Tyler Cowan

Tyler Cowen took all of the emotion out of the current economic situation in a brilliant piece in yesterday's New York Times and in so doing set up the discussion in a way that few others have done.

For me, this was the money quote:

The fundamental problem in the American economy is that, for years, people treated rising asset prices as a substitute for personal savings. The thinking went something like this: As long as your home’s value rose every year, you didn’t have to set aside so much from your paycheck. If your stocks went up, too, so much the better; don’t forget that the Dow Jones industrial average stood in the 800 range in 1982 and seemed to rise almost nonstop for many years.