Viva Las Vegas!

Blogworld Expo is being held in one of my favorite cities in the whole world, Las Vegas*. In addition to advertisements for porn all over the place, signs with phone numbers you can call to get strippers sent to you and skanks dressed in leather teddies and fishnet stockings dancing in front of coffee shops, we have this scene from the world famous Strip.

It's like a snow drift, only more colorful!

Best of all, they go on for a long way down the Strip. Yay!
* - Las Vegas is not actually one of my favorite cities.

Blogworld Expo 2008 - Keynote by Anil Dash and Chris Alden of Six Apart

At work, we use Six Apart's Movable Type as our blogging platform. We're very happy with it, so I was excited to hear what these two had to say. They didn't disappoint. In addition to the expected discussions of their company, they talked about where they thought blogging as a social media is going. Here are my notes from their presentation.

• Six Apart is a company of 200 people.
• They recommended we visit blogs.com. I've never seen it until just now as I'm writing this post, so I can't say anything about it one way or another.
• Six Apart Media was just launched trying to help bloggers monetize their sites.

With the preliminary discussion of their company done, they moved on to the meat of their talk. Anil is a broad and emotional thinker. His themes are so expansive and beautiful that notes were difficult to take as I listened. Here's my poor attempt at capturing some of what he said.

Anil Dash
• Bloggers want to connect. Bloggers love the web because it lets us make these connections and share our passions. It’s not about the technology, it’s about making the connections with the other people who care as much about our passions as we do.
• Dollarshort.org (now mena.typepad.com) was one of the first blogs. Anil showed a screen capture or perhaps and archived page of Mena's first post. I wish I could find it, it was quite touching.
• It doesn’t matter what the blogger's affiliation is – MSM or personal, the real question is what are they accomplishing with their blog.
• Anil mentioned how well internal corporate blogging has paid off in GM, Siebel and Boeing.
• Blogging is moving from an activity to an industry.
• Starting in 2007, the majority of Internet users were reading blogs.
• All of the online advertising trends are going up. The media is being transformed, there is almost no barrier to entry now. The power of blogs is the freedom of expression, control of your own site, control of your online identity and management of your advertising. Personal autonomy is key.
• Six Apart is encouraging the discussion of blogging 2.0. What do we, the blogging community, want out of it? Blogging 1.0 was about personal publishing. Blogging 2.0 is about social publishing. It sounded sort of like the merger of Facebook and Blogger, and add to that Vox, Twitter and Tumblr.
• Today’s mainstream social media are like yesterday’s MSM.
• This was particularly exciting to me - Anil discussed the use of OpenID as a way to manage your identity so that your blog is what represents you in the comments on other sites. This breaks down the barriers of registration and allows your participants to bring along their native identity to your site. This is a wonderful concept. I want my identity carried over into the other accounts and I want The Scratching Post to be easily accessible across the network.
• Anil also mentioned Blog It – it will allow you to created content and alert people across a wide variety of platforms. It's another product with which I am unfamiliar.

I really enjoyed this talk, particularly the details they gave about their vision of the future of blogging. OpenID is an idea whose time has come. I work very hard on The Scratching Post and I want it to be my identity. I need to look into this some more.

Chris Alden

Blogworld Expo 2008 - Rick Calvert, Vicar of Victory

I'll bet that most of you Blogworld attendees did not know that the force behind Blogworld, the one and only Rick Calvert, was a member of the Feline Theocracy. Well, he is. He's our Vicar of Victory and we are delighted to see him do well. Bravo, Rick!

Our Vicar of Victory, looking rather stern.

Blogworld Expo 2008 - Keynote by Richard Jalichandra of Technorati

Richard went through an enormous number of statistics that Technorati has been collecting for some time along with personal discussions they have had with some of the top bloggers. Technorati will be publishing their findings starting Monday at their site. Here are my notes from that session.

