Cracks in the Wall

It's 7:05am here, and the news suggests that the 700 billion bailout plan is not getting the job done. The US dollar suffers its largest single day drop in 7 years on CNBC. The price of oil jumped up in a single day record. The Dow lost some 370 points yesterday. See those fun stories here.

The scary part, is that while the US government debates, the bleeding continues abroad. The Royal Bank of Scotland Group and Deutchebank both lost some 3% of their value overnight, and the international recriminations have only just begun in the NYT. I'm still waiting on other media sources to pick up the European banking declines. Similar numbers are coming from Singapore and Tokyo.

So far, the MSM story of the day is about the argument about to play out between the President and congress. Let's hope that argument actually matters. Here's the first think piece in The Weekly Standard musing on the "D" word. Here's more good news from Politico: there really is no plan B. None of this is exactly good news.

I suspect markets and commodity prices will continue to swing wildly, and keep these unpleasant doubts alive.