I wish I felt better about the state of things. I wish that Jim Cramer wasn’t saying we had just averted a Depression, and I wish the New York Post wasn’t reporting that we were 500 trades away from a meltdown, and I wish Chris Dodd and John Boehner weren’t on TV saying that the Ben Bernanke had used language so apocalyptic that they couldn’t repeat it in front of George Stephanopoulos and his viewers. What I really wish is that Paul Krugman felt better about Hank Paulson‘s plan. As Joe Nocera pointed out in the Times on Saturday, the Treasury Department is really kind of making things up as they go along, and now it really seems like what we’re doing is giving total control to Hank and telling him to solve things. Which may be fine. It worked when Felix Rohatyn ran Big MAC and pulled New York City through the crisis. So often in life, what’s true is that while would like to have a great plan, and one would dearly love to have the best plan, what one really needs is a good plan, or failing that, just a damn plan that everyone can get behind! William Kristol, who is usually a simple-minded thinker, says that our goal in this predicament is to try to limit the damage to that which occurs in a typical recession, which seems to me like a pretty good goal. Given that the crucial part of this problem seems to be a crisis of confidence, maybe lit’s best if we let Hank Paulson become a big old saucer into which we can pour all this panic and allow it to cool. Hope so. But I’d feel better if people were listening to Krugman.
