How's Your Retirement Account Doing?

-
Schmuck! That's if you're like most Americans and have seen the value of your retirement fund dip alarmingly with the collapse of the economy.

Shoulda been a "top executive!" According to the WSJ, their pensions have risen an average of 19 percent in 2009 - with more than 200 excecs seeing a 50 percent increase in their pension...

Also news in the WSJ, the private sector shed more than 200,000 jobs in October and big bonuses are back for Wall Street bankers...

The yin and yang of life in America.

Comments

Ted K said…
Haven't seen you comment in "Baseline" for awhile. We need the antithesis for the evil "Bond Girl" haha. I noticed there is a story on Ayn Rand in the most recent (most recent in print) New Yorker. Honestly I haven't read it yet, but it's rare to find a bad story in the New Yorker. I notice it's pronounced similarly to "I'm" and I always thought it was supposed to be pronounced similar to "ain't" the AY part I mean. Anyway........
November 7, 2009 at 12:55 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The October Rose

-
Image
‘Tis the season to bring love and joy into the world – and here’s one of the loveliest stories of the year… It’s a story that begins in October 2008, when the economy is in a state of collapse; the culture is in crisis, and faith in humanity – at least, my faith in humanity – is at an all-time low. It is precisely at this time that my next-door neighbor, Annie Jennings, comes home from high school bearing an orange rose. She presents this flower to her mother, Ellen, with the announcement that she is one of the “Sweet 16,” a member of Libertyville High School’s Homecoming Court. Annie is not quite 18 years old, a high school senior with stick-straight, sandy blond hair, glasses and a big smile. We hire her to feed our cat whenever we head out of town and we leave knowing our cat is in very good hands. So when I learn of her selection as a member of the homecoming court, I am intrigued. This is the girl who watches my cat, after all. Ellen is curious about what it means to...
Read more

On the failure of "the invisible hand" to influence our financial sector

-
In Alan Greenspan's book, The Age of Turbulence , one of the issues he explores is the failure of economic populism in Latin America. Here are his thoughts: " The dictionary defines 'populism' as a political philosophy that supports the rights and power of the people, usually in opposition to a privileged elite. I see economic populism as a response by an impoverished populace to a failing society, one characterized by an economic elite who are perceived as oppressors. Under economic populism, the government accedes to the demands of the people, with little regard for either individual rights or the economic realities of how the wealth of a nation is increased or even sustained." So in Greenspan's view as a self-described Libertarian Republican, economic populism comes to life in "failing societies" that have significant income inequality and are dominated by an economic elite. And in Greenspan's mind, it is not the government that can make t...
Read more

"Good-bye to all that..."

-
Harry Patch died last week in England. It was the expected outcome for a man of 111. But it is a notable death because with Harry Patch goes the last living memory of trench warfare experienced nearly a century ago during The Great War - known now as World War 1. This story on CNN.com is a wonderful summary of Patch's life. He was a plumber before and after his stint in the trenches. He saw some of the worst warfare man has ever experienced: "He fought and was seriously wounded in Ypres, Belgium, in 1917 at the Battle of Passchendaele, in which 70,000 of his fellow soldiers died -- including three of his close friends." That's a placid little sentence to describe the slaughter of 70,000 men. A horror Patch refused to talk about until he turned 100 years old. Here's a YouTube video that shows some photos and film footage from the Battle of Passchendaele: You can hear the survivor's voice in this video shot at Passchendaele about two years ag...
Read more