Finding a Collaborative Solution

"The new group at the Fed is not equal to the problem that faces it"

- Anna Schwartz, Telegraph, January 2008

It is increasingly clear that Anna Schwartz' comments apply equally to those now at the Treasury. When policy makers are not capable of generating working solutions, what can we do about it?

Unfortunately, President Obama seems less willing than hoped to listen to those who actually know and understand what is going on in the markets better than his own advisers. Here is an excerpt from a recent New York Times intervew:

Mr. Obama rode to the White House partly on his savvy use of new technology, and he has a staff-written blog on his presidential Web site. Even so, he said he did not find blogs to be reliable, citing the economy as one example.

“Part of the reason we don’t spend a lot of time looking at blogs,” he said, “is because if you haven’t looked at it very carefully, then you may be under the impression that somehow there’s a clean answer one way or another — well, you just nationalize all the banks, or you just leave them alone and they’ll be fine.”

This assessment of the situation displays a truly unfortunate misunderstanding of the situation. The list of bloggers on the sidebar here represent the best of the best minds on the planet today when it comes to markets and the economy. This financial crisis is far worse today than it would have been if policy makers had paid more attention to what these bloggers were saying all along. This financial crisis will be far worse tomorrow if policy makers do not listen to what these bloggers are saying today.

The purpose of these pages is to try to harness the knowledge of finance and economic bloggers as well as the extremely insightful thoughts of many of those that contribute in the comment sections of their blogs. To paraphrase the words of a friend:

You go there [to the blog] to chat and you come here [to the wiki] to work.

Let's get to work. Unlike a blog, with your help these pages will ultimately become a coherent document representing a concrete proposal complete with in-depth financial and economic analysis.

How to Contribute

To contribute to the effort, there is one small hurdle. You must fill out a simple form to become a member of Wikidot. There is no membership fee and your identity can certainly remain anonymous, but to maintain a high level of integrity, the membership allows a minimal level of necessary moderation. Once a member, you can easily edit existing pages or create new pages.

In addition to these pages, there is also a Discussion Forum where you can ask questions or start your own discussion on any topic you like. In particular, have a look at the Reference Library.

Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License