Conditions are less than ideal, let us say, for President George W. Bush’s last state of the union speech, to be delivered today. This is an administration that had precious little to boast about even before the economy began to nose-dive – a calamity that may not yet be plain in the figures but was certified by the Federal Reserve’s dramatic interest rate cut last week. One wonders, how much worse can things get for this White House?

For months, the need to address economic anxiety has been a well-established theme in the campaigns of all the presidential candidates but until recently it was possible for Republicans to talk as though the ongoing expansion were a flawed success. When Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, took the economy’s temperature a week ago and recoiled like the figure in Edvard Munch’s “The Scream”, that calm posture was no longer available. Alarm on Wall Street is business as usual; alarm verging on panic at the Federal Reserve is more difficult to shrug off.