It will be bad
The “basic problem” behind the failure to pass the $700 billion economic rescue plan, says Steven Pearlstein in The Washington Post, is that too many people “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, financiers, voters, and foreign leaders are all in denial. They, and we, will understand soon enough, when we find ourselves in “a world with less debt and more inflation.” Like it or not, “extraordinary government interventions”—effectively nationalizing much of the financial system, fixing it, and returning it to private hands—beats the alternatives.
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