What kind of Cassandra ...

… am I? I predicted this stock market crash back in February 2007. But did I get into bear market mode at the end of August? Ha! If only.

It's bad enough to be a Cassandra who predicts doom only to be ignored by all who hear; how about being a Cassandra who does not even follow her own dismal advice? "Come in out of the rain, Hector! You're gonna get wet!"

To try to analyze why I failed at this: I underestimated the perfidy of the Democrats. I thought they would just put out in the media the usual stories claiming that the economy was bad, regardless of the actual numbers, and let it go at that. It never occurred to me that they were so desperate to win this particular election that they would go ahead and really try to tank the economy. Of course, since Democrats don't know what the economy is, they misfired; stock market, housing prices, these things are not the economy. They partake of the nature of the economy, but the economy is much more than these things.

But since the strategy was 2-pronged, "lose the war and tank the economy," when the first one failed, the second one had to be executed with that much more emphasis.

Remember 1929? Of course not. I don't either. If I were actually Hector Owen, from the novel, I would remember it vividly. (FDR on TV, and all.) After the crash, the factories and farms were all still there. It took FDR to start enacting policies requiring destruction of food, to keep prices up, when people were hungry; oh, I'm not going to expand (or expound, or expatiate, either) on this any further, just go read The Forgotten Man.