There’s always something to howl about.

Pressing news from the world at large: We will survive

One:

If we go back to 20 percent down payments, the market will be more stable. I’m sure that in a free market we would see 20 percent down payments. Barney Frank is the only person I can think of who still wants to lend with little or no money down. He’s welcome to do it, but I dare him to use his own money instead of ours. –Arnold Kling, EconLog, via Cafe Hayek

Two, Donald Luskin at Poor and Stupid:

I’m quoted extensively in Debra Saunders’ column in today’s San Francisco Examiner.

On the campaign trail Wednesday, Obama bemoaned “the most serious financial crisis in generations.” He said the exact same words the day before…

“The most serious financial crisis in generations?”

Donald Luskin, a chief investment officer with the Menlo Park investment research firm TrendMacrolytics and an economic adviser to McCain – who tells me he has never talked to McCain – remarked that if Obama “had a little bit more experience,” he would “put these things in more context.” Luskin has lived through five or six recessions, and “this ain’t one.”

It isn’t a recession because the U.S. economy has grown in both of the last two quarters. Read: It is not receding. And while Luskin sees the unemployment rate as “a little high,” it is “not as high as it typically is in a recession.” Yes, Luskin is concerned about inflation, now at 5.4 percent. The drop in oil prices may help…

Luskin questioned what has happened to politics, when a candidate “must pretend this is a recession or you’re seen as hard-hearted.” And: “What does it say when we can’t be nuanced? And we can’t say, ‘Look, we’re in a little bit of a slowdown, but the fundamentals are strong’?”

The answer, of course, is that Democrats can’t win without trashing the economy. As Luskin pointed out in a piece in Sunday’s Washington Post, in Obama’s famed anti-Iraq war speech back in 2002, the then-Illinois state senator suggested the war was waged “to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.”

In fact, the stock market had four bigger one-month drops since the Great Depression, but facts don’t matter. The winning candidate in 2008 may well be the man who can say the worst things about the American economy. That’s how he shows he really cares.

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