• Forget about using the word "consumer" – people are now producers of content.
• Centralization is dead, fragmentation rules. Man, my organization is going in the opposite direction in terms of management style. It will be interesting to see the cultures clash.
• Richard went through a list of Web 2.0 platforms and their role in the world. Social networking is all about sharing and communicating. Online journals are about sharing and life casting. Blogs are for information and influence.
• Blogs are media!
• One study said that there are 80 million unique visitors in the US going to blogs. A different study by eMarketer says it’s 94 million.
• 4 of the top 10 entertainment sites are blogs.
• Larger blogs are taking on the characteristic of the mainstream media. The Huffington Post is an example of this. Meanwhile, the mainstream media are creating their own blogs. Blog trends, stories and behaviors are influencing the MSM. You can take a look a the way Sarah Palin has been savaged in the press through rumors and innuendos started on blogs as an example.
• Most bloggers are male, most are young, most are affluent and most are educated. How those sets overlap was not shown.
• Blogging is all over the country. It is not localized to major metropolitan areas. It is also International. Interestingly, most bloggers publish in English. This could drive English even more as the global language.
• When they asked bloggers to categorize their blogs by subject area, 43% fit into the "other" category. When asked, they said their niche was so fine that it didn’t fit into a category. That sounds like an army of experts instead of an Army of Davids.
• Most people blog to share their opinions and expertise.
• 71% of the top 100 bloggers use tags. OK, OK, I get the message. I'll start using tags!
• The big bloggers write often as well, typically several times a day.
• The big bloggers know their external tools and use them. Bloggers are also active web20 users. They comment, subscribe to rss feeds, watch videos on line and so forth. None of this is surprising, since we live a considerable portion of our lives online.
• Brands permeate the blogosphere. Lots of brand reviews and blogging about brands. This is why you need to monitor the blogs to see what people are saying about your brands. Your brand is in the blogosphere whether you like it or not. You can’t control the media, but you can engage in the conversation.
• And now the same message as every other talk - Be authentic and be transparent!
• You can’t just hide out on your own blog, you’ve got to participate across the blogosphere.

Richard Jalichandra

Blogworld Expo 2008 - Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV Keynote

To say that this was an energetic Blogworld session is a vast udnerstatement. Gary is one of those people who seems to be single-handedly hasterning the entropy death of the Universe. He is a creature of pure energy and his style and passion made this hour go by very fast. His theme was that social media was all about branding and getting yourself known as an expert in your area. Here are some notes I managed to take amidst the flurry of good advice from Gary.

• You need to spend 2-3 hours a day of communicating on blogs and in the comments. Find the blog leaders in your field and participate in their comments. Answer every email and every comment on your blog forever. This community work is huge – build up name recognition by leaving comments everywhere. If you know what you’re talking about, you’ll win.
• Content is king, but marketing is queen and the queen runs the household.
• Technology is fine, but the connection is the factor, what makes us tick are the human connections. You have to go to every meet up that you possibly can.
• You need to build up brand equity by sharing your knowledge. You need to be pumping out content every day, if not, you will be out-hustled.
• Hustle is an imperative essence of this. Things don’t just happen. If you want to build a business, you have to work like mad.
• You have to put out great content and you have to find money – find a way to monetize your content.
• Gary said he doesn’t sell wine, he was building personal equity. With that, he earned the offers he has received. For example, Guy Kawasaki has brand equity.
• You need to become the king of your domain. We’re in the middle of a gold rush.
• You have to be doing what you love because you’ll need to work 17 hours a day. You need to Google the topics you are trying to work so you can get them to buy advertising on your site. There are more and more people in the corporate world who get it.
• If your goal is to build a company and sell it, then you need to make money. People don’t want to buy companies with users, they want to buy companies that make money.
• Make swag for your products – that’s the quickest way to build brand equity.
• You have to be patient waiting for your marketing efforts to pay off. The big players in the corporate world know it’s coming and they have patience.
• Work on getting the most traffic you possibly can. The best way to do that is to become part of the community where the community knows you and knows you’re an expert.
• You need to have a huge email button on your blog. You want to induce conversation at every turn. You need to have friend buttons for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. Your job is to create a connection - a two way connection. You need to have your IM address available all the time.
• Remember that your goal is to build business, not go hang out with people.
• You have to be authentic. (We heard that in every session.)
• Check out Ping. fm. It allows you to tweet to multiple platforms.
• Using the @ in Twitter is a great way to make connections.
• He spends a lot of time searching for people who say bad things about him and he engages them and converses with them. Don’t waste your time on hating people. Spending any energy at all being angry at other people is a waste of time. Don’t spend your time finding people to be angry with, instead find places to leave comments on your expertise.
• Comment on all of the big blogs in your area.
• Gary tried a full-page ad in the New York Times. It cost about $30-40,000 and resulted in no payoff at all. It’s just a matter of time before the Internet kills off the newspapers and the old media.
• Gary's method is not scalable, but you need to do it as long as you can.
• Team up with others and don’t worry about how much they’re contributing – take every viewer you can get.
• People resist the new media because they can’t control their message.

