COMMENTARY by Nicolas Sarkozy (President of France): We should do everything necessary for world growth. This week, however, we must also attach that same level of priority and sense of urgency to making progress on the regulation of financial markets.
COMMENTARY By WALTER E. WILLIAMS: Most of our nation's great problems, including our economic problems, have as their root decaying moral values. COMMENTARY By JOHN STOSSEL: Under President Obama's stimulus plan, the government will spend billions of your dollars building new roads and fixing old ones. They say they'll do it efficiently. I say bull. COMMENTARY By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN: I dont expect much from the G-20 meeting this week, but if I had my wish, the leaders of the worlds 20 top economies would commit themselves to a new standard of accounting call it Market to Mother Nature accounting. Why? Because its now obvious that the reason were experiencing a simultaneous meltdown in the financial system and the climate system is because we have been mispricing risk in both arenas producing a huge excess of both toxic assets and toxic air that now threatens the stability of the whole planet. Just as A.I.G. sold insurance derivatives at prices that did not reflect the real costs and the real risks of massive defaults (for which we the taxpayers ended up paying the difference), oil companies, coal companies and electric utilities today are selling energy products at prices that do not reflect the real costs to the environment and real risks of disruptive climate change (so future taxpayers will end up paying the difference). Whenever products are mispriced and do not reflect the real costs and risks associated with their usage, people go to excess. And that is exactly what happened in the financial marketplace and in the energy/environmental marketplace during the credit bubble. Our biggest financial-services companies, some of which came to be seen as too big to fail, engaged in complex financial trading schemes that did not adequately price in the costs and risks of a market reversal. A.I.G., for instance, was selling insurance for all kinds of financial instruments and did not have anywhere near adequate reserves to cover claims if things went badly wrong, as they did. And our biggest energy companies, utilities and auto companies became dependent on cheap hydrocarbons that spin off climate-changing greenhouse gases, and we clearly have not forced them, through a carbon tax, to price in the true risks and costs to society from these climate-changing fuels. COMMENTARY By MAUREEN DOWD: You know youre in trouble when Old Europe chastises you for being too socialist. But, hey, nobodys perfect except maybe Michelle Obama, who landed in London with a huge Obama entourage, wearing a daffodil yellow dress and looking like a confident ray of U.S.A. sunshine. As President Obama renegotiates the terms of American leadership this week in Europe, those of us left at home struggle to get over our affluenza. That condition, the bane of the middle class, is defined in a book of the same name as a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more. The president is obviously worried about leaving us alone and under the economic weather; that must be why his Department of Health and Human Services put up some advice Tuesday on its Web site about Getting Through Tough Economic Times. Economic turmoil (e.g., increased unemployment, foreclosures, loss of investments and other financial distress) can result in a whole host of negative health effects both physical and mental, the government Web page sympathized, offering warning signs such as persistent sadness/crying and excessive irritability/anger and tips for managing stress, including: Trying to keep things in perspective recognize the good aspects of life and retain hope for the future. And one particularly useful for Rick Wagoner and those of us in the newspaper business: Develop new employment skills. COMMENTARY By JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ: What the Obama administration is doing with the banks is far worse than nationalization: it is the privatizing of gains and the socializing of losses. "What we've worked for, for 25 years, can be gone in 25 days, basically. That's how fast this is moving."-BOB VISTINAR, G.M. worker, on the company's efforts to reconcile its restructuring with union contracts. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WebTV Dawgs/Dittos" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/WebTV-Pals -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
