| The news coming out of Wall Street and Washington is grim at best. We all thought Black Friday of 1929 was bad, and now we hear a $700 Billion bailout is needed. For those of you who find that number a little unfathomable, it looks like this $700,000,000,000
yes, that's a heck of a lot of money. Even more than Amway Guy has with all of his soap and hope, but I digress. With an economy and workforce reeling from the constant blood-letting of the Auto Industry, Michigan foreclosures are at an all-time high. So when we hear the bulk of this collapse stems from bad mortgages and shady sub-prime markets, we brace ourselves for the worst. From the Freep- "I know in our arena in Michigan, because we have ranked so high on that list of foreclosures, we will be the first ones on the totem pole to be impacted by whatever solutions they come up with," said Robert Rahal, president of Birmingham-based Shore Mortgage.Michigan had the fifth-highest foreclosure rate in the nation in August. From January to August, it had 95,272 foreclosure filings and 33,829 bank repossessions, according to RealtyTrac Inc. But don't actually fool yourself into thinking that Michigan residents completely brought this on ourselves. Michael Barr is a professor of banking and financial services law at UM Law School and had this to say to Crain's Detroit Business ...Barr said the Bush administration refused to enact serious mortgage market reform to protect homeowners and ignored growing evidence that a wedge was forming in the financial markets among the incentives facing borrowers, brokers, lenders, investment banks and investors.
“Conflicts of interest, lax regulation, and ideological blinders fed this crisis; boom times and lack of transparency hid it for a time, but no more,” Barr said.
Now this same administration is advocating that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to run a muck and unchecked with our nation's financial system, and telling Congress they have no choice but to pass his recommended plan. Anyone else scared yet? I don't like government without checks and balances. But government running the markets without checks and balances makes me even more uncomfortable. Who knows what the next hours and days will bring. What we can all do is make sure our voices are heard with our public servants in Washington. Speak out because if you don't, how much can you really complain afterward. And so that we aren't all completely depressed, many thanks to last night's Colbert Report's The Word for making us laugh while we cry about it. (Watch the video below the fold) |
