These campaigns are way too volatile
Like reeds swaying in the wind. This makes the electorate nervous about the crop of candidates who want to be president. Their ‘message of the day’ campaigning drifts to wherever the hot air is blowing….and there’s plenty of that.
Race, gender, experience, how much the other guy doesn’t support abortion, how dire the economy is….lead the argument of the moment, and we’re not being served well. By the candidates, or the press.
Look at what happened in the economy ‘near crisis’ this week. I know little about international markets and economics, but I had the sense that something else was going on with that. It just didn’t seem to line up. On Monday, Martin Luther King Day, when US markets were closed but the European markets started plunging, our media watched in horror and reported all sorts of grim predictions as a result. The Fed reacted, dramatically advancing the chain reaction that drove the political campaigns to start hitting the economy as the critical issue.
This didn’t feel right. There was a missing link.
Sure enough…Turns out it wasn’t as it appeared.
Yesterday America awoke to another story, one out of France, where a rogue trader at the firm Societe Generale had defrauded his employer of roughly $7 billion by hiding trades going back to 2007. Societe Generale discovered the fraud over the weekend and immediately started closing out their positions on Monday when the European markets opened (and quite possibly on the Asian markets that were already open on our Sunday night).
But guess what? Soc Gen never mentioned this to the world. There’s growing evidence that Soc Gen’s actions on Monday are what caused the European stock markets to panic, which caused our markets to panic on Tuesday, which caused our politicians to hammer out the stimulus package.
Which caused other politicians and the media to hammer the issue that the economy is in terrible trouble.
Now we have a new set of questions, including: If our economy really isn’t in as bad of shape as we thought earlier this week, were our corrective actions actually the right steps?
And how about: Are the media and the political candidates going to get a grip on the truth behind the issues so we can trust what they say?