Assembly Line Crises
In the days of yore, most knowledgeable predictors and beltway pundits pontificated that the housing crisis brewing in 2006 would be quite manageable and certainly not impact Main Street in any appreciable manner. Treasury and the Federal Reserve could certainly keep up with this. Then along came other little tremors, also to a great extent downplayed, like Freddie and Fannie, Countrywide, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, AIG, the fall off in employment, failing banks here and abroad, and then even Iceland’s credit froze, fer Gawd’s sake . . . Well, the video below is a pretty good representation of how the initial crisis snowballed into something that is an avalanche and well above everyone’s pay grade, as they say in D.C.
Picture Lucy and Ethel as Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke, and I think you’ll get the idea. Perhaps if we think of the shift manager as God, it’ll help focus our prayers.
