“Im just a no-name reporter, I wish I had nothing to say”… from the song Chaos and Disorder, Prince,1996
In retrospect, it seems that the Enron and WorldCom financial scandals earlier in this decade were only the tip of the financial-system-mess iceberg. Looking back at the deception and fraud at the core of the aforementioned scandals, few among us could have imagined that it would ever get to the current levels of a downward spiraling of the entire financial system. Just think, some of America’s biggest banks, Bank of America and Citgroup, are for all practical purposes, are dead banks walking. Technically, from a financial perspective, they are insolvent. Yes, that means they should be shut-down and their assets (mostly toxic) should be liquidated. However, the worth or non-worth of said assets is so horrible, to sell them off, revealing their true real-time worth would probably be a shock to the fragile American collective psyche. I am not so sure if all of Americans have a good sober perspective in understanding and knowing that the American financial system has been officially crashed. Collusion from checkpoints throughout the financial sector, with greed as its fuel, has led to the demise of Wall Street. The system became too top-heavy(99 percent of money in the hands of 1-percent of the populace) and fell over face first, and no one yelled “timber” until it was lying on the ground. Imagine a building being imploded or exploded. Imagine that the engineers charged with replacing the building with a new one, instead decided to glue back together the building from the now broken bricks and mortar of the old building. Let’s stop right there, for there is no need to take this line of reason further.
I guess we will not know the wisdom of the government’s strategy of capital infusion until down the road, where either the bailout and stimulus plans will have worked or not. This is new territory for the American capitalist system; I just hope that collectively we recognize that sooner than later. The time for denial is past us now. President Obama and team are attempting to solve the financial crisis, but what if the tipping-point has already passed? Is that a thought that you or I can truthfully bear? Maybe not in a full-frontal fashion, but the time is now to begin to fathom it. We Americans are known for our audacity to dream, which may be the reason we are sleepwalking.
-G. Malone a.k.a SubZeroPoet
