James Doran

James Doran says the instant success of America’s car scrappage scheme merely highlights the failures of the rest of Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus package America’s tortured love affair with the gas-guzzler is finally drawing to a close thanks to the Obama administration’s so-called ‘Cash for Clunkers’ scheme. By promising anyone with a clapped-out old motor as much as $4,500 so long as they spend the rebate on a shiny new fuel-efficient model, Obama has managed to do what a doubling of the price of petrol could not.

In Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, there lives a fat rodent called Phil whose job it is in the middle of every winter to tell us how much longer we must suffer through the cold and dark until spring. Phil is a groundhog and his annual prediction is taken very seriously. There is even a celebrated film about him, starring Bill Murray. But this year Phil has been usurped by Barack Obama and Ben Bernanke. The President and his bearded Federal Reserve chief emerge daily from their offices like Phil from his hollow tree stump to tell us that ‘green shoots’ are poking through the hard and frozen earth despite obvious signs that winter, economically speaking at least, will be with us for a long time to come.

The US Treasury chief sees his interventionism as a case-by-case response to unprecedented events, says James Doran, but his critics see it as inconsistent, dangerous and ‘un-American’ It’s hard to keep up with Hank Paulson, the grim-faced US Treasury Secretary and would-be architect of a new financial order. Over the past eight months, since the collapse of the investment bank Bear Stearns, Paulson has been confronted with an escalating crisis that has engulfed Wall Street, plunged markets into chaos, and threatened to push the global economy into deep recession. And at each milestone on the road to ruin, Paulson — Hermes-like — has presented a different face.