The economy…. I’m gobsmacked.
$700 billion… and it’s not working….
I haven’t posted since the markets went to hell because, truthfully, I don’t really understand what is happening. I understand only in basic basic terms, but I can’t take an 18% stock market crash and turn it into information about how my experience or anyone’s experience feels the impact. Perhaps it’s too soon for the real effects to get to the individual level.
So, global economic crisis. John McCain thinks more deregulation and more oversight are the correct response to this. Obama thinks oversight is a good response. I agree with Obama, but only to the extent that I really understand what’s going on. Which is not much. It seems that there should be checks in place to make sure that risk is being appropriately analyzed before banks do major things – but you’d think that the free market would actually encourage such a thing. It seems like any business enterprise would be well served to research its transactions, examine the credit of loan applicants, check out the security of the mountains of loans it wants to buy, BEFORE entering into these transactions. Call me crazy.
Did government intervention really bring huge financial institutions to give risky loans to risky borrowers without concern for the risks involved? And even if the government pushed for loans to be more widely and riskily available to credit-unworthy applicants, then did government make banks buy packages of risky loans from other lenders without fully examining the risks? I don’t think so, but I really don’t know for sure.
It seems to me the answer is reasonable but not excessive government oversight of business? My husband asks me, where is the line? And that’s a good question. I’ve been getting twisted and feeling ill trying to figure out how to answer that very question. It seems like regulatory conditions are set as a reaction to past events, not in any kind of forward-looking way. It also does seem like in some ways, regulations can be harmful because they allow businesses to stop thinking about what is safe, or what is best for consumers and instead to focus on what they CAN do within the scope of regulation.
*sigh* I’m getting a headache and upset just trying to talk about this. I have no vocabulary for economics.
It occurred to me, what if voting for Obama IS the wrong answer for the economy? I don’t know, but I don’t think this is the case. It’s possible that he will attempt to implement too much regulation, but this seems like a better answer than McCain’s “deregulate!” response.
Take the economy out of the picture (this takes a big imagination, but anyway…) and of course I’ll vote for Obama. (This is not seriously in question, but the subject of the economy is so abstract for me that I had to examine the possibility that Obama might not have the answer.) I agree with most of Obama’s policies, and on the one area I really don’t understand, I think his solution sounds more reasonable. So… I rest on my previous decision.
And that’s about all I can write on the subject. I will now return to my previous state of confused silence. Good day!
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