Meanwhile, another financial services giant, reputed to be the nation’s largest savings and loan, Washington Mutual, experienced a 50% drop in share values, fueling concerns that the company may not have enough resources on hand to weather current problems. AIG, WaMu and dozens of other high flying financial behemoths are flying low these days.
Other major financial institutions took pre-emptive steps Monday to try and calm both investors and employees, while the handwringers in and out of government short-circuit their political neurons trying to pre-empt the other side with solutions to “the crisis.”
A writer from the Philippines puts an interesting twist on the old saw about political means:
One can say that disaster politics is traditional politics by other means. A simple question of helping our less fortunate countrymen has turned into a political tug-of-war on who will be given credit for spending public money on the disaster. (http://moncasiple.wordpress.com/2008/06/29/politics-of-disaster-2/ )
And, that is the heart of the matter today. From a political standpoint, how will the candidates manipulate the crisis and morph it into a form whereby they can take credit for, if not solving the problem, spending money on it?
