Essays on the Great Depression by Ben S Bernanke - For Serious "Depression Buffs" Only

This is such a pertinent read right now. If you care at all about the value of the greenback, if you care at all about the state of affairs, from microeconomic to macroeconomic, and everything in between, you’ll want to not only glance and sift through this title; take it along with you to the beach. Sit on it a while; the author certainly has, who’s none other than the current Fed Chairman. He curated and cultivated this relatively short list of essays over the past 20 years—20, before publishing circa 1999. It just frames everything that we’re going through, in terms of the recession, in terms of the housing crash in the U.S., in terms of the collapses of various nation-states in the E.U., in such a clearer light. You read the book, and you sometimes forget, that he’s referring to the Asian Contagion most of the time, (especially in that intro, with his side notes), but it just makes so much sense to be talking about the global recession in those terms as well. This is for the serious “depression buffs” out there, as the author admittedly is. He’s not at all a good writer; he writes like he talks, when he testifies. He says stuff like “very substantially,” which is just kind of endearing, if not a little disappointing, considering his stature then, as an economist, but particularly now. You definitely come away with a sense of confidence and security about the man at the helm, thankful that he’d been this depression buff, instead of a wacky “wizard” (Alan Greenspan).

Forward on Reverse: Reverse Mortgages as National Security Assets from National Mortgage Professional Magazine by Atare E. Agbamu

Who would've thought? My little old lady physician, that's been our family's family doctor practically my whole life, was into the mortgage and underwriting business? Anyway, it was sitting in the waiting room, and my phone was out of battery. So I picked it up, and stopped at this article. I was only on it for a few seconds, honestly, but I just couldn't believe that this guy was quoting Greenspan: In his memoirs, The Age of Turbulence, Alan Greenspan argued that private resources must be part of the solution to America’s entitlements-influenced fiscal problems. Home equity is private resource. Yeah, and he'd basically retracted that whole idea when he testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. I made a mistake, he basically said. Yeah, for almost 20 years, he'd been making that same mistake.

Woops.



That all said, the book reads awfully naively. The Wizard, right? It sounds that way, because he's all throaty and stuff when he testifies, and he has ton of baggy skin. But on paper, the text, the way he writes sort of openly about how he feels about all of the various topics that seem to run through (such as, if he were a terrorist and wanted to inflict some real damage, he'd hit the electronic transfers systems instead of blowing up a few buildings; this would immediately shut down the economy he says). On paper, it makes sense that he'd fess up to a "mistake" on Capitol Hill that way; he's an empirical guy, ultimately, and he goes off the data, and he's really just trying to make the best decisions he can. It was an honest mistake. Check out these pundits: The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations?, The Myth of the Free Market: The Role of the State in a Capitalist Economy, Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy, Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don't. Oh, there's a ton of them. Check out the Kindle samples.