Plain Sense Economics

There’s an old Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times!” Well, we are certainly living in interesting times.

In my econ classes we’ve started looking at the current financial/banking/credit crisis. It’s complicated, and much of it I don’t understand. Still we need to stay as informed as possible and look for resources to understand the root causes and possible solutions.

Here are a couple of media “tutorials” that are a good start.

David Leonhardt, in The New York Times, wrote today:

In 1929, Meyer Mishkin owned a shop in New York that sold silk shirts to workingmen. When the stock market crashed that October, he turned to his son, then a student at City College, and offered a version of this sentiment: It serves those rich scoundrels right. (read more…)

And then a couple of days ago, the brilliant economic explainer, Robert Krulwich, had this video on ABC News, that explains how credit is such an important fuel for our economy.

I’m going to add a “- I” to the title of this post. I’m sure there will be “-II” and “-III” in the days to come.