Sunday Financial Meltdown Blogging

Every now and again, and then increasingly as things start looking worse, I get a comment like "how can you write about [thing that's not earth-shatteringly important] when the economy is [something terrible happening in the economy]." The twofold answer is, of course, that nobody can write exclusively about the most objectively important things all the time and secondarily that I try to focus write blog posts that I think are going to be good posts rather than just posts on objectively important topics. I don't, in general, have any opinions about the problems in the financial markets that go beyond the utterly obvious -- bad things seem to be afoot and I'm worried.

If you want non-stop coverage of the financial crisis from a center-left perspective, I'd recommend Delong and Krugman; from a more libertarian perspective there's Marginal Revolution and The Atlantic's own team of Megan McArdle and Clive Crook.

But speaking strictly as an ideologue, I don't necessarily have a problem with the government intervening to bail a bunch of rich guys out when their own bad decisions blow up in their faces if that's what's needed for the health of the overall economy, but this sort of thing is one of several reasons why I think the very rich should pay high tax rates and we shouldn't be happy about the prospect of ever-growing inequality. At a certain level, the game is rigged and you're not really bearing any risk.

UPDATE: Also the widely recommended Calculated Risk. Don't take the remarks here as intended to disparage the quality of analysis offered elsewhere. There are a lot of good economics blogs out there -- along with legal issues it's one of the best-covered issue niches of the blogosphere.