Hello and welcome to this late political Gab Fest for Friday, July 18th.

I'm John Dickerson.

Happy to be back with David Plotz and Emily at Bazelon.

Today we're going to talk about the economy and its many woes.

And then we're going to talk about politics.

And David started us off with the economy.

How was, where were you, John?

You've been gone for a long time. I was gone for a very long time. I was in Italy with my family, and it was fabulous. It was very wonderful. I missed all of you. I was just like a pretend that I didn't know that. Yeah. But I thought our listeners would want to know. that everyone was confused about that?

I don't know.

I realized it had a kind of air of affect an air of like, oh, John, where were you guys?

I see. but I thought our listeners would want to know. You think that everyone was confused about that? I don't know.

I realized it had a kind of air of affect an air of like, oh, John, where were you? I see, I see. I just wanted to. You know, but while I was gone, apparently you screwed up the economy. So explain what happened. You personally gave it. Yes, I screwed up the economy while you were gone. This week brought just an unbelievable amount of terrible news about the economy.

Notably, the sort of woes of the housing market continued with the kind of continued difficulty of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,

these kind of government-sponsored enterprises and the sense that they were on the verge of collapsing

and that there was a huge effort made by the Bush administration and by Democrats in Congress to get a rescue package in place so that if the worst happens to them, the government will still be supporting them.

At the same time, there was a gigantic bank failure in California, and there's a sense that a lot of other banks are on the verge of also of collapse

and the FDIC, which is the government agency that insures banks is kind of parachuting all over

the country to make sure banks are solvent. And there was news that at the same time the sort of general

economy is going down, inflation rates are going up. So that inflation in, I guess it was June,

went up at a rate that we haven't seen for decades. And part of this is directly related to fuel

costs. And part of it is all these other things which are connected to

fuel costs food costs you know anything that needs to be shipped everything is tied into food but

...