Managing Information on the Markets' Manic Monday

Today would be a very busy day if I were still working for the Senator. Global capital markets have been in a frenzy all weekend, and my old boss would want to know about the macro-economic impacts of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, the Bank of America takeover of Merrill Lynch, and the AIG restructuring. He'd want to know the political implications of an amazingly activist Treasury Department and Federal Reserve Board. Most importantly, he'd want some bottom-line facts on how all this is affecting everyday folks back home.

Congressional staffers are going to be hard pressed to keep up with everything today. I'd probably be asked to check in with the boss at noon and just before the markets close with updates.

Of course, the staffers of today are more fortunate when it comes to information access than I was a few years back, thanks to an explosion of financial and economic news available through social media channels. In addition to the typical sources you'd expect, and the list of "econo-blogs" from the left and the right I put together last September, Here's some of what the smart and social media savvy staffers will be looking at today:

• The Wall Street Journal Marketbeat blog has been live-blogging the weekend's events.
• Paul Kedrosky at Infectious Greed noticed mischievous (or worse) changes to the Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch pages on Wikipedia. He's one of the Wall Street guys I follow on Twitter.
• Duncan Black has been snark-blogging the news from his liberal-econo-political post Eschaton.
• StockTwits keeps track of the most-discussed stocks. Soren MacBeth is the CEO. No suprise what today's topics are...