Getalife, I appreciate that you are a poorly-paid astroturfer recruited from your local college chapter of White Suburban Communist Kids for Consensus or some other such foolish organization, but please, take pride in your work. Why don’t you actually TRY to make your comments nuanced, interesting or thought-provoking. Engage in a debate of ideas. Challenge our policies. For the love of God, do something more than throw out the same old tired rah! rah! propaganda that is both meaningless and factually incorrect. Be a proud little soldier and at least pretend that you care enough about your job to be effective. At the very least, be funny. If we’re going to be stuck with each other, at least make it entertaining.

patriette on March 23, 2009 at 10:08 AM

Well said, but in a lost cause, I’m afraid. You’re talking to a spambot that gets taken offline when the Dow falls for the day. Better to use its posts as a golf tee to set up your own points, rather than respond to it directly. It just produces a ton of brainless two-sentence posts that make the comment boards hard to read.

Whatevs. If +143 makes your leg tingle, then go enjoy yourself for the few hours (or minutes) it lasts. The trillion dollars the Fed just quietly printed out of thin air and pumped into the banking system is about to cause hyperinflation like nobody’s business. The Dow is just one cog in an extremely complex economic machine that you clearly don’t understand. Unfortunately, neither does our President, who once said that he thought $10/gal for gas sounded great to him, and later followed up by saying how wise it would be to bankrupt the coal industry.

Seriously, enjoy the +143, getalife. It may be the last positive economic sign you see for a very, very, very long time.

aero on March 23, 2009 at 10:11 AM

Inflation is very worrisome indeed, but I think the real long-term damage is the loss in market confidence. It will take much longer to repair that, and it’s harder to conceive of a short-term policy agenda that would be much help. Advanced economies rely heavily upon trust – trust in the value of currency, the stability of contractual arrangements, and the sanctity of private property. All three of those things have been shattered, in a process that began before Obama’s election, but went into overdrive during the last few months.

Simple economies feature very little trust or confidence – buyers and sellers compare bartered goods directly. Marxist collectivism is also a very primitive economic system, in that its subject class doesn’t have to trust anyone – they are required to obey, and compelled by force when necessary. In order to achieve the more advanced productivity and technological accomplishments of the modern free market, it is necessary for the participants in the economy to have a certain degree of trust for each other, and for the system itself. It’s not reasonable to expect average people to become medical doctors before they purchase health care, or doctors of economics before they buy some stock, or expert auto mechanics before they purchase an automobile. The consumer’s trust in the providers of these goods and services allows the advanced economy to function.

Post-Obama, we live in an economy collapsing from its lack of trust in the value of currency, or the legal security of contracts and purchases. Consumer complaints about goods and services are nothing compared to the damage caused by the very foundations of the economy being shaken. In the last few weeks, executives and top-level employees have learned they can be targeted with special taxes; the government can forcibly take over companies, as it did with Wells-Fargo, which was compelled to accept bailout money it didn’t want; and investors have learned the currency can be devalued by fiat, through massive deficit spending, very swiftly and with little debate. The market has seen that government incompetence and malfeasance will not be punished or corrected – it has not escaped the notice of investors that Barney Frank and Chris Dodd are still in power, guilty as sin and free as birds.

Even the concept of competitive enterprise has been threatened, because giant bailouts prevent badly run industries from failing and releasing their customer base to hungry competitors. What’s the point of making huge efforts to beat Ford or GM in the marketplace, if the government won’t let you win, because it won’t let them lose?

It will take a long time to undo the damage that has been caused by the crisis of confidence, damage whose effects are just now beginning to make themselves felt in a slow, glacial collapse.

Doctor Zero on March 23, 2009 at 12:05 PM