Last week’s announcement from the Office of Federal Housing Oversight that Fannie Mae had been overstating its annual profits came as no surprise to those of us who’d been tracking the derivative-happy behemoth. However, the likely denouement will play havoc with the bond markets, the housing markets and the U.S. economy.

President Vladimir Putin’s suppression of regional gubernatorial elections last week finally put to rest the hopeful theory that Russia was finally becoming a “normal Western state.” Yet the economic implications of “Putinism” remain unclear, and there is considerable confusion among international investors and Russia’s potential business partners.

Presidential candidates George W. Bush and John Kerry are agreed on very little, except on the one issue that has become the motherhood-and-apple-pie of modern U.S. politics: entrepreneurship. Both candidates seek to encourage it and offer micromanaging policies that would do so. Like most politicians’ economics, this too may be wrong.

We’re choosing a President this fall, and supposed to be thinking about the next four years. So I thought it worth looking at today’s economic trends and the candidates’ economic policies to see where, by 2008, they may have led us.