CRASH TALK

Robert Kuttner, American Prospect - The Obama stimulus package is spending $787 billion over two years, about 2.5 percent of gross domestic product. The economy is now shrinking at the rate of at least 6 percent per year. In the Great Depression, despite FDR's large public-works programs, the unemployment rate never dropped below 14 percent until we mobilized for war. During World War II, government spending finally expanded to a scale adequate to end the Depression, and unemployment melted away. It should not take a war to realize that we have vast unmet public needs that can rendezvous with adequate public outlay.

Peninsula, Qatar - Iran and Venezuela opened a joint to develop economic projects, Iranian state television reported. The Tehran-based Iran-Venezuela bank, which was inaugurated by visiting Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has an initial capital of $200m with each country providing half. . . Chavez, who arrived in Tehran on Wednesday for an official visit, accused the United States and Britain of being "the most guilty" for the international economic crisis because of the financial model they had imposed. "The values of capitalism are in crisis and capitalism has to end," the television quoted Chavez as saying at the inauguration ceremony. "We must take a transitional path to a new model that we call socialism."

Marisol Bello, USA Today - A small but growing number of cash-strapped communities are printing their own money. . . The systems generally work like this: Businesses and individuals form a network to print currency. Shoppers buy it at a discount - say, 95 cents for $1 value - and spend the full value at stores that accept the currency.

Michael Mandel, Business Week - I added up the various lists provided by AIG by country, and the results were quite revealing. About $44 billion went to counterparties headquartered in the U.S., such as Goldman Sachs and states such as California and Virginia. But as I expected, the majority of the funds-$58 billion-went to banks headquartered outside the U.S. The big winners were French and German banks, which pulled in $19 billion and $17 billion respectively. To put these numbers in perspective, remember that the U.S. fiscal stimulus bill passed in February provided only $27.5 billion for highway and bridge construction. In effect, the U.S. Treasury and Fed have been bailing out the rest of the world, to a massive degree.