Guy Sorman of City Journal writes at length in the Dallas Morning News about the financial crisis: As in the 1930s and 1970s, so today: Crises are a serious problem, but misguided economic policy makes them worse. After the 1930s, only war production could overcome the negative economic consequences of the New Deal. After the…

Sy Harding, in Forbes: Yes, the economic recovery was an illusion. So let’s not talk of double-dips. Let’s face the reality that the real economy’s first dip is still underway, that the real economy is still scraping along a bottom. That’s not a bad thing. It’s better than the thought that the economy recovered but…

Journalist and blogger LaToya Egwuekwe created a depiction of the recession entitled, The Decline: The Geography of a Recession that is as powerful for being so startling. Here’s that depiction, showing the spread of the recession through the increase in unemployment across America: Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ssIhiD8kKM. Sad and astonishing in its subject, this is a video…

So are people hard-wired to make bad decisions, the way monkeys do? Take finance: we tend to play it safe in situations where we stand to make gains. But faced with the risk of a substantial loss, we get nervous and opt for even riskier strategies in the vain hope we can avoid losses altogether….[Researcher…

See, Daily Yonder on Rural Jobs Picture.

The report’s findings confirm one thing, and suggest a second. First, regardless of the different solutions economists have for remedying our troubled economy, there’s general agreement that difficult conditions persist. Second, although the state is seeing hard times, not every community will feel the same hardships. Unemployment is not uniformly distributed across the state. Some…

Over at Cato.org, Alan Reynolds shows how Paul Krugman’s turned out to be a sloppy, careless columnist. In assessing the tax policies of the 1970s and 80s, Krugman cherry picks his figures, and even gets the starting date of a recession wrong – by about a year. Krugman’s blog makes mistakes like this ever more…

….Most economists believe a dip back into recession — as well as an equally debilitating bout of deflation, or broadly falling prices — will be avoided. But many have nonetheless warned that the prospects are rising, and say the more probable scenario isn’t much more appealing: a protracted economic malaise with imperceptible growth and stubbornly…

John Merline asks, “Where Did All Those ‘Green Shoots’ Go?” In an Aug. 2 op-ed headlined “Welcome to the Recovery,” Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said that “we are on a path back to growth.” Eight days later, the Federal Reserve issued a report saying the “pace of recovery in output and employment has slowed in…