When the stock market crashed that October, he turned to his son, then a student at City College, and offered a version of this sentiment: "It serves those rich scoundrels right". A year later, as Wall Street’s problems were starting to spill into the broader economy, Mr. Mishkin’s store went out of business. He no longer had enough customers. His son had to go to work to support the family, and Mr. Mishkin never held a steady job again.

That is the cost to be paid if the US Congress and the voting public refuse to allow the government to use their tax dollars to try and ameliorate the crisis.

While having to use gobs of taxpayer (our taxes) money to throw at the problem is despicable, Rush Limbaugh and the conservative/free market economists forget to mention that the crisis will cost the public, regardless. Even more despicable is the pork that has been slipped into the revised bill, the more bizarre examples including a mental health parity clause that would require health insurance companies to cover mental illness at parity with physical illness, tax earmarks for film and TV productions, the removal of an excise tax on wooden arrows! and a tax earmark extender for auto racing tracks! (see: A Crap Sandwich with a Side of Pork).

The crisis is already costing Japan. The BOJ is considering cutting its 2008 GDP growth forecast to zero amid plunging business confidence. The Bank of Japan's latest Tankan survey showed a significant deterioration in corporate sentiment, with the diffusion index turning negative for the first time in five years, but the Bank at the same time pointed out that these figures do not reflect the negative effects of the Lehman Shock and the events thereafter.