Some guest poems from the Wall Street Poet’s web site, including

No Investor or a Broker Be
by Karl Neice

No investor or a broker be
In times when future nigh
As postwar doldrums see
Us through
2025

Cash is king, long live its value
Its liquidity, and interest free
When deflation signs can tell you
What your stocky mind can’t see

Economists Agree!
by Rob George

Folks came from afar just to see
Two Economists who’d agreed to agree.
While the event did take place,
It proved a disgrace.
They agreed one plus one adds to three.

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…let there be light. But not generated by a public utility. It should be investor-owned and free of government regulation.”

Okay, that’s not an actual amendment in the Conservative Bible Project, which seeks to “render God’s word into modern English while removing liberal distortions.” The initiative, subject of an AP article today, is being hosted by Conservapedia, which claims to be an open-source conservative antidote to the “liberal bias” found in Wikipedia.

The Conservative Bible Project’s home page includes these guidelines:

-Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias

-Using powerful new conservative terms to capture better the original intent; Defective translations use the word “comrade” three times as often as “volunteer”; similarly, updating words that have a change in meaning, such as “word”, “peace”, and “miracle”.

-Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning

-Exclude the interpolated passages that liberals commonly put their own spin on, such as the adulteress story

-Prefer conciseness to the liberal style of high word-to-substance ratio.

Some Conservative Bible Project analysis from the Books of Matthew and Mark:

Matthew 20:15

“Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? Is thine eye evil, because I am good? ”

Conservative Bible Project Analysis

At issue is not the principle of “equal pay for comparable worth,” but that an employer has the absolute right to pay whatever wage he wishes to pay, so long as he honors his agreements without discrimination. In the same way, God has the absolute right to reward those of us who serve Him exactly as He wishes, and He will always reliably honor the agreements He makes.

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Google has released its Year-End Zeitgeist, in which the search engine “examines the billions of queries that people around the world have typed into Google search to discover the spirit of the times.”

In the U.S. economy section, these terms showed up as the most searched-for:

1. crisis
2. cash for clunkers
3. iceland
4. california
5. recession
6. obama
7. unemployment rate
8. green
9. great depression
10. inflation

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In this episode, we’re going to put the poets out front to report the economic news. Lu Olkowski’s  “In Verse” – is a multimedia reporting project combining poetry, interviews, and photography. This installment takes us to Troy, New York. Long, long ago Troy was a thriving manufacturing town. These days, as you will find out, it is very much not that. We’ll hear a poem called “In the Office of Temporary Assistance,” by Susan B.A. Somers-Willett. It documents an afternoon she spent with Billie Jean Hill, a 25-year-old woman with a young son, who lost her job as a hotel housekeeper in May. Check out all the amazing “In Verse” stories at PRX and discuss them at Transom.

Podcast: Download (Duration: 5:56 — 4.2MB)

“In Verse” is produced through the generous funding of Public Radio Maker’s Quest 2.0, an initiative of AIR, the Association of Independents in Radio. This project is made possible with funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. “In Verse” was created in partnership with Virginia Quarterly Review and originally aired on Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen.

Do you have a piece you think should be considered for the EconomyBeat Podcast? Put it on PRX, and add the tag ‘ebpodcast’.

“This story should be a screaming headline on the front page – not buried on page 9999 in blogland. What is the US coming to?”

Just one of the comments left on the New York Times site in reponse to an article about the end of COBRA subsidies yesterday. The subsidies, part of the stimulus package passed in February, cover 65% of COBRA premiums for nine months for those laid off from September 2008 to December 2009. So unless Congress acts, the cost of health insurance premiums for millions of jobless Americans is going to triple.

So Congress lets this slide. But had it been AIG or Goldman Sach, Mon Dieu, how Congress would have jumped into action! Thanks for nothing, Obama, thanks for nothing Democrats, thanks for nothing Republicans! Middle-class Americans, we are so on our own.

