House of Cards

So the financial chickens are finally roosting, and the serious hand-wringing has begun. Who woulda thunk that a fourth-order Ponzi scheme (subprime loans granted with no collateral, bundled into mortgage bonds, used to leverage arcane derivatives, which were insured by massive financial groups) could backfire? Getting greedy is one thing; getting greedy by selling millions of wildly overpriced houses to seriously underqualified customers and betting billions of dollars on a perpetual bubble is just stupid.

So what are we going to do about it? Well, seems one straight-talkin' maverick has had his come-to-Jeebus moment.

A decade ago, Sen. John McCain embraced legislation to broadly deregulate the banking and insurance industries, helping to sweep aside a thicket of rules established over decades in favor of a less restricted financial marketplace that proponents said would result in greater economic growth.

Now, as the Bush administration scrambles to prevent the collapse of the American International Group (AIG), the nation's largest insurance company, and stabilize a tumultuous Wall Street, the Republican presidential nominee is scrambling to recast himself as a champion of regulation to end "reckless conduct, corruption and unbridled greed" on Wall Street.

Which is funny, because his own main economic advisor and former colleague, Phil Gramm (R-Draaawwwlll) was a prime mover behind many of the deregulatory schemes which resulted in what you have now -- a bunch of nervous bookies expecting the peons to bail them out.

Klondike Barbie gets in on the game, adding to the usual "thanks but no thanks/I put the plane on E-Bay" cheer lines for the credulous morons in the audience. She talks a good game about "reforming" the "mismanagement" of those Wall Street fat-cats, and returning it to the shareholders, evidently via a complex process of "shakin' things up" and "fixin'" and other vague actiony phrases.

She makes it sound as if this was all just a tragic accident, and not crooks taking advantage of intentionally lax policy. Palin has already characterized herself roughly as a Reaganite economically, a bunch of vague platitudes about government getting out of the way of people and letting the market work its magic. Which is how we got here in the first place. This makes her just as vague, when you come right down to it, as the nominal head of the ticket, whom she has been noisily superseding over the past week.

McCain's flip-flops this morning can be chalked up to misspeaking, but in the larger sense, his sudden opportunistic embrace of regulatory reform contradicts his earlier stated positions, as well as that of his main economic policy advisors. To be fair, it's not entirely clear what Obama can and will do about it either, but at least his stump speeches aren't rotely peppered with egregious, repeatedly debunked tropes and hysterical hypocrisies about lobbyists. And notice that no one's even bothered to ask Fredo what he thinks about any of this.

Regardless, it might be a good time to hold off on any major purchases, learn to grow your own food, and walk or ride a bicycle whenever possible.