Friday 3 October 2008

How can the financial market 'meltdown' be a crisis?

Call me cynical but I do not see how the current market 'crisis' in the United States, which has spilled over to Europe, is anything other than a normal perturbation that happens when a segment of the market overheats.

Why do I think this?

Two reasons.

One. The Democratic Party stuffed the bill with more pork for its special interest constituencies than ever before.

Two. The Democratic Party, which has the majority in Congress, could have passed the bill on the first attempt and thus be credited with the 'rescue' of an economy required due to 'the failed economic policies of George W Bush'.

From the start of the 'crisis' the public has been told that we're on the precipice of financial ruin.

The media loves this stuff. As long as they can report doom and gloom people will keep buying their product to find out what's going on. There's an interesting parallel to the way the mainstream media loves reporting on climate change.

Imagine on December 8, 1941, a day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, that either side of politics had tried to take advantage of the war funding bill and attach huge payments to special interest groups in order for the bill to pass.

It's inconceivable that in such a moment of crisis a political party would do that.

It's also inconceivable that if one party had the ability to pass a war bill and would not do so in such circumstances.

Therefore, I reckon that the hysteria surrounding the urgent requirement for a bail out bill is unwarranted and is simply political point scoring.

I should be amazed that the mainstream media is blaming the Republican Party for not passing the bill on the first attempt in spite of the fact that the Democratic Party didn't need them in order to pass it but I'm not.

The Democrats needed Republican support so that they both had a stake in the pork barrel spending attached to the bill.

The other point is that it's going to become clear to the US public at some point (probably after the election thanks to the Democratic Party supporting mainstream media) that the problem is 100% the result of Democrat policies.

To have a bail out bill passed by the Democrats for a problem they caused and with huge amounts of pork going to special interest groups would look bad for them indeed.

Let the market play itself out. Let the government act as lender of last resort for the required period. There'll be some pain but at this point it doesn't look as bad as the situation post the dotcom boom or 9/11 so there's no reason to panic.

(Nothing Follows)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think that you are mistaken -- The Democrats are never going to get any of the blame that they deserve for this. The majority of the American public will always believe that this was all the fault of the Bush administration. Any attempt to educate them to the contrary will fall on deaf ears or be shouted down as heresy.

Anonymous said...

The continual distortions and outright lies put up by a media obviously in the tank for obama and covering for the corruption of the democrats and their obvious complicity in this current sub-prime meltdown, is at the level now of a severe and obvious national security issue.

Eisenhower warned of the dangers of power being accumulated by an industrial-military complex many years ago.
Fast forward to the current day and it is completely obvious that the far greater threat and now actually a clear and present danger, to the national security and to the continuing prosperity and social and economic progress of the US, and by extension much of the western world, comes from the propagandizing, 24 hour a day drumbeat of a largely monolithic news/entertainment/media complex that can no longer be trusted even as a remotely unbiased and impartial information conduit.


The corrupted, values-free, leftist-biased education system that many of these reporters and so-called journalists and their editors have been subjected to has possibly irrevocably distorted their thinking processes so it is possible that they are not even fully aware at some level of the magnitude and impact of their gross distortions.

It is the double-think of 1984 in real life.

And of course the unending series of abyss-straddling near catastrophes avoided by last-second action-hero like actions with nail-biting suspense up until the last moment make for bigger profits and higher ratings from spell-bound audiences for these snake-oil sellers of lies, dread, panic and misinformation.