Volatile stock market is a thing for Washington to fear

After what had been one of the wildest weeks of stock market volatility in recent years last week, it appeared that traders had developed some sense of normalcy. Until Thursday.

And while an adage holds that all politics is local, finance is becoming increasingly international.

While Thursday’s Wall Street plunge appears to have been driven by discouraging employment and manufacturing numbers that came out during the day, everyone who was watching knew before the markets opened that things were headed downward.

European bank stocks tanked before the U.S. Market opened Thursday and the Dow Jones industrial average plunged by more than 500 points during the first hour of trading. The market stabilized and made modest gains later in the day, but still finished down by more than 4 percent.

These massive fluctuations are particularly troublesome because they are reminiscent of the run up to crash of 2008, when the market lost 20 percent of its value in a week.

Those losses precipitated a recession from which we’ve only technically emerged. Regardless of what the numbers may say, not many people have felt like they were living in an economic recovery.

Time for rethinking

President Barack Obama might want to consider revamping his scheduled vacation into little more than a long weekend and head back to Washington, D.C. If nothing else, it would send a message that the abnormalities of the U.S. and world economies have been noticed and are being taken seriously.

We’re tempted to suggest that congressional leaders follow the same lead, except that rampant partisanship has made it impossible for the leaders of the House and Senate to stand side by side and send any kind of encouraging message to the nation and the world.

It is time for Washington politicians to recognize that the economic uncertainty here and abroad has everything that’s needed to provoke a double-dip recession.

That should worry them, because of the potential it has to do damage to the people they are supposed to serve. Second, they might want to consider their own well-being, because voters who are broke, frightened, angry or any combination thereof are perfectly willing to vote any incumbent out, regardless of the R or D after the candidate’s name.