LONDON (MarketWatch) -- While the global credit crunch is clearly beginning to bite hard, there are some positives to the financial turmoil that it has wrought.

The U.S. election is no longer leading the news. Whatever your brother-in-law's brilliant financial move was last year probably looks pretty boneheaded now. Wall Street bigwigs are exposed as blubbering hypocrites in congressional hearings. You probably didn't do anything as embarrassing as the head of Iceland's central bank, who issued a statement announcing a 4 billion euro loan from Russia when Moscow hadn't actually agreed to it. The world will no longer have to spend trillions of dollars to cut carbon emissions since the crisis will do more to reduce greenhouse gases than all the government initiatives, wind farms and cap-and-trade schemes combined. Capitol Hill bigwigs are exposed as blubbering hypocrites in congressional press conferences. You probably didn't do anything as embarrassing as Germany's KfW Bankengrouppe, which transferred 300 million euros to Lehman Bros. just before the investment bank filed for bankruptcy. Instead of foreign aid programs or the United Nations, your tax dollars will now go to fund assistance where it's really needed -- Wall Street. Gasoline's back down to merely extortionate prices from obscenely extortionate prices. It's as good a distraction as any from the Chicago Cubs' abject playoff failure.

- Tom Bemis, assistant managing editor