Talking the Markets Into a Panic

What would Obama like to see on Monday?  How about a full-fledged market panic complete with Wall Street meltdown.  John Podhoretz thinks that's the purpose of Friday's press conference:

An enraged Barack Obama just took to the nation’s airwaves to announce his effort to strike a deal with Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner has fallen apart. Perhaps for the first time in American history, this president is literally using this press conference to create a financial panic over the weekend about the opening of the markets on Monday. He is warning of disaster on Monday. Clearly, he wants to use this as leverage to frighten the GOP into passing the plan proposed by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, which will push the debt ceiling problem into 2013, but it’s still an entirely new and astonishingly reckless gambit.

There's more at the link.

There's nothing better for sowing panic than telling seniors they won't get their Social Security checks and then destroying the value of their investments with a market crash.