The Dow(n) Jones

It is a little after 10AM, the Dow has been open almost half an hour and is bouncing. It fell nearly 200 at opening and is now down only about 100. The ASX and TSE both ended their Wednesday sessions without coming back up to the level of Monday's losses. The European exchanges are about to close for the day, and are down as well. Looks like Benny's 3/4 percent panic rate cut had little effect on overall market sentiment.

In musing over the problem of trying to find out how much of the economy had been funded by entrepreneurs flying under the radar of the unemployment managers, it struck me that the impact of the alien invaders from south of the border has not been mentioned much in the mainstream media. They seem to be fixated at this point on which primary candidate put which foot in his/her mouth on a given day.

Does it seem like a coincidence that the banks (read : lenders) who were so eager to accept the Mexican Matricula card as ID for loans and credit cards are the ones that appear to be having a huge share of the current difficulty? Could it be that as things sort of ran out of steam, the alien invaders found work harder to get and are now simply walking away from the obligations they have incurred? After all, if you can go back to Mexico, where your credit report is irrelevant ... (wait a minute -- no SSN, no credit report!!! -- but they were acceptable credit risks according to BofA and CITI and WaMu and so many others!!). The plus side for the government is that they will never show up as "unemployed", either. Makes for a rosy economic picture, to the bureaucratic way of thinking, I suppose.

Just like the Great Depression (which may have to be named the period Formerly Known as the Great Depression), this little bump in the economic road will generate plenty of graduate papers and scholarly studies.