The drawback, of course, is that it does not address the meltdown of the many-times-abstracted complex credit markets without which the ordinary month to month of business becomes a madhouse of ad hoc solutions, like the startup of the fur trade in 1807 in Saint Louis. COmpanies got formed up by "subscription" and if they succeeded the subscribers got paid off, but the development of the startup capital was a slow and complex and risky process.

Not that the risky part has changed, but I think you get my point. We absolutely SHOULD spend a bunch of trillions doing the things Charles suggests, and Obama has also incorporated them in his platform. But they won't make the financial collapse go away.

Transport, heavy equipment, cyclical staging loans, etc., etc. -- transactions large and small with which the financial world is riddled -- will start to stink like   dead plums in late summer.

So much as I like the alternative strategy, I don;t see how it could fly.



A