Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Teetering at the Precipice

We offer telegraphic opinions, sans hyperlinks, on the present distress:

  • Yesterday, hardly a single politician looked good. Pelosi proved how shallow a Speaker of the House can be. Barney Frank proved how shamelessly he can lie. Democrats in general proved that they can't be trusted to govern, no matter what they say about Republicans. McCain and Obama proved that they are completely impotent as leaders of their parties. Bush proved he's the lamest of ducks. Every member of the House who voted against the so-called bailout proved that she or he would rather risk a deflationary depression than take a stand that's unpopular in the short term. The single politician who hardly looked good was John Boehner, House Minority Leader, who at least made a good speech in favor of the doomed bill, even if he can't deliver his party's votes.
  • American voters, every bit as eager as SWNID to blame the politicians, have exactly the government they deserve. Has a nation ever been more willing to scapegoat someone--anyone--as the greedy blankety-blank responsible for this mess while failing to acknowledge that everyone is a greedy blankety-blank who has benefited directly or indirectly from the agglomeration of policies that pumped air into the housing and finance bubbles that have burst?
  • Political ideology has seldom been as perniciously used as in the present "debate." The hard right is insisting that free markets be genuinely free, as if panics never happen when they are. The left is insisting that markets must be stringently regulated to avoid disasters, as if there's ever been a market regulated that actually avoided disaster. Neither side has much empirical data to support their doctrinnaire conclusions.
  • The Treasury and the Fed are not without tools to alleviate the present distress. Reports that cross the SWNIDish desk indicate that they're working hard to get cash in banks where it can be lent to businesses who need it to do business. For now, they aren't empowered to do cancer surgery on the finance system, but the patient has already authorized aggressive treatment with drugs and radiation. The finance system's implosion may still be limited, and the consequent recession may still be contained.
  • Barring some unforeseen development (scandalous revelations, new international crisis, effective political Hail Mary), Obama will be the next president. Pray that he empowers Democrats like Robert Rubin, not Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi. If he chooses the latter, look for terms like "tax shelter," "stagflation," and "job action" to re-enter the popular vocabulary.

5 comments:

Joe said...

I'd love your thoughts on the questions raised in my blog post this week in prep for our next teaching series...

Unknown said...

I couldn't believe it when I flipped on the BBC here and saw the D's blaming R's for the failure of the vote. Unsurprisingly, this was also the the position of the British press (the stalwart Daily Telegraph excluded as of yet) who were somehow unable to put together that the D's are the majority party in the House and could have passed it had they been competent at being a ruling party. Don't get me wrong, any R who would flip his vote just because he was offended by that Californian Harpy is just as despicable, what I can't understand is how people buy this stuff!

At any rate, great post—this is so going on facebook.

Anonymous said...

22 days after saying the election was "over," with McCain the winner, SWNID says Obama will likely win.

"SWSID" is going to be even harder to pronounce than "SWNID."

Anonymous said...

The congress was right to oppose this bail out. It has nothing to with it being unpopular, it is just a bad idea.

Don't just take my word for it.

http://faculty.chicagogsb.edu/john.cochrane/research/Papers/mortgage_protest.htm

Jon A. Alfred E. Michael J. Wile E. SWNID said...

As to changing electoral prognostications, the standard is always, "If the election were held right now entirely in the SWNIDish brain . . ."