09.29.08
Well, unless you have been living under a rock for the past week it has been impossible to ignore the news roaring out of the U.S. The Wall Street bailout failed today going down at 228 to 205. After a flurry of calls and emails protesting the bill flooded the government, lawmakers were just not willing to risk passing such an unpopular bill this close to an election. Wall Street responded promptly with one of the sharpest single day drops in the history of the American economy.
What does it mean for people like us? And by that I mean working designers, Art Directors, Photographers, Artists, etc.? Well, time will tell. A friend of mine who works at Wachovia stopped by over the weekend and said that people were pulling money out of the bank all last week and that the credit score for a simple car loan had been raised to 700. A perfect credit score is 850, and you can trust me when I say that there are a lot of people out there no where near a credit score of 700. That means working-class people like you and me are going to start feeling a crunch very soon unless something miraculous happens. I think what America is finally discovering is that you can’t build a kingdom on credit. Its akin to building a house on a foundation of sand. The days of the gold standard are long past and the concept of value now is open to speculation. And speculation just isn’t a hard currency.
One thing is for sure. The corporate government has been firmly put in place, and I think we are seeing the end of an era in the United States. I am just waiting to see what’s next. If I wake up tomorrow and hear the headline, ‘America Sold To China’, I can’t say I will be surprised.
