Whatsa Matta?

Everything. The DOW is down below 10,000 for the first time in I don't even know how long. There doesn't seem to be much bounce from the VP debate, although I don't think anyone really expected there to be much of one. Obama is outside of the margin for error on just about all of the polls.

I'm kind of glad that I'm in school and don't have to deal with the job market for another 4 years or so. Kids, I'm not gonna lie...I think if I had a magic 8 ball, it would say "outlook not so good". We are most assuredly going to be hitting a recession. Our generation has lived through one before in the early 90s, but I have no idea what it'll be like going into one as an adult.

If you're trying to time the market (which is generally a bad idea) then the next couple of weeks might be a good time to jump in. Although with the prospects of the election and going under democratic leadership on all levels, things might get worse than better.

It seems that any sort of bad news gets immediately heaped upon the Bush administration, which in turn casts an ugly shadow on the McCain campaign, whether that's deserved or not. I wonder if this comes from more than just the credit crunch, but I'm inclined to believe that seems to be the root of all these problems - not enough liquidity in the markets.

But do you know why banks started overextending themselves in the first place? It wasn't because free-market principles backfired. This post from Powerline explains it pretty well:

If it turns out to be the financial crisis that puts Barack Obama over the
top in his quest for the White House, the irony will be difficult to overstate. First, the biggest driver of the financial crisis was not any conservative policy such as the kind of deregulation John McCain supports. Rather, as Diana West argues, the biggest driver was the “race-based social engineering” that “virtually created the sub-prime mortgage industry.” The implosion of that industry, in turn, triggered the present crisis.

The operative vision, then, was leftist and racialist, not free-market. As West puts it, the social engineers decided that not “enough” minorities had homes because not “enough” minorities were eligible for mortgages. The solution was to junk the bottom-line, non-racial markers of mortgage eligibility traditionally used by banks to distinguish between good and bad credit risks -- steady employment, clean credit, and a down payment. Obama, then, is the beneficiary of the terrible failure of affirmative action style policies in the mortgage banking sector.

But the irony extends further. For it turns out that intimidating banks into making bad loans to minorities was a major activity of “community organizations” during the 1990s. And, according to Stanley Kurtz, Obama himself trained and funded ACORN activists who engaged in such intimidation.

So at least with an Obama presidency, we have that to look forward to as well. Here is the Diana West article. From her piece:

These lending practices were further institutionalized once government-sponsored Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, under the astronomically well-paid leadership of Fannie CEO James A. Johnson, began snapping up high-risk loans and repackaging them for sale on the world market. Johnson, whom Obama, of course, chose to lead his vice-presidential selection committee (until financial shenanigans over a sweetheart housing loan forced him out) even set a goal for Fannie Mae to buy up $1 trillion in low-income loans to ensure that, as CNSNews.com quoted him as saying, "Every American who wants to get a mortgage will have their loan approved."

Well, they did. And it didn't work out so well, did it? Such is the human cost of social engineering, whether on Wall Street, Main Street, or Red Square.

There you have it. The reference she draws to Red Square is no mistake either. This is the leadership we have to look forward to. At least the Angels won last night.