I was driving, listening to BBC last night, as the economic chaos spread around the world

[greenman3610]

There seems to be a growing sense that this is something out of control, people are
using words like "unknown" "unprecedented", "nobody has seen this before",..
and there are increasing references to the 1930s.

one academic said this would all blow over and most of us wouldn't notice, but
another said that we had a long way to go before we reach bottom.
We've seen gyrations on Wall Street before, 1987 comes to mind -
is this one different?

I want this chaos to throw the election to Obama, but I dread
having our team being faced with an ungovernable situation.....

[Raven]

1. I listened to the same thing...very scary. I think that if we had a

President who wasn't an idiot, the rest of the globe would not be in such a panic. Part of the problem is that no one has any confidence in the US anymore.

[ladjf]

3. Republicanism is a disease that has made the world sick.

[ixion]

2. things have been out of control for quite some time...

I'm glad the world is finally catching on that we're in the process of imploding. I wish more people in the US would realize that and stop living in denial. We can't start fixing things until people accept the parameters of the problem.

[Marsala]

4. Look on the bright side - we got the New Deal last time this happened

Obama could be the next FDR.

On the dark side, yeah, this is bad. Really bad. 1987 was just a fluke that corrected itself without much damage. This is the first really noticeabe symptom of the entire financial system melting down. We can only have faith that our leaders have learned the lessons of the 1930s and won't make the same mistakes... they'll make brand new ones. (Or, possibly, do everything right and pull off a miracle.)

[Warpy]

5. Democrats rarely make a bad situation worse

but GOPs always do. The GOP economic philosophy is fatally flawed. It can't work long term, ever.

Whenever they get into power, they crash the system.

They are allowed back into power when a fresh generation of people has forgotten who crashed the system for their grandparents. They are allowed into power when good times have lulled people into a sense of security.

Then they destroy the economy they strut around proclaiming to "save."

[demo dutch]

6. FDR kind of times, needs an FDR kind a guy

[Bosso 63]

7. How much chaos would it take to cancel the election?

[mmonk]

8. They may say it's unprecedented, but it's not.

Before FDR, we had unregulated capitalism. That's why it was stupid to shed the regulations designed to give our financial markets stability. The Reagan revolution was a revolution against FDR's regulatory regime. We were bound to arrive where we are.