Gary Vaynerchuk

Blogworld Expo 2008 - How to Implement Blogs & Social Media Strategies for Big Business

This was another excellent panel discussion in the business segment of Blogworld. The moderator was Michael Rubin from GasPedal and the panelists were Michael Brito of Intel, Hillary Weber from Kaiser Permanente and John Andrews from WalMart.

Here are my (somewhat) raw notes from the session. This was a very lively session with lots of interaction from the audience. A Twitter feed where tweets with the #bwe08 tag were collected was displayed on the screen behind the panel and gave the audience the ability to ask questions in real time. The Twitter feed rapidly outstripped the panel's ability to answer the questions, so the Michael Rubin picked the best questions to keep the discussion going. The use of Twitter was very effective.

• WalMart bloggers focus on the message of the WalMart brand – they blog all about saving money and being frugal.
• A question arose quickly about the role of blog evangelists - does every company need a Robert Scoble? It was generally agreed that you needed a high-power champion of web 2.0. Social media is not easy in the corporate world because of the cooperation required across the organization and you have to work with people who are uncomfortable with the technology. The Kaiser group had a doctor who created their farmers markets and created a newsletter and then moved from their to blogging and did it all in his spare time. He was Superman! The guy was passionate and involved. His work evolved into the first corporate blog.
• On the Internet, Intel monitors posts and tweets and sends their people wherever the conversation is happening to make sure the company is not misrepresented.
• I asked if it was necessary to have management and bloggers make use of web 2.0 outside of work as well as within work. Hillary Weber person thought it critical that their seniors and others use web 2.0 outside of work. Their uneducated managers are kicking and screaming about the techanagoly and are a real impediment to progress. WalMart managers don’t know anything about it, but the ones who get involved did go out and get twitter accounts, blogger accounts and so on. Intel – it’s crucial that the managers use the tools and understand them.
• What companies are doing it right? Dell is doing it well. Ideastorm is a good example. Southwest Airlines was a good example. Lego seems to have a good one. Stoney Fields Farms have a good one. Wells Fargo has a good one. WF started talking about their history first and not banking. BestBuy does it well and McDonalds does it well also – BMW, too. They make use of their workforce and users. Home Depot was another good one.
• Home Depot was directing people on where to get help during the hurricanes and used Twitter for that so that cell phone users could get at the information ata a time when people at home wouldn’t have power. Very clever.
• Line level employees are a much better source of blogging than the management they have a better connection with the customers. The higher you go up the food chain the less time they have to blog. Worker bloggers are more credible than manager bloggers.
• Being authentic is crucial.
• The Kaiser blog is definitely on brand – helping people thrive is the message stated in any number of ways.
• The Intel bloggers are working full time on other projects. This one bothered me. In the corporate orld, nothing gets done unless there is money put behind it. Unless your bloggers are given time dedicated to blogging, you'll keep getting blog posts in dribs and drabs and have to constantly harass them for content.
• Johnson and Johnson has started a health channel on youtube. WalMart has a youtube channel with 40+ videos on it.
• None of them work for companies where time is set aside deliberately for blogging or sharing information. Instead, they’re making the tools super cool and hoping that the workforce uses them. That seems doomed to fail to me. Hope is not a strategy.

