What We Need

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, on what needs to be done to tackle the financial meltdown, and how Americans need to prepare themselves for an extended recession:

We keep pouring money into the dark banking hole of this crisis, desperately hoping that we will hear it hit bottom and start to pile up. But so far, as hard as we listen, we can’t hear a thing. And so we keep pouring...

...We need a stimulus big enough to create more jobs. We need to remove toxic assets from bank balance sheets. We need the Treasury to close the insolvent banks, merge the weak ones and strengthen the healthy few. And we need to do each one right. But even then, the turnaround will be neither quick nor painless.

...Second, we’re going to have to get used to a loss of trust. All those rock-solid people and institutions that we trusted with our money, our pensions and our kids’ piggybank savings — like Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, Bank of America — do not seem trustworthy anymore.

...That may be President Obama’s most important bailout task: to educate the country that there is no easy escape here, except taking our medicine, getting our fundamentals right again and working our way out of this, brick by brick, by getting back to making money — what was that old Smith Barney ad? — “the old-fashioned way” — by earning it.

I am ready to give the President some time to fix this. The American people, though? Their pathetically short attention spans and faulty need for instant gratification will more than likely translate into a high level of impatience come summertime.