Hold On To Your Seats

...it looks like we're in for a wild ride this week! With the 700 billion dollar congressional bailout safely passed last Friday, everything should go back to normal, right? This morning with the Dow down below 10,000 , it looks like things are still coming apart. Over the weekend there was word of big problems in the foreign markets, and Paul Krugman pointed out that the credit situation was still dire, and seemed to have not been affected by the bailout. The credit crisis is the real problem, the stock market is not really the indicator to watch, but it does get people's attention.

Meanwhile we have about the weirdest and most tumultuous circumstances I can ever remember when coming down to the wire in a presidential election. The candidates are having trouble keeping up with rapidly changing events, which threaten new surprises every day. With the election 30 days off and with the rate we've been clicking off momentous historical events (3 per week seems to be about the average), this 30 days seems like an eternity. The newsmedia were talking about this, how any one of these events would have been the story of the year normally, and how they are being swamped by these things. Their reporting seems matter of fact because they haven't really had time to take it in; so you have analysts sitting around discussing the day's events with nervous laughter, when you'd expect them to be sounding the alarm, that life is changing drastically for all of us.