Surreal November

From Senior Producer Tom Nagorski…

It is hard to imagine how historians will come to view this time — but living through it, and endeavoring each day to render that "first draft of history," as journalists are meant to do — the month of November has been a surreal time. Four decades after blacks were given the right to vote, a black man won the presidency with 365 electoral votes.  Exactly one hundred years after its birth, General Motors faced a financial abyss. Ten years after the financial giant Citigroup was created, the company cut 52,000 jobs and saw its market value plunge 90 percent from a $274 billion high (in 2006) to $26 billion. Three months after gas prices peaked at more than four dollars a gallon, the price dove back to two dollars a gallon — one of many factors stoking fears of deflation.

Wages are flat, 1 in 10 mortgages is delinquent or in foreclosure, businesses cannot finance investment, and even fundamentally healthy companies have been swept up in the waves of selling. Now, nearly every meaningful metric comes with a queasiness-inducing comparison to the Great Depression ("weakest employment growth since the Great Depression…", "first time the Dow has fallen 6% on two consecutive days since the Great Depression," "Obama ponders New New Deal," and so on).

So here we are, on the eve of a new administration that arrives with a bounty of hope and high expectation — a halo of history having been made — and an almost unprecedented slew of nightmarish news and uncertainty ahead.

As I said, surreal. It is impossible to know where it will lead us. We are, after all, only the first drafters of history.