John Andrews, Hillary Weber and Michael Brito

Blogworld Expo 2008 - Corporate Blogging: Myths and Realities

This morning at Blogworld Expo, we heard a panel discussion about how corporations are using blogs to connect with their custoemrs. It focused primarily on external, Internet-accessi ble blogs. The panelists were Paula Berg of Southwest Airlines, Mario Sundar on LinkedIn and Chris Baggott of Compendium Blogware. The session was dominated by questions, answers and discussions with memberws of the audience. That interaction made it particularly valuable. What follows are my notes from the discussion.

Myths and realities:
• My customers don’t read blogs. Reality: Southwest discovered this was definitely not the case. Their blog, Nuts About Southwest has turned into an informal, but useful, focus group. It's a means by which they maintain contact with their customers.
• Blogging is risky. Reality: Not blogging is riskier. The discussion about you and your products is going on out there on the Internet Tubes. You can ignore it and let damaging conversations spread or you can take part in the conversation and make sure your message gets out there.
• Blogging has to be professional. Reality: Blogging is all about your personal voice. If your blog reads like a press release, you lose credibility.
• Producing content is too time consuming. Reality: Not producing content can be fatal. Blogs are a way to keep your information at the top of search engines and give your customers and potential customers access to your products and message.
• You shouldn’t moderate content or comments. Reality: Unmoderated contents can be fine for some sites, but you need to keep an eye on the discussion and intervene when it turns nasty.
• Blogging has no real ROI. Reality: Marketing in general has a very nebulous ROI. It's as much about managing your corporate brand as anything else and that's worth quite a bit even if you can't quantify it.

Random notes from the session:
• The book Groundswell was recommended by the panelists.
• The LinkedIn corporate communications team uses their blog to educate their users about their product.
• You need to establish the purpose of your blog so that it doesn't twig off into random topics. For example, the Southwest Airlines blog was a chance to give their customers a behind the scenes look at their company. It's importasnt to keep in mind that the blog can evolve into something much more as you engage in conversations with your readers.
• It’s important that the culture of the company should shine through on the blog.
• The panel did not advocate CEO blogging – the employee bloggers have much more passion and credibility, but some of the audience members thought it was very important.

This was an excellent session, particularly because of the interactions with the audience.

Paula and Mario.

Blogworld Expo 2008 - Dave Taylor Keynote

Here's our first report out from Blogworld Expo - the Dave Taylor keynote speech on "How did we get here and where are we going?" Dave Taylor is an author and blogger. One of his three blogs is Ask Dave Taylor. From there you can find the rest of his publications if you so choose. Here are my notes from his talk.

