I keep reading that the federal reserve won’t let us slip into a depression. They point to the “aggressive” cuts in interest rates, etc. You can’t use monetary policy to stave off a depression. If you could, we wouldn’t have slipped into the Great Depression. The Federal Reserve existed back then. It served the same purpose. There have been no major innovations in monetary policy since then. The whole idea that the fed can stop a depression short of giving away money for free is just ridiculous. It’s almost magical thinking.

I get accused a lot of being a Hillary Clinton supporter. Every time it happens, it feels like a through the looking glass moment. I have been somewhat anti-Hillary since the run up to war in Iraq. When you go back into, say 2006, that was a pretty rare position to be in amongst Democrats. That was the point when the “inevitability” story started being written. She had such unprecedented financial support and such strong poll numbers with Democrats and even likely primary voters and caucus goers that she seemed like a shoe in. A lot of the Obama supporters are fanatics. If you are anything less than one of them, you’re against them. Right now that means you’re a Hillary supporter. If you really are an open Hillary supporter then you’re all kinds of terrible things. Every terrible thing they can project onto Hillary gets projected onto her supporters. This may well come back to bite them in the general election. Obama is the likely nominee. He has to contest the remaining primaries, but now is the time for him and his supporters to start trying to bring the Democratic Party back together. That, more than anything, will make him appear presidential.

I expect that Hillary will probably take this thing to the convention. I’m sure she’ll take it at least through May 6th. But it really is time for her to hang it up and get out. The media isn’t going to let this “misspeak” on her trip to Bosnia go away quickly. I was surprised to see them still talking about it this morning on the Today show. I will not be at all surprised if we see other such “misspeak” events brought forward between now and May. We are at the beginning of a spiral that’s going to damage the nominee. We can’t afford to have the Clinton and Obama camps tearing each other down. That’s how we manage to find a way to lose to John McCain.