I’m sure there are some baseball fans who visit this site, and if you collected baseball cards like I did…you’ll find this amazing and eventually “on-topic” for a politics site… But there is an economic angle to this… Topps needs to augment reality because baseball cards are struggling in the Internet age. Today’s collectors, most [...]

Cramer should have just shut up and taken his lumps. Instead he tried to make it Stewart the boogeyman and here’s how that turned out. Yes, Cramer actually fired back and then tried to use the excuse of, “Well, but, but, but Warren Buffett and stuff!” I’m sure we’ll have more tomorrow.

In Sri Lanka… This has to be one of the most terrifying and haunting images I’ve ever seen. It takes a tragic place right alongside the Vietnamese children who are running down the road near Trang Bang after they got hit with napalm. (credit: Telegraph)

I thought since I’ve been so sunny today, here’s a few more rays to pick you up… The math is pretty simple. It’s the worst drop in the S&P 500 since The Great Depression. Now, since I posted that graph earlier of how much GDP loss it’ll take to get to 1932 numbers, who here [...]

Practically speaking, at our current rate we’d need the GDP to drop 6.6% in 4 straight quarters for it to hit the purple line below. While that’s not very easy to do, it’s much more likely if the banking problem doesn’t get solved and credit freezes up again. Calculated Risk offers this handy graph… And, [...]

A netizen of reddit saw this recently… There are no words. (credit: noseeme)

And while there seem to be no details about what he actually wants in the plan, there is one very important thing he doesn’t. From HuffPost: Sen. John McCain is putting together a major economic plan that will be structured, in some ways, off of Newt Gingrich’s famous Contract With America. In an email obtained [...]

In the past, President Obama has indicated he’d be supportive of teacher merit pay and charter schools. Today, he made that support official in his first major presidential speech on education: His solutions include teacher pay and charter school proposals that have met resistance among members of teachers unions, which constitute an important segment of [...]

Remember when I highlighted a 60 Minutes piece back in December that talked about this? Well, now it’s happening. From WSJ via Calculated Risk: Standard & Poor’s Ratings Service on Monday placed its ratings on $552.8 billion worth of U.S. first-lien Alt-A residential mortgage-backed securities issued between 2005 and 2007 on watch for downgrade, saying [...]

A pretty funny SNL skit from this past weekend. Do note that the biggest applause was for the AIG bit, which I thought was the funniest too.

Christina Romer explains exactly why at the Brookings Institute today. Some key points: This similarity of causes between the Depression and today’s recession means that President Obama begins his presidency and his drive for recovery with many of the same challenges that Franklin Roosevelt faced in 1933. Our consumers and businesses are in no mood [...]

The flagging economy has accelerated the decline of the American newspaper industry. Already suffering from waning readership and declining ad sales, several major newspapers are now projected to fold or go exclusively on-line before the end of the year. Those papers include such stalwarts of the news business as the Miami Herald, the Boston Globe, [...]

And she fisks Ann Coulter in a fantastic op-ed for The Daily Beast. For the Republicans in the crowd, she spouts some hard truths: It is no secret that being a Republican isn’t the most hip political stance a person can take right now. President Obama has successfully established himself as the hippest politician around. [...]

As the economy goes cliff diving, the effects are being felt around the world. From NY Times: In its new report, prepared for a meeting next week of finance ministers from the 20 industrialized and large developing countries, the World Bank warned that the financial disruptions are all but certain to overwhelm the ability of [...]

And maybe that’s a good thing for the GOP. After all, it keeps the Democrats constantly guessing as to who they should target next. From Rasmussen: Sixty-eight percent (68%) of Republican voters say their party has no clear leader, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Another 17% are undecided. Just five percent [...]

He called the NY Times back to talk about a question they asked him. Obama’s basic argument: You do realize that Bush started all of this, right? So, was Bush a socialist? Also, does anybody think that Democrats don’t believe in capitalism?

And so it begins… “Close them down, get them out of business. If they’re dead, they ought to be buried,” Sen. Richard Shelby, the Ranking Republican on the banking committee, told ABC’s This Week. “We bury the small banks — we’ve got to bury some big ones, and send a strong message to the market.” [...]

Tax cheats are coming under a new pressure from Congress. This is Lagan from ANP, Switzerland’s largest bank, UBS, has long been a generous donor to American lawmakers. Last year alone, the bank spread over three million dollars across hundreds of U.S. election campaigns. That kind of money wins lots of friends on Capitol Hill, [...]

The economy is obviously the topic again, but one note hear about balance…I don’t think Newt Gingrich should EVER be in the roundtable section. Partisan political figures should not be on that panel. So 6 weeks in, and even before the stimulus has really started, they’re essentially already saying that it won’t work. Good times.

If this one goes until April, which it’s very likely to do, it’ll be the longest one in American history. From AP: Unemployment hasn’t reached 1982 levels and the gross domestic product hasn’t fallen quite as far. But the hurt from this recession is spread more widely and uncertainty about the country’s economic health is [...]