Martha Holmes Picnic September 1947 Eve Prince’s midnight picnic in Warrenton, Virginia Ilargi: Obama expands his job stimulus plan, moving the goalposts from 2 to 3 million jobs to be created over a 2 year period. There are a few things that don’t add up in this. First, these are largely jobs that cost the US economy money, instead of making it richer. And that economy is already so broke that any more additional costs will weigh heavily on it.
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Unknown POW’s 1864 Chattanooga, Tennessee. Confederate prisoners at railroad depot waiting to be sent north. Ilargi: The credit crisis yesterday brought down a first entire government, in Belgium. As Niall Ferguson writes today: ”It is all but inevitable that we shall see serious political and geopolitical upheavals in 2009, as the recession takes its toll on weak governments (Thailand and Greece are already reeling) and raises the stakes in inter-state rivalries (India-Pakistan)”. In the same vein, Stoneleigh looks ahead at
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Harris & Ewing Fairview Hotel 1916 1st Street and Florida Avenue, Washington The proprietor is former slave and “colored philosopher” Keith Sutherland Stoneleigh: The interface between finance and energy will prove to be the most important determinant of the way the Greater Depression we are rapidly moving toward will play out in practice. For those here who may be unaware of peak oil, the point is that global oil production appears to have reached a production peak that it will
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Detroit Publishing Co. Under the boardwalk 1908 Chalfonte Hotel and the Boardwalk.Atlantic City, New Jersey Stoneleigh: In recent years, the prevailing financial orthodoxy has been that markets are efficient mechanisms for resource allocation based on the collective expression of rational human decision-making, the implication being that they are grounded in stabilizing negative feedback. Markets have been seen as essentially dispassionate and objective arbiters of value, and their constant fluctuations as a random walk with no underlying pattern. It would follow
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Lewis Wickes Hine Scavengers November 1912 Children going through Whitman Street dump. Pawtucket, Rhode Island Stoneleigh: There are many things we have discussed here frequently that come up as questions in the comments because we are attracting new readers all the time. I thought it would be a good time to answer those questions en masse, so that there would be a URL to point to if the same questions should come up again. The basic point is that we
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from The Crimson Permanent Assurance- Monty Python Stoneleigh: Everyone has heard of pyramid, or Ponzi, schemes. In their simplest form they are short-lived deliberate frauds where a small number of existing members are paid from the buy-in of a larger number of newer members until the supply of newer members is exhausted, whereupon they collapse. Typically, the founders, and perhaps a few others who got in early and out before it was too late, end up making a lot of
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National Photo Co. Filling 1924 Havoline Oil Company, Washington, D.C. Ilargi: As British government borrowing has risen an astonishing 75% (!) in one year (what would the country have looked like without that?), a consensus emerges in the US to expand the budget deficit, and dramatically. Everybody still believes that is is indeed possible to borrow their way out of misery. The only other places where you can find this sort of thinking is in casino’s and crack-houses. There is a
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