Before the House voted to pass the Wall Street bailout on Friday, the Dow industrial average was up about 250 points for the day. When it passed, the Dow gave up those 250 points plus about another 150 more. Today, the Dow is down more than 700 points at this writing. Gee, wasn’t the bailout supposed to stop the panic?!? This bailout was bad policy from the start, and (as Martin Feldstein argued Saturday in the Wall Street Journal) it was never likely to have the intended beneficial effect. I actually think it will make matters worse, and the Dow response so far is certainly not providing much evidence against my analysis. These are bad times. Our leaders/knaves in the Oval Office, the Treasury, the Fed, and Congress are making bad times worse. Never have so many struggled mightily with such good intentions to take a serious problem and turn it into a crisis of astronomical proportions. This whole thing should make all of us victims of it sick, and incredibly angry.
