Important Note:
Opinions are fun. My friends tell me I am someone with lots of opinions and that's fine since I don't get mad at others when they disagree with me. In this same spirit I am interested in hearing yours views as long as you are able to share your views without boiling over. I look forward to hearing from you. I tend to write in the form of short essays most of the time, but contributions do not need to be in this same format or size. Some of the content here will date itself pretty quickly, other content may be virtually timeless, this is for the reader to judge.
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The economic coin toss
Posted at: Mar/04/2011 : Posted by: mel
Related Category: Economics,
It's been almost five years since the housing bubble popped. When the housing market evaporated venture capital and the creation of new businesses seemed to also disappear. Just with respect to the housing market the ever repeating question has been “why is it taking so long for the housing market to sort itself out?” I have read theories and heard congressional hearing talking about the glut of .....read more…
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A recovery stymied by risk aversion
Posted at: Dec/14/2010 : Posted by: mel
Have you noticed; the Great Recession has left a deep and possibly lasting scar on our American psyche. From ordinary families to CEOs and captains of industry, we are a nation that is more cautious, more fearful, and more risk-averse than any time in our history. This widespread and, to this point virtually indestructible anxiety over risk has hobbled the recovery and helps explain the slow pace .....read more…
Have you noticed the deficit?
Posted at: Dec/06/2010 : Posted by: mel
There has been a lot of talk in recent weeks and months the National deficit or just plain deficit. I am by no means an expert on economics or government budgets, and fiscal policy often seems more like magic than logic to me, but I am go to try and wade through some of this stuff. I worry over this because I have kids and like most concerned parents, I think about their future and what kind of .....read more…
Why banks won't help homeowners
Posted at: May/12/2010 : Posted by: mel
The investment banking sector is in the toilet. There are millions of homeowners who are underwater on their home loans. The federal government has pushed a program out to banks for restructuring home loans. It would seem obvious that we should be seeing a wave of easy refinancing to resolve this mess, but it just isn’t happening. Sometimes the obvious is just not all that obvious. Let’s take.....read more…
Regulating banks
Posted at: May/05/2010 : Posted by: mel
There has been a lot of news about financial regulation coming from congress in the wake of the deepest recession in nearly seventy years. There is no doubt in my mind that the short-sighted motive for profit over financial responsibility led these banks to make irresponsible choices. For most of us, if we do something wrong and get caught there is normally a punishment and a change in the rules.....read more…
Is Hyperinflation Looming?
Posted at: Jun/29/2009 : Posted by: mel
First of all, I am not an economist, I do not work for the treasury. The scope of my economic knowledge is my wallet. In my college days I learned that Inflation is when the price for goods and services goes up, and generally goes up at a rate that exceeds most peoples wage or salary increases. Obviously, “Hyperinflation” would therefore be the extreme case of this. By extreme I mean that when.....read more…
What is the future of Detroit?
Posted at: Apr/02/2009 : Posted by: mel
Predicting the future has never been a science. For those who know me, you know that I like to look to the lessons of the past to speculate on the path for the future. But the predicament that our American auto industry is in is pretty much uncharted territory. In stead of expressing an opinion I will try to pull together everything I think I know and we’ll have to see how things unfold in a m.....read more…
Stay away from the Depression Word
Posted at: Mar/25/2009 : Posted by: mel
Okay, so times are pretty tough. The stock market has lost a lot of value in the past 18 months, some banks are failing, many more people are out of work than in decades, and people are losing their home. Hey, this sounds a whole lot like that thing all of us studied in school years ago…The Great Depression. For all of the aforementioned reasons and many more it is really easy to jump to that c.....read more…
Where were our media watchdogs?
Posted at: Mar/09/2009 : Posted by: mel
Okay, so we have a global economic meltdown. Sub-prime mortgages, collateralized debt obligations, car makers making too many cars, excessive government waste and ear-marks, the list of contributing factors goes on and on. We are all now very much aware of what went wrong and what we should not have done or allowed. So where were our media watchdogs? In this country we give the press a grea.....read more…
Improvising our way out of the recession
Posted at: Mar/06/2009 : Posted by: mel
Any historian or reader of history will tell you there is a lot to be learned from history. Sometimes reading history presents us with a previous cause and effect that can be applied with great similarity to a current situation enabling us to predict a reasonable expectation. Sometimes the lessons of history are much more vague and need a broader interpretation. The depression of the 1930’s .....read more…
