Next on Copper Robot: Blogger, author and investment researcher Barry Ritholtz, talking about the economy—how we got into this mess, and when and how we’re likely to get out of it.

When: Sunday, Aug. 2, 2009, 6 pm PDT

Where: The lovely Seaside Theater, World2Worlds Island in Second Life, or watch the live video on the Web.

Barry is author of the book Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy, and the economics blog The Big Picture. He is CEO and Director of Equity Research at Fusion IQ, an online investment research firm.

Some of things I hope to talk about: What’s the outlook? Are we seeing “green shoots” of emerging recovery, or will this be a “double-dip recession?” Is the worst still ahead of us?

What can average people do to prepare for the future? Hoarding canned food, automatic weapons and gold is probably not such a great idea, and will only get you talked about by the neighbors.

I also hope we can get Barry’s insight on the underlying causes of the recession. Have we brought this on ourselves by relying too heavily on consumer spending, depending on selling iPods and plasma TVs to keep the economy moving? I’d also like to talk a bit about the economics of healthcare reform—which plan makes the most sense from a financial perspective.

Barry and I went to college together back in the dark ages, so it’s a real treat for me to have him as a guest on Copper Robot. Unlike me, he kept his hair, and avoided ballooning up to John Goodman-esque proportions—but I forgive him for these transgressions.

I hope you’ll join us Sunday.

If you’re reading this, that means that I pressed all the buttons, turned the cranks, and worked the levers correctly and the blog successfully moved to our new hosting company.

Your Copper Robot service should continue uninterrupted, however if you spot any problems, please contact me at mitch@wagmail.com.

The old content hasn’t disappeared—all of it is at copperrobot.libsyn.com.

Thanks!

Update 4:20 pm: Step one is accomplished—the copperrobot.com domain now correctly points to the blog. At first I had problems getting everything to work, but had help from the blog’s Web hosting company, Westhost, which fixed the stuff I broke and was good enough not to make fun of me when I broke it all again and they had to fix it again.

Or, at least, they didn’t make fun anywhere I could hear.

Yay, Westhost!

However, external links to old blog entries are broken. I’m still trying to work through the wonders of .htaccess files to get that sorted out.

Meanwhile, if you’re looking for some of our most popular content, you can find it at copperrobot.libsyn.com—just scroll down, you’ll find what you were looking for, the most popular entries are the most recent ones. I did start to enter the URLs here separately, but my brains are too scrambled at this point to do it right.

I feel I will get everything straightened out if I just bang my head against my desk hard enough.