News: Bailout Musings

All of my professors (especially my Inome Tax and Bankruptcy teachers) talked about it, and now it's here - the bailout designed to save the finance sector of the economy. I suspect the true pros and cons of this plan are beyond the understanding of most people (and lawyers generally make terrible economists), since even all those experts on Wall Street and Capitol Hill were caught with their pants down when the crisis hit.

One thing is certain: the global economy runs on credit. That's an interesting thought in and of itself - thousands of years ago, there was no such thing as credit (or, by extension, debt). Things were simple back then; you give me this pot, I give you X pounds of wheat, or whatever. People didn't live very long in that era, which must have really played havoc with the time value of money.

Even with the bailout passing, there's still a lot of doom and gloom about the world economy. But a second Great Depression wouldn't be all bad - sure, there's grinding poverty and despair, but all those unemployed workers will have the time to create some classic board games. The Great Depression was the genesis of games like Monopoly and Scrabble - who knows what'll be cooked up when all those out-of-work computer programmers start hitting the soup lines?