The Direction We're Not Moving In

I heard something on the mainstream news last nite that actually made sense. This recent crisis is more about fear than any sort of underlying economic problem... When prices are kept artificially high for years, people panic when they start to come down. that panic leads to "SELLSELLSELL!!" which leads to prices coming down even more, which leads to more "SELLSELLSELL!" If there were no bailout, eventually the panic would subside and things would stabilize at a sustainable level. The % of our GDP that is tied up in the financial sector would shrink, and the % of our GDP related to manufacturing, technology, etc would increase. The hundreds of billions in evaporated wealth due to the stock market crash would not magically reappear--it would be gone (not that it ever really had any right to exist in the first place), wages might come down a bit, values of savings would decrease, and that obviously would suck for a lot of people... But homes would be affordable. Energy would be affordable. Food would be affordable. And we could move forward in a slightly more sustainable fashion. Too bad, we're not moving in that direction... Not yet at least.