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Monday, September 15, 2008

Financial meltdown roundup

It's been a pretty dismal day economically around the world. Here is a roundup of the latest developments in the financial meltdown on Wall Street:

The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped like a rock today, losing over five hundred points on the news of Lehman Brothers' imminent bankruptcy. It's the biggest slide since the aftermath of the September 11th attacks. While the news was bad for the Dow, it was worse for other indexes: the S&P 500 lost 4.7% and the Nasdaq lost 3.2%.

Abroad, the markets have taken a beating. The New York Times reports:
In Europe, benchmark stock indexes were off nearly 4 percent in London and Paris and almost 3 percent in Frankfurt.
CNN's Jack Cafferty read some great comments on air this afternoon from viewers who are refusing to buy the Bush-McCain-Palin spin about the economy:
The last “once in a century financial crises” in this country was the Great Depression run by Republicans, with a Republican President Hoover, who didn’t know much about the economy either. It took a Democrat to get us out of that one then and it looks like it may again.
Here's another email:
It is embarrassing for me to admit I am a Republican. McCain-Palin represent everything wrong with politics. I can’t believe that man said our economy is structurally sound. But considering he doesn’t know how many homes he has, yes I do believe it! I am voting for Barack Obama, a Democrat for the first time in 30 years.
Reacting to the weekend bombshell about Lehman and the sale of Merrill Lynch to Bank of America, Barack Obama said in a statement:
This morning we woke up to some very serious and troubling news from Wall Street.

The situation with Lehman Brothers and other financial institutions is the latest in a wave of crises that are generating enormous uncertainty about the future of our financial markets.

This turmoil is a major threat to our economy and its ability to create good-paying jobs and help working Americans pay their bills, save for their future, and make their mortgage payments.

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 certainly don’t fault Senator McCain for these problems, but I do fault the economic philosophy he subscribes to.

It’s a philosophy we’ve had for the last eight years – one that says we should give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else.

It’s a philosophy that says even common-sense regulations are unnecessary and unwise, and one that says we should just stick our heads in the sand and ignore economic problems until they spiral into crises.

Well now, instead of prosperity trickling down, the pain has trickled up – from the struggles of hardworking Americans on Main Street to the largest firms of Wall Street.

This country can’t afford another four years of this failed philosophy. For years, I have consistently called for modernizing the rules of the road to suit a 21st century market – rules that would protect American investors and consumers.

And I’ve called for policies that grow our economy and our middle-class together. That is the change I am calling for in this campaign, and that is the change I will bring as President.
Meanwhile, John McCain continued to insist this morning that the economy is sound: "Our economy, I think, is still -- the fundamentals of our economy are strong, but these are very, very difficult times."

Which economy is he talking about?

Comments:

Blogger Ken Camp said...

If you can afford enough houses that you can't count them all, the economy is fundamentally sound.

September 15, 2008 8:36 PM  

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