The End of the World As We Know It

The REM song kept creeping in my head all day, as I caught glimpses of the market while following the presidential campaign. For Bernanke, all pretense of being an inflation fighter/hawk is gone. Good, i say. For Democrats, the pretense of fiscal discipline and adherence to so-called PAYGO rules are gone. For Bush, the my-way-or-the-highway stuff is gone. For the rest of us, the idea that this thing is going to be over soon is gone. And the next things to go: The blithe assumption that global growth can keep it all going. No, probably not. All this doesn't mean the end of the world, just the end of the world as we know it. sang Michael Stipe. The next line: And I feel fine. Not quite, but the new world, where everybody drops their facades, the people who run this country are better able to fix it.