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Pat Forde of ESPN offers five "doomsday scenarios". Here's Stewart Mandel's calmer discussion.
Sorry, but I've heard this before, and most times--not all, most--it works out pretty well. (But I've got to admit, this year offers a lot of bad possibilities.)
Bill Simmons recently listed his "best sports pieces ever written". The Millions blog found links for many of them.
One that is excellent is Mark Kram's account of the Thrilla in Manila. An excerpt:
Came the sixth, and here it was, that one special moment that you always look for when Joe Frazier is in a fight. Most of his fights have shown this: You can go so far into that desolate and dark place where the heart of Frazier pounds, you can waste his perimeters, you can see his head hanging in the public square, maybe even believe that you have him, but then suddenly you learn that you have not. Once more the pattern emerged as Frazier loosed all of the fury, all that has made him a brilliant heavyweight. He was in close now, fighting off Ali's chest, the place where he has to be. His old calling card—that sudden evil, his left hook—was working the head of Ali. Two hooks ripped with slaughterhouse finality at Ali's jaw, causing Imelda Marcos to look down at her feet, and the president to wince as if a knife had been stuck in his back. Ali's legs seemed to search for the floor. He was in serious trouble, and he knew that he was in no-man's-land.
Whatever else might one day be said about Muhammad Ali, it should never be said that he is without courage, that he cannot take a punch. He took those shots by Frazier and then came out for the seventh, saying to him, "Old Joe Frazier, why I thought you were washed up." Joe replied, "Somebody told you all wrong, pretty boy."
. . . a man ate a 15-pound hamburger (with 5.2 pounds of toppings).
And lived.
John Seater pointed me to a recent paper by Blocker, Kotlikoff, and Ross, "The True Cost of Social Security".
Implicit government obligations represent the lion's share of government liabilities in the U.S. and many other countries. Yet these liabilities are rarely measured, let alone properly adjusted for their risk. This paper shows, by example, how modern asset pricing can be used to value implicit fiscal debts taking into account their risk properties. The example is the U.S. Social Security System's net liability to working-age Americans. Marking this debt to market makes a big difference; its market value is 23 percent larger than the Social Security trustees' valuation method suggests.
The authors argue that an estimate of Social Security's unfunded liabiltiy should account for the uncertainty of wage growth. (It's wage growth that largely drives both SS benefits and taxes.) After accounting for that uncertainty, they estimate the unfunded liability in 2005 at $10.4 trillion, almost $2 trillion more than estimated by the Social Security Administration.
$2 trillion: but what's a couple of trillion among friends? We need to update the famous wisecrack attributed to the late Sen. Everett Dirksen as follows: "A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money." (But note that Senator Dirksen never actually made the wisecrack. How disappointing.)
Most economists who have studied the issue think that in a few decades the government will have a substantial problem funding currently promised Social Security and Medicare benefits. (Especially Medicare.) A short. non-technical summary of the problem by distinguished economist Edgar Browning is here. His longer, more detailed paper is here. And if you find that useful, you can buy his recently published book, Stealing from Each Other: How the Welfare State Robs Americans of Money and Spirit.
Maybe a good outcome from our current financial problems is that more people will believe that the future eventually arrives.
Finally, if you haven't seen it, you should read the incredible story of how Congress has mandated that if taxpayers ask to see the Social Security "trust fund" they be shown fake bonds printed on a laser printer.
Oliver Sachs--the Awakenings guy--reviews, empathetically and eloquently, a father's account of his daughter's struggle with bipolar disorder.
Money is important, but so are good memories (NY Times, 10/18).
. . . we just live in it.
"The check is in the mail."
"I'll still respect you in the morning."
"But I do tell you that if the Democrats win, and have substantial majorities, [the] Congress of the United States will be more bipartisan." --Nancy Pelosi, 2008.
Silicon Valley VC firm Sequoia is warning of very tough times.