There was an old lady who swallowed a fly...

Well, if you know how the rest of the song goes she doesn't top until she swallows a horse and dies but everything is justified except the fly. That's kind of how I view the economy right now. No one knows why we were irresponsible with home loans. I mean, who do you blame? The banks? Insurance companies figure out odds and adjust their rates for their insurance products accordingly, could our banks not do the same things when offering their loan products? I honestly don't don't know if there would have been a good way but I'm sure a couple statistics professors could write a book on how best to have adjusted rates and amount down, work history. It seems to have gotten away with us. Eerie, because when you look at how blind we seemed in hindsight from the 1929 stock crash, it really looks like that to me again. I am almost sure we won't see quite that magnitude of depression, but we will be paying for it for many many years.

The poster-child for the negative publicity of the bailout seems to have been AIG. With their hands in just about everything we saw an initial bailout for $85bil and a follow up of $37bil to "replenish liquidity" and then turned around and had an executive retreat that featured spa treatments and a price tag of $440,000. Well $400k is tiny compared to the bailout money, it just shows bad judgment and appears as a slap in the face to our congress.

I will say that to be optimistic of the situation I think Bush may be right on his prediction, in fact it seems very likely: Investor confidence in the market (currently down to 8500 from about 11000 not long ago) will return SLOWLY. I guess it is kind of vague but it looks like something to welcome as soon as it may come... no one with a 401k out there is probably planning on retiring soon. We can only hope that when we look back 10 years from now we can praise congress for their actions and not curse the time when we were damned to years of more and more debt to pay back for naught. Keep on truckin'....