The Fourth of July holiday weekend in the United States, coming right after the start of the second half of the year, marks a good time to look back over the first half: It was a time unusually bright with the hope of positive change but also unusually ominous because of the global food and fuel crises, and growing tensions between the United States and Israel with Iran over the Islamic Republic's nuclear program.

U.S. President George W. Bush's economic policies based on keeping interest rates at rock-bottom levels had ridden out seven years of unprecedented terrorist attacks, ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and steadily rising global oil prices. But the first half of 2008 was the time when the Bush economic juggernaut finally fell off the tracks.

First there was the global subprime crisis that had in fact hit in the fall of 2007, but its ripples continued to spread around the world in the first half of 2008, weakening the U.S. and British economies in particular and casting a continuing pall of uncertainty.

That was bad enough, but the subprime aftershocks were only heralds of far worse long-term economic tsunamis that drenched the U.S. domestic economy and most of the rest of the world as well.

As if out of nowhere, a global crisis in soaring food prices hit. Global warming, or climate change, had quite a bit to do with it, especially several years of drought in Australia. But the levels of food exports from the United States, the European Union and Brazil, the world's three largest food exporters, took a huge plunge because of environmentalist polices to grow grains for renewable fuel.

The biggest culprit was the growing of corn to be used as ethanol, which diverted no less than 20 percent of the U.S. annual corn harvest by 2007. An even larger percentage of the annual Brazilian sugar crop was grown for the same purpose.

At least the sugar ethanol grown in Brazil was vastly more cost-effective and efficient in terms of the BTUs, or energy units, that could be chemically extracted from it. Corn ethanol, in terms of the energy returns from the energy invested in growing it, was a disastrous flop. The constraints corn-ethanol production put on grain supplies to a hungry and still growing world population were even worse.

An unprecedented global energy crisis followed the food shortage and made it worse, because no less than 2 billion people, almost one-third of the human race, now lives on so-called miracle strains of grain and rice that are dependent on enormous inputs of nitrate fertilizer, which can only be industrially produced with very great inputs of oil or natural gas.

There was hope during the year for the American people was well: Sen. Obama, D-Ill. defeated Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., in the race for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, and he brought a fresh face as the first African-American front-runner for a major U.S. presidential nomination on to the national and world stage. At the same time, maverick Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., clinched the Republican presidential nomination and proved an unconventional and fresh figure on his side of the race. However, the soaring energy costs and plunging value of the U.S. dollar overshadowed all other considerations during the first half of 2008 in the United States.

It was not a catastrophic time, but it was an ominous one. It wasn't the best of half-years; it wasn't the worst of half-years. But on balance there was a lot more gloom than hope.