Brief summary for those not following ( Read more... )

Nobody has come up with a plan for the unemployed of Europe to start working again ( Read more... )

OK, it's the local broadsheet, it shouldn't need signal-boosting, but this is fucked-up serious business.

( Personal Background )

Something I've been meaning to post on for a while now is the Move Your Money project, Arianna Huffington's call for people to close their accounts with the large national banks and move their money to small community banks and credit unions. I was reminded of this by the news that the New Mexico House of Representatives has voted 65-0 to move ( Read more... )

The Telegraph has done a nice report on the potential nationwide expansion of a program in Flint to treat vacant neighborhoods like the cancerous surplus they are. I'm not sure I believe the author's implications about how much momentum this idea has as a national program, but I must say the idea is theoretically sound, and can't wait for it to ( Read more... )

California: Too big to Fail? If so, how can we get the Federal Government 55% of California's common stock ( Read more... )

As a followup to my previous post, 24 hours after 789 Chrysler dealerships got the UPS Letter of Doom, 1,100 GM dealers got FedExed the bad news. GM, unlike Chrysler, is not releasing a complete list of axed dealers, but HuffPo is attempting to compile a list.

This is great too: "Chrysler placed perhaps the most entertainingly transparent ' ( Read more... )

Chrysler is starting the job of taking a chainsword to the bloated Detroit Three auto dealership networks, revoking the franchises of 789 dealers. This is where the End of the Automaking World As We Know It starts reaching out from Michigan and Ohio and really starts going nationwide (except Alaska, but they don't count). GM is following suit and ( Read more... )

I've been saying for a while that the overbuilding of the housing bubble resulted in exurban houses which, in the extreme case, had no economic value above the scrap value of the materials. I would then contrast this against the continued shortage of housing in desirable urban centers like New York and San Francisco, to illustrate that both the ( Read more... )

From Megan McArdle's comment section"In 1950, Detroit had ~1.85M people, about 300K of whom were black. By 2000, the black population had more than doubled (to 780K) but the total population had been more than halved (down to 900K). That means the white pop of Det 50 years ago, 1.55M, was cut more than 90%, down to 115K ( Read more... )