Congratulations to the Philadelphia Phillies! Maybe all baseball games should be 3-innings long...
- As gas prices come down, driving goes up. The sharp decline in gasoline use earlier this year — with volume down nearly 10 percent in some weeks — suggested to many people, including the automobile companies, that a permanent change in American habits might be at hand. But with gasoline prices falling drastically in recent weeks, some American drivers are returning to their old ways.
- Gas prices coming down are like a big tax cut for the consumer. It's like another stimulus package!
- Barack Obama mixes up his black sitcom references. “If Senator McCain is elected, we’ll have another president who wants to privatize part of your Social Security. Could you imagine if you had your Social Security invested in the stock market these last two weeks, these last two months? You wouldn’t need Social Security. You’d be having a — like, what was it, Sanford and Son. `I’m coming Weezie!”
- Weezie is from The Jeffersons.
- An interest rate of zero could be coming.
A growing number of analysts now predict that the economy is so weak that the Fed will have to reduce its official target to zero if it wants to jumpstart the stalled economy.
Japan’s central bank reduced its benchmark interest rate to zero for five years, from 2001 to 2006. It did so mainly to combat a particularly persistent case of deflation, a broad-based decline in consumer prices, and to revive economic growth.
Some analysts see signs that the United States faces a similar threat. Like Japan’s, American banks have become so decimated by losses in real estate that they are either unable or unwilling to resume normal lending. And as prices for oil and many other commodities have crashed during the past two weeks, some analysts now warn that deflation might be a threat here as well.
- I wonder how many episodes of The Jeffersons McCain has seen?
- But the biggest news of the day isn't the Phillies, Weezie, or the latest poll numbers. The Beatles may be joining Rock Band.