stupid!

Here's a better idea: hang the "financiers".

Just more secret plans to take over the country...Beginning to think Alex Jones has the right idea about these evil doers in Washington.

'it carefully avoids a call for tighter regulation.' Hey LW, since you don't follow finance, take a guess what the financial titans blackmail the government with? You guessed it--if you regulate us even a little you'll be forcing us overseas. It's very much like the dire warnings from B. Gates should his precious H1-B's be limited too much. The difference is that while Gates feels H1-B's should be unlimited he acknowledges that's unrealistic politically. The banks and hedge funds not subject to banking regulations have been given free reign until now but with this bailout (following that of LTCM) strings are likely to follow, especially from Democrats.

"I don't follow financial matters, but" Dude, get a clue, everybody should follow financial matters, finance matters. Here's the short on sub-prime & finance, the sub-prime fiasco is not from "under-regulation" but from federal regulations that prevented standards, and federal GSE guarantees (government sponsored enteprise like FNM FRE) on crappy loans. The federal response so far has been to assume liability for private bad loans and increase loan limits & lower loan standards even further-the exact opposite of what should be done. The sub-prime meltdown was a predictable outcome to the government's program of encouraging home loans to illegal immigrants. In a void of regulation people wouldn't buy "toxic loans" in the secondary market without huge downpayments & proof of income of borrowers (that's how the rest of the world does it), they'd be relegated to the market of investors for Nigerian mail scams. On another note finance wise THE US GOVT has over 83 trillion ($83,500,000,000,000.00) in unfunded debts & liabilities (excluding the liabilites of illegals and some unaccountable governmetal entities) in today's dollars at a time when we should have trillions in assets & surplusses. This is the equivalent of going to your IRA or 401K or SS trust fund at age 64 to check on your assets & finding no assets & a couple of million in debts & liabilities for every single retiree in the nation. Bottom line-trillions more unbacked dollars will be printed over the next 40 years or taxes will have to rise more than 100% above today's levels without impacting the economy negatively. If anything our future tax revenues will have to drop from today's levels as our population is growing less skilled, less educated, less healthy and has a burden of trillions in debt all while the rest of the world is cutting expenses, and cutting taxes. Expect the dollar to decrease in value significantly-simular to what happened in Weimar Republic Germany or is currently happening in Zimbabwe. Portable commodities are where you should be, food crops, oil, gas, coal, copper although I see future export taxes eating up profits-like in Argentina.