Um … the following would seem to indicate that something is seriously unstable and unsustainable in our economic system.
The Treasury opened its window to help. They pumped a hundred and five billion dollars into the system and quickly realized that they could not stem the tide. We were having an electronic run on the banks. They decided to close the operation, close down the money accounts, and announce a guarantee of $250,000 per account so there wouldn’t be further panic and there. And that’s what actually happened.
If they had not done that their estimation was that by two o’clock that afternoon, five-and-a-half trillion dollars would have been drawn out of the money market system of the United States, would have collapsed the entire economy of the United States, and within 24 hours the world economy would have collapsed.”
It would have been the end of our political system and our economic systems as we know it.
That’s the chair of the Capital Markets Subcommittee, Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D-PA), talking to C-Span.
Which makes me think of a house on a hill, where the hillside is about to be washed away by and collapse under a storm today, saved only by the National Guard throwing a ton of sandbags on it. We’d generally speaking call the homeowner crazy if they kept living there, under the assumption that the National Guard will always be able to throw sufficient sandbags to save the day in future storms.
So … when are we going to stop being crazy?
(via BoingBoing)