Last Friday as the public markets completed a 40-percent loss year over year in reaction to the still-roiling worldwide credit crisis, some observers took the Wall Street cataclysm as an opportunity to play a little politics. Witness the sage editorial writers at Investors Business Daily who used their years of market savvy and investing experience to pinpoint the real reason for the collapse....wait for it...a near-certain Democratic victory in three weeks.
...right now it looks like the U.S., which built the mightiest, most prosperous economy the world has ever known, is about to turn its back on the free-enterprise system that made it all possible.
It isn't only that the most anti-capitalist politician ever nominated by a major party is favored to take the White House. It's that he'll also have a filibuster-proof Congress led by politicians who are almost as liberal.
Throw in a media establishment dedicated to the implementation of a liberal agenda, and the smothering of dissent wherever it arises, and it's no wonder panic has set in.
No wonder indeed. It's creeping socialism that sowed the panic, not over-leveraged mortgage securities toppling into the crater of a real estate valuation sinkhole. Oh, noooooooo. That bunch of energy-saving bulbs at IBD have it pegged to worries about electing a liberal, never mind that the supply-siders themselves threw unfettered, unregulated capitalism under the bus these last two weeks.
Cue one Jonah Goldberg, as ever a leading crankonomic indicator of dwindling blogospheric consumer confidence. Under the headline, The Obama Discount, Goldberg soared to his usual standards of reportage:
I have no idea whatsoever if there's merit to this, and if there is how much merit, but lots of email like this:
When are people going to start talking about the REAL reason the markets are down - Obama up in polls. If I was McCain, I'd start telling people, "If you want to lose more money, vote Obama."
Of course, as Glenn Greenwald points out today, none of these loonball Obama/Dow theorists are crediting today's all-time stock surge to the continued high polling of the Democratic ticket.
Could it perhaps have just a leeeetle bit to do with the leadership of one massively-noggined Brit, the dour Prime Minister Gordon Brown (and by the by, this fancy Cameron chap seemed dashed cranky about it), who went all Keynesian on George Bush's ass with a limited nationalization of the British banking system - a move now being parroted by the rest of Europe and by the Americans as well? Yes, the threat of socialism really tanked things today, old sod.
And what a cherry on everyone's economic sundae this morning: the news that the bold Paul Krugman had won the Nobel Prize for Economics. The Hillary-loving enemy of the supply siders wins world acclaim in the year of Obama, and just keeps on blogging. Good on 'im.
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