Sometimes Marginal Revolutions is jaw-clenchingly conservative, but other times they're downright awesome. Reasons for the financial crisis:

4. The increasing value of human capital: Bankruptcy is no longer so painful for the wealthy. You can always get another high-paying job plus you have $10 million squirreled away somewhere in Switzerland. You could end up working for the guv'ment for $130K a year and your life still is pretty good once you get over the shock of adjustment. So why not take lots of risk and try to get ahead of the other guy?

Be sure to read the comments, too, they're as instructive as the article.

Spokesdude from Goldman Sachs: We have to leave large piles of money lying around, or else how will we attract the best thieves?

(Some paraphrasing may have occurred)

Me: Holy carp, batman. It will cost us $2000 to fly out west for Christmas, and another $1000 to stop in Saskatoon to visit your parents.
Him: Wow.
Me: Yeah.
Him: Well, at least try and pick a non-bankrupt airline, would you?

In other news, I had SEVEN HOURS OF NAPS this weekend. That is an excessive amount of napping. I just couldn't keep my eyes open. It was crazy. Also, there was lots of rain. The cat became very damp, and I spritzed down the finches* to allow all the household animals to get into the feeling of fall.

I have nothing to report, really, except that I am awake, and will hopefully stay that way for at least another hour. Or two.

* You use a plant-mister. They love it, and in my opinion there is nothing more adorable than damp birds fluffing up their feathers and giving me nasty looks.

This just gives me chills:

... Deregulation brought us miseries in finance, transport, energy and the climate. Free trade agreements dole out favors to big farmers and big pharma. The financial crisis finished off what was left of monetarism, the idea that the Fed should only worry about inflation. And everyone has given up on waiting for low taxes to unleash the creativity of the ultra rich.

Under Bush, oil and gas, drug companies and defense contractors, insurers and usurers control the government of the United States and it does what they want. This is the predator state. The wisdom of free markets? The President gave his own verdict in Houston the other day: "Wall Street got drunk." True enough, but where were the grownups when the party went wild? - James Galbraith

This quarterly CUPE bargaining report is a must-read if you're interested in the state of the Canadian economy and a little bit of crystal ball-gazing. Put together by the folks at the Progressive Economics Forum - all of whom are the kind of economists who keep getting proved right again and again, even though nobody listens. They were even plagiarized by TD Bank. But people keep saying 'yeah, but they have an obvious political bias...' and I quote Colbert: yes, indeed, the truth does have a well-known liberal bias.