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To: Moominoid who wrote (92061)	12/26/2008 8:38:04 PM
From: Sunny Jim	4 Recommendations Respond to of 116555

Moominoid, I think you are entirely correct. Over the past 40-50 years the banking structure has become more and more a giant debt manufacturing machine. There have been several developments, which individually are not such a big deal, but collectively they have created an unsustainable debt mess. Things as simple as the credit card were a great thing when it started. However, if some banker would have said, and oh by the way, these will become so popular that we will be sending them in the mail to people who have maxed out their limits on other cards so that they can continue buying stuff without paying off their existing card debt, you would have thought he had lost his mind. And if that visionary banker had explained structured investment vehicles or Alt-A mortgages to you, you would have simply dismissed him as insane. Further, no one in their wildest imagination would have thought that the Chairman of the Federal Reserve would have spoken positively about these financial instruments, essentially endorsing such financial flim flam. So along the way, the repeal of Glass-Steagall is probably not the straw that broke the camels back. There have been numerous events that have each contributed to where we are now. If you look back at it all, I would summarize the major flaw in the whole system as basically the "savings don't matter- debt is good" philosophy that the bankers and our politicians have foisted upon us (and we collectively as a society have bought into). Here we sit in the middle of this mess, and anybody who is a saver has been slaughtered. You can earn zero on short term treasuries or 3 or 4 percent if you are willing to buy a CD, but evaluating the credit worthiness of any bank has become a crap shoot. In any case, inflation induced by FED policy is killing you. Meanwhile if you have borrowed more than you can ever afford to repay, and are behind on payments, you are invited to the front of the line to get credit relief at whatever interest rate you can afford to pay. What's wrong with this friggin picture?? And that's at the individual level. If you are a credit company that way overextended yourself, the FED will simply turn you into a bank so that they can lend you more and bail you out of your bad decision situation. This is happening with every lender that screwed up and it's getting hard to guess what brick the FED will come up with next to put in the debt addiction foundation. And so, Moominoid, it's not one thing, but a whole host of things that the bankers and politicians have done to get us where we are. Not a ghost of a chance that they can get us out of the mess now.