The production recession is over, the GDP recession is over — the employment recession is not. The Fed is in a good position right now. It can hold rates low and steady.
—Brian Bethune, economist at IHS Global Insight
Ryssdal: Does this mean then the increasing nichification of this music, where bands go out and find fans who like this band in particular. Does that mean the days of the blockbuster, globe-shattering bands like U2 and the Rolling Stones are done with?
KOT: Yeah, I’m crying a bitter tear here because those days are gone. I’m saying, what have we lost there? Seeing a mega band in a stadium, that’s a good experience for somebody? I’ve been in the last row for a Rolling Stones show, Kai. It’s not a lot of fun back there.
—Conversation with Greg Kot, music critic for the Chicago Tribue, on Marketplace
To maintain decent growth and avoid massive unemployment, the Chinese government was left with no option but to replace flagging external demand by domestic demand.
—Yu Yongding: FT
If we have a recovery at all, it isn’t sustainable. This is more likely a ski-jump recession, with short-term stimulus creating a bump that will ultimately lead to a more precipitous decline later. We haven’t fixed the problem. We’ve just slowed down the official recognition of it.
—Kevin Harrington, Clarium Capital, on the market’s refusal to recognize that there are issues with the economy.
without a formal repertoire, internalized to the extent of being automatic, performance is haphazard and without shape or boundaries.
—Stanley Fish: NYT
it is hard to find examples where government-run businesses compete with private companies and win. One reason is that governments are not very good at innovation. As the great 19th-century economist Alfred Marshall wrote, “A government could print a good edition of Shakespeare’s works, but it could not get them written.”
—Richard Thaler: NYT, 15 Aug 2009
…and insurers are?
think of the world economy as driven by social epidemics, contagion of ideas and huge feedback loops that gradually change world views. These social epidemics can travel as swiftly as swine flu: both spread from person to person and can reach every corner of the world in short order.
—Robert Shiller: NYT, Economic View – 30 Aug 2009
Struggling for his identity within the materials at hand, [they] show us, in the mere turning of a sentence this way or that, how to keep from being smothered by the inherited structuring of things.
—Richard Poirier on close reading, who died last weekend at 83
We ought to be grateful to language for making life messier than ever.
—Poirier
is not dirty silence/Clarified. It is silence made still dirtier.
—The Creations of Sound, Wallace Stevens
Why the Hipster Must Die Time Out New York: May 30 – June 5, 2007
We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.
Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization, Adbusters: 29 July 2008
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