At this time of year, Mr. Clinton could be in Davos, Switzerland, mingling with his fellow global elites at the annual economic summit. Instead, he is working like a precinct captain in places called Barnwell and Walterboro and Kingstree.
Last year, Mr. Gore accepted free merchandise that was worth $15,245, more than double the value of products accepted by any of Apple’s five other outside directors, Apple’s latest proxy shows.
John Shirley’s great subject is the terrible ease with which we modern Americans have learned to look away from pain and suffering. The opening line of his novel “Demons” states the theme succinctly: “It’s amazing what you can get used to.” In “The Sewing Room,” one of the new stories in the present collection, an ordinary woman discovers, to her horror, that her husband is a serial murderer, and we discover, to ours, that she can live with it.
“The issue of economics is not something I’ve understood as well as I should,” he said last month, according to The Boston Globe. “I’ve got Greenspan’s book.”
When you see the market gyrating wildly downward and hear some pundit saying it’s because of this or that data or this paradigm or that ratio, remember trader realism. The traders move the market any way they want, any way they think they can make money, and then they whisper a reason to journalists later in the day. Then the journalists print it or say it on television, and the amateurs believe it. And the traders snicker.
The current slowdown is layered on top of deep-rooted economic problems that are not addressed by a stimulus package. If the nation’s leaders do not start showing the political will to do more than dole out popular tax breaks during an election year, short-term fixes could actually make the long-term problems worse.
Lisa Germinsky, 33, a screenwriter who lives in Gramercy, has just begun to trim back. “My boyfriend and I, we were talking and he’s just like doom and gloom, ‘impending recession,’ his stocks dropping,” she said. “And I’m a freelancer, so I’m like, ‘Oh, my God.’ ”
“These are going to be tough economic times, very tough, and when I think about it, I want somebody who is going to hit the ground running."
