Thing 44 - The Economy

I appreciated the video posted right away at the beginning, it was a pretty good metaphor for the situation we're in. It was a little oversimplified, in that they would explain that a mortgage was like a "promise to pay more money in the future", but then refer to mortgages as promises for the rest of the video. They did the same with business Securities. So conflating all this as "promises" in an attempt to simplify it actually obscured the meaning.

Other than that, I liked it.

Some of the money saving tips were odd. I mean, some of them were overly simple, like the video, like "Save your money and you will have more money!!!" which I think I inferred. But some of them were really weird. I guess I never thought of "raise your own chickens" as a good money saving tips, especially because you presumably have to buy a chicken coop and a bunch of chickens. Seems like it'd be cheaper to just go buy chicken meat from the supermarket. I mean, even if a chicken is cheaper to buy than just the meat, you still have to wait, what, a year before it's big enough to be slaughtered? I don't argue with it being a nice hobby, but I don't think it's a good money saver.

I like that the white house has a few money education websites up. I think it's a good little public outreach effort. I don't know how many people know about them, but I leafed through the pages and it looks like there's a pretty succinct description of most of the important stuff relating to credit, loans, insurance, etc. This is a good resource and I'll recommend it to patrons if necessary.

Overall I guess people are going to have to pinch pennies to get through if prices start to soar or they get laid off, but mostly the crisis seems to be in imaginary money that doesn't exist. So investments and stocks are plummeting but for people whose net worth is in actual dollars (like me!) stuff isn't so bad yet. Gas prices are even down from what they were before things started getting terrible. Obviously we need to solve the recession though, and the good news is that no one has any idea how to do that!