links for 2009-10-06
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If the excerpt gives any indication of the quality of the book as a whole, Sorkin has succeeded in writing the book of the crisis, with amazing levels of detail and access. Many books end up having much less detail than the day-to-day journalism in the papers, choosing instead to concentrate on the bigger picture. This one, by contrast, has a lot of detail, and it’s worth reading the Q&A with Sorkin to get an idea of how much reporting went into it. The VF excerpt covers a period which has been rather overshadowed, in retrospect, by the collapse of Lehman Brothers — the week after that epochal event, when Morgan Stanley came thisclose to failing...
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We learned over the weekend that, at this point in the process, President Obama "strongly" supports a public option and has launched "an intensifying behind-the-scenes campaign" in the hopes of getting the provision included in the reform bill. (The LA Times ran a big story on this today, and it's getting lots of attention, but it's the same piece the Chicago Tribune ran yesterday.)
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It’s all there: mass unemployment is necessary, because you have to shift resources away from sectors that got too big, stimulus is a bad thing because it slows the necessary adjustment. And now as then, the whole notion falls apart when you ask why, say, a housing boom — which requires shifting resources into housing — doesn’t produce the same kind of unemployment as a housing bust that shifts resources out of housing.
