By the close of the market yesterday, it looked like the Fed’s latest rate cut was having a beneficial effect. In this wildly volatile market, though, anyone who is awake has learned not to count any eggs, hatched or unhatched.

On a personal level, I’m pleased at the chance that our credit union’s mortgage rates may drop to 5.25%, allowing M’hijito and me to refinance the Renovation House and cut our monthly bill by $300.

On a macrolevel, though . . . well, how can I count the ways to skepticism?

In the first place, let us speak of cabbages and ethics: The government, since Reagan days the nesting place of laissez-faire zealots, is using taxpayer dollars to bail out people whose cupidity and stupidity have brought them to the same pass to which greed, recklessness, and stupidity bring poorer people. Bailing out a “welfare mother,” however, or instituting “socialized medicine” so that we all have access to doctors and hospitals is so far beyond the pale as to be unspeakable. But it’s OK to rescue the fabulously wealthy from the wages of their own sin? Uh huh.

Granted, if we don’t bail these folks out, we all go down with their sinking ship. But there’s a fundamental inconsistency that grates.

We don’t need a bail-out. We need regulation! How hard is this to grasp?

In the second place: We should do a dance to spring because the stock market headed for the stratosphere on news of the rate cut? Turn off the bubble machine, folks! These wild swings up and down are a sign of disease, not economic health.  Market volatility is not a good sign.

Consider:

☛  We have been at war in Iraq for five years. That is longer than our participation in World War II lasted. Four thousand Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis have died and many more have been maimed. Unlike World War II, it is not a just war. It is a war perpetrated on the basis of a lie, a passle of lies, actually, foisted on a frightened American populace by leaders who would never think of rising to a slogan such as “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” Previous wars have been financed by the American taxpayer through tax increases. Instead of raising taxes to pay for his war, however, Bush cut taxes and then started spending. How did he finance his spending? By borrowing. We are trillions of dollars in debt to China and to the oil-producing nations, sovereignties that are not, at heart, our friends.

You could probably walk to Alpha Centauri on a bridge of hundred-dollar bills and not tread on enough cash to pay off our foreign debt. Thanks to this and other fiscal irresponsibilities perpetrated by the party in power, the dollar speeds toward worthlessness.

☛  Meanwhile, even if the mess in the finance industry is tidied up with a patch here and a patch there (not bloody likely), years―not months―of inventory sits on the real estate market like a gigantic pile of wet, dirty laundry. The millions of unsold houses will not go away soon, even if tomorrow every suspect mortgage debt clears right up. While those houses await buyers, more property comes on the market as some people are foreclosed, some have to move to go to new jobs, some die or fall too ill to care for property, and some simply choose to move.

The housing glut will take years to resolve itself. In the natural course of things (remember “supply and demand”?), the price of housing will drop, meaning that the real estate investment for every homeowner in this country―whether they bought before, during, or after the bubble―will lose value. This will not be good for the country or for you and me.

☛  Then there’s the little matter of the price of oil. No: there’s the little matter of the existence of oil at all. The scary truth behind the run-up in oil prices is that we’re running out of the stuff. The gigantic pool of oil beneath Saudi Arabia is almost drained, and other resources are significantly smaller. We may dig up all of Alaska and contaminate our own coasts from sea to shining sea in the quest for new sources, but the fact of the matter is we’re running out of fossil fuels.

☛  As the price of fuel rises, the price of everything rises. The cost of food is already being driven up not only by the cost of getting it to market but by the new practice of converting acreage used to grow food crops into biofuel operations. Meanwhile, hereabouts our fairest power company, Salt River Project, has announced it will jack up electricity bills by over 6 percent come next summer, when people run up $200- to $400-a-month tabs with their air conditioners.

Yesterday three-quarters of a tank of gas cost me almost $50, up from about $35. Some kinds of grain products are no longer available on the market anywhere, at any price―tried to buy buckwheat flour lately? Others―ordinary whole wheat flour, for example―are through the roof. That’s just the start, my friends.

One could go on and on. Nice to see the stock market go up, but don’t take off your safety belt and stand up in the roller-coaster car. And pray that the mortgage interest rates go down enough that you can refinance your payments so you can afford to put food on your table.

angst