If the economic numbers are to be believed the plunge of this downturn is over. That precipitous fall that began in late August, accelerated through September, and continued unabated. However, the consensus is that this is not merely a pause in the plunge, but it is also not a bottom.

1. “This was a Black Swan.”

This crisis was not a rare, unpredictable or random event. However, the people pushing this idea are not named Taleb. Taleb argues the reverse in his book: that rather than this being an improbable and unforseeable event, such as the discovery of anti-biotics, it was the result of systematic decisions:

Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while reducing volatility and giving the appearance of stability.

Forget what you have been told about the financial crisis, because most of what has been written has been written from the view point of the financial system. That system exists to be an investment bank for the global wealthy. It packages revenue streams, and sells them. The most important one, was you.

Simon Johnson shows just how little the elite world reads its own writing. As chief economist of the IMF, he made some useful observations about global imbalances and how excessive complacency led to the present crisis, but in his current incarnation, he is busy engaging in revisionist economic history.

The complex Kabuki of financial regulation between bankers and the Obama Administration is gradually widening to become bebop improvisation, with strains from Princeton, Beijing, Main Street, and Brussels eager to get a chance to sit in and change the tune.

Americans are, naturally, focused on the domestic policies and domestic economy. However, the world is round, and we all live on it. Globalization is a reality, because many of the most important resources, such as oil, and many of the most important problems, such as carbon driven climate change, are global in nature.

The AIG bonuses were a distraction. Even the counter-parties of AIG is a distraction, in that the real bottom line is this: all of the different programs announced so far, from the first firebreaks which were supposed to “contain” the “sub-prime crisis” – ah for the days when serious people could blame this on a few, implicitly non-white, borrowers – to the present put money in the same place.

According to WHO, over 1 billion people suffer from the effects of a “Neglected Tropical Disease.” If you read Dr. Margaret Chan’s speech on the progress on combating these diseases, it is filled with names which are strange to the eye. I doubt many Americans could list any of the four “highest burden” NTDs:

If you look at long term unemployment, the recession of the mid 1970′s had an interesting feature: some jobs never came back. The economy down shifted to a state of higher structural unemployment. This sort of thing should, in neo-classical theory, result in an immediate reduction in wages until unemployment reaches equilibrium.

A generation has lived in the era of complacency. Recessions were “shallow” expansions were long, inflation was tamed. Monetary policy seemed to be able to stabilize the economy. It was the neo-conservative version of technocratic Keynesianism. Today a large neon sign went up that said “The End:”Real gross domestic product — the output of goods and services produced by labor and propertylocated in the United States — decreased at an annual rate of 6.2 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008.