Rich, your friend is spot on. There’s no simple solution to our current economic predicament, but one thing is clear: If we’re to return to something resembling a ‘normal’ cycle (at least in the post-war sense of the word), the mess in the banking sector needs to be fixed — and that’s where the administration’s priorities should lie.

That doesn’t mean that simultaneously launching a stimulus package is wrong, at least, in theory (in my view it’s not, although I suspect that the form of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid ’stimulus’ will ultimately prove to be counter-productive), but it does mean that now is absolutely not the moment to embark on the sort of massively expensive social engineering that the president’s new budgetary proposals imply. Am I biased? Sure. To me those proposals are, for the most part, nonsense based on nonsense. However, even if I was a fan of what Obama is suggesting, I’d be wondering whether the decision to push them forward at this particular time owed more to recklessness and arrogance than to audacity, and I think I’d know the answer.