I don’t write about economic issues for a simple reason. I can’t offer unique insights or useful correctives to the economic media, and I don’t want to offer people financial advise when I am not qualified to do so. It’s not indifference that leads me to avoid commenting on economic trends, but humility. Like John McCain, my understanding of complex financial markets and instruments is limited. Since I became a full-time political blogger, my knowledge of economic trends has atrophied dramatically, as I no longer have time to peruse business and investment literature.
But, today I have to make an exception. Today is no ordinary day. The Stock Market is tumbling with news that Lehman Brothers has gone into liquidation and Merrill Lynch has been bought up by Bank of America. America is sneezing and the world is catching the flu, as international markets match our slide. Industrial output in August was the lowest since Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in September 2005. Corn and soybean crops are suffering from sustained drought, and that will create inflationary pressure on commodities. Nearly a third of the nation’s top executives are looking to cut jobs in the coming months.
Unless you subscribe to the view that all news is excellent news for John McCain, this is not good news for John McCain. And the Obama campaign is on the offensive this morning. They have reminded the press about a speech Obama gave back in March, where he warned of these types of economic woes if we did not get our house in order. They sent Joe Biden out with a blistering populist critique of McCain as being “firmly in the corner of the wealthy and well-connected,” and as a man “so firmly in [Oil Company CEO’s] corner he’d hand the Exxon-Mobils of the world another $4 billion dollars a year.”
George W. Bush’s ruinous policies have now trickled all the way up to highest echelons of Wall Street and they are about to turn around and come racing back down to wash away what’s left of the middle class. Them’s the facts. The era of no-regulation ‘you’re on your own economics’ is coming to an end. And John McCain is down in Jacksonville, saying, ““We will never put America in this position again. We will clean up Wall Street. We will reform government. This is a failure.” No. John McCain is a failure. The Republican Party is a failure. The only reforming McCain would do is to try to stave off the populist backlash against the greedheads and warmongers that have bought our country so low.
