Durante una visita a Bagdad, George Bush è stato preso a scarpate da un giornalista iracheno, Muntazer al-Zaidi del canale tv «Al-Baghdadia», assurto subito ad eroe nazionale in patria.

La scena è stata subito oggetto di parodie sul web.

Fact: The Iraqi journalist Muntazer al Zaidi threw two shoes at President Bush during a news conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, and has been acclaimed in Iraq as a national hero.

If more people understood what has happened in the British and American banking system, the financial crisis would only be containable by the immediate partial nationalisation of every bank in Britain and America. There was not a run on the banks by depositors queuing in the streets to withdraw their savings. Rather, it was an escalating and terrifying run on the banks in effect by themselves, which, if it spread to millions of small savers, would reproduce the events of 1929.

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Everybody tries to ‘game’ the system on their route to vast personal fortunes – whether short-selling, packaging up dud mortgages as prime mortgages or telling lies about their financial viability – and the result is that the system is getting wise. The best course today in any financial transaction is to presume zero integrity. Credit is drying up and with it the very lifeblood of the economy.

Siamo ad un passo dalla fine del credito. Come dica la parola stessa, al “credito” bisogna crederci. Se si perde la fede che il credito possa venire ripagato, non si fa più credito. Questa fede sta adesso scomparendo dal mondo. Scomparirà allora probabilmente anche il credito. E dato che la nostra economia è interamente fondata sul credito, anche la nostra economia sparirà. Per quanto bizzarro ciò oggi possa sembrare.