Makes You Wonder

So, the Dow goes up three hundred points or whatever today even though there isn’t a bailout agreement yet and I can’t help wondering what it’s all about anyway and whether lawmakers ought to just let the Market find its own level even if it means that a bunch of people are going to lose a bunch of money because clearly some people are making bank right now, none the least of which have got to be stockbrokers who are pulling in their commissions on all the frantic trades that are happening minute-by-minute all day long.

Of course, I’m sure this is a far too unsophisticated take on things and no doubt part of the reason that stocks went up today is that Wall Street is counting on an influx of cash from Washington, but I don’t know—and that’s probably the main thing with all of us: nobody does, I’ll warrant.

At least with the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, cooler heads could look at things and say, “hold on!” (even if those words were ignored), because it seemed pretty clear, if you listened to experts on the Middle East like Chris Hedges, that without Saddam to clamp down on things, the region would devolve into sectarian violence, but in this case, it’s much trickier because, in the first place, it’s not at all obvious who qualifies as an expert on this crisis (after all, it’s the so-called “experts” who got us into this mess in the first place,) and second, even if we could identify those experts, they’ve all got a vested interest in the outcome they predict should the bailout package be approved.

Still, it’s curious whether the need for action we’ve been told is so urgent really is so urgent; David Horsey (not my favorite cartoonist) had a this one in the paper the other day, and it seemed pretty apt to me; all this wolf-crying makes me want to cry “bullshit.”