The Homa Files

Excerpted from The Washington Post, “They Just Don’t Get It”, by Steven Pearlstein, September 30, 2008

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The basic problem is that too many people don’t understand the seriousness of the [financial and economic] situation.

Americans fail to understand that they are facing the real prospect of a decade of little or no economic growth because of the bursting of a credit bubble that they helped create and that now threatens to bring down the global financial system.

Politicians worry less about preventing a financial meltdown than about ideology, partisan posturing and teaching people a lesson.

Financiers have yet to own up publicly to their own greed, arrogance and incompetence. And leaders of foreign governments still think that this is an American problem and that they have no need to mount similar rescue efforts in their own countries.

In the coming weeks and months, all of these people will come to understand how deep the hole really is and how we’re all in it together.

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Restoring real stability to financial markets will require the kind of systemic approach and extraordinary government interventions that the public has refused to authorize and finance.

In better times, the public might have put aside its reluctance in response to the strong and unified recommendation of political and business leaders.

But it is a measure of how little trust remains in both Washington and Wall Street that voters are willing to risk a serious hit to their wealth and income rather than follow their lead.

Edit by DAF

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Full article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/29/AR2008092902762.html

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This entry was posted on September 30, 2008 at 9:39 am and is filed under Government & Politics, Mortgage Crisis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.