On Thursday, November 20th, at over 1,000 gatherings nationwide, MoveOn members will celebrate Obama’s historic victory and launch a new campaign to help him make real change in Washington.

There is MoveOn.org web page to find a gathering.

The idea seems to be to start a petition drive to support various of Obama’s initiatives.  The petitioner signature collectors will gather pictures of signers to show the world the diversity of the people continuing to support Obama.

I decided that such an effort is not really my cup of tea.  I have been trying to imagine an effort that would help Obama overcome opposition to the initiatives that he is going to take.

The book Obama’s Challenge: America’s Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency by Robert Kuttner suggests that one of the things that a leader like Obama must do is to educate the people on the wisdom of taking the steps that he proposes.  I have started to imiagine an effort where, we the citizens, help Obama in this education endeavor.

I can picture local gatherings addressed by people who can explain the thinking behind the initiative of the moment.  Perhaps it can be gatherings in peoples’ homes to watch a webcast on the topic and then have discussions about it.  This might be something that Obama is planning to do using his transition web site after the transition is over.

I even sent the above suggestion to Obama using his suggestion web page.

In the Simon Johnson class webcast mentioned in my previous post, Global Crisis Orientation, there was a discussion of the GM bailout.

I was also reading another blog that was touting the successful Chrysler bailout as a model for a GM bailout.

I don’t understand this talk about how the bail out of Chrysler was a tremendous success.

There is very little of Chrysler left. What little that there is will disappear shortly. If this is the success that we can expect from bailing out GM, then this is not a pretty picture. Maybe the slow death of GM rather than a rapid demise is the best we can hope for.

Maybe the discussion needs to change to one about how we will replace the big three with some other industries and let cars be made by the existing successful car companies like Toyota. What steps can the government take to ease the transition for the employees, retirees, and supply chain?

What will happen to the financial system when GM defaults on the trillion dollars of GM company debt being held by the financial system?  We need to prevent this financial disaster.

If there is to be a bailout, perhaps its only purpose should be to smooth the transition to the phasing out of some of these three auto companies. If others want to start up a new American auto company by purchasing some of the resources of the big three, then so be it.  If nobody wants to do this, then we ought to let them fade away.

The web site, The Baseline Scenario, provides resources to understand the current global financial and economic crisis.

The first item on the web site, Global Crisis Orientation, suggests four ways for getting the most out of the site.

Today there was a webcast of Simon Johnson’s class on the global crisis at the Sloan School of Management at MIT.  A recording will be available to download later in the week, probably on Thursday.

There was some tutorial information at the beginning of the class to explain some of the issues in the crisis.  In particular, I learned some facts about CDOs (collateralized debt obligations) that I wish I had understood months ago.

The members of the class had diverse backgrounds in industry, finance, real-estate, and government from many countries around the world. The information and points of view  that they contributed to the discussion was most enlightening.

Thanks to RichardH for letting me know about the webcast in time for me to view it live.

In the description for the Senate Budget Committee hearing at which he was supposed to testify today, the listing is Dr. Simon Johnson — Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

According to the book Obama’s Challenge: America’s Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency by Robert Kuttner,

Peter G. Peterson, the onetime secretary of commerce under Richard Nixon and billionaire former partner of the Blackstone Group, a private  equity firm, has written four books over the past two decades bemoaning the cost of entitlements and forecasting disaster.  Peterson recently endowed the Peter G. Peterson Foundation with a personal gift of a billion dollars, about half of his windfall from his sale of Blackstone just before the markets crashed

Kuttner finds Peterson’s view on entitlements profoundly naive and misleading.

I do not know how this association affects the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

As I was posting this, I was imagining my feelings if the discussion had been about a think tank funded by George Soros.  Maybe I am over-reacting to Pete Peterson.

Finally someone was present on This Week to correct George Will’s misreading of history.  One of the reasons I stopped watching This Week was the presence of Sam Donaldson to pretend he had knowledge of the economy when in fact he was a complete ignoramus.  Cokie Roberts doesn’t add anything to the “mix”.

If it hadn’t been for Huffington Post, I never would have known about this episode of This Week. A comment on Huffington Post led me to Brad DeLong’s posts.

Brad DeLong in his post, Lessons from the Great Depression Blogging, provides some nice backup for Krugman’s position.

In the above DeLong post he has a link to his original post, What a Change! “The Week” Gives Airtime to an Expert, about the Krugman appearance on This Week.

The New York Times has a story Deregulator Looks Back, Unswayed.  You can see comments on this story on Huffington Post.

He just can’t seem to understand why every American doesn’t have a PhD in economics so that they could be on an equal footing with him.

I can see him as one of those mortgage brokers.

Customer:

I can’t afford a mortgage with those high interest rates.

Gramm the broker

Have I got a deal for you. Half the standard interest rate for the first few years.
It’s called an ARM mortgage.

Customer:

What happens after that?

Gramm the broker

The interest rate triples, but you’ll be able to refinance with a new ARM mortgage.

Customer:

I don’t know, it sounds too risky to me.

Gramm the broker

Trust me, I have a PhD in economics. Would I steer you wrong?

Now he is blaming predatory borrowers for the problems that occurred. He had no idea it would come to this.

Apparently the reporters on this story were cowed by Gramm’s credentials and his domineering personality.  All they can do is report it as a one side says this and the other side says that.  They haven’t got a clue as to what may be true and what may be more snake oil from the master snake oil salesman.  (Is that too many metaphors in one post?)

As long as I am asking who people are, I thought I would add this one about Rahm Emanuel.

Rahm Emanuel and Arab Perceptions is an article by an Arab-American about his experience of Rahm Emanuel. I think it says a lot about Emanuel’s style and a lot about the author of the article.

The Hussman Funds founder, John P. Hussman, Ph.D., has an article on the funds’ website about the current stock market. Its title is How Low, How Bad, How Long?

This interesting article was brought to my attention by the Investment Quality Trends newsletter.

The article gives you lots of numbers to ponder to describe the assumptions that are safe to make about the market’s future without predicting exactly any of the elements in the title.

The other topic that I found interesting in this article was the last paragraph about how to and how not to handle the home mortgage foreclosure crisis.  This paragraph discusses an idea similar to what I described in a previous post, Greenberg et. al. Solution to Real Estate Bubble.

The following sentence is from Hussman’s article:

Any solution that provides for a reduction in mortgage principal, without tying that reduction to some amount of surrender of future property appreciation – will immediately encourage mass delinquencies and foreclosures, as homeowners compete for what would, in effect, be free money.

I suppose this post could have been made in my Investing Forum, but I thought it of enough general interest to post here.

According to a story on Huffington Post, Obama Names Valerie Jarrett Senior White House Advisor. The story on HuffPo is rather brief but the links in the story and in the comments more than make up for the brevity.

Particularly enlightening is the DailyKos article So just who is Valerie Jarrett?

The DailyKos article had a link to an interview with Jarrett conducted by Katie Kouric.

The intellectual depth that Obama and his advisors would bring to the executive branch is one of the things that attracted me to Obama in the beginning. So far there have been few, if any, disappointments along these lines.

There are more videos at parodyandson.blogspot.com.

Andy Borowitz has written a piece called Bush in Race Against Time to Wreck Country.

Since this article is on Huffington Post’s Politics section instead of their 23/6 Humor section, then we should evaluate this as serious commentary.  Looking at Bush’s actions of late, it certainly seems like Borowitz has it figured out.

Can the economy last until January 20? When you are in a nightmare, it is sometimes hard to realize that things will be better when you wake up.