Joan's Blog

That Depressing Bag of Bills
8/27/2010 @ 11:53 am
One of the more trying aspects of the current economic malaise is the subtle way it has stripped too many of us of our pride and sense of accomplishment with how we have conducted our lives. The 90% of Americans who still have jobs don’t remotely understand the degree to which those who are out of work have been made to feel helpless. If you are a striver who has done well in life until now, you are quite ill equipped to deal with your present situation. It’s likely you have been caught up by global events more than you have underperformed at your job and you don’t deserve to have lost your income stream.  It’s clear to me that those still working cannot imagine your anguish.
 
They’ve Pulled Back the Curtain on Our Financial Wizards of OZ
4/9/2010 @ 12:00 pm
So here we all sit with our diminished “fortunes” and estates to leave for our children. Congress spent last week grilling the very men we were led to believe were our “Financial Wizards” with solutions to all our problems. There they were before the once complicit Finance Committee investigating the Great Recession trying to discern what went wrong. There was Alan Greenspan, former Federal Reserve Chairman to several presidents of both parties.  This is not the same Mr. Greenspan who for years imbued us with conviction that he had his finger on the pulse of the economy even as he muttered gibberish in his Congressional testimony. This is not the same man CNBC assigned a theme song of “Mr.
The Recession of Fear
3/14/2010 @ 11:45 am
This week marks the one year anniversary of that dreadful day in March 2009 when the Dow hit 6470. The only real difference between then and now is the “Recession of Fear.” It is not clear that things are a lot better now than they were then other than we don’t think the banks are going down for the final count. For most of us, it’s still hard to get credit, a mortgage or a loan. Unemployment seems frightfully high. Consumers are mostly keeping their wallets shut. The big change is that fear has definitely receded. However, fear of stocks remains very high.