Show me the Money

We are being asked to come to aid of Wall Street at a time when the economy is straining under the weight of deficit spending, tax cuts aimed at the upper one percent, and a seemingly unending war in Iraq. The war in Afghanistan is careening out of control, home values are dropping faster than clothing at a nudist park, gas is at prices that this country never thought it would ever see.
Groceries are costing more and more, and we are headed to a position where we may have to make difficult buying decisions.
I am not an economist; I am not qualified to to discuss macroeconomics, I have a dim memory as to what M1 and M2 are in relation to money supply, and I can barely understand what leveraged, securitized derivatives are and how they affect the brokerage houses.

What I do know, is that when most people go to the local supermarket and take a look at milk and other dairy products, the prices are through the roof. The conversations in the supermarkets rarely turn to Wall Street, the concerns are much more immediate.

There are folks who are falling behind on their mortgages...the unemployment figures in Florida are hovering at around the seven percent level, and in the land of milk and honey, California, the unemployment rate is 7.3%.
And yet, we the people, are being asked to save an industry that makes its' living betting on whether stock "a" will go higher than stock 'b". These folks will also bet that that company "a" will fail, and when it does, they collect on the "put".
So what is being asked?

As far as I can make out, we are being asked to reward risky behaviour without any penalties. Reward the gambler by giving him\her another seven billion pot so that they can continue playing a perverse version of Texas Hold'em.

I am not quite sure what the answer is, but I am very sure that the right questions are not being asked.

A fairly accessible explanation of CDO's

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=929747



So, there you have it...