Five Ways to Handle Your Fear of the Economy

Bill Treasurer knows how to handle fear, he's been doing it all his life. Here are Bill's five tips for handling your fear of the current economic crisis:

1. Refocus on your work. Fear is the enemy of productivity. Get clear on what needs to be done - right here, right now - and go about the business of doing it. If you're not contributing, you may be in danger. Stop being in denial. Know your job, and then do it.

2. Stop playing it safe. Ditch the herd. While everyone else is hiding, you can stand up and stand out, getting noticed for your talent and contributions. It's easy to follow the herd. It takes effort to lead.

3. Form a posse. Create an inner circle - a small group of co-workers who you can trust and turn to when the going gets really tough. Take turns being "the positive one" and injecting a daily shot of courage.

4. Find a productive distraction. What makes you feel better - a little stronger or braver? U2 on your iPod? A can-do mantra? A long run at lunch? Identify that one little thing - your own personal "fear buster" - and use it early and often.

5. Just say "no" to the pity party. It's tempting to commiserate with co-workers. Don't do it. It will stoke your fears and shake your confidence even more.

What are your suggestions for handling the fear? Write them in below (no login/security clearance required).

Better Ways to Spend a Trillion Dollars

Author Rob Simpson gives you five creative ways to spend a trillion dollars (and five ways to be outraged at the way it was spent on the war). Many more suggestions can be found in his book:

1. Send every high schooler in America to a four-year college. We'd have the most educated workforce in the world.

2. Create a retirement account for every child born in America -- shortly after the child's birth. That child will be a multimillionaire come retirement age. If they don't touch the account, they will never have to save up for retirement for the rest of their lives.

3. End ALL homelessness in America.

4. Rebuild New Orleans -- completely. This means bring back all displaced families, build new housing for everyone who needs it, repair all damage, reinstate businesses, create new incentive programs for businesses, restore wetlands and counter environmental damages, and pay for an ongoing, aggressive tourism plan.

5. Buy everyone in the world an ipod. It may not be the latest, cutting-edge model, but it still means we'll be rocking the Casbah, not blowing it up.

Five Reasons Why the Bailout Was A Bad Idea

Larry Mitchell is a leading scholar in the field of finance and corporate law and a professor at George Washington University Law School. He gives us five reasons the bailout was a bad idea for us all:


1. The bailout was structured by a Wall Street investment banker for Wall Street investment bankers to be run by Wall Street investment bankers. First they make a mess, then they give Congress a plan that saves themselves above all others. What is the logic here?

2. Trickle-down economics doesn't work and we know that now, so why are we attempting a trickle-down bailout? The claim was that by saving Wall Street they’d save Main Street because they are loosening up credit to help the innocent victims of high finance. If they really wanted to help the victims, the bailout would have been a targeted economic stimulus plan for the real economy as well as targeted individual aid. Seven hundred billion dollars could provide a lot of relief.

3. The bailout is based on free market principles. Nothing wrong with that, unless you consider that one of the main reasons for the economic collapse was thirty years of deregulation based on free market as religion. It didn’t work then. Why would it work now? One of the clinical definitions of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly hoping to get a different result.

4. How do you put a value on mortgage-backed securities ? One significant reason for the panic that led to the collapse was that Wall Street couldn’t value them. There is probably a way to figure out how much they’re worth, but Congress should have made some effort to do this before deciding to allow $700 billion to be spent on them.

5. There’s no administrative infrastructure to handle the bailout because overseeing this takes an entire government department to make sure it's done right. Right now, the U.S. Government is the investment banker to the world. Hiring a few guys from Goldman Sachs doesn’t help to administrate the world's biggest social welfare program.