From The Washington Post
By Eugene Robinson

When I lived in Buenos Aires in the late 1980s as a correspondent for The Post, Argentina’s economy was going through spasms of hyperinflation. My office was in the heart of the financial district, where banks and currency traders had electronic signs in their windows showing the value of the Argentine austral against other currencies. When things got really bad, crowds would gather and watch their wealth evaporate minute by minute as the numbers went south.

That’s how I feel these days when I watch cable TV and focus not on the news anchors but on the hyperactive Dow Jones ticker at the bottom of the screen. Up 100 points, down 200, rallying, retreating, meandering, “looking for a bottom,” falling off a cliff. Another day, another triple-digit decline.

So here’s a question I’d like to ask Barack Obama and John McCain: Is the United States destined to look and feel increasingly like a “developing country”? Is this the way it’s going to be?

I know that our mammoth economy bears little resemblance to Argentina’s, or Brazil’s, or any of the other economies I covered in South America. I know that we’re dealing with a mortgage meltdown and a credit crisis, not runaway inflation. But one thing is the same: the feeling of free fall into some sort of abyss.

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