Obama won't have 100 days

I've been one of the most prudent people around, with no mortgage, no car loan (I drive a small 15-year-old Ford, very fuel efficient) — and credit card debt that was, until now, a very very small percentage of my net worth. Like most middle-class people, I'm a shareholder. (For reasons I fail to understand, "shareholders" are always lumped together with malignant management when politicians are eager to throw somebody under the bus as a conciliatory gesture to the almighty "taxpayer." What about when we're one in the same?) 

I'm 69, and one of those millions of retirees whose investments are meant to see one through the later part of life. I don't manage my investments — it's not my expertise — so I let a professional do it, someone whose prudence matches my own. But the markets are in free-fall, sucking into the vortex the assets of the imprudent and prudent alike. My "safety net," along with so many others', is in shreds.

January 20 can't come soon enough. And when it does, Obama won't have 100 days in which to begin instilling fresh confidence in the markets. He'll be lucky if he has 100 hours. He'll have to do something almost the moment he sits for the first time behind the desk in the Oval Office, something bold — something to lift the hopes of the nation and, indeed, the world — something to stop the terrible slide.

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[Update, Saturday Nov. 22] First Geithner, now this. It's a good beginning.