The Talking Dog

October 10, 2008, This can't be good...

NYU Professor Nouriel Roubini, an economist who has been in the news of late because he has been freaking right with just about all of his doom and gloom projections, and for the right reasons, tells us that the world is facing, in the short term not merely an inevitable and deep recession, but a possible global meltdown of the financial system and market crashes and severe global recession, following days of market panic including yesterday's over 650 point plunge in the Dow and overnight collapses of over 10% in European and Asian markets.

Every day, it seems, more and more dramatic market interventions are unleashed, and every day, the market says... not enough. The government's responses thus far continue to be reactive to rapidly moving events, and depressingly inadequate.

While the odds of an Obama Presidential victory continue to increase according to sites like fivethirtyeight.com ... the bigger question is, having insane Republican policies of ostensibly pretending that political decisions of running deficits of every kind imaginable pretty much all based on not compensating workers for their productivity via failing to increase the minimum wage for so long with consequences of overall wage lags leading so many people to make up the family budget shortfalls through borrowing, often home borrowing, with so many fees to be made on such borrowing leading to an aggressive predatory lending industry... and so many more fees to be made on repackaging these loans as investment products... while simultaneously allowing massive hedge fund and derivative markets to be regulated not by governments but by "themselves" for so long... does it even matter [yes, it "matters"]... but... does it matter that much if Obama wins? At this point... global financial events appear to be moving faster than our heretofore inept government responses to those events.

What should we have expected? The "response" to 9-11, or to Hurricane Katrina, or at least heretofore to the financial crisis, has been the usual Bush Administration/Republican ideological response: how can we take taxpayer money and shmear our friends, while pretending to have an actual governmental response that will fool the rubes. Well, the rubes are no longer fooled. The party is over. The severest consequences will be felt by those who have already suffered. As usual. Capitalism seems to work in the very clever way of having some of its severest crises spread around the length of a human lifetime, so that not too many people remember "the last time." The most notable exception I can think of... or is it the rule?... being that since the current American intellectual level is about that of the eight year old, in 2000, enough people couldn't remember 8 years until the last economically disastrous President Bush who actually tried to improve things from an even more irresponsible President Reagan... complete with a banking crisis resulting in a gigantic government bailout... and merrily re-installed a disaster named Bush because, we were told, "we'd rather have a beer with him" (notwithstanding that he is a recoverning alcoholic who has sworn off "having beers").

Economic and historical ignorance (and hell, ignorance in general) continue to be the Republican Party's best friend. It will pay the price of an electoral drubbing in less than a month'stime. The only solace is that those who supported (and in the current disastrous environment continue to support) that party will likely suffer as severely as the rest of us. As if that's any solace at all.


Comments

So let's take away all the retirement perks of Presidents and Congress. No pensions, no presidential libraries, nothing but Secret Service protection until the markets fullly recover years from now.

The pain-causers should share the pain.

Posted by Kevin Hayden at October 10, 2008 10:01 AM

Are you saying the Republicans only attract "the best and the solvent" for government service?

Posted by Just Wondering at October 10, 2008 6:04 PM