Because of my faceless bureaucrat work, I’m exposed to a lot of information about the economy. Many who know me know that I’ve been saying for months that the current recession is worse than anything we’ve seen in years, decades, and that the combination of the housing crisis, with all its ancillary impacts, and the dramatic increases in fuel costs, together pose the most significant economic challenges our country has faced in 40 or 50 years, perhaps since the Great Depression.
How odd to hear those words echoed this weekend by the financial analysts trying to explain last week, when our economy apparently was on the brink of complete collapse.
Believe me, I take no comfort in having apparently been right, as demonstrated by the determination by the federal government (let’s hope it’s not too little too late) to buy up bad loans and hold them in the fairly desperate hope that the properties that “secure” them will someday be worth something close to what was loaned against them.
Good sense seems to have taken a permanent holiday, to say nothing of doing what’s right. Now we’re being told we can’t call to account those responsible for this very risky outcome, because if we allow everyone who deserves to bear the consequences of their actions to feel the full force of their impacts, everyone’s way of life will be permanently altered. While I understand this, it feels instinctively like the wrong thing to do. There needs to be an accounting by virtually everyone in the financial food chain for this orgy of excess and looking the other way while waiting for the outstretched palm to be greased, and there ought to be a way to accomplish that without exposing the American economy to new risk. Maybe later…
The one amusing aspect of all this (besides the reaction humor from the late night comics, some of which has been great) has been watching the Republican candidate for President try to wriggle off the hook of his lockstep adherence to the traditional (now failed) GOP shibboleth of deregulation. “We need to allow the free market to regulate itself,” the conservative Republican base would say. Well, not this week. Just as there are no atheists in foxholes when the mortar rounds start to fall, so there appear to be no deregulators to be found when the tidal wave of bankruptcies and foreclosures crashes onto shore. It’s obvious we need more regulation, not less. It also seems clear that at least one of the long and dearly held philosophies that the GOP, right wing talk radio and Fox News have propagated for decades is now dead, because it turns out to be dead wrong.
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