The stock market of late has been like a drunk on roller skates. It falls, gets up, waves its arms wildly, falls again, gets up, falls. Gets up? As Edward G. Robinson (he was an actor; look it up) might have said: “Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Rico?”

The general consensus is that the recent meltdown was caused by “a classic credit correction.” In English, that means that a lot of people and corporations borrowed a lot of money which they now discover they can’t pay back.

This is leading to mortgage foreclosures, hedge fund failures, higher interest rates and a collapsing housing market. All of which, in turn, leads to a fall in stock prices.

This has inspired a low-grade panic in the hearts of many shareholders. Their vision of a retirement spent gazing through the bug-splattered windshield of an RV is fading.

I have some money in the stock market but I do not worry about it. My needs are small and can be made smaller. Besides, I saw it coming. As a matter of fact, pretty much anybody with a grain of sense could see it coming. This, apparently, does not include Henry Paulson, our esteemed U.S. secretary of the treasury. He recently told a group that he viewed this credit collapse as a “wake-up call.”

Which raises the question, why was he asleep? When banks lend money at an artificially low temporary rate to people who are bad credit risks, what do you expect to happen when those rates rise to market levels? They lose their houses. Corporations go belly-up. Financial markets begin to shudder.

This is not a wake-up call; it is the inevitable result of the 19th century, laissez-faire economic policies that inform every corner of this administration.

Regulation of financial markets is not a socialist scheme to subvert capitalism; it’s a way of protecting the public from the worst predatory aspects of capitalism.

It’s not just the stock market, though. As a nation, we seem unable to anticipate anything. We invade a country and we’re surprised that a lot of the people there are upset about it.

We build a city below sea level, with inadequate sea walls, and we’re amazed when it floods. We build other cities in the desert and can’t imagine why they’re having water shortages. A bridge falls down and we’re shocked.

We have been hearing about the decrepit state of our “infrastructure” for decades. Report after report has recommended that we start putting serious money into rebuilding our inadequate bridges and roads. Generally speaking we ignore the reports. Congress ignores them. Generally speaking, there is no sex appeal to infrastructure.

The public doesn’t feel grateful when you tell them that you’ve arranged to close a major bridge in their area for three years in order to make it safer. It’s ticked off because it’s going to take an hour longer to get to work. But give a town a new post office and you’re a hero.

We’ve got a lot of icebergs out there in the mist ahead of us – unfunded pension liabilities, a huge budget deficit, an ever-widening trade deficit, a growing dependence on foreign oil – none of which we pay the slightest bit of attention to.

Until it’s too late.

Don Kaul is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-losing Washington correspondent. His e-mail is This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it . Article distributed by www.MinutemanMedia.org.