The Conservative Cat

« After a Week of Sarah, We're Back to Doing Bad Commercials | Main | EMAIL Wars: the Terrible Truth About Joe Biden »

September 16, 2008

Confused Americans for Truth - A Small Rock in a Stony River

I find myself at a disadvantage when discussing yesterday's financial meltdown. Unlike potential President Barack Obama, I can't tell you what caused it.

See, we have rules around here. In order to say something like this:

The challenges facing our financial system today are more evidence that too many folks in Washington and on Wall Street weren't minding the store, Eight years of policies that have shredded consumer protections, loosened oversight and regulation, and encouraged outsized bonuses to CEOs while ignoring middle-class Americans have brought us to the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression.

I would have to be able to tell you which consumer protections are no longer in place, what oversight has been removed, and exactly how large bonuses to corporate CEOs relate to what happened at Lehman Brothers. Not only would I have to show these things, I'd have to come up with links to web pages that provide the evidence.

Monday was not this country's first stock market free-fall since the Great Depression. There was one in 1987. Afterward, limits were placed on certain types of trades that were considered the cause of the big drop. None of these limits stopped yesterday's fall, just as the regulations imposed after the S&L crisis in the early Eighties did nothing to prevent the recent wave of mortgage defaults.

In this country we have a long history of fancy new business models ending in failure. This latest one involves low-interest mortgages, but as you can tell from the preceding paragraphs in this article, it's just one more rock in a very stony river.

As I said before, I can't tell you the exact cause of this affair, or even of the previous examples of this sort of thing that have happened in the recent past and which the American economy has absorbed and overcome. All I can do is tell you the one single thing that is at the root of each, the clear and obvious seed that unites them in a clear pattern: CHANGE. The Old Ways No Longer Apply, so it's time for Something New. Sound familiar?

Here in America, we can afford to lose one sector of the economy every now and then. We survived the economic meltdown after September 11, and we'll survive this. What we won't survive is putting the force of the entire government behind one of these crazy ideas. When that happens, the downside risk as that the whole thing gets dragged down.

If Obama knows what to do to prevent the mortgage crisis from happening again, why didn't he know what to do to stop it? The one time he made a clear prediction in advance of the results, he was wrong. Why should we believe he would be any better at predicting the results of new financial regulations? It sure as heck isn't because of his extensive experience.

So, yes, there's a whole lot I'm thinking but not saying, because I don't know for sure. I apologize for this, but the current Democratic candidate for President is a poster child for the importance of being cautious about your conclusions.

And that is definitely NOT a change.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat

# At Tue 12:13 PM | Permalink | Trackback URI | Comments (2) | More Confused Americans for Truth | Tags: banking bankrupt Barack Obama campaign 2008 conservative economics Lehman Brothers mortgage relief philosophy politics

Trackback Pings

Comments

Posted by: David at September 16, 2008 5:25 PM

Posted by: dc at September 18, 2008 1:33 PM