The New Thesis, take 1
The corporate media has decided that the downturn is the fault of all the evil working and middle class people who were part of an evil conspiracy to take out bank loans and credit lines they could never afford to pay back. It's YOUR FAULT PEOPLE is the message I see seeping from the corporate media I catch out of the corner of my eye.
I have another perspective. Corporate America has pursued a set of catastrophically destructive strategies since the beginning of the new millennium. Some would say twas ere so, but the cost removal policies that drove the outsourcing boom, the establishment of law and legal concerns as the primary skill set for the executive class, and the strategy of making money by floating cashflow and other financial engineering tactics have left most businesses merely hollowed out shells. Now that the opportunity to make money with money has dried up, corporate America can now be characterized as a metastatic body committed to strategies that have no connection to combining capital, labor, and other infrastructure into products and services that are demanded now, and into the future. They are still looking for ways to make money by floating cashflow into the giant Ponzi system that the Ibanks and insurance companies had devised, and are hunkering down to generate income by suing. This is what they have left.
The Dow is down, and will continue to sink, becuase the future cash flows of these reckless, smoldering hulks will continue to sink. Big business largely divorced itself from its underlying productive capacities, and as a result will flounder in a new environment that is diametrically opposite to what it is set up to achieve. Companies with lawyers as their CEO will continue to crash and burn. Companies who elevated financial engineers to key spots will shrink into oblivion.