An Essential Part of the Economy Is Drying Up!

Is it my imagination or do the advocates of emergency action on the credit crisis sound like the advocates of emergency action on peak oil?

Some perspective

Back in the 1970s, I recall reading a comment that “monetary crisis” used to mean interest rates would go to 7% (this was when interest rates were much higher). In the current crisis, with the worst money shortage since the 1990s (a time out of living memory if you're a financial journalist), the three-month LIBOR went all the way up to … 3.77%.

Somehow, I don't think this is an unprecedented emergency.

On the other hand …

Many of my fellow wingnuts are also treating this as an unprecedented and permanent expansion of government. I suspect the best analogy, even under worst-case conditions, would be the wage–price controls of the early 1970s. Not only wasn't that permanent, it managed to discredit wage and price controls as a tool for handling inflation.