As I see it …

Even in elementary school, the students have a better grasp of our economy than our politicians and the movers and shakers on Wall Street. No matter how many MBA’s you have from Harvard and Stanford, arithmetic is still arithmetic.

This whole crisis starts when someone offers a loan which they do not consider secure, which they fear will not be paid back on schedule, It does not matter why…

• inflated property values
• fraud within the evaluation process
• lender has few if any additional assets
• lender has questionable income sources
• lender has unverifiable income sources
• lender income does not meet sensible payment guidelines.
• inappropriate guidelines for mortgage brokers
• fraud within the mortgage broker process
• inappropriate guidelines for underwriters
• fraud within the underwriting process

A questionable loan was offered, billions of dollars of them.  We all can understand a few mistakes, favors for friends, even some fraud.  But billions of dollars worth of mistakes, favors and frauds are a stretch, don’t you think?

After the first step, it is easy to see what happened when you know the players.  It’s the old CYA boys.  OK, we have some questionable paper here, let’s wrap it up with some good stuff, make it into a derivative and sell it to pension houses and overseas.  The arrogance of Wall Street and the banking system amazes me.  But someone still had to write the original mortgage – how did hundreds of billions of dollars worth of bad mortgages get approved?

Then for the icing on the cake the Wall Street boys bail out of their own company stock before it crashes and burns for selling derivitives which they knew had no hope of paying out.  There must be a place in prison for these people.  Martha tells a few white lies to the feds about chump change insider trading and and she got prison, fines and restitution.  In comparison these guys should get personal and corporate bankruptcy and life.  Sounds like a plan to me.

Furthermore, she did not victimize pension plans across America.  She did not bilk our foreign allies.  She did put unreasonable strain on our foreign affairs which are already at disaster-like low levels.

Is there anybody out there thinking about the good of the country.  These asses on Wall Street are making millions of dollars while they destroy this country.  When is it enough money that you start thinking about the consequences of your actions?  Sorry to sound anti free enterprise here, but with freedom and rights comes responsibility and accountability.  I guess I truly am naive because all I can see are a bunch of bullying pigs in Washington and New York fighting over the carcus of the American citizen.

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