• Blogging is storytelling
• There has always been a bias issue - We only see bias when we disagree with what is being said. He brought up the example of the New York Journal issue by Hearst that dealt with the destruction of the USS Maine and set off the Spanish-American War.
• Blogs are diaries, but diaries are historical records as well. The Diary of Anne Frank is a good example. She didn't write it with the intention of having millions of people read it. It was just a record of her life and yet it has turned into a major historical document.
• People need to have a voice. Making money is a tiny part of blogging, it’s all about making your voice heard. He gave examples of political graffiti from various countries. He then moved on to this blog post about South Africa. People are taking real risks to post their views. He gave an example of a Saudi blogger who was jailed for speaking his mind.
• Blogging is easy to start – it’s a very democratic device to getting your voice heard. It's a very effective communications because it is bidrectional, global and free.
• Blogs prevent the silencing of the past a la George Orwell – "who controls the past controls the future and who controls the present controls the past." More voices means less control. At their core, bloggers are journalists.
• The PR and marketing departments in organizations across the world are losing control of their situation. CNN has recognized this and has developed iReport to bring news from all kinds of people all across the world.
• These days, everyone can have their own media channel and you can’t tell the difference between NYTimes and FilmBuzz (Dave's Twitter feed). That leads you to wonder, how do you trust anything you read?
• The Internet is becoming pervasive – Chrysler is bringing it to cars, Amtrak is bringing it to trains and Row 44 is bringing it to airplanes.
• Spam comments prove the health of the blogosphere – no one would bother spamming a dying industry.
• My favorite quote from Dave - "The revolution won’t be televised because the infinite channels of our new media ARE the revolution."
• All of the 1950s projections of the future were wrong – they showed one-way communications – the Jetsons watching TV.
• The iPhone is changing the whole nature of the computer industry.
• Corporations are learning how to deal with the new world. Level 1 – corporations can use the blogs to send out their point of view. Level 2 – corporations can participate in the conversation. Imagine the world as a big party and you are just one person at the party – you can’t interrupt everyone and demand they come and see you – it’s their party, not yours. Press releases don’t work so well any more. You need to be involved in the conversations about your product. You can't expect people to read your press releases in response to negative blog posts or comments they read on another site. In fact, by many people press releases are seen as spam. The question being answer is this - How do you communicate with a culture that doesn’t want to hear your normal PR broadcasting?

Dave Taylor

You're Leaving?

... how terribly fascinating.

Can you do it quietly? It's time for my mid-morning nap.
Our Maximum Leader was clearly devastated by the news of my road trip.

Road Trip!

We're heading for Vegas, baby! A friend and I are on our way to Blogworld Expo, riding in the world-famous FredMobile*. I'll be blogging from there to let you know what's going on. If you're going to be there and you want to meet up or you'd just like me to try and find some people or get some questions answered, leave me a comment and we'll do our best to get you what you want.

Look out, Vegas, here comes the FredMobile!
* - It may not actually be world famous.

If You Visit This Link You Might Be Breaking The Law

... so don't say you haven't been warned!

In the video, watch for the scenes of power plants releasing steam into the atmosphere as a symbol of environmental destruction. I want to make it perfectly clear that I oppose the release of steam in all forms. Steam can become clouds which can become rain which is a major part of all hurricanes. We must stop the release of steam!

Err, I seem to have gone off track. Here's the link. Don't go there. It's too horrible for words.

Steam - the bane of all Mankind!

Some Quick Thoughts

Watching the market meltdown and having absorbed the campaign rhetoric from both sides, I'm struck by a few things.

1. The global consensus is that governments manage economies. I've got longer posts on this, derived from a book I'm reading now, but the essence is this: once we decided that governments managed economies, government budgets became untethered from fiscal realities. Balancing the budget could wait, the economic slowdown of (fill in a year between 1965 and 2008 here) had to be dealt with right away! Until this notion that the government runs the economy is put to rest, the debts will continue to grow.

2. Obama is running around saying this is the worst economy in the last 30 50 100 6012 years. If that's the case, doesn't that argue against more government intervention? The government just blew through $9,700,000,000,000 worth of borrowed economic stimulus and Obama thinks we have the worst economy since Caligula sang to his horse. Now we want to do even more?

3. That debt number is going to go through the roof as Social Security and Medicare fall apart.

4. Western Europe has done the same thing and has it worse.

5. McCain subscribes to this concept, too. He thinks we need to cut taxes to stimulate the economy. I thought that's what we'd been doing while running up that debt. How come it didn't work?

6. As we watch that concept painfully fall apart, there's another one that is falling apart, too. The secular, do-your-own-thing culture has proven itself a failure. People cannot determine morality for themselves. We actually need an objective, rigid set of morals that cannot be disputed. Barack Obama in his Greek Temple speech said this.

Yes, we must provide more ladders to success for young men who fall into lives of crime and despair. But we must also admit that programs alone can't replace parents, that government can't turn off the television and make a child do her homework, that fathers must take more responsibility to provide love and guidance to their children.

