Iceland’s Prime Minister has resigned, Spain has lost its triple-A credit-rating, Britain is officially in a recession and by next quarter may be in a depression. I haven’t agreed with my old colleague Matthew Parris about many things in recent years but this line from his London Times column is well put:

This recession is not a failure of market economics. It is a reassertion of market economics after a decade in which we paid ourselves more than we were producing, and funded it precariously and temporarily by complicated credit instruments that it took a while for the market to rumble.

As for this side of the Atlantic, I don’t agree with a lot of what Nick Gillespie has to say in the Journal today, but this is spot on:

Taxpayers now guarantee some $8 trillion in inscrutable loans to a financial sector that collapsed from inscrutable loans.

What’s the solution? “Stimulus”! As the Instaprof says:

This is not so much a stimulus, as a massive transfer of wealth from the politically unconnected to the politically connected.

And you’d be amazed at who’s connected these days:

“You know, I’m concerned about the size of the package. And I’m concerned about some of the spending that’s in there, [about] … how you can spend hundreds of millions on contraceptives,” House GOP Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) later said.
“How does that stimulate the economy?”

Maybe they’ll be needed for Larry Flynt’s porn bailout. Or maybe they’re developing massive new condoms that we can all roll over our heads to prevent our illusions from ever being infected by reality.

A reader wrote to me last year after I’d been moaning about multiculturalism or some such, and he said : Relax, we’re rich enough that we can afford to be stupid. It wasn’t clear even then that that was the case. But, judging from the “stimulus”, the new line is we’re rich enough to be twice as stupid.