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invisible hand is powerless
Monday, September 29 2008
Today was the day that the stock market took a shit in Adam Smith's picnic basket and there was no invisible hand there to wipe or shovel or otherwise make any sort of hygienic effort whatsoever. It all began some time this afternoon after the U.S. Congress failed to pass a 700 billion(!) dollar bailout package to somehow unfreeze the credit markets, which have been behaving as if they'd inadvertently brushed up against a nugget of ice-nine. Once word got out that there would be no bailout, pandemonium ensued, though not in any way detectable to anyone not paying attention to the news. The winds still gently rustled the trees and clouds slowly slid silently by overhead, west-to-east, west-to-east. Occasionally a Chestnut Oak acorn would fall into the hole I've excavated for my greenhouse. By the close of trading the Dow-Jones Industrial Average was DOWn 777 points.
These are exciting times to be alive. Today had some of the delightful menace of an impending hurricane (I've been in the direct path of precisely one: Fran). But it seemed a bit more final than that. I have a feeling that this particular crisis exists somewhere along the continuum between hurricane and Creatious-Tertiary extinction event. This is by no means the end, of course; we'll have to devour a bit more of Earth's life support system before the actual underpinnings of the global economic system are destroyed, at which point people will finally realize there are a lot of things the invisible hand is powerless to do. Of course, there are plenty of people eager to hurry this future along, including Sarah "Drill Baby Drill" Palin, who thinks Jesus H. Christ (the guy who claimed He'd be returning "soon" a third of the world's age ago) will return on his nucyuler popsicle stick some time during her lifetime.
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