hindsight is stupendous? (<140 characters observed)

make the finance sector pay

have a jubilee year stock write off

directors, senior managers and hi bonus earners in finance sector to have assets seized

A title is required.

"Bell Canada says it now has an SMS "revenue-sharing" deal with Twitter. But an SMS deal will not save the Western economy."

You obviously haven't seen how much Canadian carriers extort from us for things like SMS.

@AC

Collapses of an economy this size do not happen over night, nor over the course of "eight years," as the fanbois are so fond of reporting. Over and over we have seen individual sectors fall and either subsequently resurrect themselves or give rise to new sectors, generally with a certain zeal and rapidity. But this fall has taken a good decade and a-half to realize, and the roots for it go much, much deeper. Rome was not built in a day, and it most certainly did not fall as quickly.

Stick to your rhetoric if it helps you sleep at night. It most assuredly will provide you with a target for your vitriol, and whatever other angst onto which you still hold. Meanwhile, there are plenty of Americans who refuse to participate in this over-inflated, perception-driven down-turn.

Why do I say that? Simply put, before, during, and after Obama's handy work I can look around my adopted home town and see plenty of indicators of continuing economic flow. Shopping centers are still coursing with patrons, buildings are still being built, work is still being done, money is still exchanging hands. Were it not for the daily brow-beating, I think few frugal folk would be aware of this down-turn.

But we HAVE lost something, most definitely. Jobs truly are being lost, spending really has gone down, belts have tightened. But perhaps if we look closer we can see what we have truly lost: excess. Buying, selling, trading, lavishing, luxuries; the excess of all of which have come to a near end. We built up an excess which could not sustain itself, and now we are back to roots. This time, hopefully, we will carry with us the wisdom to build up an economy which does not rely on unsustainable excess, but instead builds upon a solid base to raise our standard of living without relying upon artificial means.

Paris, I got nothing here.

laissez faire

There's something to be said for the "do nothing" comment. Like any complex dynamic system the economy is resilient to change, so no amount of prodding it will have a long term effect. It goes through occasional bouts of depression and like one's brain or the weather the best method of dealing with it is to PREPARE for it as an inevitability and try to not let it disrupt one's life.

I guess there's also an element of "get-out-of-jail-for-free" where companies blame the 'ession on creating the jobless which the government could address.

Is that less than 140 words?

Toilet humour?

"...before linking to a (full-sized) bog post ..."

Better than a medium sized bog I guess.