We're gonna need a bigger boat ...

An old friend wrote on Facebook last night that he thought the economy had hit bottom and things were going to start heading back up, up, up. I just can't be that optimistic. Primarily, because of all the Zombie Banks out there, looking alive, but very much dead (and insolvent) inside.

Here's Thomas Friedman at the NY Times:

I’m worried. We’ve just elected a talented young president with many good instincts about how to propel our country forward, extend health care to more people, make our tax code fairer and launch a green industrial revolution. But do you know what I fear? I fear that his whole first term could be eaten by Citigroup, A.I.G., Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, and the whole housing/subprime credit bubble we inflated these past 20 years.

I hope my fears are exaggerated. But ask yourself this: Why couldn’t former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson solve this problem? And why does it seem as though his successor, Tim Geithner, won’t even look us in the eye and spell out his strategy? Is it because they don’t get it? No. It is because they know — like Roy Scheider in the movie “Jaws,” when he first saw the great white shark — that “we’re gonna need a bigger boat,” and they’re too afraid to tell us just how big.

But, while I'm down on the short term economic future of the country, I am still glad to have the right man and administration in charge of this crisis and everything else.
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