Oh things are going well my friends. This stock market crash could not have come at a better time. Just look at John McCain squirm. All we need are a few more major bankruptcies, and we'll have the election locked up. As a special bonus, the greedy bankers are getting screwed too.

Back in the doom-and-gloom days of...um...last week, there were a number of stalwart cheerleaders at TPM Cafe who airily assured us that Obama had everything under control. While I wasn't particularly concerned about the polls--I've seen enough elections not to get my knickers in a twist over weekly fluctuations--I had the sense that at least some of those cheerleaders would insist that all was well up to the moment of crushing defeat. The knowing assurances that Obama's hesitance to attack was part of his rope-a-dope strategy seemed the most suspect.

The SEC has banned short-selling on financial stocks. The Treasury has guaranteed money market funds and is cooking up plans to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to buy distressed assets and save troubled banks. The market has rebounded huge, taking back all of this month's losses.

So are we all clear??

Hardly.

Many people want to know how this country got into its current economic mess. The news this weekend that some of Wall Street's biggest, most prestigious financial institutions (Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, AIG) are failing and need to be rescued will raise many more questions.

Of course, the full story is quite complicated, but one of the main drivers behind the current problems is the housing crisis, and the fact that these institutions allowed many homeowners to take on way more debt than they could handle.