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What sort of country do we live in? Do we have no shame? How can we allow this to happen to our people? Anybody who calls themselves a Christian needs to look into their soul in private and ask themselves these questions. We are a considered to be barbaric by people in other countries. What you think of people in Afghanistan, Europe is thinking of us. We are allowing thousands of Americans, yes Americans, to die every year, allowing tens of thousands , millions to suffer every year. How can we do this? How in God’s name can we do this?

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Yesterday marked the expiration of the first wave of subsidies distributed to unemployed workers for their COBRA health insurance. The subsidies, part of the stimulus package passed in February, cover 65% of COBRA premiums for nine months for those laid off from September 2008 to December 2009. So unless congress acts, the cost of health insurance premiums for millions of jobless people is going to triple.

If no government extension emerges, many will undoubtedly have to drop their plans Here’s one blog post from someone who suffers from both depression and COBRA sticker shock:

Last night I stopped over at my parents’ house for a visit. I had just stopped by the pharmacy to get my Happy Pills and realized something horrifying–my Cobra insurance is running out very soon. I’ve already applied for my very own health care package through a local group, but most self-purchased health insurance policies do not cover pre-existing conditions, and my anxiety and depression sadly fall into that category in the mental-health bracket of their giant list. Greeeeat. So while I was at the pharmacy, I casually asked how much the pills would cost if I didn’t have insurance and promptly wanted to DIE.

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Speaking of crime and the recession, we found this press release issued last year by the National Retail Federation. It deals with store return policies and “return fraud.”

Though retailers seem to be confronting return fraud, incidents continue to permeate most retail stores. According to the survey, most retailers (88.9%) have had stolen merchandise returned to stores within the past year. Retailers also report being victimized by returns of merchandise originally purchased with fraudulent or stolen tender (74.1%) and returns using counterfeit receipts (45.7%).

The release goes on to address something called “wardrobing.”

“Consumers experiencing a bit of buyer’s remorse as a result of the economy may be returning unworn and unused merchandise to stores,” said NRF Vice President of Loss Prevention Joe LaRocca. “While retailers look at returns as a way to provide good customer service, an increased rate of returns is yet another challenge for retailers during a tough economic climate…”

The unethical practice of “wardrobing,” the return of non-defective, used merchandise—especially in the apparel and electronics categories—continues to be problematic for retailers. Nearly two-thirds of retailers (64.2%) have seen this type of merchandise returned in the past year – down from 66.1 percent last year, but up from 2006 levels (56.0%).

So remember, this year, act ethically. When you unwrap that new blender – the moment you hit “puree,” it’s yours.

The New York Times reported the other day that even in this brutal economy, crime is actually down in New York City.

A series of posts from the political science blog Monkey Cage addresses this counterintuitive lack of correlation between crime and the economy, in relation to people’s perceptions.

Since 2001, perceptions of crime have become far worse even as the actual crime rate has remained stable. I took FBI’s violent crime rate from 1989-2008 and matched it up as best as possible to Gallup poll numbers for each year.

For 1991-2001, perceptions line up nicely with reality. But in 2002-2008, a larger percentage of Americans perceived an increase in crime than one would expect, given the actual crime rate. It appears that 2009 will only continue this trend. A graph with the property crime rate would show a similar finding.

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Michael Silverstein is a financial writer and former senior editor for Bloomberg. But more recently, he’s known as The Wall Street Poet, writing market commentary in the form of satiricial verse. A regular contributor to Minnesota Public Radio, he also has his own web site, WallStreetPoet.com, featuring a substantial archive.

Those in the know about poetry will enjoy these mannered musings even more, as many of them parody famous poets. Take, for instance, “The Plight of the Charge Brigade,” in the style of Alfred Tennyson.

I
Charge it up, charge it up,
Charge up that purchase,
Deep in the valley of Debt
Plunge the card holders.
Stuff they don’t really need!
Charge for the fun! their creed.
Into the valley of Debt
Plunge the card holders.

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Here’s an animated map of unemployment rates by county from January 2007 to the present. As the map turns from lighter (more employed) to darker (less), you get a good sense of the economy’s deterioration. Click on the map and hit play to see it do its thing.

More visuals:

• Health care reform explained on the back of a napkin
• Indexed – Thinking relationally on a single index card
• Images from the Great Recession