Dan: Beyond the feeling that neither McCain nor Obama has any clue as to what to do here? I don’t see either candidate stepping up and telling the American people what are now home truths: We need to stop buying s**t we cannot afford, we need to go back to our core strength of manufacturing and production and we need to stop these nasty and expensive foreign misadventures.
I would opine that the US has managed to gull the rest of the world for the last 25 years into believing we were possessed of a financial acumen that didn’t exist and that we’ve managed to sustain an unsustainable standard of living through insane amounts of debt creation (personal, commercial and governmental) and now the bill has come due.
I would also say that I think our days of being a world leader in banking and insurance are over, but
then I see the problems in the Euro zone, and China and even the Mideast, and realize that the whole world is pretty sideways right now, so who the hell knows? We are in completely uncharted waters right now, even relative to something as catastrophic as the Great Depression and while the US won’t emerged unscathed, we seem to be ahead of the curve (in terms of timing) of many other countries.
In response to your sign-off, I can only offer the wisdom of Devo: “Whip it. Whip it good”.
