A reality we wouldn’t want to live in
Courtesy of The Automatic Earth
Producer Mack Sennett’s comedy reels featured a bevy of "bathing beauties," among them Marvel Rea, seen here in the harlequin costume
Ilargi: It’s a thin line beteeen comedy and tragedy. From time to time, quite often actually, stories pass before my eyes that make me think: did I really just read that? Was that serious? Like I had one last week, with Paul Krugman talking about aliens:
Paul Krugman: Fake Alien Invasion Would End Economic Slump
"If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months [..]"
Ilargi: Only, what I found weird was not so much that he talked about aliens, but that he implied that a “common enemy" would end the US economic slump in 18 months. That to me, once again, shows such a deep lack of understanding of the issues at hand that what’s maybe truly weird is that the man still has readers. Unless the US declares all-out war on its creditors, there’s no way it can get rid of its piles of debt, public and private, in 18 months. So, nah, not all that remarkable perhaps, just more Krugman.
The following series of articles form today’s Daily Telegraph, however, does have that je ne sais quoi level. First off, James Hurley writes:
UK household finances are ‘worse than during height of recession’
Household budgets are deteriorating at a faster rate than during the height of the recession in early 2009, according to an analysis of consumers’ finances. Almost 40pc of households saw their finances deteriorate between July and August, compared to just under 6pc that reported an improvement as Britons were hit by rising prices and a squeeze on take-home pay.
The latest Markit household finance index also found consumers suffered the fastest fall in their available cash since the monthly survey began in February 2009. Income from employment fell for the
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