More than one person forecast the bursting of the Dot Com Bubble, twelve years ago. The Pets.com sock puppet wasn’t the only clue — the general enthusiasm for companies that had never, ever shown a profit proved signal enough. And then there was all the talk about how the stock market “could only go up.”
Soon after, it went down.
Then stocks rose again, in a Fed-induced bubble. And then collapsed again, along with the financial system.
Brace yourself for another rerun.
The Economist informs us that “European bankers have been saying things are fine for weeks now, even as their exposure to indebted euro-zone countries strangles their access to funding.… Fears of contagion from Europe have now infected America.”
The gloom and doom just rises from there.
The article is depressing for another reason, though — the assumption that governments must not let banks fail, making The Economist read like council for never-ending tax-funded bailouts. Which was the kind of thing actual economists used to warn governments against. (A long time ago … perhaps back when the science was called “political economy.”)
Times sure have changed, as The Economist admits. The three years since 2008 have made a difference: Now it is the governments that prove insolvent.
It’s time for The Economist to rethink its policy advice, time to call for a general overhaul of the international monetary system.
We must end the age of inflation-and-bailouts, before it ends us.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
3 replies on “The End of an Era?”
Much of the stimulus bill’s dollars that DIDN’T go into the banks where they could sit on the money and not crash made its way into the stock market to prop up the prices of the stocks so that the great unwashed would THINK that things were cooking along just fine and not panic. Had that NOT have occured then it would be readily apparent to the bitter clingers just how badly we are really doing and that we have already surpassed the 30s in economic devastation.
We are like a grizzly with a bullet in the heart who just hasn’t gotten the message to the brain yet that it is dead.
BUT IF THE GOVERNMENTS DON’T BAIL OUT THE BANKS, WHO WILL GIVE THE POLITICANS BRIBES ( SORRY, I MEAN CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS; SINCURE JOBS FOR RELATIVES; SINCURE JOBS FOR THEMSELVES WHEN/IF THEY ARE EVER FORCED FROM OFFICE, ETC.? IF NOT THE BANKS AND THE BAILED OUT FAILURES??
It’s about time soemnoe wrote about this.