Follow this link to see Jon Stewart prove that Jim Cramer really missed the boat with his predictions of  Bear Stearns’ future.

If you followed the discussion at the time when people were trying to hold Cramer to account, Cramer was artfully able to claim that if you listened to his words very closely, you would have no cause to complain about what he said.

In this video, Jon Stewart seems to be going down that very same path of previous critics.

Never give up on Jon, though.  Wait for the final coup de grace.

Follow this link to a 40 minute interview with Joseph Stiglitz. Stiglitz is a Nobel economics laureate in economics.  He is a professor at Columbia University and the former chief economist at the World Bank. He is the co-author of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict.

This discussion is in the same vein as the other two items I posted today. In an interview like this, Joseph Stiglitz gets a much better chance to go into some details than Paul Krugman can do in a short column.

Follow this link to Paul Krugman’s latest column where he criticizes the Obama administration’s non-plan for bailing out the banks.

Perhaps it is not coincidence that I am finding many knowledgeable economists and financiers that are saying similar things.

Here is my fantasy positive spin on what the Obama administration is doing.  They really know what needs to be done, but they are having a hard time selling it politically. They keep proposing ineffective solutions until all the experts demand that they do what the administration wants to do anyway.  Then Obama can come around and say, “I really don’t want to take over the banks, but if you absolutely insist, then I guess I’ll have to do it.”

Follow this link to hear the interview of Simon Johnson on the bank bailout plan.

Simon Johnson helped shape the International Monetary Fund’s response to worldwide financial turmoil as the organization’s economic counselor and director of the research department, a position he held from March 2007 until August 2008.

Now a professor of entrepreneurship at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, Johnson is also the co-founder of BaselineScenario.com, a Web site that chronicles the global economic and financial crisis.

Johnson joins Fresh Air to analyze the bank bailout plan and its alternatives.

In the interview, he discusses other bailouts in history.  Some were successful and some were not. He analyzes the reasons for both success and failure.

I have previously blogged about Simon Johnson in the post Global Crisis Orientation.

In an earlier post, Musings on Mark-To-Market, I talked about the problems of this accounting rule in the current economic crisis.

RichardH commented that valuing assets is more of an art than a science.

I know this is anathema to accountants, but perhaps a company ought to be able to say, “We don’t know what our assets are worth”.  In this environment, that is probably a truer statement than putting almost any kind of misleading number on it.

Other possibilities would be to allow companies to state a range.  They might be able to say to their creditors, “if you make me sell all my assets today they are worth $100, but if you let me sell them over time and after the economy recovers they are worth $1,000.”

I remember a discussion with an ex-boss of mine who asked me to tell him how long a software-development project would take.  He then asked me if I was 95% certain about this number. I could not honestly tell him that I was.  After berating my poor abilities to manage a software project after my 40 years of experience, he asked me again how sure I was.  I told him I was 95% sure.  He then proceeded to ask me that if I was not 95% certain 5 minutes ago, how could I be so certain now?  I told him that I was just trying to give him the answer that he wanted to hear. I guess I should have waited more than 5 minutes to change my answer.

RichardH’s comment on the earlier post indicates that he has similar stories to tell from his world.

I’ll have to ask my daughter, the accountant, if there is any parallel between my experience and that of the accounting world.

Follow this link to the article in The Atlantic magazine

On the other side of the crisis, America’s economic landscape will look very different than it does today. What fate will the coming years hold for New York, Charlotte, Detroit, Las Vegas? Will the suburbs be ineffably changed? Which cities and regions can come back strong? And which will never come back at all?

Reader GarlandB has brought this article to my attention.  I haven’t had a chance to read the complete article yet. I save the link here for my own reference so I can get back to it after supper.

Now that I have competed reading the article, I see that there are a lot of ideas in there to contemplate.

One of the interesting ideas is the purported delitirious effect on the economy of too large a percentage of home ownership. This comes very near the end of the article.  The author’s arguments sound plausible to me.  I think they deserve some time to digest before deciding if they make sense or not.

What do you think?

If you want to see Cramer, CNBC, and Santelli put into perspective, you have to watch this Jon Stewart clip.

Remember back in the election of Bush vs. Kerry, how the Bush administration said that they could not imagine how Kerry’s suggested use of diplomacy could possibly work?

Follow this link to a story in the New York Times about how the Obama administration is trying to use diplomacy to repair our relation with Russia and solve the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons.

At the time of the Bush/Kerry contest, I was upset at John Kerry for failing to point out that Bush’s ridicule was not proof that diplomacy wouldn’t work.  Instead, it was proof of Bush’s lack of imagination.

The above eleven minute video is an easy to understand explanation of the crisis of credit. Follow this link to the author’s web site for an explanation of why he made the video. It also gives you a chance to support keeping the video on the web.