Free Republic

The foreclosure butterfly flapped its wings in smalltown USA and the hurricane built up and tore through world banking. Cathy Busby has never met Mick Mayor. The 47-year-old hospital administrator from Colorado had no idea that when she fell behind with the mortgage payments on her three-bedroom home in the Denver suburbs, it would stop Barclays extending the overdraft limit on Mayor's business four months later. But this is the true story of the global credit crunch. What seemed initially to be a problem in the US housing market is now forcing up the cost of borrowing here in Britain,...

And here I thought liberals were the ones who love to glorify those "hard-working average Americans." The mythic salt of the earth who sit around the supper table discussing the need for universal health care, or whatever, before getting up in the morning, grabbing their lunch buckets and heading off to work hard and play by the rules. Isn't it supposed to be those mean-spirited conservatives who denigrate those same folks as irresponsible? And yet . . . Proving that there's no elitism like liberal elitism, the Boston Globe emits an astonishing editorial this morning, analogizing those with less-than-ideal credit...

<p>The last politician who took advice from the bond market was Bill Clinton. When he pushed for a tax hike back in 1993 to cut the budget deficit, it was under the assumption that bond investors would respond by bringing down interest rates. (The theory here is that deficits are inflationary. Inflation is bad for bonds.) Yet long-term interest rates surged from 6.45 percent when Clinton signed his tax-hike bill on Aug. 10, 1993, to 8.16 percent on Nov. 7, 1994, the day before the midterm congressional election where Republicans won back the House and Senate.</p>