Another "DEPRESSION" sighter: Robert Reich confirms my call of 6 months ago

Hey. I said it HERE on 10/30/08

I am not an economist. I am not a political hack. I am simply someone who can see long term trends and extrapolate from there.

I emailed EVERY single person I could. I think that Robert Reich, Brian Lehrer, and a few other public people are on my mailing list for this blog.


I kept saying (over two years ago) that we were headed for a terrible economic shock, and needed to bring the country together again, with a new version of Roosevelt's "new deal".

Also See the Next person to confirm my beliefs, former IMF chief on 2/9/09.

Anyone want to take on my next item, about Saving the car companies, and why we're asking the WRONG questions?

We DONT need to save GM and Chrysler. We need to save the JOBS they represent. However, we need to change detroit from car companies into TRANSPORTATION companies.

We (USA) will never again sell 5 million cars in our country in one year.
We will never ever have the same free open credit again.
We need to come to this realization.

We need to scrap attempts to save GM and Chrysler as is. We need to turn them into GREEN transportation companies. See the post above, or just search my blog for auto-bailout.

We need to start to DISCUSS these issues, especially the two issues that no-one (else) has started to discuss:

a) A mandatory service/training corp/conscription (let's call it national service for arguments sake). See HERE (comes under: Job training, education, minority assistance...)

b) Federally paid day care starting at six months. (head-start, education)

And: we need to start to undo the damage that wall street has done to the world.

Number one on my list is to BAN the concept or development of "CDO"'s (collateralized debt obligations)-- Banning CDO's is essential to get wall street under control, and under reasonable debt obligations. see here.

The reason we need to ban CDO's is simple. I believe that the 'sub-prime' mess was only 25% of the toxic debt on the books from the banks.

The rest of the shoe will start to drop later this year, when consumer debt created CDO's (like car loans, student loans, and Credit card debt), start to go belly up.

When that hits (and I think that is a 15-17 trillion dollar mark) we will think the 'sub-prime' mess was a walk in the park...

I wish I didn't have this ability to see long trends where other people don't.

I wish I could be predicting that the Dow Jones wasn't going to drop below 5600 (but it will bottom out around there.

I wish I had a degree in economics so that I could be quotable, and interesting to media types.

I wish I had a job that would allow me to bring my long term vision to a company that needed good long term (strategic) computer advice.

I can wish for a good lottery ticket, but I need to get one first.

Cheers to all. and I wish everyone to continue to be employed.