Your time-travel sentence of the day

Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Monday, September 8, 2008 - 1:32 PM Share

This one goes out to those readers old enough to have some kind of memory of the Cold War. Imagine, for a second, if you could go back in time and tell the people of, say, 1983 that, twenty-five years later, the following sentence would be written:

The Russian stock market's rise can be traced to positive news on the nationalization of US mortgage agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

I'm going to be trying to wrap my head around the concepts in that sentence for the rest of the day.

EXPLORE:CULTURE, ECONOMICS, COLD WAR, HOUSING CRISIS

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BILL HARSHAW

4:17 PM ET

September 8, 2008

Great minds, except my

Great minds, except my referent was a report of the rise the Chinese stock market.

(What sort of oxymoron is "Russian stock market", anyway?) The mind reels.

ROB

9:09 AM ET

September 9, 2008

Yes, wrap your head around

Yes, wrap your head around the idea that our tax money is going to help backstop bonds owned by a country that just demolished one of our allies. Wouldn't want Russia to lose money and not being able to buy any new weapons systems to possibly be used against us or our friends, would we? So why not just give them our money!

While we're at it, why don't we send hundreds of billions of dollars a year to countries that support terrorism against us? Nearly seven years after 9/11, I'm still trying to wrap my head around that one.