The Economy -- With Beer Bottles Poised.

Staring into the abyss that was once Wall Street, pundits are asking the presidential candidates what their recipes might be for getting us out of this mess. They talk of prescriptions, clear plans, strategies for prevention, and make demands normally reserved for prophets and oracles.
What’s your cure, John? Barrack, how will you keep this from ever happening again? The media express frustration and disappointment that no such clear trail has yet been blazed. It appears that a major qualification for president has become knowing the unknowable.
Good night! The whole situation reminds me of being in a canoe on a lake when a large power boat zoomed past us. You are caught rocking madly in its wake and for one sickening instant you are not at all sure if you’re going to stay upright or you and all your gear are going for a swim.
Like the Feds’ Bernanke and Treasury’s Paulson – the guys actually in the canoe – you lean this way, you lean that way, hoping you are leaning the right way, hoping you are both leaning the same way. Maybe you stay afloat, maybe you don’t.
In any case, you’re the guys in the canoe – and all the shouting and advising from watchers on shore is not going to do a bit of good. You can’t tell me that both Bernanke and Paulson don’t have the same feeling I’ve had in a canoe riding a wake or some rapids. (And if there’s a guy in the middle of the canoe with his own ideas – Congress – all the more exciting.)
Paulson is basically asking Congress for more authority and power to act instantly than anybody has been given since FDR’s First Hundred Days. Are we in as much trouble as we were in 1933? A lot of people seem to think so. Should Paulson (with Bernanke) be given that much power? Fewer people seem to think that.
So what will happen?
Most of the times I’ve been in a rocking canoe, it has righted itself as the waters calmed down. We can reasonably hope that will happen this time. (I have gotten wet also, but let’s not think about that.) It may do it by itself.
After all, no one really wants the American canoe to tip over. A lot of countries and groups that consider themselves to be our enemies still measure their own wealth in dollars and benefit by selling their goods to us for those dollars. No one will escape unscathed if all the American gear is lost or ruined by a fall in the water.
Will either McCain or Obama be able to chart a course to calm water and safety, assuring us the boat will not tip in the rough waters ahead? I doubt it. Roosevelt couldn’t get us out of the Depression with seven years of innovation and trying.
He could not have foreseen that a nasty little Austrian with a black mustache would, in the end, be his only hope of restoring American prosperity. Hitler was not his choice, but Hitler it was. Neither McCain nor Obama can be expected to have the foresight to know what may do the trick now.
We are in the same situation that Churchill was in the summer of 1940. The Germans had driven the British Army into the sea, weaponless. They were training with broomsticks; they had no rifles. The Germans were massing along the channel for what looked like an invasion.
Churchill could not foresee that the Russian Army would occupy two thirds of Hitler’s army for the entire war. He could not foresee the Lend Lease Act that sent England unimaginable quantities of munitions and supplies. Nor could he foresee an island full to the point of sinking with American troops, planes, tanks and trucks.
He could only see a very few Royal Air Force fighters struggling to hold the air space over the channel, with unarmed troops below. So he went on the air – as Bernanke, Paulson, Bush, Obama and McCain should – and made an inspiring, if nonspecific speech.
“We shall fight them on the beaches,” he promised, “we shall fight them in the hills, in the fields … .” At the end of the speech, he put his hand over the microphone and muttered, “We’ll hit them over the head with beer bottles as they crawl ashore. That’s all we’ve left to work with.”