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...past decade has been something of a Martian era of space exploration. Since 1996, the U.S. alone has launched no fewer than nine spacecraft Marsward, and seven have arrived in one piece--an extraordinary success rate for a planet that historically had been a bit of a graveyard of failed missions. Currently, six ships--five American and one European--are at work on Mars, and a handful of others sleep peacefully on the surface or orbit silently above, their missions completed and their systems exhausted. While a lot of the work the spacecraft do is the quiet business of spelunking...
Certainly some stocks have been getting cheap. McManus points out that last Friday the dividend yield reached 3.3%, which was higher than the expected inflation rate. The last time this happened was during the 2002 sell-off, which presaged 26% market growth the next year...
...That may not seem like much next to the $700 billion Paulson just got from Congress, but Bair notes that in the past, the FDIC hasn't needed much. Even at the peak of the savings-and-loan crisis in the late 1980s, when thrifts were closing at the rate of one a day, the FDIC maintained its perfect record of returning every penny of every insured depositor's money, and Bair has preserved that record through 15 bank failures this year. That's partly because the FDIC by law gets to tap a failed bank's assets before...
...Great Depression may have been triggered by a financial crisis, but its lasting story is written in the miseries of massive unemployment. Some 25% of the labor force stood idle in 1933--a rate that never went below 14% for the remainder of the decade. No unemployment insurance backstopped laid-off workers or kept communities going when paychecks disappeared. Given the demography of a workforce in which scarcely any married women toiled for wages, a 25% unemployment rate effectively meant that nearly 1 in 4 households had no income...
...similar unemployment rate today, when a majority of women, both married and single, are in the workforce, is fearful to contemplate. But it would be unlikely to translate into equivalent hardship for individual families. And thanks to Social Security, a solid floor of support exists for elderly Americans--which guarantees a minimum level of consuming power for the economy as a whole...