Emphasis mine. In the absence of a rigid moral code, that means absolutely nothing. It could mean anything from more Similac and Pampers delivered to a guy's 3 baby mamas or it could mean marriage before sex. All Obama and his social liberal friends know is that whatever we're doing right now isn't working. They haven't quite made the leap to realize that the destruction of traditional morals has wrecked huge swaths of society.

I'm voting for McCain, but I think much larger forces are at work in the world. Two concepts that took decades for their failures to become apparent are going to have to be unwound no matter who wins the presidency.

Global Keynesian Economics

... has a mighty payoff - debt! Everyone across the globe is getting into the act. Governments everywhere are "managing their economies" and producing their best product - debt.

US debt - $9.7T
The following are all normalized to the size of the US economy.
German debt - $9.4T
French debt - $9.2T
English debt - $5.5T

Just think - all of these monstrous debts were run up during a time with almost no major crises or wars. Instead, it was the entire Western world managing their economies just like Keynes said we should. Balance the budget? Save for future emergencies? Nonsense! Let's manage our economies! Yay!

Think what your life would be like if you managed your money at home like this.

Note to Putin: Angering the West may not Have Been Such a Good Idea

... now that your economy is becoming a train wreck.

Russia moved Wednesday to bolster its increasingly stressed banking sector, as global economic turmoil deepened fears the country could face a crisis similar to the financial collapse of 1998.

Russia's primary stock indexes, MICEX and RTS, plummeted, with banking stocks leading the way, prompting regulators to halt trading for the afternoon.

Any time trading is stopped, that's a bad sign. There's more.

Economists also warn that the deepening financial turmoil is likely to dent Russia's red-hot economic performance in the coming months, as financing dries up for companies and banks.

"Russia's economy has entered the crisis phase," warned Mikhail Dmitriev, a prominent economist who advises the government. "Russia has been practically cut off from external financing and we're much more dependent on them than it seems."

Cut off from external financing? Ow! That must hurt. Maybe that invasion of Georgia wasn't such a good idea, particularly when all you sell are raw materials and commodity prices are falling rapidly. Here's a 6-month chart of the Russian stock market. Note how it fell from around 3500 to below 1500 in the last few months. We just had a 500-point drop in the DOW and everyone threw up on their shoes. (As of the writing of this post, we've recovered about 300 points of that loss in less than two days.) The Russians have had the equivalent of a 6000-point drop in the last four months.

Wheee! It's like a going down a big hill on a roller coaster!
And that, my dear Mr. Putin, is why you need to play nicely with the other countries.

It Must be all That Terrific Infrastructure Barack was Talking About

... that leads to industrial solvents in baby food.

Chinese authorities have found the industrial chemical melamine in baby formula made by 22 different producers, indicating that China's problems with tainted baby formula extend far beyond that made by Shijiazhuang Sanlu Group Co.

The additional cases turned up in extensive tests of baby formula conducted by regulators in the wake of the widening scandal, which has so far claimed two deaths and caused over 1,200 babies to fall ill in China.

Investigators found 69 batches made by some of China's best known formula makers were contaminated with melamine, an industrial chemical normally used in non-food products...

Non-food products? I'll say. The stuff is made into countertops for your kitchen!

Only 40% of the countertops tested were found to be contaminated with baby food.
I'm sure that as soon as the press finishes it's investigation of Sarah Palin's shoe store receipts from 1987, they'll be right on this one, complete with questions for Barack Obama about his claim that the Chinese infrastructure is better than ours.

Right.

Comment of the Week Award

...goes to B-Daddy, from The Incredible Lightness of Being ... Obama blog. Here's what he had to say about the financial crisis and the finger pointing about corruption in the government watchdog agencies who stood by, took political donations, and allowed it to happen.

This discussion proves why reform and smaller government go hand in glove. With fewer goodies to give out there are fewer opportunities for corruption. Steve Forbes said it best when he ran for President in the 90s, discussing why campaign finance "reform" never works. When you have an ant problem in the kitchen, you can keep setting traps and trying to seal the doors, but sooner or later you're going to have to remove the cake from under the sink.

