4 Papers Charge for Online Content. News delivered online by four newspapers in the Florida Panhandle is no longer free. They are among the first papers to charge for online subscriptions. By The Associated Press. [New York Times: Technology]

Cue the theme from Jaws.  

Friedman: In Oversight We Trust

You see, what really distinguishes American capitalism from most other countries' is not that we don't have C.E.O. crooks, but others do, or that we never have bogus accounting, bribery, corruption or other greedy excesses, but others do. No, we have all the same excesses that other capitalist nations have, because fear and greed are built into capitalism.

What distinguishes America is our system's ability to consistently expose, punish, regulate and ultimately reform those excesses — better than any other.

  

Fear: This might be merely the start of a long, harsh financial crisis

There is absolutely no precedent for measuring what effect this crash — the largest assets collapse in history — will have on the U.S. economy and consumers. Straight dollar comparisons with the 1929 crash are meaningless because of inflation. However, as a percentage of U.S. gross domestic product, the loss of equity wealth between 2000 and 2002 is somewhat higher than during the same period after 1929. This time, however, more of the loss has hit the middle class. Thank you again, financialization.

from Christopher