Into the Economic Abyss
RACHEL BECK and ERIN McCLAM
Associated Press
March 24, 2008
NEW YORK (AP) — For months, Americans have been subjected to a sort of economic water torture – a maddening drip of bad news about jobs, gas prices, sagging home values, creeping inflation, the slouching dollar and a stock market in bumpy descent.
Then came Bear Stearns. One of the five largest U.S. investment banks nearly collapsed in a single day before the government propped it up by backing emergency loans and a rival stepped in to buy it for a paltry $2 per share.
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To the drumbeat of signs that seemed to foretell a traditional recession, this added a nightmarish specter – an old-style run on the bank, customers clamoring to pull their cash, a stately Wall Street firm brought to its knees.
The combination has forced the economy to the forefront of the national conversation in a way it has not been since the go-go 1990s, and for entirely opposite reasons.
As economists and Wall Street types grope for historical perspective – which is another way of saying a road map out of this mess – Americans are nervously wondering about retirement savings, interest rates, jobs that had seemed safe.
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