On the A.P. wires financial ruin approaches, but they fast forward the little men walking on the trading room floor. It seems odd, doesn’t it, that a corporate controlled entity would try and maximize the appearance of frenzy when their fate is linked with the fate of the stock-market?
Are they that hard up for news? Or performing a dubious public service? My finger’s curl a bit, but remain half open.
Crisis sells so well, it’s hard to trust anyone on the t.v. Too often, popular media is practically worthless. Fear seems to be a business now. Remember ‘America, the Promised Land’? There must have been a time when we weren’t mitigating our doom.
But I feel worry about the financial future of this country. Today’s news isn’t the financial hurricane, the great bomb, and that’s the scary part. Today’s news is more like the domino effect of the last year triggering many more dominoes. It takes only a little foresight and imagination to see that today’s economic blows have exponentially expanded the intensity and number of markets affected by the housing crisis.
Lenders won’t lend now. They are afraid, and they need their capital to ride out the trouble they’re in. This would be a big deal to the housing crisis anyway- without buyers the problem worsens. But that isn’t the only market.
America is a credit country. That’s how we buy things here- on loan: Cars, houses, furniture. When you have spooked banks you have a radical mutation of the economic flow of this country.
You also have another contributor to the fear cycle. Questions are already being posed by American Citizens: “Is my money safe?” “I’m insured by AIG, do I need to move?” “I’ve been using Merrill Lynch, do I need to place my investments elsewhere?”
There isn’t really any answer reassuring enough to stop the tide that has now started. On both sides of the aisle you have companies and consumers tensed and waiting to see what everyone else is going to do.
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