Columnist Who Cried "Wolf!": This Time It's Serious, Really

Thomas L. Friedman, self-styled prophet in the wilderness, is now wandering wild-eyed in restaurants telling the patrons to repent of their wasteful ways & go home w/ their steak in a doggie bag. Or he thinks he should be. We'd love to see that. "Sure, Friedman, you show us the Iraqi WMDs, we'll pack up, go home, & live on tuna 'til the crisis is over. Jerk!"

Tom's really not kidding this time. He sounds worried & desperate. And he, too, is calling for Bush to get out & Obama to get in there. 

If I had my druthers right now we would convene a special session of Congress, amend the Constitution and move up the inauguration from Jan. 20 to Thanksgiving Day. Forget the inaugural balls; we can’t afford them. Forget the grandstands; we don’t need them. Just get me a Supreme Court justice and a Bible, and let’s swear in Barack Obama right now — by choice — with the same haste we did — by necessity — with L.B.J. in the back of Air Force One.

Why the rush? Because we're in the hand basket & hell is right around the corner.

Right now there is something deeply dysfunctional, bordering on scandalously irresponsible, in the fractious way our political elite are behaving — with business as usual in the most unusual economic moment of our lifetimes. They don’t seem to understand: Our financial system is imperiled.

As if that would be the end of the universe or something. 

The stock and credit markets haven’t been fooled. They have started to price financial stocks at Great Depression levels, not just recession levels. With $5, you can now buy one share of Citigroup and have enough left over for a bite at McDonalds.

Tom obviously doesn't get out much, as that $5.00 he's talking about is barely enough for a "bite" at Mickey D's. Who knows what Citigroup is worth today? And it is possible we should be worried. It's not just Mr. "I Married an Heiress" whose knickers are bunched tightly.

“A great judgment has to be made now as to just how big and bad the situation is,” says Jeffrey Garten, the Yale School of Management professor of international finance. “This is a crucial judgment. Do we think that a couple of hundred billion more and couple of bad quarters will take care of this problem, or do we think that despite everything that we have done so far — despite the $700 billion fund to rescue banks, the lowering of interest rates and the way the Fed has stepped in directly to shore up certain markets — the bottom is nowhere in sight and we are staring at a deep hole that the entire world could fall into?”

If it’s the latter, then we need a huge catalyst of confidence and capital to turn this thing around. Only the new president and his team, synchronizing with the world’s other big economies, can provide it.

“The biggest mistake Obama could make,” added Garten, “is thinking this problem is smaller than it is. On the other hand, there is far less danger in overestimating what will be necessary to solve it.”

We just want to know when we'll see the real suffering, the bread-lines & food riots, the suicides of the wealthy, the abandoned & burned-out storefronts, the empty malls, the cars being pulled by teams of horses, etc. We don't have forever, let's get a move on here!