The Faded Mirror

I am now officially scared.  I was on my way home, listening to the news of the Big Wall Street Bailout.  Maybe, since I was on vacation last week, I just hadn’t been paying attention until now.  But the enormity of the situation just dawned on me.  This is Bad.  Real Bad.

By any accounts, seven hundred billion dollars is a LOT of money.  I can’t even conceive of how much that is.  And, this amount may not even be enough to shore up the banks and keep the credit flowing.  That scares me.

Think of this:  What if we all woke up tomorrow morning, and none of our credit cards worked.  That’s all, suppose we had no access to easy credit.  A minor inconvenience?  We’ll just stop at the ATM.  But, everyone else had that idea.  Now there is a big line.  In fact, people are pulling out as much cash as they can, because they will need it.  Remember the run on the “old savings and loan” in It’s A Wonderful Life?  Welcome to the 21st centure version.  But will Jimmy Stewart still have Poppa Dollar and Momma Dallor at the end of the day?

It doesn’t matter.  Most people don’t have much accessible cash in their bank accounts anyway.  We all might muddle on, but what about the small businesses?  Many of them don’t have much available cash, either.  Housepainters, plumbers, lawnmower guys — they all charge their purchases of paint, pipe, and gasoline.  Without this capital, they don’t work.  And then they stop patronizing 7-Elevens, ‘McDonald’s, and Exxon.  This means that more businesses scale back, and more people are out of work.  I don’t know how much of my own employer’s business are credit card transactions, but I know that credit card purchases on the Internet lead to lots of shipped packages.  Once the snowball is rolling, it’s hard to know where it will stop.

Maybe this is all doom and gloom.  This is largely a therapeutic post, so I don’t drive my family and friends crazy sulking about it all night.  Maybe tomorrow I’ll be upbeat and cheerful, and I’ll go ahead and decorate the post with lots of cute little Internet links as I am wont to do.  We’ll see.

But meanwhile, Congress continues to dicker away on trivialities instead of actually doing something.  The Democrats have managed to turn this crisis into an election year issue, which will probably carry them the White House.  Too bad that there won’t be any money for them to do anything once they get there.

Seven hundred billion dollars is a LOT of money not to have.