Warning! Warning! Warning!

It's a very simple solution that the government and Wall Street fails to put together. The U.S. Treasury expects the American taxpayer to rescue Wall Street at a cost of $2300.00 a taxpayer. This years tax stipend offered up by the Bush administration was a mere $600.00. American homeowners are struggling to pay off their mortgages. All of this, and yet the American people are being asked to rescue Wall Street. The U.S. government has been irresponsible, and Wall Street has been irresponsible, and taxpayers should not have to pay. Several solutions were put in place by the U.S. government, and yet all have failed to help the economy sustain itself. It simply cannot. Everyday in America, Americans are losing more and more money, and while they lose, the U.S. government insists on withdrawing more money from them. The well is dry.
Now back in April of 2008, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, were both warned about their accounting practices, having performed the practice of producing "gains when the value of securities declines." Basically these companies were legally cooking the books through accounting standard no. 159, Fair Value Option for Financial Assets and Financial Liabilities. The law set aside, it was not regulated and not used with an ounce of prudence, and had inflated the actual value of Fannie and Freddie's assets. Even the director of the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO), stated that "it is important that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac apply fair value in a sound and consistent manner." But no one one was listening. Why not? (Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac get accounting warning)
How much warning does this government need, in order to intervene, before it is too late? Even as far back as July 2007, Bear Stearns, ripped a hole in the the global markets, when Bear Stearns admitted that their $20 billion worth of hedge funds, "were now virtually worthless." At the same time, word started to spread throughout the investment markets, that hedge funds of Lehman Brothers were also in trouble (Market is shaken by warning on sub-prime crisis). In October of 2007, the New York Times reported that Bear Stearns, not only was laying off employees to balance out costs due to flailing asset values, it had "written down the value of some assets by 3.4 billion dollars." With this UBS issued a warning, saying "exposure to the United States credit market 'could lead to further write-downs.'" (More Cuts at Bear Stearns as UBS Issues Warning)
It is sickening to know that with these warnings, and the insight offered up by certain companies, that no one, either in government or in the market, stepped up, and had a plan to salvage our markets, in a time when crisis was as present as it is now. If this article doesn't convince you of how many warnings, this government could have paid attention to, go ahead and search Google, for any of the bailed out company's names, and the keyword "warning". Now Congress is asked to not take its time in resolving the issue of financial crisis, and have just a week to implement a plan for the most critical decision to be made in the history of the U.S. The government and lawmakers had plenty of warning, and either ignored warnings, or rushed to place a band-aid on every financial breakdown that came our way. Basically, the U.S. government is planning to shovel more resources into proven failure. This failure is a vacuum, and produces no return to investors, and the more dollars poured into this vacuum, the more bloated it becomes, and the faster it runs away from those in debt, who are already having trouble keeping pace with the markets.
The consumer, and the average investor cannot continue to be financially beaten down, and at the same time be expected to have confidence in the current market. Like Senator Dodd, stated today, in the banking committee's hearing, "it is simply not a cosmetic issue", anymore. It no longer is a matter of market psychology, but rather a matter of reality. There is a real failure evident, and it needs to be regulated in a manner that will allow the government to oversee the investment practices of large firms on Wall Street, without dollar valued rescue, and only guard the U.S. taxpayer from crisis before it happens, by stepping in, and being prepared to enforce the law against those who intentionally abuse the financial system, for selfish profit.
How much warning did the government need? It was evident as far back as at least one year that these investment companies were not only in financial dire, but that they were intentionally massaging the system, so as to falsely preserve not only their own assets, but create pseudo-confidence in the investment markets.

Cursed To Live Under Failure

Talk about being born under a bad sign. As most of you probably don't know, I've been broadcasting a lot from my humble abode, having been laid off this past April. It was not expected to be honest, and I pretty much lost all my health insurance and retirement in the process. Then I sat on the edge of my couch wondering what was going to happen to my 401K that I've had from other jobs in the past, due to the collapsing of huge bank and financing firms. Three out of the five mentioned in the news yesterday are in my portfolio, and I don't know what is going to happen to my investments and their values. I can't fall back to Social Security, because it's been privatized, and back when Bush stated that it was headed toward bankruptcy, he thought that the private market would allow it to grow at a greater rate than the current government system would ever allow. Have you looked at the private market lately, especially this past weekend. It's bottoming out. So where does a guy like me turn for future financial stability? All I get from McCain and Obama is change. Change? What in the world is change going to do for me? I don't want change! I want a commitment to establishing a financial future for me and my loved ones. I want to know that in four years I won't have to worry about working until I die. I won't have to worry about not being able to visit the doctor and have to take out a personal loan to pay the doctor and the medical research labs back. I don't want to feel this unsafe anymore.
Going back to being unemployed, in the past month I have applied for well over 200 positions within and without my skill set. Out of those 200 jobs, I have received only 4 email responses, and 2 phone calls. What about the 194 jobs? Of those 6 responses 2 were rejections, and the other 4 were recruiters asking me if I was willing to relocate across the country for a temporary to permanent job, without the guarantee that I would have a permanent job in 6 months. For one, I don't have the funding to pick up and move across the country. Second, and most importantly theses temp-to-perm positions are ridiculous. What ever happened to getting hired to work for someone permanently?
No matter how the news spins it, it is not news that there is absolutely no value anymore. There's no value in big banks supplying people with endless amount of credit, and expecting there to be more money available to them, because the economic infrastructure in this country didn't support this type of lending behavior. And now a large part of America's population exists off of transparent value, called credit. There's no value in empty promises.