Ravengate
Partners - Stock market, economic and political commentary by Patricia Chadwick

I went to the mall yesterday to try to gain a sense of whether consumers are buying and when we might see a recovery. The first thing I noticed was that the mall parking garage was nearly empty, but then I realized that yesterday was only the second day since Memorial Day when it had not been raining here in New England and so perhaps the lack of attendance might have had something to do with people’s need to ingest a bit of sunshine.

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The Obama Administration’s aggressive and seemingly frantic pressure to get a health care bill passed over the next few weeks (a virtual impossibility) brings back memories of sixteen years ago, in 1993 when the newly inaugurated Clinton Administration tried exactly the same thing. And it was that very aggressiveness on the part of (most particularly) Hilary Clinton that (thankfully) ultimately doomed the project. I predict the same thing will happen again in 2009.

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With Chrysler and General Motors in bankruptcy and under the ‘de facto’ if not ‘de jure’ management of the U.S. Government, the hue and cry emanating from the pundits and politicians and television journalists and on and on wails, “What is left of the American auto industry?”

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