Eric is such a great writer, I'll just repost here:

Quote:
Originally Posted by GRG55
The headline and opening paragraph of the article state...
Congressional Leaders Stunned by Warnings
WASHINGTON — It was a room full of people who rarely hold their tongues. But as the Fed chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, laid out the potentially devastating ramifications of the financial crisis before congressional leaders on Thursday night, there was a stunned silence at first...
Either the US Congress is even more clueless and illiterate than I'd suspected,or this is just another act in the unfolding Greek tragedy designed to prepare the audience [US taxpayers] emotionally in advance of the "hundreds of Billions" announcement that followed. No prize for the correct answer...
Which came first, the egg of incompetent crisis prevention or the chicken of incompetent crisis response?

They are preparing Congress for the next phase. They may also hope they might pull out of it, and know they don't have a chance without a blank check from Congress. But at some level they must know they have little chance anyway. Too many things have broken at the same time. This is why Bernanke has been out of sight. Paulson is a crisis-hardened executive, Bernanke an academic. He never learned how to manage and hide his fear. Fear is more contagious than a virus. He is kept out of the public eye.

America's enemies smell weakness. Open season on America has begun.

Next comes financial chaos where even the appearance of control is lost. The sheer speed and randomness of events will catch many by surprise, like a financial tornado.

After the financial tornado passes we will all stare in wonder at the strangeness of the scene, the red Lamborghini stuck upside down 40 feet off the ground in a last remaining branches of a leafless oak tree, at the man smiling who is glad to have survived unscathed in his underwear in the bathtub that was as all that remained of his home. Lives will be frozen in economic time, careers ended, ancient relationships cut off by economic irrelevance.

Next year, slowly we will stagger out of the economic wreckage and start to rebuild. But things will never be as they were, for our old reality was fantasy anyway, built on false beliefs. We have no more chance of recreating it than we have in the morning after waking from a lovely dream to fall asleep again back into it while the alarms are ringing.