Like a testosterone-addled teen ager, we forgot our own 18th birthday on December 18. It’s been a busy year!
So Alice Cooper is here to celebrate that and the New Year with us. And we thought we should thank all of you readers, commentors, link-senders, and donors who have made our longevity in independent site-years possible.
This site started in 2006, when the econoblogosphere was not just a vibrant but also an important place, where finance practitioners, economists, and journalists were trying to understand what was happening in the opaque credit markets and whether and how much it threatened the financial system. Figures like Nouriel Roubini, Simon Johnson, Tanta, Richard Kwak, Barry Ritholtz, Felix Salmon, Paul Krugman, Chris Whalen, and Steve Waldman held forth and regularly critiqued each other’s findings. Lambert contends that the independent media-sphere has gone though a cycle. Interest seemed to move away from text output to podcasts and YouTube. But we seem to be in a revival of interest in written commentary, perhaps due to the continued erosion of and increasingly obvious elite-fealty of the mainstream press, as witness by the proliferation of Substackers, many of whom attract decent-sized audiences if they keep putting out high-quality work. But I wish this blog revival generated more discussions across sites as we had in 2006 to 2008. The open questions are as numerous as then and if anything more pressing.
There are so many who helped us over the years, such as Mark Thoma, who gave us encouragement and promoted our early posts, to Richard Smith and Andrew Dittmer, who were absolutely indispensable in helping edit our book and continued as valuable contributors. And we have had many our other esteemed site writers, such as Matt Stoller, Philip Pilkington, Ed Harrison, Marshall Auerback, Rob Parenteau, and more recently, Michael Hudson and IM Doc, and of course our regulars: Lambert, Dave Dayen, Jerri-Lynn, Nick, Conor, and KLG, backed by our comments wranglers, first Jules and now Katiebird and Semperloquitur, and our tech maven Dave.
We could go on about all the things we’ve done over these many years with all of your help and input, but perhaps you’d rather kick back and enjoy the show.
Wishing you a healthy and happy 2025! Hope you have fun ringing in the New Year!
