Making the USA look great.

As you may or may not know, Iceland is one of few places in the world that has made the USA look financially responsible and risk-averse during the turmoil of the last few years. Basically, Iceland privatized and monetized its fishing industry in the 1970s, and the new-found free time allowed the country to turn into "[...] a machine for turning cod into Ph.D.’s." Unfortunately, this led many (extremely overconfident) Icelandic men to jump into finance with no training or experience; hilarity ensued, if hilarity can be equated to financial and economic ruin.

I recommend reading this (admittedly lengthy) article by Michael Lewis, written for the April 2009 issue of Vanity Fair: "Wall Street on the Tundra." Aside from describing the logic behind the rise and fall of Icelandic financiers and banks, this article supplies what I always desire in travel writing: a picture not only of the beautiful scenery and buildings of a country, but also of the personalities and idiosyncrasies of the population.

Send rescue!

Below is a video that includes the 911 call made by a police officer who confiscated some marijuana and baked brownies with his wife. After eating the brownies, the cop calls 911 because he and his wife think they have overdosed and are dead ("Time is moving really really really really slowly"). Highly entertaining, though it makes me question how well police are educated about the illegal substances from which they supposedly 'protect' the general public.

"Who Gains from President Obama's Stimulus Package...And How Much?"

I recommend everyone at least read this summary of a recent publication by two economists at The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College (summary taken from this website):

"In this Special Report, Levy scholars Ajit Zacharias, Thomas Masterson, and Kijong Kim provide a preliminary assessment of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), a package of transfers and tax cuts that is expected to provide relief to low-income and vulnerable households especially hurt by the economic crisis, while at the same time supporting aggregate demand. By the administration’s estimate, ARRA will create or save approximately three and a half million jobs by the end of 2010; while the ameliorating impact of the stimulus plan on the employment situation is surely welcome, say the authors, the government could have achieved far more at the same cost by skewing the stimulus package toward outlays rather than tax cuts. Their analysis points toward the necessity for a comprehensive employment strategy that goes well beyond ARRA. The need for public provisioning of various sorts—ranging from early childhood education centers to public health facilities to the “greening” of public transportation—coupled with the severe underutilization of labor, naturally suggests an expanded role for public employment as a desirable ingredient in any alternative strategy."

If you are interested in reading the complete article (only four-and-a-half pages), it can be directly downloaded here.

The world is ending!

The world seems to be going completely crazy, as evidenced by the following:

Reason 1: GMail is experiencing a complete outage, including POP and IMAP servers. Fucking weak.

Reason 2: Alberto Gonzales agrees with the investigation into abuse of prisoners by US personnel.

Reason 3: I was accepted into The New School's MS in Economics program.

Water slide.

This is a video Katie emailed to some people. I just uploaded it to YouTube and am posting the link. Enjoy.