LOL! Worth staying with it until the end.
Other references I’ve found today in trying to understand what the hell the US government is doing:
Jeffrey Sachs (possibly best known as the author of The End of Poverty) discusses Geithner’s asset buying plan here:
There are countless preferable and more transparent courses of action. The toxic assets could be sold at market prices, not inflated prices, making the bank shareholders bear the costs of the losses of the toxic assets. If the banks then need more capital, the government could invest directly into bank shares. This would bail out the banking system without bailing out the bank shareholders. The process would be much fairer, less costly, and more transparent to the taxpayer.
And I have finally, finally found a detailed, clear, and well-documented primer on how we got into this mess in the first place. In fact it’s an entire online supplementary chapter to Stanford Professor Charles Jones’ macroeconomics textbook. It clearly explains basic concepts like bank balance sheets, liquidity crises, the role of the federal interest rate, leverage, etc. and goes through a detailed history of the last two years from a macro-economic point of view. Lots of graphs too, the recession in pictures! Highly recommended.
