Spengler: No, Barack, we can't.

Well, I'm supporting Obama and I also basically agree with Spengler. I don't doubt that we're heading for some form of significant national economic downturn. It's actually one of the reasons I support Obama. My crunchy heart is convinced that this economic downturn will only accelerate the rise of local solutions to local problems, out of sheer necessity. No one's cavalry is coming to save those Ohio communities that have depended on factory jobs for so long, the ones we've discussed here recently. Those who will be able to thrive and grow during this time (because millions will, just as millions like my grandparents, a couple of chemists, did just fine during the Depression) are those who take responsibility for their own lives, who rein in their spending, start small businesses or careers, go back to school.

Obama as "bully pulpit motivational speaker in chief" is well-positioned through biography and rhetorical skills to be a great aid in encouraging individual American achievement despite overall tough times. Sure we'll get some screwy policies out of DC that will do more harm than good. But when wouldn't that be the case? I don't think the economic policies of an Obama administration would be any worse than the policies of a McCain, Huckabee, Romney or Clinton administration.

Bless,
Doug

I'm with Spengler. Putin for President! Finally, I. am. pumped.

Ah yes. "People in the know" are "whispering." Because there is some Council of Elders of Zion/Bilderberger/Globalization Directorate they answer to that mandates they leak only on deep background.

What Rod is starting to sound like: Yes, this will be the year that they will learn I was right all along. They'll wish they had sold their soul-less McMansions in suburbia and gone rural, growing organic vegetables on their plot of land adjacent to a Benedictine monastery under whose spiritual guidance they would have been wise to place their families. O how there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth when they did not hear the prophecy that was Cruncy Cons, and are reduced to living in trailer parks in the Florida panhandle, only able to feed at church suppers (once they publicly renounce big box stores and tabloid television). O how the GOP will cry bitter tears by not simultaneously nominating a Ron Paul and advocating new middle-class entitlements protecting native-born true Americans from the Great Unraveling, as I urged it to when there was still time! Yay verily the subprime bubble represents not the predictable consequence of political pressure to give cheap money to bad credit risks, but a Divine Indictment of the West's fall from its pre-Englightenment state of grace. They will know I was right when their harlot daughters must serve scotch and other favors to their Malaysian industrialist overlords to enable their parents and siblings to survive in the new dark age that is upon us. Perhaps if they had listened to me in 2006, we would now be in only in that Purgatory in which we consider our false ways, welcome defeat in 2008, and be ready to win back Eden with the guitar-strumming Populist from Hope at our head, and the dark-skinned Roman from Baton Rouge at his side. But nay, all is lost.

Obama as "bully pulpit motivational speaker in chief" is well-positioned through biography and rhetorical skills to be a great aid in encouraging individual American achievement despite overall tough times. Sure we'll get some screwy policies out of DC that will do more harm than good. But when wouldn't that be the case?

Yes, when that market crash happened in October 1929 and we started a moderate recession, we should have just accepted that screwy politics out of DC would give us irrelevant and only slightly bad things like Smoot-Hawley. What harm could that do? Just a speed bump towards encouraging "individual American achievement".

From The BG
"In the name of transferring risk - and in the interest of creating an appealing new product to sell to aggressive investors seeking higher returns - a bank could create a CDO (collaterallized debt obligations), for instance, that packaged subprime mortgages together with corporate bonds. An economist would expect those to move independently, but thanks to a large - and unseen - investment in such a linked package, problems with one could drive down the other. A bad apple can ruin an entire barrel of fruit."

Exactly. (Except the fruit analogy - Wherein it's the lack of a good picker that's ruining the fruit.)

K Street (at 1:58 p.m.): excellent!

'Nother K_Street fan here. 'Preciated.

K Street, In your big diatribe, I searched and couldn't find any "Peak Oil."

I felt hurt. What gives? Have you finally accepted the inevitable? Say it ain't so!

Go K Streeter.

I'd note-fiscal markets are about to tank, and Congress can take a bow. Sarbanes-Oxley encouraged companies to list themselves elsewhere,and the market will do the rest. Hello London and Hong Kong. These pols don't get it; capital doesn't care. They're busily loading up the stimulus debacle with more pork. Moody's will love that.

In Brooklyn, real estate developer Bruce Ratner has suddenly announced his massive apartment/arena complex is losing expected funding. Fewer Masters of the Universe means fewer dollars for luxury condos. But hey-we'll have Obama's empty but flowery speeches, filled with nothing more substantial than hope and change. And that's what matters, right?

Well, Spengler was wrong on everything else so why should he not be wrong on this?

Yes, Obama is a bag of hot air but there will be no major collapse. If there were that possibility there would a lot more short selling in the markets than there is. And if there is, expect him to be elected. That will make you happy, won't it?

What I am seeing here is an attitude, of "We want everyone to be poor and miserable because that is the only way our social vision can come about." Well, it don't work that way. The last major recession was the mess in the 1970s and people weren't miserable then except when Jimmy the Chicken was trying to persuade people that the sky was falling.

The doom'n'gloom reminds me of what I was hearing in 1999 about the alleged Y2K crisis. I also remember people saying that the big crash of 1987(?) was the start of the *real* crash. The DJIA was then, what, 1700, and now it's 12000+? Too many people scare easily.

Well, Spengler (and all those who agree) why are you an American? If we cannot possibly make this country any better how can anyone who agrees even claim we live in a great nation? Can Obama make a utopia? No! But can we make it better? YES WE CAN! And a functional utopia is the efforts of our forefathers, and every noteworthy candidate since. I think that is all that the American public dreams about right now, something - anything - better. If any one thing that Obama speaks about does come true, then the desires of the American voter is accomplished.

In the 1990's when that "great sucking sound" started did American products become cheaper, or did amerikan CEO's become richer? (America, spelled with a big A and a c, isn't about corporate interests). I am pretty darn certain that Maytag would find some way to continue to exist even with their supposedly "inefficient" factories if they had to. I am pretty sure that once the US Government and the co-sponsored Central American gravy train stops, American companies will find some way to make money and to survive. Isn't that capitalism is all about? Survival of the, bets most efficient and most valuable of products at the best price? How anyone can claim to be a capitalist and support governement paychecks to big business and exploitive trade policies which lend our jobs to other nations than our own is beyond me. We tried this "service economy", a word made up so we can feel good about our under-diversified economy, and IT DOESN'T WORK!

So how dare you, Spengler, questioning what America and Americans CAN do. Doing so is, in my opinion, anti-pragmatic and most of all anti-American.