…you’ll see people scaling back on cable before they send back their cable modem) and b) spending more time using it doesn’t cost extra. Plus, unemployment = lots of time to spend online screwing around “updating your resume”.
Bruce Sterling: 2009 Will Be a Year of Panic, a summary of seven factors that we should be concerned about in 2009 and beyond.
Most people in this world have no insurance and ignore building codes. They live in “informal architecture,” i.e., slum structures. Barrios. Favelas. Squats. Overcrowded districts of this world that look like a post-Katrina situation all the time. When people are thrown out of their too-expensive, too-coded homes, this is where they will go. Unless they’re American, in which case they’ll live in their cars. But how can dispossessed Americans pay for their car insurance when they have no fixed address?
(thx, bruce)
The Atlantic’s new business blog has an interview with Michael Lewis.
A related thing is that there was blind faith in the value of financial innovation. Wall Street dreamed up increasingly complicated things, and they were allowed to do it because it was always assumed that if the market wanted it then it made some positive contribution to society. It’s now quite clear that some of these things they dreamed up were instruments of doom and should never have been allowed in the marketplace.
(thx, djacobs)
The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis compares the current recession against some past recessions and, so far at least, it doesn’t look too bad. However…
This page does not provide forecasts, and the information should not be interpreted as such.
(via mr)
Sign o’ the times: Chronically Indigent Resent Influx of Nouveau Poor.
“Panhandling and recycling are hard enough without extra competition,” Mr. Baxter continued. “Damn it — if too many people give blood, my income is gonna drop even more.”
(via clusterflock)
In an Op-Ed piece for the NY Times called The End of the Financial World as We Know It, Michael Lewis and David Einhorn explore what checks and balances should have been in place to prevent the US financial markets from running themselves into the ground in search of perpetual short-term gain.
Our financial catastrophe, like Bernard Madoff’s pyramid scheme, required all sorts of important, plugged-in people to sacrifice our collective long-term interests for short-term gain. The pressure to do this in today’s financial markets is immense. Obviously the greater the market pressure to excel in the short term, the greater the need for pressure from outside the market to consider the longer term. But that’s the problem: there is no longer any serious pressure from outside the market. The tyranny of the short term has extended itself with frightening ease into the entities that were meant to, one way or another, discipline Wall Street, and force it to consider its enlightened self-interest.
Here’s part 2, in which Lewis and Einhorn propose some possible remedies.
Ketzel Levine is a NPR senior correspondent who came up with the idea of doing a series about how Americans are handling the economic downturn…and then got laid off by NPR in the middle of her reporting. Here’s the series, American Moxie, How We Get By.
This radio program made the rounds last week, but I finally got caught up this weekend so I’ll add my voice to the chorus urging you to listen to This American Life’s episode on the financial crisis, Another Frightening Show About the Economy. Paired with The Giant Pool of Money from back in May, this is an excellent overview of what’s going on in the financial markets right now. The hosts of the two shows are also doing a daily blog/podcast thing at Planet Money In addition, the last half of this week’s TAL concerns the political angle of the financial mess. I haven’t had a chance to listen yet, but check it out if you’re into that sort of thing.
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