After Monday's rout on Wall Street, Asia gets beat up badly, with Europe likely to follow as I write this.
AIG, heavily into the derivatives business (insurance, essentially), fell 60%, after Merrill's "shotgun marriage" to Bank of America, and the bankruptcy filing of venerable, century and a half old Lehman Brothers.
These are not Enrons, or Global Crossings, or World Coms—companies that came out of no where to do things that few people understood, shot up and then, relatively quickly, crashed. What we saw on Monday was more like waking up after a long weekend to find out the Boston Red Sox were no longer a baseball team.
Anyone who thinks this is going to sort itself out quickly, by November 4th, by year's end, is dreaming. But it will, eventually, sort itself out, though not in time for John McCain. No, the casino going berserk is not good for John McCain, who is beginning to sound like Hoover back in '32 ...
Let's hope this mess gets sorted out quicker than that one.
And otherwise not get ahead of ourselves. There is still Tuesday to reckon with. While we wait, check out the thoughtful conservative David Brooks, on the subject of experience.
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