Today's not-so-deep economic thought

Reading all these stories about Madoff, Stanford, Nadel...never before have I been so happy that I never managed to earn or save enough money that I needed to hire someone to manage it.

Will loss of confidence in financial advisors, brokerages and managers be the lasting fallout of this crisis? Who is going to give their money to anyone else to manage after all the horror stories keep coming and coming without end? And what the hell was the SEC doing under the Bush administration to protect investors? Anything?

The inside of my mattress is starting to look like a better savings account every day.

Stumbling through economics

My reaction to any crisis, be it personal, professional, or national, is to attempt to learn as much as I can about it in order to find a way to fix it. This has been a challenge with our country's financial crisis, since I have about as much aptitude for economics as a cat has for swimming. (In other words, I can muddle through if I have to...but I REALLY don't want to.) But I firmly believe that a big part of the problem right now with public discourse about the crisis, the stimulus, and the collective effort to figure out what to do next is that most people don't understand this stuff and don't want to put in the effort to learn more about it. So, we blindly trust that our political leaders understand the complex economic principles at work here (some do, plenty don't) and that the press is keeping an eye on them to make sure they don't screw it up (even though that same press maybe doesn't understand these things any better than the politicians). Because I've never really been a fan of blind trust, I've decided I have to start educating myself about economics at least enough to have a basic understanding of the problems and the rationales behind the proposed solutions.

If you want to follow me on this convoluted and challenging journey, here are a few great daily reads that I have found:

Financial Crisis for Beginners at The Baseline Scenario (also an excellent daily read)
Paul Krugman's blog (I don't love Krugman's politics but I can't argue that the guy won a Nobel in Economics and clearly knows his stuff.)
Nouriel Roubini's Global EconoMonitor (who unfortunately predicted virtually everything that has happened in this crisis. And is not real optimistic about it ending soon.)

If you have other great daily reads that fit this mold, clue me in via the comments. And if your first instinct is to ignore all this because reading about economics makes your head hurt, I understand...but I urge you to reconsider and put in a little mental heavy lifting to educate yourself. Knowledge is power, particularly when it's a subject most people run screaming from.