I See London, I See France ...

By J. Thomas Duffy

Now we all see Mr. Andrea Mitchell's underpants ...

News, in brief, so to speak ...

From Sam Stein;

As chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan was known for using quirky, proletariat metrics to judge the temperature of the economy. The most famous of these, as recounted by NPR's Robert Krulwich in January 2008, were the sales of men's underwear. If the economic scales dipped even the slightest, Greenspan reasoned, it was as sure a sign as any that people were truly feeling the pinch.

"If you look at sales of male underpants it's just pretty much a flat line, it hardly ever changes," Krulwich recounted after the publishing of Greenspan's book, "The Age Of Turbulence." "But on those few occasions where it dips that means that men are so pinched that they are deciding not to replace underpants. And [Greenspan] said 'that is almost always a prescient, forward impression that here comes trouble.'"

Well, here comes trouble.

Yeah, trouble alright, especially when it comes to Greenspan.

He all but claimed he was on intravenous-delivered Ambien, saying he was "mystified" by the Sub Prime meltdown.

Stein reports that there is a 2.3% drop expected in the sale of Mens underwear products for 2009

I hope this doesn't mean we have to look forward to bailing out the underwear industry.

That, certainly, would be a cringe-inducing press conference.

For the good news;

Men's underwear is a replenishment item. If you see a dip in the market it is because of the economy. But over a longer-term period it will even out. They tend to be later going into the recession and earlier coming back... Men certainly aren't wearing underwear less frequently than before."

Phew!

Bonus Riffs

James Joyner: Greenspan’s Underpants

Digby: Boxers Or Briefs




(Cross Posted at The Garlic)

There's no tomorrow

By Capt. Fogg

I'm not in favor of financing tax cuts with borrowed money,

said the man, and the man isn't a farleftliberal weenie with McCain derangement syndrome. It's Alan Greenspan talking about the tax plans of Lyin' John McCain, who likes to brag that he knows nothing about economics so that the proletarian snobs he panders to will think he's a regular guy who keeps a fridge full of Budweiser in all nine houses -- and on the jet.

Of course, Joe Sixpack and Mary Mooseburger are happy to tell you he'll cut spending to offset the 3.3 trillion dollar loss in tax revenue, but there isn't that much to cut unless it's the military budget, and the reality is that he will borrow, borrow, borrow like there's no tomorrow.

John, who said he never once has flipped or flopped, now supports the same Bush tax cuts he once opposed and apparently no longer believes in his call to "get the best minds in America together and fix this tax code." Unless, of course, he's begun to believe in the wisdom of those who also know nothing -- like Simple Sarah Palin. I mean, what does Greenspan know? He has hardly any experience and he went to some elitist, la-de-da school without a football team.

Greenspan contra Bush

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan's new book, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World, is set to be released tomorrow. Now, I've never been a huge Greenspan fan -- he is, after all, a Republican, a Reagan appointee, a long-time friend and follower of Ayn Rand, a fiscal right-winger -- but, well, when he says something, or writes something, particularly about politics, and even more particularly about Bush and the Republicans, it's usually worth paying attention. The BBC previews Greenspan's Bush-related comments here:

The former chairman of the US Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan has said President George W Bush pays too little attention to financial discipline.

In a book to be published next week, Mr Greenspan says Mr Bush ignored his advice to veto "out-of-control" bills that sent the US deeper into deficit.

*****

And Mr Bush's Republicans deserved to lose control of Congress in last year's elections, he charges.

He writes that he advised the White House to veto some bills to curb "out-of-control" spending at the time Republicans controlled Congress.

President Bush's failure to do so "was a major mistake", he said.

"Little value was placed on rigorous economic policy debate or the weighing of long-term consequences," he says of the Bush administration.

And he charges that Republicans in Congress "swapped principle for power" and "ended up with neither".

"They deserved to lose."

Yes, they did. Clearly. And for many more reasons than fiscal irresponsibility, Greenspan's pet peeve, although the poor state of the nation's finances is very much a result of what they, and their president, have done in power. But where was Greenspan during the early days of the Bush presidency? Supporting those massive tax cuts for the wealthy, of course, and then the plan to privatize Social Security.

Greenspan may have a lot to say now about the blunders of Bush and the Republicans, but he went along for the ride when he ought to have been offering independent criticism of those and other disastrous policies. He will make a lot of money from this book, as from his post-Fed career generally, but, in the end, talk is cheap.

And the economy is still on the verge of catastrophe.