Piling on Obama

Today’s New York Times features a host of generally left leaning pundits who usually cut the new guy in charge a lot of slack. Today was different. They’re going after him for two things mostly; underestimating how pissed off people are about bailouts and how deep the current financial catastrophe is. Well, sorry for being human, but none of these geniuses saw it coming either.

I’ll stop patting myself on the back for calling this thing half a decade ago, and point out that the conventional wisdom missed the whole damn thing and the media was complicit in telling any and all that real estate is going up forever, and buying and holding stocks is the way to gain wealth.

Whoops. Never mind.

Just how the hell to fix this stuff is beyond complicated. A primary problem is the staggering amounts of debt sloshing around in world markets. Repeat after me; there is more debt than money in the world and this can’t have a happy ending. Get it? Most of a quadrillion dollars in derivative debt just can’t be unwound. There isn’t that much money. Quadrillion, with not an M or a B or a T, but a Q. That’s US$1,000,000,000,000,000.00.

There’s no way humans are going back to using the home as ATM by refinancing, and even the credit card abusers seem to be wising up to that nastiness, so it’s not going to be back to business as usual by summer. This is the collapse of a decades long spree of deregulation, cheap credit and the insane notion that “deficits don’t matter”. (Thank you Dick Cheney for that one. Apparently Democratic deficits do?)

So really, we’re just starting to get a vague idea of just how ugly it gets, and in a fair amount of denial in the mean time. Here in Key Largo, most people are employed in the vacation business, as waiters, bartenders, maids, fishing guides, cooks and the like. With discretionary income collapsing by the day, who’s going to go on vacation to the Fabulous Florida KeysTM” and spend money?

This really gets ugly and I have no clue how the population is going to handle it. Unfortunately blaming Obama for inheriting the shitstorm is likely to become a popular pastime. Like The Onion headline states when Obama was inaugurated, “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job”.