Tito's Blog

A Long Term View

Interesting graphs that compare the current Great Recession with previous post-war recessions and the Great Depression are available at Quarterly Update: The Recession in Historical Context (pdf) by the Council on Foreign Releations.

Simon Johnson Said It

Former IMF Chief Economist and MIT Sloan Professor Simon Johnson has an excellent followup on his “oligarchs” theory and nationalization on The Quiet Coup - The Atlantic (May 2009).

It is a long but worth to the last word read. [Spoiler Warning] A quote from the last paragraph is below, where someone finally said it:

The conventional wisdom among the elite is still that the current slump “cannot be as bad as the Great Depression.” This view is wrong. What we face now could, in fact, be worse than the Great Depression—because the world is now so much more interconnected and because the banking sector is now so big.

Update: Desmond Lachman, also former IMF officials, chimes in on WSJ on similarities between US and emerging markets.

Finally Found A Countercyclical Business

Dinner + fun at home is cheaper than going out …
Condom sales rise through credit crunch.