Uh Oh!
Sure fire way to get the market to tank even further? Add President Bush’s sharp intellect to solving the fiscal woes of our country:
President George W. Bush plans to meet on Monday with top U.S. financial policymakers, the White House said, at a time of increased strains in credit markets and fears of a recession.
What’s that sucking sound? That’s the market drowning in corporate bail outs (read: corporate welfare) for the already rich (Bear Sterns ring a bell any one). Any one taking bets on if Bush will be able to fix this situation like he’s fixed Iraq?
March 16th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
Actually… this is pretty careless of you to say this. You think Bush wants to be doing this? C’mon… His buddies are all losing their ass and the rest of us with it…
March 16th, 2008 at 10:23 pm
Steve,
Actually…that’s pretty careless reading. Windspike didn’t say that the current economic slowdown or recession or approaching recession or whatever you want to call it was something Bush wants. He asked if anyone thought Bush would be able to stop it. Whole different vibe. By the way, I’m not betting. Bernanke’s no Greenspan!
March 16th, 2008 at 11:08 pm
There was a cartoon a few years ago showing an old sailing ship going down fast by the bow; the crew were calling out, “We’re sinking!”
Captain Dubya, standing on the stern hugging a treasure chest, was correcting them: “Wrong. You are sinking. I, on the other hand, have all the money I will ever need.”
The current mess could not have happened without the process of gradually growing deregulation, unraveling of protections put in place during and after the Great Depression to prevent its recurrence, that actually started in the Carter administration and has continued during every presidency since. This Bush has been the most reckless, in the way he ran up the deficit, but he’s just continued a tradition of pandering to big money and instant gratification.
The feds don’t seem to be able to come up with much in the way of solutions besides shifting the risk from the stockholders of the corporations holding the bad debt to the taxpayers, and to print more money. Hope it doesn’t work out this way, but the most likely outcome looks like a combination of a big increase in the national debt, thereby increasing the amount spent on paying the interest and reducing what’s left for everything else, and accelerating inflation caused by the dilution of the money supply. This is how the Germans ended up having to take wheelbarrows full of cash to go grocery shopping in the 1920s.
March 17th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
Liberal jarhead
Sounds like an appropriate summation of situation.
March 17th, 2008 at 4:10 pm
LJ, unfortunately, I don’t think there is another way to read it. Either way the forecast is gloom for everyone except pals of the W, Rove and Co. How many folk in JP Morgan donated cash to W’s causes, I wonder?
March 17th, 2008 at 6:20 pm
Bernanke can’t do crap to stop this… I read in the Economist this week the wars are going to cost each and every American $25K from beginning until the “last surviving soldier” dies 75-80 years from now.
Scary… we should get out of Germany, Japan and Korea…
I am most concerned about American’s losing jobs at this point. I fear the worst when it comes to unemployment. I hate seeing people not work because there isn’t a job.