Outstanding work, B-Daddy!

Anyone for a Windfall Losses Subsidy for Big Oil?

From today's WSJ:

Crude-oil futures rolled further downhill Tuesday as turmoil on Wall Street encouraged investors to exit futures contracts to raise cash.

Light, sweet crude for October delivery was recently down $4.60, or 4.8%, at $91.11 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. November Brent crude on the ICE Futures exchange, which debuted as the front-month contract Tuesday, fell $4.80 to $89.44 a barrel.

This is bound to affect Exxon's bottom line and dramatically cut into their profits. If we were willing to soak them with a windfall profits tax, it's only fair to start debating subsidies for them now that they look to take a financial hit.

Meet Lehman's Board of Directors

As the financial bombs continue to go off and investment firms and banks go under, pay special attention to the way the politicians and press frame the discussion. Most of it will be in terms of what the government could have done to prevent the crisis.

It's all nonsense. Dig this profile of Lehamn's board of directors.

Nine of them are retired. Four of them are over 75 years old. One is a theater producer, another a former Navy admiral. Only two have direct experience in the financial-services industry.

Meet the Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. external board directors, a group of 10 people who, perhaps unknowingly, carried the health of the world’s financial system on their shoulders the past 18 months.

That's hardly the group you would pick to lead an investment firm. For a time, it worked. Here's Lehman's stock price chart from the last 5 years.


In January of 2007, when this crisis was brewing, LEH was around $85. It had turned a nice profit for the shareholders and the company was showing fantastic growth. Profits almost doubled between 2004 and 2007. All the while, today's catastrophes were gestating.

Thanks to companies like Lehman, more and more people were buying homes. Of course, they couldn't afford them, but it was a big jackpot for everyone. The folks whose money mangement skills had kept them renting duplexes could now invest in real estate, real estate that was surely going to keep appreciating.

Which politician currently in office was going to stand up in 2007 and tell the financial world and the citizens of the country to stop all of this madness? Who was going to introduce the regulations that kept knuckleheads from buying houses? Which party was going to endorse policies that would deflate the stock prices of companies like Lehman? Nobody who wanted to get re-elected would ever do that.

The current financial crisis perfectly illustrates how the government does not manage the economy. No politician "gets the economy moving again" no matter how much they flap their gums. The press, with their brows furrowed in confusion at the sight of their own checkbooks awaiting balancing, lucky enough just to find their way in to work in the morning, can't comprehend the notion that bubbles and crashes are a natural consequence of human economic activity.

Instead of preparing for crises like this through thrift and restraint during good times, we rush about pointing fingers at each other when the crash hits, having rushed about only 6 months earlier taking credit for the boom.

Some day, if we're really lucky, we might wake up to this. Hopefully we can do this before the Social Security and Medicare bombs go off. Hopefully we can do it before we jump off the cliff of a massive, new health care program. In the meantime, we'll be treated to campaign commercials that claim credit for market success and blame the other side for market failures.

Update: Investors Business Daily blames Bill Clinton. If I had the stomach for it, which I don't, I'd check out Paul Krugman at the New York Times to find a similarly convoluted reason why it's all Bush's fault.

Update 2: While he's biased in favor of the right, Captain Ed points out how those champions of government regulation, the Democrats, went right into the tank for the mortgage industry.

Cheezburger of the Day

more animals

Who Gets the Credit and Who Gets the Blame?

Lehman is about to go under. Washington Mutual might not be far behind. Wells Fargo is turning a profit and shows no signs of any distress at all.

Do we blame President Bush for the failures and give Harry Reid the credit for the success? Vice versa? Or do we finally admit that the government can no more "manage the economy" than they can appoint a board of directors that will either ruin a company or bring it profit.

If governments could really manage the economy, then why isn't France, with one of the most managed economies of all, the global economic giant? Do we want to claim that Frenchmen are inherently stupid?

I don't.