Why Waste Your Energy on Something Real?

To hell with the global banking system. What matters to Europeans is the opportunity to ridicule.

From the left:

Expressing nostalgia for "the good old days when bankers jumped out of windows," Aeschimann condemned as "extortion" the rescue of U.S. corporate giants by the very state that free-marketeers resent.

Never mind a half century of collective unionized extortion that comes at the expense of the whole population, or the dirigisme of what they try to call Capitalism, underlying is a set of paranoid delusions and lack of memory. While the commentary on the BBC World Service and Radio 4 simplistically ask "is this the failure of capitalism", as if the same observers were intelligent enough to differentiate it from anything else, they forget that the COMECON satellites in the Soviet orbit experienced economic downturns all the time. What they couldn't do well at all was take advantage of the upturns in the economy enough to actually improve medical care, life prospects, or anything else to the degree one could in capitalist market environments or even the less efficient partially socialized areas.

And to the right:

"Greenspan was considered a master," Tremonti declared. "Now we must ask ourselves whether he is not, after [Osama] bin Laden, the man who hurt America the most. . . . It is clear that what is happening is a disease. It is not the failure of a bank, but the failure of a system. Until a few days ago, very few were willing to realize the intensity and the dramatic nature of the crisis."

Especially all of those people in the entire business press who have been writing about the potential of a banking crisis without quite knowing what shape it would take for the past 18 months.

But the purpose of the message is clear. If there is a downturn, in lieu of looking at the causes or measures to correct it, there has to be a straw man to blame. Enter the all purpose US. If it didn't exist, the euro-ass-clown commentariat would have invented it.

But fear accompanied gloating. The crisis threatens to worsen woes -- inflation, unemployment, weak growth -- of regional powerhouses including Britain, Spain and Italy. Joaquin Almunia, an ideologically moderate Spanish Socialist who is the European Union's economic commissioner, offered a simple analysis.

Deep wisdom there in that simple analysis. In fact that might be the only analysis you will get, after showing the same weaknesses in Europe for the past year that the US has shown. But let's not bother ourselves with anything like that, after all, the US'[ unemployment rate in a recession is still 2 points lower than Germany in what it liked to call its' recent boom.

No, when in doubt, you need the reflection of that great coterie of exhaulted experts that you can't seriously question, a junta of economic nattering such as the likes of those the LA Times sought out and found... And what greater expertise can you find than a cell-phone sales-lump:

"And I'm furious when I see the pictures of Americans who thought they were on the sunny side of life and now have lost their homes and have to live in their cars," Evers said. "I definitely do not feel sorry for the bankers who lost their jobs in the last couple of days. I can't believe that a country like the U.S.A. could have been so careless on a money issue!"

"I was taught that the U.S.A. is the motherland of moneymaking," she added. "And now all I can see is a herd of headless chickens running around on Wall Street."

This in a country where they completely banned short selling, so that no-one will ever be able to do anything is an asset starts to evaporate. There won't be any reason to run around like a headless chicken, nor will there be the opportunity to.