{"id":329,"date":"2009-04-01T07:28:54","date_gmt":"2009-04-01T14:28:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/?p=329"},"modified":"2009-04-01T07:28:54","modified_gmt":"2009-04-01T14:28:54","slug":"toxic-assets-and-economic-schizophrenia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/?p=329","title":{"rendered":"Toxic Assets and Economic Schizophrenia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Anybody else find the phrase “toxic assets” strange?<\/p>\n

Asset is a good thing.\u00a0 Right?\u00a0 You’re supposed to accumulate them.\u00a0 They are a point of pride.\u00a0 You show them off.\u00a0 You can take them to the bank.\u00a0 People require them for loans — ok, for a while they didn’t\u00a0 — which leads us to the “toxic” part. \"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Toxic.\u00a0 Not good.\u00a0 Don’t drink.\u00a0 Stay away.\u00a0 Will kill.\u00a0 Or if not kill, at least send to the emergency room.\u00a0 And you’ll have some disease that only Dr. House can cure.<\/p>\n

So how can there be toxic assets?<\/p>\n

This, I believe, is the topic of the iceberg of economic schizophrenia that has begun to bleed its way through American society.<\/p>\n

Things are awful.\u00a0 But they’re also ok.\u00a0 You need to conserve, scrimp and save.\u00a0 But not too much.\u00a0 This is all terrible.\u00a0 But it is all good.\u00a0 We’re going broke.\u00a0 But we’re going back to old fashioned values.<\/p>\n

We’re losing hundreds of thousands of jobs every month, home values continue to drop with no end in site.\u00a0 Meanwhile the President’s approval rating is high and there’s been a sharp increase in consumer confidence.<\/p>\n

I remember a quote that a cultural anthropologist friend of mine used to cite from an interview he did with a housewife during the recession of the early 1980s …<\/p>\n

“Things are getting better … sometimes for the worse!”<\/p>\n

Now people are saying the same thing in reverse.<\/p>\n

“Things are getting worse … sometimes for the better!”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anybody else find the phrase “toxic assets” strange? Asset is a good thing.\u00a0 Right?\u00a0 You’re supposed to accumulate them.\u00a0 They are a point of pride.\u00a0 You show them off.\u00a0 You can take them to the bank.\u00a0 People require them for loans — ok, for a while they didn’t\u00a0 — which leads us to the “toxic”…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[10,156],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=329"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}