Back to the Barricades: Free Markets are Under Attack Again (From the Top‪)‬

SEPTEMBER 24, 2008, should go down in the history books as a day of infamy. And clarity. That's when President George W. Bush looked into the eyes of anxious Americans and told them they weren't being nearly anxious enough. "America could slip into a financial panic," he warned (or was it threatened?), just hours before Washington Mutual became the biggest bank to fail in U.S. history without generating as much as a fluttered eyelid from blase depositors (including me). "Millions of Americans could lose their jobs," he said, one week before new federal data showed unemployment unchanged at 6.1 percent, lower than it was for any month between January 1980 and June 1987. "The value of your home could plummet," he added, the same day new August housing figures showed the median U.S. house price to be $203,100. While down $73,000 in real terms from the height of the bubble two years ago, that's still a full 40 percent higher than it was at the beginning of 1997.