The Economy and George III

Not that I planned to write about the economy but I don’t want to repeat that apocryphal story about George III that he wrote in his diary on 7/4/1776, “Nothing happened today.”

I always thought he got a bum’s rap since he obviously couldn’t get on Google News and how good was snail mail in those days? It wasn’t like carrier pigeons were flying the Atlantic.

But to get back to the economy. Something happened in the U.S.A. yesterday since that infallible indicator of our economic well-being, the stock market, tanked.

Apparently, even before the House vote on the bailout, stocks went south. Like the spoiled child who knows it’s not going to get a favorite treat, it held its breath, it stamped its feet, it screamed, it got our attention.

Then the vote is taken and the bill doesn’t pass; that much we know. And now, the spinning begins; always a tacky process (like stepping in tar, you never come out unscathed) but worse now with so few weeks until a presidential election.

As with so much history, we may never know if our economy is really in such dire straits, though I believe it probably is. We may never know if a tax-payer bailout of the richest strata of our society was a necessary step to help the economy.

The myth may once again replace the reality. (Remember WMDs?)

Perhaps George III was right. Nothing did happen today.