President Bush just offered an explanation as to what has happened to America’s financial system:

In his parlance, Wall Street “got drunk”. He also advised them to get rid of those “fancy financial instruments”.

I suppose this is an improvement to him repeating the same mantra about the economy’s underlying strength; the housing market is in tremendous pain, the banking system is reeling still. “Getting drunk” is rather a mild way of describing what happened. What the banks were doing, really, was smoking the crack cocaine of easy money, big returns, and like a crack cocaine user, they didn’t care about the whys and wherefores of getting another hit. They didn’t want understand that lending money to people who couldn’t pay it back was likely to end in tears, all they saw was the big potential returns, if and when these people won the lottery or had a rich uncle who died.

Or perhaps this isn’t like crack cocaine; the word “dope” seems more applicable somehow.

Bush also suggests that he is looking forward to relinquishing the power of decision making; yes, the rest of us are relieved too.