Funny Money

I'm no economist or politico, so I don't have a lot of original thought on the current economic situation, but I did enjoy reading John J. Reilly on the current economic situation:

This is not your average recession. Actually, it's not even a recession at all, in the sense of a historically familiar inflection of the business cycle. It's a technology failure. I have always recoiled at the use of the term "technology" to refer to anything but hardware. I have been particularly annoyed by the way that intellectual property laws now treat financial algorithms like patentable gadgets. Nonetheless, the behavior of the financial system in recent months was a essentially a design failure. Twenty-five years of financial models turned out not to work. The enterprises that grew up to make use of them, and particularly the housing industry, are in many respects morbid; we should not want them to revive, not in their former state. We particularly don't want to "revive" the housing market. We want to anaesthetise it like The Blob in the various movie remarks of that names and carefully dispose of all the pieces. Home ownership can be wonderful, but there is no shame in renting.