So, as you surf the intertubes trying to make sense of the financial crisis and the administration’s response to it, who are the sources that make the most sense to you, or who does the best job of describing what’s going on in terms you can understand?
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
This guy is always worth reading: http://rick.bookstaber.com/
Easy Answer- Calculated Risk
The Baseline Scenario or “What happened to the global economy and what we can do about it“, in posts by Simon Johnson, James Kwak, Peter Boone.
Specifically organized to try to educate the reader (at whatever level his or her background).
Major dailies for references to primary sources (FedReg, THOMAS, EDGAR, FDIC, the Fed, Treasury, etc.); and here (political), and CJR’s The Audit (financial industry) for analysis of the coverage.
Calculated Risk mostly, but once I decipher whatever Roubini has said it always works the best.
depends on my attention span…
short: TPM is pretty good
longer: Bonddad’s blog (beware: technical content)
CalcRisk, Kroog’s Blog, Bonddad, Roubini, Brad DeLong, and Atrios.
jon stewart and stephen colbert
Calculated Risk; Illargi and Stoneleigh at Automatic Earth (true doomers, but they saved me a lot of money by scaring me out of the equity markets a couple years ago); Mish Shedlock; Yves Smith (Naked Capitalism). I also read DeLong, Setzer, and Krugman as well as Bonner (The Daily Reckoning)
knows anything about economics. None of the assholes pontificating about what plan is good and what plan sucks knew anything about the catastrophe before it happened. Now folks are listening to them with the rapt attention reserved for those who are really in-the-know.
It may just be a confidence thing. If folks believe Geithner’s plan will work it will work.
But nobody knows for sure.
Both Atrios and Krugman were sounding the alarm years ago. Roubini is undisputedly the first one to understand the scope of scale of this, about 2 years ago.
Dissenting voices were out there, maybe you just chose not to listen.
No. Those were not the first. I was reading about this from Stoneleigh’s posts on the Oil Drum in at least early ’06. Mish was also on it. Tanta at Calculated Risk was warning about the oncoming mess in Decmeber ’06. I’m sure there were others who were even earlier. The economic bloggers were way ahead of the acceptable “experts” on this one.
I was responding to the silly idea that ‘we shouldn’t listen to any economists since none of them predicted this problem.’ That’s the basic idea of the original comment, and it’s ridiculous.
Plenty of people out there saw this coming, we agree on that.
is a “silly idea” too.
I like Krugman and the guys who wrote this:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-black-tom-ferguson-rob-johnson-walker-todd/how-to-stop-aigs-bo
nuses_b_175351.html
but I get bits and pieces from everywhere…too numerous to mention lest I’d risk appearing an effete snob. I have this giant newsreader full of many, many sites and sources of information…even some rightee stuff. I won’t say that I take an average but I do try to sort through it and find whatever truth there might be.
I do have to say that many of Krugman’s reservations about Obama during the campaign are appearing more prescient in retrospect given his choice of Geithner at Treasury and his apparent conviction that things are headed in the right direction.
In so many words Krugman had said that Obama might not be read to deal with the savage wolves he would surely encounter.
I have found a lot more negative reactions than positive, but if you want to see a positive reaction that is not by a shill, not hard to follow, and is reasonably convincing, read Brad DeLong today at
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/03/the-geithner-plan-faq.html
Whether he is right I have no idea. I sure hope so.
Best financial commentary on the net is Barry at the Big Picture. I think it is also ranked #1 in traffic for that category. Daily reads, Calculated Risk, Bonddad, and Delong. All wonderful. If you haven’t gone by Bonddad for his market summary, Mon – Thurs, you should check him out.
Angry Bear
Boo, I want to thank you and all the readers for posting these sites. I occasionally follow a link to Krugman or DeLong, but these are all great sources. I am over my head with economics, like most of us I feel everyone’s gotten screwed but not sure exactly who did the screwing or how.
I made a new folder in my favorites and stuck all these blogs in there. Thanks again everyone.
By the way, I occasionally check out Lucy Komisar at:
http://thekomisarscoop.com/
Asia Times has the big picture.
Daily lookup:
Naked Capitalism, Big Picture, and Calculated Risk.
Semi-daily:
Brad deLong, Krugman, Thoma
Sounds right, but doesn’t always agree:
Angry Bear
Sounds wrong:
McArdle
And now for something completely different:
Lew Rockwell
I’m starting to believe that Paul has a touch for getting the entire story backwards.
bondad, firedoglake, atrios, krugman, some of daily kos’s writers, calculated risk, and occasional good analyses by greenwald (his piece on cramer was great). I don’t read enough roubini, and I should.
atrios is exceptionally good, in terms of being concise and cutting the the chase. and jane hamsher has done great work comparing and contrasting the then-and-now statements of geithner and summers, who seem to change their story an awful lot.
If you only have 2 seconds to digest: Atrios
If you have 2 minutes to digest: TPM or Krugman
If you have 20 minutes to digest: Galbraith or CalcRisk
If you have 2 hours to digest: Roubini