This is the first post of the new decade. I can’t be sure, but I think that the recent two digit change in the Great Odometer has been a little underplayed this time around, relative to the buzz from, say, 1990.
(Fussbudgets who insist that decades start with years that end in 1 instead of 0 need to stop taking themselves so seriously. Yes, the conventional definition 
is not entirely logical. Does it also bother you that fire alarms go "off" when they operate?)
Part of the under-buzz may be due to the fact that we never really got around to naming the decade that just ended. In fact, a large portion of what media coverage the decade got focused on this oversight. I have no helpful suggestions. Personally, I will always think of the 2000-09 period as the Really Fast Decade. Seriously, it feels like it lasted ten months, at most.
For investors and savers, one obvious nominee is The Lost Decade. My main objection to this is that the name is already taken, referring to the 1990s in Japan, where two generations of postwar economic expansion came to a sudden and bewildering halt on or about January 1, 1990. Compared to that, our last ten years wasn’t really all that lost. The Misplaced Decade?
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By far, the most read item this year on Bad Money Advice was Swoopo: Entertaining Yes, Shopping No. It’s the closest I’ve ever gotten to a post really going viral, accounting for about 4% of all page views on this site. No 
doubt it was the first thing many of you ever read here.
So I don’t need to recap what it says. But I will remind you all that I called Swoopo a sort of "commercial performance art in which it is demonstrated just how dumb we really are." But dumb isn’t quite the right word. Irrational is better.
And that is today’s year-in-review theme, that we are all nuts. Not that there is anything wrong with that. It’s just that we aren’t nearly as logical as we think we are.
Back in March I posted on a wonderful new concept discovered by two professors: saver’s remorse. The gist of it is that it is possible to regret saving instead of spending, just as you could regret the reverse. In a better world that would have been an absurdly mundane finding, but in our world it is pretty radical.
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As winter rolls in and the season of office parties fades into the season of empty offices, it is time to pause and take stock. It is hard to imagine that we will be looking back on 2009 as the good old days any time soon, but things could certainly have been worse.
The end of 2009 also marks, more or less, the end of the first year of this blog. So it makes sense to review the year by reviewing the year in the blog. In the next few posts I will be highlighting a few general themes that emerged as the year went on. Today it is the most obvious of topics, The Great Recession.
What set off the GR was best discussed here at Bad Money Advice in a book review I wrote (in two parts) of the probably now forgotten The Wall Street Journal Guide to the End of Wall Street as We Know It. I meant to do more book reviews when I started this blog.
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Would you rather pay $399 now and $20 a month for two years, or $199 now and $30 a month for two years? If you are a rational consumer, you probably prefer the $399 deal. The other one is like a $200 loan at 20% interest.
And yet, according to a long and meandering article from yesterday’s New York Times on the madness of cell phone pricing schemes, we wacky Americans preferred the iPhone at $199 with a $30 data plan over the previous deal of $399 with a $20 plan. I’m not sure I buy that. iPhone sales could have increased for a number of reasons, including the fact that the $199 phone was an upgraded version. Still, the Times piece does bring up a number of peculiarities about the economics of cell phones.
In case you live in a cave, I’ll explain that here in the Land of the Free we "buy" heavily subsidized cell phones from the companies who run the cell phone networks and in exchange agree to a service contract with that network, generally for two years. The cell phone company takes a loss on the phone and makes it up on the service end.
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This time last week I created one of my more unique posts. A commenter suggested that if I was in search of a topic I could write about what I thought of the "ballooning national debt." I usually try to keep closer to the personal 
finance theme than that, but a request is a request. Gotta keep the readers happy.
The first thing to say is that anybody who confidently predicts any particular result from borrowing so much money is full of it. Nobody really knows what the long term effects are or what will happen next. We can speculate on it, and some prognostications may be more reasonable than others, but ultimately these are all just educated guesses.
With that disclaimer out of the way, let’s start with the big picture. Below is a chart of the US Federal Debt as a percentage of GDP. I got the data from the useful site usgovernmentspending.com.
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is not entirely logical. Does it also bother you that fire alarms go "off" when they operate?)
Economics, Investing, Media | Frank Curmudgeon | 
January 4, 2010 12:59 pm | 
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