Born: August 4, 1891

Died: January, 1976 in Penobscot, Maine.

It isn’t clear from the citation whether she’s buried here but the “nearest” cemetery is listed as:

Alton Cemetery, Penobscot, Maine

We’ve always known that America’s reign as the world’s greatest nation would eventually end. But most of us imagined that our downfall, when it came, would be something grand and tragic.

It seems Sen. Shelby of Alabama:

has now placed a hold on all outstanding Obama administration nominations — about 70 high-level government positions — until his state gets a tanker contract and a counterterrorism center.

One wonders what it will take to get the Congress functioning, and I mean really working again. As Krugman notes, ” America is not yet lost. But the Senate is working on it.”

NPR had a story recently on the plight of the workers taking the immediate hit and the general economy that gets hit right along with them. Are furloughs a way for states to staunch the bleeding? Are they effective? Maybe not. Interestingly, two of the academics interviewed (John Sullivan – SFSU and David Levine – UC Berkeley ) are themselves being furlough: faculty from both the University of California and the California State University systems have been furloughed.

I’ll post here how I’m coping. I still believe (despite the silence of the blog) that we are experiencing an experience much like our grandparents did. It is relative: we don’t have the soup lines. But then again, we do have the soup kitchens who are suffering from the effects of the recession even more than the rest of us. For those angels live on the “leftovers” (sometimes literally) of those who are doing well, or well enough. What happens when that bedrock of support collapses? The support for the supporters is diminished.

I don’t want to push the Great Depression analogy too far, but what’s surprising when you go back to primary sources from 1930 is the optimism.  I don’t mean to imply that everyone thinks things are just swell.  But while you know that they are facing the worst economic decade of the twentieth century, they don’t.  They’re expecting something more like the recession that followed World War I.  People are cutting back, but they’re still spending, particularly because companies are slashing prices to move inventory.  It was the long grind of the years that followed, and the catastrophe of the second banking crisis, that scarred them permanently.  And this shows up in the economics stats and the stock market, which did not, as we like to imagine, simply decline in a straight line.

Harvard Economic professor Robert Barro on lessons from the Great Depression. He’s interviewed by the website, The Browser.

B: I thought that the Great Depression was the ultimate cautionary tale on the dangers of protectionism. That’s not the case?

RB: No I think what is much clearer is the role of the financial system and the credit implosion, both in the 1930s and today. The rest of the stuff may just be a sideshow, it may not be that important. There’s a strong tendency for the economy to recover on its own, as long as it’s not subject to further new shocks, so a likely scenario is that that is what will happen today as well. And then the Obama administration will say that it’s because of our policy that things recovered, and there won’t be any way to prove whether that’s right or wrong.