Is anyone else obsessed with the financial bailout or is it just me? Following this story has taken up a large chunk of my time for the past week and a half. I find it fascinating. And not from the financial standpoint.
Obviously as a writer, I'm not well-versed enough to understand how the lending squeeze has pressured the T-Bill which results in the Dow dropping and so on and so forth. I don't know and I'm not so inclined to figure it out. Instead, I have a friend who is in the financial sector and when he starts pulling money from the bank to stuff in his mattress, then I'll be worried.
I'm more intriguied by the incendiary language in the media. Last week, Bush was asking for a bailout to re-establish a struggling market that was entering a recession. It was sweeping language, positive about how it would "rescue" us all from this crisis.
The stocks bounced.
Over the weekend, as Congress worked feverisly, the language changed again. By the time Bush was addressing the nation, this $700 billion dollar fuck up was shoring us up against "economic catastrophe."
Catastrophe? Really? Maybe he wasn't getting the appropriate amount of freaking out that he thought was necessary.
Despite the ensuing catastrophe, the bailout obviously failed and the language changes yet again. We're in a financial "meltdown" that requires a financial plan to rescue us from "severe consequences."
I love that words can be so powerful but is that kind of dire verbiage necessary? Yes, the markets are tight, but not tighter than after 9/11 and surprisingly, we survived. Remember Enron? The APR on a money market account went from 5 percent to .8 over night. Anyone recall the dot.com bubble? When that bubble burst, more than $5 trillion when flying out the door.
So it makes me wonder, who is this inciting who? And more importantly, for what purpose?
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