Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

Sales of Ayn Rand's classic novel Atlas Shrugged have gone through the roof since the election of Barack Obama.

-- LARRY ANDERSON

This is not your grandfather’s Great Depression. It’s ours, and it will scar and mold and re-shape us in its own unique way. In its accumulation of bad debt and consequent squeeze on credit, it may have similar origins to the social and economic trauma that brought us Adolf Hitler and the New Deal, Britain's "Hunger Marchers" and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. But the course and the casualties and the impact of our Great Depression will be different. At the same time, its long-term effects, like those of the 1930s, may prove to be surprisingly useful, re-shaping our global economy and our social systems in fundamentally positive ways.

-- MARTIN WALKER

The argument that Obama is somehow responsible for the collapse of Wall Street is absurd. First, every major policy that led to this collapse occurred under George W's watch (or, more accurately, his failure to watch). The housing and financial bubbles were created under Bush and exploded under Bush. The stock market began to collapse under Bush.

Second, it's inevitable that stocks, led by the bloated financial sector, would lose their remaining hot air as the new administration begins "stress-testing" the big banks, many of which are technically insolvent. After all, their share prices were built on a tissue of lies and dreams. Other sectors whose values were similarly distorted and distended by years of financial deception and regulatory disregard, such as housing and insurance, will also have to return to the real world before they can recover. Which could mean more stock losses.

Finally, none of the financial wizards who are now charging Obama with leading America into the abyss has offered an alternative plan for getting us out of the mess that, not incidentally, many of these same wizards happily led us into. For years, the Wall Street Journal editorial page and the financial gurus of cable news cheered as Wall Street leveraged its way into oblivion.

-- ROBERT REICH

The incessant parade of bad advice, partisan quackery and general ignorance about the way markets work is fascinating to watch. I used to find it annoying, but now I simply use it as a way to make money. Just find the dumbest of the group, and take the other side of their trades.

The latest idiocy coming out of the usual collection of misfits, dolts and cheerleaders is that the last 20% leg down in the market is pretty much all President Obama’s fault. Now before I explain — yet again — why this is so foolish, I have to point out that just about everyone who is saying this has been pretty much wrong about, well, pretty much everything.

-- BARRY RITHOLTZ

Americans didn't vote for the tax cut philosophy. And Obama's delivering.

Also, you don't get elected leader of the free world by nearly 10 million votes to then have the opposition party define how your policies will be shaped. . . . So for my fellow friends/bloggers to so quickly judge Obama as having failed on trying to change Washington because he hasn't adopted Republican's "Let’s Cut Taxes!" ideas is a shaky stance at best. It's excruciatingly easy to stand back, fold your arms and say, "See! See! More of the same!" without really appreciating the critical situation we're in or the results of the last election.

-- JUSTIN GARDNER

In the other two great bear markets of the past century, in the 1930s and the 1980s, the p-e [price-to-earnings] ratio ultimately dropped to about 6 or 7. To get to that level now, the S&P 500 would have to drop below 400, from the current 701, and the Dow Jones industrial average would need to be below 4,000. So stocks may well continue to fall. They may even still fall a fair amount.

But long-term investors -- and that describes most of us -- should start to feel perfectly fine about buying stocks. Investors who bought in the late 1930s or late 1970s, when the p-e was also around 12, had a rough ride. But they did quite nicely if they held their stocks for a decade or more.

-- DAVID LEONHARDT

A Feb. 25 Style article incorrectly quoted President Obama as saying, "See, I know we can get some concessions here," during his address to a joint session ofCongress. He said, "See, I know we can get some consensus in here."

-- WASHINGTON POST