Quoted: From Economic Report of the President found via Economix Blog - NYTimes.com. The graph compares the % change in consumer spending (dark line) to % change in household wealth.

Peter Schiff's articles.

Quoted: An Economic Nightmare Before Christmas
...
Low Rates, Big Problems
...
Why Bailouts Are Not the Answer
...
The Truth About Bailouts

Quoted: This transformation will not be fun, but it is necessary. Our standard of living must decline to reflect years of reckless consumption and the disintegration of our industrial base. Only by swallowing this tough medicine now will our sick economy ever recover. By accepting a lower standard of living today, we will eventually be rewarded with a higher one tomorrow.

Tom Friedman was talking about this book on The Daily Show. However, he said that the financial boom bubble doesn't qualify. Specifically, "The real tragedy of this moment is that this financial boom bubble and bust has left us with a bunch of empty condos in Florida and a bunch of dead, derivative contracts that no-one understands."

Quoted: Amazon.com: Pop!: Why Bubbles Are Great For The Economy: Daniel Gross: Books

ReFaving @zzelinski. Almost everybody in the media is saying the nonapproval of the bailout is a disaster. Further, they argue that those who opposed the bill did so because of politics (e.g. the "Main Street" voters they represent want to punish "Wall Street") but are not giving more thoughtful analysis.

This is the first article I've read that gives some high quality reasons why a bailout might not be the right approach.

Quoted: Talk of Armageddon, however, is ridiculous scare-mongering. If financial institutions cannot make productive loans, a profit opportunity exists for someone else. This might not happen instantly, but it will happen.

Quoted: Further, the current credit freeze is likely due to Wall Street's hope of a bailout; bankers will not sell their lousy assets for 20 cents on the dollar if the government might pay 30, 50, or 80 cents.

Quoted: The obvious alternative to a bailout is letting troubled financial institutions declare bankruptcy. Bankruptcy means that shareholders typically get wiped out and the creditors own the company.
...
Bankruptcy punishes those who took excessive risks while preserving those aspects of a businesses that remain profitable.

Free "Introduction to Economic Analysis" from a Caltech professor. I like his description of the book...

Quoted: This book presents introductory economics ("principles") material using standard mathematical tools, including calculus. It is designed for a relatively sophisticated undergraduate who has not taken a basic university course in economics. It also contains the standard intermediate microeconomics material and some material that ought to be standard but is not. The book can easily serve as an intermediate microeconomics text. The focus of this book is on the conceptual tools and not on fluff. Most microeconomics texts are mostly fluff and the fluff market is exceedingly over-served by $100+ texts. In contrast, this book reflects the approach actually adopted by the majority of economists for understanding economic activity. There are lots of models and equations and no pictures of economists.

Heard George Soros talking about his new book on NPR this morning.

Quoted: "The idea was that regulators always make mistakes, state interference in the markets just messes things up," Soros says. "And that was a false idea .... Regulators are human and bound to make mistakes, but markets are also human and they are also bound to make mistakes. Instead of markets always being right, they're actually always groping at trying to find out what the facts are. But they never get it right."

Quoted: The dollar is in a tailspin, the trade deficit is growing and a recession is on the horizon. The American way of life is in serious danger. But the head of the Federal Reserve keeps on pumping easy credit into the system -- a crazy policy that will worsen the crisis.

Quoted: I think this is basically a good idea. If the government is going to bail out the people trading with Bear Stearns in an effort to calm the markets, then they might as well go right to the source of the poison and clean up the mortgage mess. But it has to be done right. And I think that insuring the mortgages instead of buying them, as was done in the depression, is an idea with some merit.